A. Identify Your Audience
1. My capstone’s ideal target audience is musicians looking to teach others the ways of playing an instrument, reading, and writing music. On the flip side, I am focusing on users who wish to learn all there is to know about reading music, writing music, and playing an instrument. A peer-to-peer social network where users help each other.
2. The users that are closest to my target audience would have to be the members of the UMaine Pep Band. All the on campus musicians and groups are what I am looking for. I also have access to my old high school band.
3. Kristy Yeaton, Christopher Cotreau, and Aaron Sanders might be people that I would collaborate with because they are all doing something related to music and we could help each other out getting users and content. This would also serve well in advertising for each other’s projects with our own Capstones.

B.Identify your promotion strategies
1.I will post a link with description in all folders found related to instrument music on First Class.
i.Pep Band
ii.Symphonic Band
iii.Marching Band
iv.Music Student Teaching
v.Trumpet
vi.Flute
vii.Music Minors
viii.University Orchestra
ix.Brass Class
x.Maine Music Organization
xi.Musician Coalition
xii.Announcements & Alerts
xiii.New Media Society
xiv.Debating posting to Signing groups to get more people
2.Other Online link Posts:
i.Facebook Profile and music groups
ii.Have my mom, who is a teacher; forward my email to my old middle/high schools band director and her students in Millinocket. See if she can also forward my link/description to the East Millinocket/Medway bands.
iii.Good idea to post requests to the pool for reviews and participation
iv.Post to the NMD Website
3.Offline
i.Place posters in 1944 hall, New Media Department, Old High School
ii.Considering making postcards and giving them to classmates to hand out to people they know would be interested
iii.Considering putting a demo of the site on YouTube

C.Choose sampling mechanism
1.Hand-picked seems to be the best mechanism for me. Random is too risky for a user-content heavy startup project like mine. Mass-invited might work for me as well to get as many people as possible, but I feel that the chances of getting the right music oriented people is not in my favor

D.Choose feedback format
1.I am not quite sure what is the most appropriate action to take for my website. I would think qualitative might be the best for my site since the user is controlling the content and would need more freedom to express how they feel about the website. Categories are needed for my site since there will be a variety of instruments people might want to discuss.

E.Choose feedback aggregator
1.SurveyMonkey.com would be the best site for me to use to compile feedback and data. I should consider using bar graphs because I am sure there will be statistics that I will be easier to read in graph form; Microsoft Excel is what I own so I would probably use that to create these graphs.

Graham Readings/Sustaining Capstone

After reading the many pieces of advice that Graham offered us, 18 Ways to Kill a Startup stood out to me as the best advice for keeping a project or business from crashing upon startup. Having multiple founders to startup is a great suggestion. I know, personally, I sometimes procrastinate slightly more then I should because of being so busy. I can vouch for the fact that if you have others working with you which helps create motivation to get it done. The advice about having a specific user in mine, trying hard enough, and choosing the wrong program is directly correlated with my project and require serious thought and work on in order to make my capstone a success. Graham covers all areas that might break a start up company. I find it really helpful that he not only tells you what not to do, but he also lets you know how you can avoid that from happening. I don’t feel the need to go in depth on the readings since we all read them. However, I do feel these tips are absolutely necessary for one to be successful in the business world. I don’t believe I would personally start my own business, but I would definitely make sure that I was a part of it.

If I were to make my capstone project self-sustaining upon graduation, several things would have to occur. I would definitely need some sort of funding to sustain the yearly cost of maintaining a domain name and hosting provider costs. I would probably need to look for a couple of collaborators to help me or completely take over the programming management of the site over the long term. I do not believe that starting a company would be in my capstone’s best interest. Getting an internship might be a possibility for my project. In getting this internship, I could propose this project to the companies’ board and have them take over the project. If there already is a community dedicated to music in some sort of way, I could have my project join their community and collectively sustain each other. Going to grad school might be beneficial for the fact of taking some business management courses and other things of that nature to further my knowledge in being able to sustain my capstone beyond graduation. As far as the content of my website, the users will be sustaining the content themselves.