Timing & Markets

As with most good things in life, timing plays a big part. This is certainly true when it comes to exploiting market opportunities.

Back in 1998, I was a partner in an online music site called Techno.ca. At the time, it was easily Canada’s (if not North America’s) #1 site to find great club music. We had DJs streaming sets. We had communities for artists and record labels a decade before community became the “it” word on the web.

Being young punks we had some bold plans to raise capital and take Techno.ca to the next level with full e-commerce integration so that you could buy whatever track you were listening to. We wanted to help promote independent record labels and their artists and enable them to sell their music globally.

If any of this sounds familiar, its because this site exists today in the form of Play.fm. Play streams content from over 12,000 DJs. It offers the ability to buy some of the tracks and gives you direct contact with the DJs and artists. It’s a great site.

Contrasting the opportunity for Play now vs. what we saw over a decade ago, there are several big pieces that would have been missing if we tried to go for it:

- Ubiquity of mobile digital music players: Back then, walking around with a Discman was considered high tech. There was no iPod. Very early MP3 players were making there way into the market, but they had little disk capacity.

- Digital rights management (DRM): This is an essential tool for selling digital content. It did not exist back when we were doing this.

- Distribution: The most important missing part was how to connect artists with fans / buyers online. There was no Myspace for artists to plug their streams into.

As you look at your markets, are there big missing pieces that are needed in order for users to find you in large numbers (distribution) and/ or buy and use your product or service (monetization)? If so, you could be in for a long ride. You want to time your market entry to take full advantage of industry infrastructure that can help you scale and monetize. In the case of Techno.ca that infrastructure was not there. I hope its there for you in your markets.