Prateek Dayal

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.

Sound of Silence at Muziboo

Popularity: 16% [?]

Last few months have been very interesting as we had been working hard on a new Muziboo that we finally launched yesterday. It was very exciting because this is the first Muziboo design where we have worked with a professional designer and there has been a lot of learning involved. This will be a series of posts where I will write about the Why, How and What of the redesign. I am hoping to turn this into a discussion and see what others think about the whole process and where we could have done better.

Starting Point

Muziboo has a lot of professional musicians and the website serves as a portfolio for a lot them. Some people have actually managed to talk to prospective clients through the website. Lately there had been many requests for 128 kbps streaming and a couple of other features like reuploading, private sharing etc which make a lot of sense for professional musicians. We therefore rolled out the pro account beta and were working towards releasing it to everyone. Before the release however we thought of polishing up the UI a bit and started looking at things we can improve from usability perspective. The research led into a lot of insights and we decided to redo the whole UI.

Analyzing the Logs

We started with google analytics to find out what we can improve. Google analytics has some pretty neat tools available to help you identify weak pages in your website. These are pages with high exit rates and bounce rates. There are some bounces that you cannot help but there are other that can be helped. To know this, we looked at the bounce/exit rates for different keywords and entry sources. On some of the pages, there were bounces for keywords that we actually serve. We also found that the referral traffic converted pretty well and came to a conclusion that people who come after reading about muziboo or by clicking on our widgets convert well. Putting these two observations together, we came to a conclusion that some of the pages were not conveying the correct picture and orienting the user well. Another interesting observation was that every page that had little or no related content had high exit rate.

Talking to the users

Next we talked to a lot of our user to know what they liked about Muziboo and what more they would wanna see. We asked them about their first impressions of the place and what made them stick on. Most of these discussions reinforced the feeling that most people value the community here the most. Another learning was that most musicians value charts a lot and that was something missing in Muziboo.

Armed with all this learning we set out to do a complete overhaul of Muziboo. We decided to work extensively on improving the usability and also the look and feel of the site. Another thing that we decided to focus on was the interaction design to make sure that as the site grows the personal feeling does not go down.

In the next post, I would be writing about the specific changes that we did to improve the usability and interaction and how eating our own dog food helped us a lot :)

Popularity: 12% [?]

Getting Real is one of my favorite books on writing software and I love reading it every now and then. However when it comes to real projects, one is very likely to skip the advice given in that book. Its very easy to overbuild a product especially if you love coding. I have seen this in Muziboo and also seen it in a couple of other projects that I have been closely associated with. On the other side, I have seen a lot of examples of release early release often in successful products and have come to believe that it is in general a good idea to write less code initially and write more as and when required.

Its not the features, Its the idea

People should come to your service for the idea or the philosophy of your product and not for fancy features like ajax search. An example that I really like is @ replies were not part of twitter. They were introduced later when people started using twitter that way. Same goes for video response feature in youtube which was introduced when people started responding to a video with another video. Assuming that your service will not take off until there are enough features to wow everyone is a mistake. Delaying launch to add more features is an even bigger mistake.

For wide adoption, build what people want

If people start using your service in ways you did not imagine and you build a feature that facilitates such usage, its gonna have adoption. Both @replies of twitter and video responses of youtube were such features. Its a good idea to not let the geek in you decide what features to implement because the coolest new feature may not be what people want. When your users ask for a feature, they adopt and evangelize it. In case of Muziboo, some features that we built did not have huge adoption but surprisingly features offered as part of pro account had good adoption even though they are paid. These were the features that we rolled out after users asked for it.

Don’t underestimate the cost of a feature

A feature is not just a hundred lines of code that you can hack together in a few hours. When you have a live site, a feature is much more. It is

• Real estate on the page
• Cross browser compatibility work
• Documentation work
• Bug tracking and fixing

Make sure you factor in all of above before you decide to implement something new.

Don’t listen to everyone

Finally don’t listen to everybody. Don’t listen to the geeks and coders who love coding new features or use cool new technologies. Whenever in doubt, ask your users.

If you have not already read, I highly recommend reading the Getting Real book.  By the time you finish the book you will realize that constraints are not such bad things after all :)

Popularity: 14% [?]

Barcamp Bangalore 5 was a pretty interesting experience. I met literally hundreds of interesting people, attended a few interesting sessions and organised a session on “Challenges in building an online community”. On the second day of barcamp, there was a blogging session that Nithya attended. The day before, a few of us (Nithya, I and a friend) were talking over coffee about why for a startup like Muziboo its so tough to get blog mentions whereas for sites like Shelfari even their cheap tricks can get them publicity (negative or positive, as the proverb goes, it is publicity). Nithya raised this point in the session and a big debate followed.

I had the misfortune of missing the debate because a lot of bloggers from the Blogaloreans group were there and they have lots of strong opinions about blogging and I would have loved to discuss it with them. From what I read on some blogs, Nithya’s point was that if we claim to build a network or entrepreneurial ecosystem (we met most of these bloggers at networking events), asking them to review the website and write about it should come only naturally. However most bloggers feel that they want to write about something that “has something for them”. An example I believe was writing about Om Shanti Om v/s Sawariya by about almost all major bloggers and Nithya’s point was that most bloggers claim that they are blogging for a social cause, in which case writing about mundane stuff such as which movie wins the rat race (I add this word) really isn’t a social responsibility. I have a few points to make myself

1. Organizers of Barcamp Bangalore work for no money, no credit as someone said and no real benefits, but they still do it. Hats off to them. Asking a “Whats in it for me” there would not have helped. They do it because they feel our country or our ecosystem needs it and if they don’t do it, it won’t get done. I have had a similar experience volunteering for SPICMACAY and Techniche in IITG and I can relate to that feeling.

2. Open Source people do this all the time. They stick to their cause even when most people use (abuse?) their software and the license and these guys get almost no money back. They wanna do it and they do it and have fun …

3. Services such as blogger were run for years by a guy who went almost broke, had to ask for donations and even break up with his girlfriend on the way. He had a vision and he stuck with it. Sometime, the returns don’t come anytime soon.

Lots of us talk about how so many social networks are mushrooming up with the same functionality and are even getting funded but when there is a new webservice that tries to do something different, the same people never take notice because the scale is too small or the media buzz is not there. I feel we write about what we hear everywhere … not what someone tells us .. thats too small to be mentioned most times.

My disappointment is not that bloggers don’t write about Muziboo, it is that most bloggers write about how great things are not happening or whats wrong with things but sometimes fail to take notice of things at smaller scale trying to do something right or different. Shelfari invites sucked but our invites were always neat, but we never got any press coverage coz of that. Can only a controversy get you publicity?

I don’t say that you have to do anything as charity (you can if you want) or as a favour (never do that). I am not doing Muziboo for free so I don’t expect anyone do do me a favour. However are we all really gonna be doing stuff that can pay us back in terms of money or traffic in the next two days?

Just wanna end this post saying that people who have been talked about in this post are people I know really well and I am taking the liberty of quoting some of them. I am writing this post more to say what I feel than to personally comment on anyone. In the end its a free world and it is our skills too that can compel (in a +ve way) someone to help us.

Thanks to all the Barcamp Organizers … had there been no barcamp .. there would have been no debates :)

Popularity: 9% [?]

I am very excited (as is everyone else) on OpenSocial’s launch. Most of the users for Muziboo.com are members of orkut and we are planning to roll out a few applications over the next week or so to help them showcase their music to their friends.

The great thing about open social is ‘learn once write everywhere’ as it is based on good old Javascript, HTML and XML. From what I have read so far, it is based on google gadgets architecture with a social context added to it.

Watch out for some nice apps from Muziboo …. Do join up and start uploading your music there and we will make it even easier for the world to take notice soon :)

Popularity: 10% [?]

I recently got a new VPS account and it runs 64 bit Debain Etch (4.0). I installed rubyworks on it and the installation went pretty smooth. After that, I tried to move muziboo.com files to this server and a lot of error started happening in trying to get the app up.

First one was


muziboo@debian:~/muziboo/muz$ rake db:migrate
(in /home/muziboo/muziboo/muz)
rake aborted!
no such file to load -- hpricot


When I tried to install hpricot and that resulted in the following


muziboo@debian:~/muziboo/muz$ gem install hpricot
ERROR: While executing gem ... (RuntimeError)
Unsupported architecture: x86_64


To get rid of this error, I downloaded the latest rubygems package from rubyforge and the gem command started working fine. However I ran into this error now


debian:~/Softwares/rubygems-0.9.4# gem install hpricot --source http://code.whytheluckystiff.net
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://code.whytheluckystiff.net
Select which gem to install for your platform (x86_64-linux)
1. hpricot 0.6 (mswin32)
2. hpricot 0.6 (jruby)
3. hpricot 0.6 (ruby)
4. hpricot 0.6 (jruby)
5. hpricot 0.6 (mswin32)
6. hpricot 0.6 (ruby)
7. Skip this gem
8. Cancel installation
> 3
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::Installer::ExtensionBuildError)
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

I googled around a bit and then followed this post and the error disappeared but I started getting a new error about gcc missing on the system (during native extensions building stage). I installed that with apt-get install gcc-* (doing just apt-get install gcc resulted in header files missing error message). This time the native extensions were built properly and the gem was installed.

The next problem came with rmagick. I installed imagemagick and libmagick9-dev (to avoid getting a missing Magick-config error).

Once everything was working, I could run the app using mongrel_rails start but I could still not get it up in the rubyworks framework. I would always get a 500 error. I had symlinked /usr/rails to my app’s directory.

After lots of tests and experiments, I found out that rubyworks runs the processes as user rails and therefore your app’s directory should be writeable by user rails. I don’t know what is a good way to do that but I tried to make rails the owner of the app’s directory, the application started running all fine.

So these are some of the steps where i faced some problems and thought of writing about it. I hope someone will save some time because of this. If you do, please let me know :)

Popularity: 13% [?]

The post should be called my ruby on rails learning curve. I just wanted to write about what it was for a person like me to learn ruby on rails and get productive in it and make something like Muziboo.com

I was introduced to rails by a cousin of mine when I was trying to decide the technology for muziboo. I was intially inclined to use turbogears as I knew a lil bit of python. I had used zope+plone before but I could never really get a grip on that whole system. Once I saw the ruby on rails screencasts, I got really excited and went ahead and tried the book Agile Web Development with Rails.

I found this book to be pretty good for beginners. I coded almost the entire “depot” application that they walk you through in thi book and it really gave me a good knowledge of how basically rails works. I started coding up Muziboo right after this.

After a couple of weeks when I had more specific problem or was looking for some specific information (such as implementing a forum etc), I looked at the book Beginning Ruby on Rails Ecommerce which I found to be an excellent read too.

One more thing which really helped me was the amount of tutorial available online on ruby on rails and in particular the Railscasts with Ryan series. For any non-caboose developing in rails, I feel you must subscribe to his feed and check out the videos. I think he posts twice or thrice every week.

When you actually get down to coding, the ruby on rails API is simply irreplaceable. Whatever you are doing, be it activerecords (and specially that) or controllers or anything, do take a look at this. You will find that there are so many things (as in options, methods) other than the most popular ones that you help you achieve a lot. I have never found anything better atleast when it comes to activerecords than the API.

I am currently reading Ruby for Rails on the recommendation of Illya who by the way has a great blog and is again a must subscribe to kinds. I am somehow not finding much time to read this book but so far it has been like an eye opener. If you ever wondered why Ruby ‘on’ Rails and not Ruby ‘on’ ’something-else’, you must read this book

This is what I have done to get enough knowledge to be able to code and run Muziboo.com. I will update this post with more information as and when I find something . Please do leave your comments and let me know other useful resources.

Popularity: 14% [?]

I am working on Muziboo these days and everytime I see someone use the site and upload something, thats one great moment. It made me specially happy to listen to the piece below. Its from the movie roja (tamil),

Popularity: 30% [?]