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!