Looking back at 2008
In a few days, another year will be over. This has been one hell of a year. So much learning, so many changes in life and so many new people I have met and interacted with. I wanted to write down a few things here just to record them somewhere and look back at them later. I also never wrote some of the events (of 2008) in my blog due to lack of time or motivation and I figured this should be a good place to note them all down. Lets see
Muziboo
First half of 2008 mostly went in figuring out what won’t work for Muziboo. Ofcourse it did not look that way when we started trying some of the things but then there is no better way to learn. We realized that sometimes what most people say may not be entirely correct. However a few good things happened. We launched a new design and some useful features like online recording and stats that helped us serve a lot of people in ways some other sites were not serving. We also launched Pro Account, our main revenue stream till date. We presented in Proto, worked with an awesome intern and got some good press coverage. There are some things I wish we did better. For example better music recommendations and some more features for listeners (multiple playlists etc) which can help make muziboo a better indie music destination. Nevertheless, this has been the year where we finally found some direction (towards the end of the year though). How that will turn out in the long run, only time will tell but atleast for now, we do have a plan for growing Muziboo.
Other Professional Stuff
As I wrote before, this happens to be the first full year with no job. I did some consulting gigs, mostly working with Elina Network and Circle Souce for the first few months of 2008. After that I decided to focus fulltime on Muziboo. I realized that keeping a balance between consulting and your startup is not easy. Consulting is not a substitute for the income from a job. The only substitute is to cut down costs and focus on building your startup.
Personal Stuff
We moved into a new house at the starting of the year and took some time to settle down. If you have lived in Indiranagar, Bangalore for few years and move to South Bangalore, things feel very different. The traffic is lesser, localities more residential and fewer places to eat out (which actually is better when you are bootstrapping as I later found out). On the personal front, this year we had to cut down on a lot of stuff like trips and travel, shopping, photography etc. Some due to lack of time and some due to lack of disposable income. However, we did make one trip to The Valley of Flowers after Proto which turned out to be more tiring than we had expected. I also attended PAN IIT 2008 in chennai towards the end of the year which was a good break from work. One good development was joining the gym and trying to get back in shape. Nithya made sure that I was disciplined enough with it and its been quite good to hit the gym to burn out calories and stress :)
Overall 2008 has been a very different year. I realized for the first time what it is to be on your own and what it is to try and grow a business. I also blogged more this year, met with more people than I have ever met in my life before and formed some real long lasting friendships. I will also remember 2008 as the year I lost my best friend. There have been some real highs this year and some real lows and I expect 2009 to be not much different. Goodbye 2008!
PS: We listened to one song a lot this year and there is a version of it on Muziboo that I really like.
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“I realized that keeping a balance between consulting and your startup is not easy. Consulting is not a substitute for the income from a job. The only substitute is to cut down costs and focus on building your startup.”
Thnks for sharing your learnings. It wold be great if you can share
a) ‘assumptions’ you before you start working that didnt worked
b)they talk too mcuh or networking but how much of this is really effective and useful. can we optimize? make thing better?
c)how you rae funding your startup ? as you said are not employed for a year. how you expect to maange for next year? do you thing your startup doing as expeected ? why? if how long you will persist with these conditions?
I wish you good luck and good year for you , Nithya and your startup.
-Satpal Parmar
Hi Satpal
Thanks for the comment and apologies for the late reply.
A couple of assumptions that did not work out were How Virality works (or does not) :), What people will easily pay for etc
The startup is operationally breakeven but we are still not able to generate salaries. So every once in a while we have to do some consulting. However the trick is to cut expenses and divide time well.