Prateek Dayal

The most common question that I get when I meet people is “How is Muziboo doing?”. My answer typically reflects reality, which is that Muziboo is doing fine but we still need one more year of solid effort to get ‘there’. If you ask me this question right now, I will also tell you that I am currently doing a couple of consulting gigs to build some cash reserve and that Muziboo has grown to a point where the revenues not only cover the cost of running the service but also a part of our living cost.

Quite surprisingly, there are a lot of rumors currently in the startup circle that we are folding up. I first heard it a month back and tweeted that we are not. But I am hearing it more often lately. I am not sure if it’s because of the realistic picture I paint or the fact that I am doing some consulting currently or simply the fact that Muziboo hasn’t taken off like Twitter or Facebook yet that makes people talk about Muziboo shutting shop.

So, I thought I would quell this rumor once and for all and also throw in some stats to talk about why we think we are doing fine and why we think we need at-least a year more to get ‘there’. Below is our all time traffic graph

As you can see, we have had most of our growth in the last one year. To us its not very surprising because, we believe, it is hard to figure out your business in the very first year and it also takes time to understand where you can add real value and have meaningful growth. When we started back in July 2007, we were focusing on growing only in India and we were trying to grow through a lot of offline channels – going to colleges, putting up posters, organizing an event etc. Around August 2008, we realized that offline efforts cannot help you build a profitable online business and hence we decided to focus on online channels like SEO and social media for growth. At the same time, we decided to have a more global focus. This completely changed our growth curve. Btw, here is what our last month’s visitors map looks like

We currently have traffic from pretty much across the world with US and India being the two biggest sources. This is definitely very exciting, challenging and rewarding. It also answers the question about market size that a lot of people ask us. By default, people assume that our market is only in India and therefore very limited and basically not worth doing. I honestly feel that its not the case and the map proves the point. However, international traffic comes with its own challenges. Its not a very easy task to cater to such diverse traffic and thats what we are gonna be spending next one year of our efforts on. Ofcourse not just that but you get the idea.

Hopefully this will give people some real info about what/how we are doing. So if next time someone mentions to you that Muziboo is shutting down, please do me a favour and point them to this post.

Thanks for reading this post.

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Last few weeks, I have had a few of my relatives call me up and ask me to help them out figure reservations on some travel sites. These are well known (and well funded) sites like cleartrip and makemytrip so one would expect them to be super easy to use and book. However I was amazed at how screwed up the usability of these sites is in general.

On cleartrip for example, there is no help for the credit card field. For most people, transacting for the first time on the internet, its very hard to figure out if they should enter the card number with spaces or without. In fact its very easy to write a small javascript that will just take the credit card number and remove spaces (or dashes) if the user enters them. To top it, the CC field does not allow more than 16 characters so if you type with spaces, you will be stuck at 13 characters with no error/warning message.

I have had a relative struggle with this with this screen and call me up for help last week. In fact, it took me sometime to figure out (over phone) why the site was not accepting his credit card and why he was not able to punch in more than 13 characters. According to him, the number on the credit card was printed with spaces so thats what he expected to punch in there.

There are several other examples and I am sure a lot of these issues can be exposed with some usability testing.

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Just found out this awesome tool called scribfire which lets you add blog posts using firefox and I am making this post using it!

Lately I have been trying out more firefox plugins that help me minimize context switch while working and so far I have found twitter fox quite helpful. Ofcourse its helpful only with notifications turned off. With notifications turned on, its an even bigger distraction :)

What plugins do you use to minimize context switches?

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A few days back I received an email from NSRCEL about a talk by Kanwal Rekhi on entrepreneurship. I heard about Dr. Rekhi first when I did my internship in IIT Bombay a few years back. Dr Rekhi is an IITB alumnus and has donated significant amount of money to IIT Bombay and started KReSIT there and also in Michigan Tech. He has a very impressive resume as an entrepreneur and as an investor and I decided to drive down to IIM to listen to his advice to students/entrepreneurs.

Dr Rekhi talked initially about his journey as an entrepreneur and the challenges he faced being an Indian entrepreneur in the valley in the early 80’s. Around that time, Indians were considered to be great engineers but not good CEOs or businessmen and therefore they had some trouble raising money. Dr. Rekhi told that he met over a 100 VCs before they got funded. He finally took Excelan (his startup) public and it was listed on NASDAQ in 1987. They were later acquired by Novell where he stayed till 1995.

I really liked a couple of points that he mentioned during his talk and would like to list them down here

•  Always have your fundas right. What he means by this is that you should always think of revenues, costs etc while making business decisions
•  If you wanna sell to the geeks, let geeks do the customer service and pre sales.
•  Ignore YAFO (yet another f**ing opportunity). Have a single focus and try to learn and solve one pain point well. It takes years to do that and distraction is easy
•  Your first funding should come from friends and family because it comes with more responsibility to be successful and give returns. This is generally good early on

There were some more points he mentioned that I don’t remember now. A lot of points would seem like common sense but it was good to hear it from someone who has such an impressive track record. Its amazing how many of these points are being ignored by companies right now, especially in web. If you get a chance to listen to him, please don’t miss it.

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