Prateek Dayal

I have recently made some changes to the blog and my site. I have moved my blog from prateekdayal.net/blog to prateekdayal.net. I had plans of making a real website but I finally accepted that I will never have the time or motivation to do so. I have also installed a new (less jazzier) theme. Even though, I have redirected the links, due to the move, some of the of images be broken. If you find something, just drop me a line or add a comment and I will fix it.

I had already moved my techblog to muziboo dev blog so there is no more a tech tab in the navigation menu. Since I use feedburner (who doesn’t?), the feeds should not be affected.

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Here is a mail I received from The Smart Techie magazine, that can help you get there. Remember that this is the same company that organizes the startup city event every year.

Dear Sir/Madam.,

How are you doing?

Greetings from The Smarttechie-SiliconIndia.

The May 2009 edition of The SmartTechie will be on the top 25 Emerging technology companies. We are looking at what exciting technologies companies are working for and prodigy of leadership team and investors of private companies. A few of these companies will be profiled in the magazine. We are talking to several startups to see who are the Best 25 we can feature in the magazine. A panel of analysts, Venture Capitalists and our editorial team will select the companies.

It will be good idea to feature your company as one of the 25 Emerging Companies.  There is a nominal sponsorship cost, which I have indicated below. This package is specially worked out for smaller enterprises. If you can review the same and let me know by end of today, we could plan the next steps.

COST: Rs 30,000 – Top 25 Nomination.

We would be offering you:

1. Inclusion in the Top 25 Emerging Technology Companies list.
2. One page of Company Profile
3. One full page ad in the SmartTechie at a later date.
4. The company Profile will be displayed on the online magazine page too: www.thesmarttechie.com/magazine

COST: Rs 15,000 – Only Advertisement.

We would be offering you:

1. One Page Advertisment in the issue of Top 25 Emerging Technology Companies.
2. Online banner ad on : www.thesmarttechie.com/magazine
3. 1 Page Coverage

Please do let me know how we can take this forward. It will be nice to close this loop asap so that we get things rolling.

We can look at a mutual relationship so that your company gets more visibility. Let me know what you think.

If you have anything else on your mind, I shall be open for ideas.

If you need the contact, contact me and I will pass it on to you :)

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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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Last few weeks, I have had a few of my relatives call me up and ask me to help them out figure reservations on some travel sites. These are well known (and well funded) sites like cleartrip and makemytrip so one would expect them to be super easy to use and book. However I was amazed at how screwed up the usability of these sites is in general.

On cleartrip for example, there is no help for the credit card field. For most people, transacting for the first time on the internet, its very hard to figure out if they should enter the card number with spaces or without. In fact its very easy to write a small javascript that will just take the credit card number and remove spaces (or dashes) if the user enters them. To top it, the CC field does not allow more than 16 characters so if you type with spaces, you will be stuck at 13 characters with no error/warning message.

I have had a relative struggle with this with this screen and call me up for help last week. In fact, it took me sometime to figure out (over phone) why the site was not accepting his credit card and why he was not able to punch in more than 13 characters. According to him, the number on the credit card was printed with spaces so thats what he expected to punch in there.

There are several other examples and I am sure a lot of these issues can be exposed with some usability testing.

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Just found out this awesome tool called scribfire which lets you add blog posts using firefox and I am making this post using it!

Lately I have been trying out more firefox plugins that help me minimize context switch while working and so far I have found twitter fox quite helpful. Ofcourse its helpful only with notifications turned off. With notifications turned on, its an even bigger distraction :)

What plugins do you use to minimize context switches?

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A few days back I received an email from NSRCEL about a talk by Kanwal Rekhi on entrepreneurship. I heard about Dr. Rekhi first when I did my internship in IIT Bombay a few years back. Dr Rekhi is an IITB alumnus and has donated significant amount of money to IIT Bombay and started KReSIT there and also in Michigan Tech. He has a very impressive resume as an entrepreneur and as an investor and I decided to drive down to IIM to listen to his advice to students/entrepreneurs.

Dr Rekhi talked initially about his journey as an entrepreneur and the challenges he faced being an Indian entrepreneur in the valley in the early 80’s. Around that time, Indians were considered to be great engineers but not good CEOs or businessmen and therefore they had some trouble raising money. Dr. Rekhi told that he met over a 100 VCs before they got funded. He finally took Excelan (his startup) public and it was listed on NASDAQ in 1987. They were later acquired by Novell where he stayed till 1995.

I really liked a couple of points that he mentioned during his talk and would like to list them down here

•  Always have your fundas right. What he means by this is that you should always think of revenues, costs etc while making business decisions
•  If you wanna sell to the geeks, let geeks do the customer service and pre sales.
•  Ignore YAFO (yet another f**ing opportunity). Have a single focus and try to learn and solve one pain point well. It takes years to do that and distraction is easy
•  Your first funding should come from friends and family because it comes with more responsibility to be successful and give returns. This is generally good early on

There were some more points he mentioned that I don’t remember now. A lot of points would seem like common sense but it was good to hear it from someone who has such an impressive track record. Its amazing how many of these points are being ignored by companies right now, especially in web. If you get a chance to listen to him, please don’t miss it.

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Dear HSBC Credit Card Division,

While I appreciate your attempt to flatter and impress the platinum card holders, I would request you to stop printing those fat booklets that you send with each card. In fact if you can’t do that, atleast don’t reprint the same garbage and send it with add on cards. If you recommend people to go for eStatement, then you should also send them just a one page summary of benefits with a web link when you send them new cards.

In the interest of our dying planet, please consider this. You can donate the money you save in printing costs to Green Peace

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Last couple of months I have been extremely busy with Muziboo work, attending conferences like TES and PAN IIT and also doing some bit  of consulting work.  I therefore could not blog all that much. However I now plan to get back to regular blogging and blog atleast a couple of times a month.

However in the true spirit of Web 2.0, I would like to get some feedback and know what people like reading on my blog (since I have about 50 subscribers in feedburner, I am taking the liberty of assuming readership).  I have always believed that since Muziboo is still not huge there would not be enough interest in knowing a lot about it (esp. non tech aspects).  However lately some people I met told me that they would like to know some more about what we do and why we do it. I would therefore like to ask you all this question. What would you like to read here :)

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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

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