For a long time, I’ve been a proponent of startups that maintain a myopic focus, despite the opportunity to grow their businesses in countless different directions. The more you stay true to your core competency and follow the hedgehog concept, described by Jim Collins in his excellent business book, Good to Great, the better chance you have to succeed.

With Rank ‘em, the wording has evolved, but the mission has remained the same:

To optimally organize the entire catalog of every artist of all-time.

It’s an ambitious goal, but one that we should always be able to strive towards (and in this case, the fact that we’ll never be able to 100% satisfy that criteria is not a terrible thing with new music being released every week).

In case you didn’t figure it out, we named our startup Rank ‘em for a reason. We could have easily called it Rank Music, but we always knew the premise could be replicated across a number of similar verticals. Don’t be surprised if you see a Rank ‘em branch for TV Shows soon enough…but not before we feel comfortable with our music solution.

When we initially brainstormed the idea for our homepage, I specifically emphasized one thing: simplicity. Considering we were running a search engine, who better to emulate than Google? When we first released our private alpha in February 2009, the homepage was pretty darn simple. It included two things:

1. Logo
2. Search bar

Over time, we realized that initial members would come to the site and freeze up a la the fainting goats (must watch on YouTube for those who haven’t seen it). Essentially, when you’re presented with too many options, you can’t make a decision.

We figured that we needed to add some prompts so our users could have a little more guidance. At the end of 2009, we released a new layout that accounted for this consideration, but compromised the focus of the page.

Through our association with MusicBrainz, who I affectionately call the “Wikipedia for Music,” we’ve indexed 400,000 (and counting) different artist pages. We lost sight of the importance of our search engine, and the user flow of our homepage brought visitor attention to the bottom of the page.

Now, we’re excited to release our latest revision of the homepage that showcases our search bar. We’ve also tried to do a more succinct job of conveying our mission. Lastly, if you still need prompts, we are cycling a number of artists from different genres that epitomize what we’re all about.

We still have a couple minor (but meaningful) additions that should be rolled out over the course of the next couple weeks. Thanks for reading, and we’re glad to have you along for the ride!