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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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 28th, 2009 at 11:02 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.