Hip.ly

I’ve been working on Blessable, in relative isolation, for a couple of months now. It’s kind of driving me crazy. Last week, I started venturing out into the NY tech scene to see who else was rowing a similar boat. This was before I got rejected from Y Combinator, but probably in expectation of it. If I’m not going to be part of that community, I better find one here.

Mike Lewis (of Eventlo) posted a real nice blog on the struggles of the solo startup, so he and I started emailing and he invited me to a MeetUp going down that night. It was pretty random. A bunch of (mostly) dudes hanging out near Shake Shack making rounds of introductions. But I saw a few people I’d seen at a YC event, so I figured it was the right group. Mike and his friends all turn out to be interesting. I only stayed for a bit, but it got me thinking about how much else there is out there for people in technology, and how fun it is to collaborate. I started Blessable because it’s something I deeply believe in, and no one else was focused on it. But with that comes a real dearth of interactions.

Mike is focused on Events, which is something I’m passionate about as a user. I go to a lot of rando events. Mostly without much information on them. Sometimes it’s great. Sometimes it goes horribly wrong. I’ve thought a lot about better tools for event discovery and enjoyment. Mike seemed interested in working together, so we met up to talk about it.

I had this idea that we could fund a site by selling concert tickets. I went to a panel at CMJ where the Andrew Dreskin (founder of TicketFly) told his story. I thought he said their affiliate program paid “25 percent” of the sales to advertisers. In retrospect, that doesn’t make any sense, but I got Mike all excited and was pretty disappointed when I checked their site and realized he said “25 cents”. D’oh! Yeah, we’re gonna go and sell out MSG every month to make our budget.

But it still got me thinking about how I decide what shows to see. I get the Oh My Rockness newsletter and figure out what nights I’m going out. Then I have to go and listens to all the bands that are playing (most of them are unknown to me). It’s a real pain. Especially having to find their MySpace pages and navigate through that crumbling cathedral. I also like to figure out if there are a few shows close together, in case I want to make a quick getaway. These days, I guess I know where most of the venues are. But when I first moved here, this was a pain too.

So… on Thursday I built Hip.ly. Yes, it’s just a mashup. But it’s still pretty useful. Here’s what it does:

I get paid if you click the banner ad at the top of page. But it’s not like I’m expecting to quit my… oh wait… nevermind…

I think it’s pretty useful. I sure wish I had it for CMJ. I probably spent more time researching what bands to see than I spent building this.

If it seems like something more people want, I’ll integrate Facebook Connect and recommend shows based on what music people have “Liked”. If I do that, I can import more shows and add more cities. Right now I can’t do that because there’d be too much data. Oh My Rockness does a great job of picking out the quality shows. They’re the real brains of this. Hopefully they wont mind that I’m using their data. Maybe they’ll make some extra money from the ticket links I’m using.

Let me know if you have any thoughts or ideas on this?