Starting up! How We started Muziboo.com
*This is crossposted from Muziboo.com Blog. The only thing not true anymore is that I am not fulltime into Muziboo (as in no consulting on the side). The original post can found here
Nithya and I started Muziboo.com around July 2007 and have been running it since then. I have been hacking away to keep the service up and running and Nithya has been working on spreading the word about it
After installing this wordpress blog today, I decided to write a bit about our journey so far. The motivation behind muziboo, our vision, people we have met and generally recollect the exciting last 6 months.
The idea for Muziboo came one fine morning over tea when were chatting (literally) with a friend and I told him how I always feel a service like Flickr.com can be really cool for music, specially for a country like ours with so many people passionate about it. Nithya was around and she felt that this can be a real cool idea. We brainstormed for sometime (may be a few days) and decided we will go ahead and implement it. We knew that a service like this has to be very different from youtube .. we wanted to have something more serious about music and therefore decided to go the audio way. I started learning about web technologies and Nithya started researching about user communities etc.
After evaluating lots of technologies, I decided to write the site in Ruby On Rails … I was quite convinced that I do not want to do the site in a CMS .. just to make sure I understand the internals well and can modify/customize the website as much as I want. We worked for about 3 or 4 weeks and started showcasing the site to people around 15th August. By September 2007 we, were about 100 user strong and had about 50 uploads.
Thats the time we got associated with Open Coffee Club (OCC) Bangalore. On the left is a picture from one of the opencoffee club meets where we were chatting about Muziboo. In general, I feel OCC is a great place to go and hang out if you are trying to start something on your own. Great people and great brainstorming and sometimes you can get some real help for free 
So far Muziboo had been a part time venture for us. Around October time frame, I quit my job and started doing Muziboo fulltime (almost). Nithya quit her job one month after that and we are now both completely into Muziboo. I am still working on a few consulting projects because we are bootstrapping Muziboo and that helps us meet our expenses comfortably.
Thats the story of Muziboo till about early November. Personally I feel this is where it turned really exciting for us. I will write more about it in part 2 of this series. Stay tuned!
The second part of this post can be found at Muziboo Blog here
I will soon be writing a post about how and why I transitioned out of my day job into a fulltime startup that still does not pay the bills for me. Please subscribe to my RSS feed to stay tuned.
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Comments
Prateek, It is encouraging to read your story. I’ve been on a similar trail for the last year or so with my startup. I would really love to talk to you sometime about your experiences. So do let me know if you’re in Pune sometime.
Hey Prateek,
I think that was a really interesting story.
I want to know more as what kind of consulting do you do.
Nischala
Hi Prateek,
I heard about you from Mr. L.N.Mishra of Adaptive Processes. He said that he had met you sometime ago and that we could probably seek your help.
Have you done anything on Video Streaming/P2PTV? If yes, then could you please send me a mail with your contact no so that we could get in touch with you for a discussion. If no, then do you know of anybody who has worked on the same and could forward their details to us. It would really be a great help.
Prateek, we are planning to cover the success stories out of OCC on the OCC Official Blog. Would love to have your entry there. Shall mail you the details soon.
Cheers
Vaibhav