Prateek Dayal

A 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 website. A couple of days after that, Yusuf Motiwala of TringMe wrote a post about NEN forcibly nominating startups. In his email to NEN, he wrote that he does not understand the rationale for a contest where contestants are introduced in chunks and the website has no information about the pending contenstants. He has a very valid point and I completely agree with him. A few days after Yusuf’s objections, NEN setup three email addresses, one of which can be used to withdraw notimations. We wrote to them and got a confirmation today that our nomination has been withdrawn. So as of this moment, we are officially not part of that joke.

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Internet Revolution has a great post on Google and its top 10 failures. Opensocial is listed at number 4 and I cannot agree more. With all the hoopla around the launch, it took orkut about 7 months to launch opensocial applications and even if we ignore for a minute the fact that developing on orkut is a nightmare, the app selection process is a complete mystery and a total turn off.

We worked on an opensocial application that allows user to add music to their orkut profile. This is ofcourse music they have uploaded on Muziboo or music they have marked as favorite on Muziboo. We worked on this application not just because we must have a presence on orkut and facebook but for two reasons

• Most of our users have presence on orkut and this feature had been requested before
• A lot of muziboo users add muziboo as their webpage in orkut and post muziboo links in their profile and community threads in orkut. Below is a screenshot showing that

The above led us to believe that we can add a lot of value to our users by enabling them to showcase their music on their orkut profile. We therefore went ahead and created a simple application where we can link up your muziboo account and application and your music and favorites start showing up on your profile page.

We tested the app for xss and cross browser functionality and submitted to orkut. There was no email confirming that the app has been submitted nor any link to track the approval process. After a week or 10 days, we got an email from orkut saying that our app has been rejected. The reason cited was that they are looking at more interactive apps like ilike app that let you do more.

Here is my question to the orkut and opensocial team. Who decides the value of the application? Is it the developers, the orkut team or the end user? If its the end user, then there is already enough evidence that this is something a lot of people will benefit from. Compare this to facebook where even the most basic apps are accepted if they work. I for example have picasa and flickr app on my profile that just displays my picasaweb and flickr images on my profile. They do nothing else and I don’t want them to do anything else and facebook does not interfere.

I think in orkut unless you crap on and slap your friends, the apps are not interactive and useful enough. I think they should really look into making the platform more democratic and letting users pick what they want.

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Nithya and I attended proto.in, the startup event on 18th and 19th July. It was a very interesting experience. A lot of things I loved .. a lot of things that I found very wierd :)

However before I begin, I would like to mention that the organizing team works very hard at making this event a success. A great thing I noticed was that the organizing team was trying to help every presenting company and I could never see/hear them talk about any startup  with any bias (good or bad). I think thats a really difficult but great thing to do.

Day 1

Proto is a two day event. Day 1 is different for presenting startups. After the keynote you spend most of the day in rehearsals fine tuning your presentation with feedback from the panel. This is fun and useful but the downside is that you miss most of the other talks going on in parallel. However as proto allocates 6 mins for presentation, its good to generally get a feel of timing on stage. The stage is pretty massive and can overwhelm noobies (I swear) so its good to go through the rehearsals. We got some feedback on our presentation but mostly it went fine. Unlike some of the other startups, we had a walk through and no ppt. I think eventually turned out to be good as the response to the demo was very encouraging.

There was an alumni dinner at the end of day one in Gourmet Gallery (hosted by proto) where we got  to catch up with some of the earlier presenters. In particular it was greating chatting with Ankit and Nandini of instablogs. They have built an awesome community of citizen journalists from across the world and they told us about their experiences and challenges. Incidentally, they happen to be a couple as well.

Day 2

The second day of proto is the more exciting one. The day started with an introduction to proto and a video on where the companies that presented in previous proto editions stand. I liked the fact that proto mentioned that 3 companies have shut shop. I think its great to see that failure is no longer considered a bad thing. There was also a Proto for Dummies video which was pretty well done. I think the videos will be up on youtube pretty soon.

After the videos, the presentations started. We were the 6th company to present and the presentation was pretty well received in general. I think we were the only company that finished before time, a fact that WatBlog mentioned on their blog in our company profile! After the presentations the companies were given a stall where they could interact with interested customers/investors or press. I think this is where most of the business cards were swapped. At the end of the day there was an invite only networking dinner at Radisson. However I did not find many VCs there and so ended up hanging out other friends. I think a few people were sort of disappointed by the lack of VCs. I could spot the CEO of Indiatimes there but by the time I could get to him, he disappered. I think it was disappointing to see that most of the high profile people were hanging out amongst themselves and it was sort of difficult to approach them. The mindshare that we thought would happen, did not really happen.

General Observations

I did however talk to a couple of investors during the course of the 2nd day and to quite a few entrepreneurs/ CEOs. It was in fact pretty good talking to the investors. I had always heard that talking to investors gives you a good perspective and I think its true. I had also heard that there are quite a few senior startuppy people who give a lot of gyaan and try to pull you down and I think that is true too. In general its not very hard to find a few people in proto who look like they have come down there just to feel important by giving gyaan to clueless entrepreneurs like me. A lot of times having been in the US helps all the more in exuding superiority. There are also people like BharatMatrimony founder who talk quite modestly and sound very encouraging.

Blogosphere is buzzing with blogs about the companies that presented so I would not write about them. The companies I found most impressive were Lipikaar, Blink, PicPorta and Eko. I would add LifeBlob to the list but then I did not discover them in proto.

In general I think proto is a great place to be. You can meet a lot of interesting people/companies and have a great time besides getting some people excited about your product.

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Nithya and I will be attending proto.in on 18th and 19th July in Delhi. If you are around, we would love to meet you and talk to you about Muziboo, life, universe and everything

If you are around, call me at 97410-26443 or email me (prateek AT muziboo DOT com) or sms me. Hope to see you there :)

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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 :)

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Its very interesting to watch the reaction of people when we tell them that we run an online music community. Most people think that we run a social network and dismiss it right away. A few people get curious and ask us to explain the concept. Very few people we meet already understand the difference. I think thats because online communities are still not very popular in India. There are a few popular forums like TeamBHP that have a strong community element, but only a handful of such sites exist. In this post I would try to explain is the difference between a social network and an online community and why the dynamics are completely different.

Who do you know Already

I think this is one of the key difference between an online community and a social network. More often than not a person joins Orkut or Facebook to connect with people she knows already. They could be old classmates, colleagues or friends from college. The main intent here is to reconnect and stay in touch. A few people go to such sites to find new connections but as far as I know, it does not work very well .. specially on a network like facebook that has strong privacy settings.

Contrast this with an online community. You go there because you are interested in the theme of the community. In case of muziboo, that happens to be Music. Music that you create. Most of our users come to Muziboo to showcase their music to people who care about such home made music. When a user joins an online community, chances are she does not know most people there and is looking to form some connections (mostly online) with people who share the same interest. You are not on an online community to talk about your work, personal life, relationship status, your last trip and ten other things. You are there for just one reason only … your interest. Online communities serve a niche and serve it well.

Mindset towards making new connections

In orkut you would find several profiles (mostly of women) who express that they would not accept friendship requests from people they don’t know. In a social network, your profile is a representation of you in the online world. Your connections, communities your join reflect on you and along with your profile information give people an idea of who your are. So most people prefer not to connect with strangers (again more so in case of facebook) because they would be associated with them in someway.

In an online community, your profile is just a part of your real self. So in case of Muziboo your profile is a representation of your musical self. Your connections there are people you admire musically or who like your music. You are open to adding more friends or contacts because all your care is that they would help you in getting better in your passion. Since you know most people are there for a specific reason, you are more likely to talk to them even if you have not known them before. Its the same reason why I think groups in flickr for a certain city (say bangalore) meetup in real life every now and then and orkut meets hardly ever materialize.

Culture or Spirit of the place

Both social networks and online communities try to stay neutral. They don’t have opinions. They don’t dictate what you should do (there are however guidelines as to what not to do). However an online community does have a culture that you can feel once you have spent sometime there. For example, when I started using flickr, it took me very little time to figure out that I can go and comment on anyone’s picture and then request them for a comment. I could quickly find out that groups are a great way to find people who are interested in some specific kind/aspect of photography
and so on. This culture or spirt is defined by the people in the community but the creators of the place initially play a big roll in shaping it. Which brings me to my last point for today’s post

Nurturing the place v/s letting it be

An online community has to be nurtured. Specially in India or similar place where conventionally we have not looked at online world as a place to learn or pursue something serious. Social networks on the other hand don’t really need nurturing. You don’t need to greet new users and tell them they should comment on other people’s stuff. If a social network is all about the number of users and connections they have, an online community is all about the number of comments they make or the number of group discussions users initiate. To achieve that, community managers have to work very hard till the place carries that vibe all by itself. The concept of a community manager is absent in social networks as I know.
I would be very interested in knowing your thoughts on this article. Have you been  part of an online community before? If yes, please do tell us about it and how your experience was. Do you think social network’s groups can serve as online communities?

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I have been working on Muziboo for the last 11 months now. We have done one major design revision and countless small iterations to improve the design (and ofcourse the usability). Things have show a lot of improvement and often even surprised us a lot. Being an engineer by graduation and at heart, its pretty tough for me to do the UI stuff so I thought of writing down my learnings here for other people who are in the same boat. You should (and most likely would) know that i am not a UI or usability expert, so if you wantsome real advice, go hire one. I think they are worth the money.

If you want to learn about usability, Jacob Nielsen’s website and Don’t make me think make an excellent read.

So here is how not do design your UI :)

1. Lets make it look beautiful

This is certainly the worst way to design. Its good to make your pages look nice but that alone should not drive your decision about placing things in your layout. A good way to design is to decide on the purpose of the page and see what makes the most sense. What can make it clear what the page does and help your users in doing it.

2. Lets put more content in this page. Too little right now

This is another mistake that I have personally made too often. For example, putting another tag cloud so that users don’t quit the site on this page and have something to hop on to. Putting stuff thats not related to the theme of the page, dilutes the purpose of the page. Certainly no page should be a dead end but other links on a page should feel like a logical hop rather than some random links thrown in. So while music recommendations for related music is a good idea, a tag cloud probably is not.

3. Giving equal importance to all page elements

If you land on a page and nothing stands out, you will be confused. You would spend some time in figuring out what the pages does. The purpose of your page should be clear. You can use big fonts, graphics etc to make sure you can get the message across before everything grabs user’s attention. A great example of that is Flickr. “Share your photos Watch the world” has big impactful font. Enough to catch your attention before anything else grabs it.

4. Not having a consistent structure across the site

If your pages don’t follow a theme, your users would have to figure out stuff on every page. For example. when you go to orkut or facebook, you generally know where to find the comment box or where to find the apps, where to find fans (in groups/pages) etc. You even know where to find the “Share” link on every page. Once you have learnt a page, you don’t need to spend as much time learning other pages. Define your site’s structure and then follow it.

5. Designing based on user inputs alone

Its great to listen to your users and it really helps, but most likely you will be able to talk to only a few people and that would never give you a clear picture of whats working or not working. I recommend using google analytics or similar software to find out your weak pages. These are pages with highest exit rates or bounce rates. You can also find the entrance sources on the page (keywords that people use to find this page on a search engine). If your entrance keywords are related to the page and the bounce/exit rates are still high, may be people are not getting your message right and its time to redesign the page.

These were some of my personal learnings that I am applying to come out with a new design for Muziboo and I will post the results of my experiments in another blogpost. In the meantime, let me know your feedback.

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*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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