The follow-up question is pretty simple: Who are we trying to please? As a bootstrapped team and without an outside investor telling us what to do, I see two segments: our internal team (the Athens team) and our external team (the community).

We’re running at our own pace, and we’re having a great time with the journey. Our current profits are chump change in the big scheme of things, but it’s comforting to know that our community gets stronger and dataset becomes more valuable by the day with each successive ranking that comes through.

I can’t emphasize enough how so many other sites have popped up since I began work on Rank ‘em, but as they become heavily reliant on an active community, is that the most sustainable model? Just look what happened to MySpace. They were on top of the world after Robert Murdoch acquired them, and now they’ve completely fallen off. That’s the life of a social network for you. (As a sidenote, I’m not convinced Facebook will be able to maintain their presence in the long haul, but they’re in a different stratosphere and good for them for making the social web reliant on their existence.)

In general, there’s only so many eyeballs to go around. I’ll take building a resource over creating a social network any day. Wikipedia has set the sustainable model, and it’s part of our overall mission to create the Wikipedia for Music Discovery.

The website is only as valuable as the rankings that have been shared by our community of passionate and opinionated music fans.

We have never doubted the power of Rank ‘em, the music solution. At the same time, we know that it is only as valuable as the data that we are aggregating.

It’s always refreshing to know that the site should improve as a resource with each successive ranking, but we need more & more fans to share their personal favorites before it becomes as valuable as we know it can!

In the meantime, we remain 100% bootstrapped and as resourceful as possible. We have employed all kinds of creative guerilla marketing tactics for a startup with a shoestring budget.

If Rank ‘em is going to make any significant revenue in the near future, our core technology will be at the heart of that. We already showcased it’s versatility at the Ignite Atlanta gathering earlier this Spring.

For those that missed it, we allowed the attendees to rank their favorite presentations throughout the night. It provided a great platform for engagement and was a big hit with the crowd (as was as our own Matt Smith).

We know there’s plenty of other opportunities, like the nationwide Ignite movement for us to pursue, but we’ve been trying to hone in on the most efficient use of our time.

We don’t want to get too distracted from growing the core business, but it could surely help if we made some revenue off of our technology in the meantime. A lot of those ideas are coming to a head, and I’m excited to share a number of them in the coming weeks.