A rant about NEN Hottest Startups and RadioVerve - Part 1
I have been following NEN and RadioVerve for quite sometime now. Today RadioVerve was listed as one of the nominees for the NEN hottest startup awards. I have to admit that I was a big fan of radioverve’s music (yea i don’t care enuf to capitalize some characters) since they were called infinity radio. Good two hour show and quite enthu from what I remember. Then they morphed into radioverve sometime last year and started calling themselves a startup (yeah!). When we launched Muziboo, one of the first few emails I sent out was to Atul Chitnis (he plays a big role in RadioVerve) as I had been following his blog for sometime and knew that he is really passionate about music. Guess what? No reply! I had written to him once before about this thing called simputer that he loves to talk about and I got a reply in like few hours and almost got a mention on his blog!
Now coming back to radioverve. These guys do an awesome job and they were the first one to do it but I have hard time understanding how they are a startup. Everyone is employed and has a fulltime job, the site sees less than one change every three months, no way to know when new music is added to the site and generally nothing feels very startuppy other than the presentations they make about Radioverve and the interviews they do. According to them, radioverve has received over a million hits some months and has had hundreds of listeners. Their main channel’s status page (they use icecast which has a standard status page; we use it too) says something else. As I write, it says server started on Sun, 27 Jul 2008, peak listeners 7 (max ever at any point since server was started a month ago) and current listeners 0. If you are a little creative, you can check for their other channels too. Their alexa says a completely different story with their alexa rank being 1,623,724 worldwide 114,550 in India. Guys how can this be after a more than a million hits per month. I know that alexa sucks but then its some indicator. Atleast google trends is?
Now here is what I find most interesting. Gaurav Vaz, the co-founder Radioverve and also the founder of Mediaverve and the head of Onstage foundation happens to be the bass guitarist for the awesome Raghu Dixit Project (which is commercial and released by a L-A-B-E-L not radioverve .. not under creative common’s license) and from what I can see is a fairly successful musician. He still holds his day job at Citrix and Radioverve claims in their podcast and elsewhere that they are helping other musicians make money and a living through radioverve. Now here is a guy who is one of the most successful musician in Bangalore, heads an entertainment company, has been the music entrepreneur of the year but has still not quit his software job telling other musicians that Radioverve is gonna help them monetize and now there is an alternative. You gotta be kidding me!
Btw .. guys from NEN if you are reading, I think your default entry in Entrepreneur’s Details is Former employee and Former designation. For quite a few of your startups, the founders are still holding a job. You may wanna have a category that says still in job. Also one small edit in Radioverve’s entry in the ’source of funding’. Its personal savings + Rs 80,000/- from Geodesic and donations from fans. Also fans of radioverve, if you ever donated to them to help them keep it running, you are also helping them run their personal websites and the Raghu Dixit Project’s website as they are running on the same server that you donate money for. Go here and type radioverve.com if you wanna try this amazing tool too! Your donations help them keep 8 of their websites running.
Now why this sudden rant. What has changed you will ask. Why this act of throwing dirt at someone. In the entry for radioverve, you can also see that in their competitors they list Muziboo and then they go out and say that they have
- More Content
- Better Presentation
- Varied Genres
Now Geez … I don’t mind any of the above. Your way to run your ’startup’ and your way to project how well you are doing and why you need donations. What infuriates me is the fact that we f**king slog in the night and grow our service and these guys go out and make such tall fake claims that tiny real startup like ours find hard to match. First of all. here is our alexa rank and here are our indexed pages in God Google. We have about 3000 songs, quite a few of which are originals out of which some are posted here, content in 10 indian languages and atleast 5 foreign languages spanning all the possible genres. We enable fans to get in touch with artists and express their appreciation even if they found the artist after 6 years of search. We have enabled many many collaborations. We have built a place that has made people record their first song ever and share with family as much as it has helped bands discover the value of their music and find appreciation from all over the globe. Also am sure our designer’s heart would ache when he would read that radioverve scores over us on presentation.
I find it hard to believe that we are not in NEN startup awards but they are, even though we have more users, more reach, better revenues and more credible ways of proving our claims. But then so many deserving startups are missing from that list that we can’t really complain. Wait for the second part where I rant about NEN. I have had a more personal experience with them and I think they have failed miserably at what they set out to achieve. They have made the whole startup and entrepreneurial thing a joke in colleges in the name of events and the so called e-week. Man I already feel so much better!
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Oops.. the image in the last post did not get posted - http://www.flickr.com/photos/gauravvaz/2807727492/ is where you go to check it.
Couple of points.
* Yes our alexa rankings suck but thats probably because we have 4 pages, and they somehow dont see *a* number of incoming links. Try google.com/blogsearch Radioverve to see my point.
* We also get a lot of listeners from Itunes/xmms/windows media player. Below is one channel log, we have seven such channels across 3 bitrates.
connections 44955
file_connections 76
listener_connections 5081
server_start Sun, 27 Jul 2008 01:13:37 +0530
* Google trends show search data, turns out we dont get searched a lot. We get a lot of hits from peer recommendation. Like Internet radio guru Kurt Hanson writing about us.
* Also we redirect http://play-hi.radioverve.com to http://radioverve.com:9000 and so on. Which is why icecast somehow thinks all incoming links are one listener, explains the concurrent listeners point you made.
You are a smart person who came up with some valid remarks from public data and some personal attacks which i assume comes out of disappointment. Please do the math.
RadioVeRVe continues to be a not for profit venture which aims to make a social change, If that doesnt make us a startup then our very esteemed peers (i use this loosely) like Mozilla and Wikipedia arent either.
Instead of personal attacks i would request you to look internally, maybe there is something about your own product which people/ judges are not getting. Fix that, trying to make us look bad is just shows you as bitter which takes away from the awesome work which Muziboo has been doing.
@Prateek: Please read what gaurav has already written.
Gaurav: “Also, if you have been to even *ONE* of the presentations that I have made, you would have heard me say, hits are meaningless, its about how much the artists appreciate what you do and how much they benefit from it.”
Most times the press needs words they understand, Hits is something all of us get asked. Its what we quote.
It’s not the granular details. It’s the big picture. As an artist how many times I was heard and how many people heard gives a better indication of my music appeal than how many times the javascript and css components in the page loaded! It’s just about giving the honest picture however unrosy it is :)
And now you know why I keep myself away from all these ‘hottest’ startup contests etc - they tend to promote ppl who are known..who have ‘that’ influence.
I guess few ppl have great abilities to create noise - at the EoD, good product will win.
Hey Prateek,
As Gaurav points out, this rant isn’t very becoming of you just for the reason that what you think is your competition is NOT your competition.
Radioverve from what I gather above is an NGO, a non-profit social initiative not a start-up. Hightime they called themselves an NGO and resolved it!
Carry on with your awesome job at Muziboo
dude - you are doing a great job…
Focus and execute what you have on your plate. These contests are distraction and a waste of time. You got to build your business, not win a fashion parade.
Hi Prateek,
How are you doing ? Landed here from Pluggd.
Very interesting post.
First, I see an absolute show stopper here. If Radioverve is declared as a non-profit, then it should simply not in the competition.
Actually, non-profit could mean:
1) No intention of making a dime, EVER. Be it for its founders, shareholders, or employees. This is by principle, probably set out in the articles of association (if at all registered as a company).
2) Not making a dime now, but wont say “no” if this thing happens to become huge. Tee hee.
Either way such an entity cannot be judged fairly by conventional metrics. Questions like, “How do you plan to monetize it?” will be met with “Uh, clue time, we are a non profit”.
BTW : We were nominated but decided to pass. I did not want to get involved in a popularity game for my business which is mundane network security. I can see how this contest would work for websites like Muziboo though.
Muziboo should have definitely been on that list. After all, you have demonstrated your passion and commitment by your actions not words. By doing this full time and leaving open money making - which is what all commercial activity is about.
Uhhhhhhh serious sour grapes.
radioverve has great music, I like listening to. I connect, I listen all day, that is one single connection. It’s not about millions of pageviews it’s about stickiness. Thru radioverve I now know about all these great artists from India that didn’t know about. I am a happy customer.
This NEN thing is meaningless. But yur rant doesn’t show how badly radioverve is doing, but how badly you are. 1 finger pointing, 3 fingers pointing back. They know how to publicize themselves, and so people listen to their streams and becos of that the artists get exposure. You are not able to publicize yourself so you attack them? Unlike you they don’t try to make cash of indian artists and you feel threatened? I say that this is a thoroughly unfair line of reasoning.
Oh and your definition of a startup is broken. A startup is a “start up” whatever its rationale or biz model is. They don’t seek funding and run radioverve with help of friends and support from their employers, so they are not a startup?
I know who shreyas and gaurav are, but what is relevance of atul chitnis to the rest of your rant, for you to spend so much prime blog article space on? And those references to personal websites?
Your entire “rant” seems more like a personal attack for some cheap publicity. Do you really want us to believe that only 7 people listen to radioverve in a month? Dude, thanx to your rant they will have games many many many more listeners. They should thank you!
I have tried and liked musiboo and saw you participating in proto.in but after this tasteless attack on people and things I like you have lost me.
Now let me see if this comment makes it through the “filter”.
[...] music. He takes a dig at RadioVerve (Ashish too I think), another startup in the same space, and quite literally demolishes them. I don’t really know much about RadioVerve to comment on the folks but there are some very [...]
Hello Ma’am
Have been following this blog since a few weeks now.
This is Dushyant Bhatia - a 23 year old internet entrepreneur from Mumbai. Just quit my job to try my luck with a couple of small ventures before my post graduation. I launched this website called http://www.blogertize.in on 29th Aug. Wanted to know your thoughts on the same and would like to know some strategies to publicize this site. Should I hire a PR firm or do it myself given the budget constraints I have due to my employment status
Thanks
Hi Prateek –
Read your post/rant regarding NEN Hottest Startups. We appreciate your feedback. If you have reservations about NEN or our work, let us know directly! If there is a better way of doing something, please call/mail and share your thoughts. We’re always open to input.
Regarding Hottest Startups: You will soon see your nomination online on the Hottest Startups site – http://www.hotteststartups.in. In fact, you / Nitya should have received a mail about that from the Hottest Startup team. If you have any questions or want to discuss your nomination, please call us at 80 4168 9194. (Please read my comment below on ‘Nominations for Hottest Startups Awards’.) Thanks! Babit – NEN
Hi. Just want to let everyone know that Nominations for Hottest Startups Awards are not closed till Oct 23. We launched with 52 nominations in no particular order. There are over 200 nominations in the pipeline, being checked for completeness. Self-nominations are welcome! You can see the criteria and nomination process at http://www.hotteststartups.in. For any clarifications, please call us at 080-41689194. Thanks! NEN
Well I personally haven’t been to radioverve much till now, before I saw this post on prateek’s blog. From the post I can see that radio verve guys claiming themselves to be a non-profitable organization. Is it?? But then I see them listed in the NEN list for possible funding?? Is it??
Anyways I will not talk blank here. I am not speaking again anyone here for that matter infact. But I would like to state some revealing stats here:
I just tried to simulate Radioverve’s claim for > 1 Million requests per month, and the stats says that your servers are not currently capable for such a traffic.
Complete requests: 1000
Failed requests: 550
(Connect: 0, Length: 550, Exceptions: 0)
Broken pipe errors: 0
Total transferred: 8551955 bytes
HTML transferred: 8333301 bytes
Requests per second: 4.15 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 12042.15 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 240.84 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 35.51 [Kbytes/sec] received
I tried to simulate this load with just 1000 hits and you can see more than 500 hits were failure, which clearly stats Radioverve’s site capability. Now I won’t comment further whether those 1 Million claim is right or wrong. You don’t even seems to do the very basic things which a professiona; site with such a high traffic load used to follow. May be you can follow this link for that minimum work required to sustain that traffic (frontend stuff).
http://abhinavsingh.com/blog/2008/08/how-to-make-faster-websites-and-enhance-your-site-user-experience-part-1/
I didn’t do such a test for muziboo as they don’t seems to be claiming for the same.
Any comments from the radioverve owners here? Technically your site cannot sustain that traffic atleast.
Interesting rant…even more interesting spar by Gaurav..and then it degenerates into something ugly…LOL :)
Grow up guys…everyone’s worked in the real world to know that life isnt always fair :)
Hi Prateek,
IMHO, personal bashing does no good. You never know what tomorrow brings - you might end tying up with them! Having been a small time musician myself, I have tremendous respect for what you’re trying to do - just keep up the good work. NEN will come and NEN will go. And, as the previous comment says - life isn’t fair, still you’ve gotta live with it:)
Cheers,
Anupam
my friends are very big music freaks they always end up with raaga.com don’t no why they use that.I’ll invite them to above both sites lets see which would they choose :)
@dushyant blogertize concept is I think similar to
http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com
Hey Anupam
Thanks for your reply
Agreed that the idea is similar to milliondollarhomepage but the concept is completely different and that’s the reason bloggers/forums are actually buying pixel button in there ($3000+ worth pixel buttons already sold in first 8 days). I have issued a couple of press releases about my future plans as far as the site is concerned. Just go thru it if u have time and let me know if that’s interesting. Just google around and u’ll find them. Heres one of them
http://www.prlog.org/10114956-blogertize-to-launch-its-forum-by-30th-november-2008.html
Thanks again for your reply. Appreciate it
Dushyant
[...] couple of weeks back I wrote a rant about Radioverve and Tata NEN hottest startups award. A few days after that, our nomination went live on the [...]
Hey Prateek,
So where do I start? Let me address some of the points that you have just randomly decided to throw into your argument when you actually are pissed off at something else.
From your post, your biggest rant was that we mentioned you as a competitor right? Well .. we have also said there that we are not for profit with RadioVeRVe. Does that calm some of your apprehension? When I named Muziboo as a competitor (Yes I filled that application), it was because you guys were among the very few that are doing something in the Indian indie music scene. We DID NOT nominate ourselves for this, NEN contacted us directly! Please don’t blame us for you guys not being on the list, nominate yourself, or get someone to nominate you! its a better way of going about things.
Second, we are not a startup because we are employed elsewhere? This is what I get when I try, like you say, “God Google, to define a startup. I don’t see at any point, anything being mentioned about anyone having to do it full time. Neither for that matter do I see how working fulltime defines a startup. The alternative to putting your own money that you own from somewhere into running something that is your passion, is to get funded. Please do point us to someone that will fund us on our terms, and we will be the first to do this full time! Also, while you are at it, please do keep watching RadioVeRVe, a lot of things are happening there which we haven’t told you about, or asked permission for. Maybe, because, its up to us!
That magical 1 million dollar claim! - is where we make it from. Its the webalizer stats from radioverve.com. Please glance through the column on the right that says “Hits” and tell us how we are wrong. Also, if you have been to even *ONE* of the presentations that I have made, you would have heard me say, hits are meaningless, its about how much the artists appreciate what you do and how much they benefit from it.
About the presentation, genres and content, its your view against mine and I will state my view and not yours. You have rightly stated yours and its for people to decide whose they agree with. Am I saying my site has better presentation *According to me* ???? YES!!! will I say that again? YES!!! So you say you have more songs? good! did I stop you or gasp in shock when you say that? I don’t think so!
Oh yes! I sincerely apologize to the people who have donated to us because I run my personal website from my server! and also because I run my band’s website from my server? Now what if I told you that I paid for that site to run? and also that the Raghu Dixit Project paid for running RadioVeRVe? and the Raghu Dixit Project does more publicity for RadioVeRVe than most “publicity” we can ever aim to get? Would that justify? rather .. Do I even have to justify?
On the other hand, Prateek, I do all this, for whatever difference it makes, in my time after my day job! I shuffle my job, as you call it, one of the best bands in the country, the onstage foundation, the musical that I play for (http://causefoundation.in), some other music projects that I am involved in and then do my work with RadioVeRVe. I could as well rest on many other laurels and feel I have achieved stuff but no, I want to run this Radio station and I feel I have a lot more to do there.
And since you are keeping track of us anyway, I’m sure you will notice when we make announcements and we will make them soon!
But like I said, please do continue the work you guys are doing, I have been a regular listener of Muziboo for sometime and I do believe you guys have a great product in store! This ranting really doesn’t become you!