Me, Myself and Muziboo

The concept of charging users for an on-line community platform is quite a departure from the conventional preachings of the internet. ‘Freemium models’ are most often dismissed as an overreaching effort to increase revenues. But there are a few good reasons why I strongly feel a freemium model would work better.

One of the toughest challenges in building and sustaining an on-line community is establishing trust among users who have never met in the real world. Most users are wary of false identities and this inhibits the formation of trusted interpersonal relationships online. Paid account holders carry a certain level of authenticity and thus establishing mutual trust among such users gets easier.

Charging users creates a decently high barrier to entry and any barrier acts as a filter that ensures a certain quality in content. This also ensures that as a business owner you spend much lesser resource and time on moderating/flagging content to keep the place clean.

And last but not the least, users are not threatened by the possibility of the service shutting down due to unmanageable costs.

More revenues, lesser overheads and better trust – What more do we need to believe in this model?

Myself and Prateek were discussing the other day about how existing brick and mortar companies would alter their business plan and functioning if they got inspired by the internet companies. The core objective is this – Never charge your customer for your core competency(offering). Give it away for free to attract more customers. Make money through something not directly related to your offering.

It is evil to charge your customers. It is your problem if you are not creative enough to come up with other attractive ways to make a business of your offering.

I am jotting a few of them here. All contributions welcome.

KFC, Mac D and the likes

Everything in the menu is free. The company takes a cut from the tip to the waiter ( Tipping is not mandatory).

Automobile companies

The vehicle is free. The customers will be charged for all accessories and maintenance

The Wall marts and the Big bazaars

All items on display free. Customers will be charged for parking space

The above examples sound hilarious, almost ridiculous. But the this is the norm in the internet world!

Let’s see how the whole ‘attention economy’ thing unfolds!

It is not fashionable anymore to say that Web 2.0 is not as much about technology as it is about people. When this is an accepted truism of such degree, it is worth spending some time to analyze the dynamics of a such a model.

Before one builds a website (hence a service) on the assumption and wish that users will come forward to generate content, one needs to understand what it takes to drive those users to contribute content.

The following things need to be kept in mind while trying to build an active community on-line.

Is Your Service Different

During the whole thought process – while planning to start, build and maintain a new website- if ever this question sounded cliched within yourself, you are sure to come up with a non-starter for a service. Unless there is something unique in what you offer, how fair is it to expect people to spend their time in your platform to generate content, when either, they are already comfortable doing the same elsewhere (or) they do not see a new source of satisfaction in your service. This satisfaction as your uniqueness could be in any form for the user  expression, recognition, entertainment, social and business networking and so on and so forth.

For muziboo.com the users have overwhelmingly let it known that appreciation from fellow Patrons, through constructive criticism and comments, stands out as our uniqueness that drives them to generate and share content. It soon graduated to the next level, where rewards from fellow patrons and users have become financial – in the form of offers to sing/ perform in public platforms and functions and offers for teaching opportunities. It did not stop there; this culture came up with a pleasant surprise for the owner too. The establishment of this uniqueness started giving us rapid growth, as even people uncomfortable to sing/ or record any form of music started becoming active members to be able to give their appreciation and comments on the work of other people. The demographics of active users in muziboo.com is hence a healthy distribution among musicians who record and comment and non-musicians who are happy to enjoy and comment.

Initiating And Driving A Culture

Once you have decided on what should differentiate your service from similar others, you as the owner should become one of the patrons and initiate that culture among users, which will in-turn give the desired uniqueness to the service. As the first few hundred users go a long way in giving a face and feel to your service, it is vital to have given due thought about your uniqueness at a very early stage of conception of the service. Also, one has to be around constantly, driving it in the positive direction. Majority of users need handholding while you wait for them to acquire the taste of what you have to offer. This is the only way to bring in the kind of culture (that showcases the uniqueness) that you want to offer. Because if you leave it to the users to bring in uniqueness all by themselves or give them a good idea and not follow-up with efforts to involve them in building the same, the only guaranteed result is the establishment of a culture characterized by stagnation and inertia among the users. Do not forget that this need for handholding is not a reflection of the users intelligence if you can come up with something too exciting that it needs no handholding, then good for you  read George Oates’ blog to understand that community managers had to work hard to establish the uniqueness of Flickr

Here it is important to note that this uniqueness refers to a dynamic aspect of the site, which has the potential for exciting or enthusing users to contribute. It rarely or seldom refers to the uniqueness in technology that the site has adopted. And, more often than not, only while enjoying the uniqueness will the users be spending the maximum chunk of their time when logged in even if it is a little peripheral to the main service that you offer.

For muziboo.com, the main service is reflected in the tagline ‘Getting an Audience’. We worked on growing what we decided should be the uniqueness for the service – discussions and participation from the users regarding the generated content. It was per se peripheral as the main service is to be able to host people’s music. We took time to start threads where we explained (through diverse inputs again) how the user gains through active interaction when using the service.

So this initial push to uniqueness has to be from the owners. Unfortunately some websites after getting a whole lot funding, start operating on the premise that marketing the whole service will encourage people to register and generate content. It is not enough to sell the website, you have to sell the uniqueness of the website after establishing one in the first place.

Post Sign-Up

User assimilation is a slow painstaking process. The new user should immediately be made comfortable with an interactive interface. The business manifestation of this interactive interface phenomenon for a new Muziboo user is the ease with which she can get acquainted to the other members of the community. Another of those is a way by which he is presented and recommended with the appropriate links of content to browse.

Recognizing User

Most on line community members like recognition (rightly so) either for the content contributed or for participation. Couple of ways to do that would be featured articles and featured users. believe it – such energy and fun in those sessions.

Empowering Users

Empowerment is a great form of recognition and by doing the needful on that count, as an owner, you manage to stay away from ruffling yourself with too many responsibilities. By empowerment I refer to the minimal barriers that you put out for content acceptance. All generated content need not go through great levels of moderation or quality checks before being published. The motivation to contribute from the users end is highly dampened if they get spiked. For Muziboo empowerment was seen as a gesture of our trust on them, as owners we have proprietary strictures to deal with, and there are temptations among rogue users for piracy. Also if you shackle users with too many do and donts, you will have a lot of fire fighting to be done everyday as the service scales up. Democratize as much as possible. Let most things be decided on user votes and ratings in Muziboo even piracy related rejections are recommended by the users.

Having A Balance-So Much Democracy

In the nascent stages many users come forward with their ideas  both functional and business. Some will always be more relevant than the others, the others being the ones that do not align with your vision of the service. It is for the service owner to handle this embarrassment of riches without stepping on toes. You do not want to paint yourself in a corner while asking for ideas, because when not implementing those bonafide suggestions, you are likely to come across as rude or technically in-competent- both equally hurtful for your image.

Promoting Offline Meets

Promoting local offline meets is also a way to create stronger bonds among the community members. Posting updates about such events on Muziboo has even enthused users from nearby cities to come to our meets. What a way that for celebrating your community?

It Aint Easy (because if it is, it aint fun)

Does this need elaboration??

Muziboo is offering a couple of interesting internship
opportunities over the summer. Candidates could be Ruby/AJAX hackers,
or music afficionados / evangelists

Location is not a constraint and we are flexible about work hours and duration of the internship. Stipend will be decided on a case to case basis.

It is fun to be a part of a strong growing community like Muziboo with a growing number of enthusiastic users collaborating with each other across countries to come up with real cool and contemporary music. And one of our talented users, Ronak felt the strong urge to popularise artists effort by coming up with the idea of podcast for Muziboo music and named it Muzicast. Went live last weekend! posting it here…Enjoy

How often do you feel trapped by the routine of hearing the redundant play-lists of mainstream music? If you are a music enthusiast or an upcoming artist yourself, willing to lend an ear to innovative and unexplored styles of music, your destination is ‘Radio Muziboo‘. Experience the ride through the wild terrain of eclectic music by contributing your feedbacks to artists while enjoying the sounds.

Exposing and encouraging new talent and music to listeners and critiques is what Muziboo does best.

Muziboo.com, being an active community that comes together to recognize music talent, churns out a growing number of mindblowing songs and the radio is the next logical feature that can quench our eagerness to inform the world about the great music of today.

The uniqueness of the theme is the low barrier to entry for user’s music. Its a good starting point for a newcomer with a satisfying recording that stands on its own merit. The simple radio widget on its display gives basic details of the track such as artist name and title and also a link to the song page on the site which has a complete description of the song, the discussions around it and a link to artist’s portfolio. Currently channels are by language but eventually users will be able to create their own stations with content across languages and genres.

Be a part of this effort to promote talent by embedding the radio on blogs and social network profiles. An effort which is not televised or aired but through the far reaching new online medium of WWW. To get your music webcasted, join the community and upload your music.

P.S: Radio on the side bar

The obvious reason for more and more people to try their hand at entrepreneurship with a web venture is because of the significant decline in hardware costs and the availability of Open source Software these days. That apart theres no real need for an office which greatly brings the overheads down. And a few success stories in the industry definitely pep you up to scratch your itch for the ‘big buck’

But the million dollar question here is how would you want to define success for your venture. Is it always about attracting a million eyeballs to your service and heading for an acquisition? Or bet on the hyped up ad sense revenue stream? (The sad realisation now is none of the Social networks of any kinds will ever make money through ad networks cos people come there to stay and not click ads to hop on to the next website.)

Worse still are this bunch of people who consider VC funding as success by itself. What most fail to realise is that one has every chance of going bust and failing in their attempt to impress the world with their service even after all the millions that they bag. Numerous such VC funded startups hit the dust.

In my opinion there are only two kinds of ventures. The ones that make money and the ones that don’t. If you have service used by millions of people but you still havent figured out a way to make money, but banking on acquisition, its pretty lame. Cos if the acquisition exit does not work, you will die.

When can you make money. Only when people find your service great enough that they consider its worth paying.The most often heard advice from everybody in the circle these days is ‘ Dont worry about revenue models. Concentrate on providing value’. And this often comes from people who have never burnt their fingers with anything. All they do is read a few blogs and preach. How long can a bootstrapped web venture go like this. Especially if you are a media site, with increasing user demands, one has to step aside and think “Am I offering enough value that one day when I make it paid, people will care for my service that they pay and use”

Here are a few of my opinions

1) If you believe in an idea and there are enough stats to let you believe that there is a market for it, don’t validate your idea with too many people. Get yourself to build a prototype. Your users are your best critics. Its tough to translate ideas in your head to people around with just words. Even a basic prototype can turn heads.

2)Dont be different just for the heck of it and dont stick to a niche which just serves an elite. As far as possible keep the consumer base wide.

3)As your service takes shape you should concentrate more on what you can offer that people wouldnt mind paying for.

4)Decide ways to get the word out to people. Do not get carried away with every Tom, dick and Harry’s airy-fairy offline marketing suggestions. Offline marketing and brand building comes with a cost and in the initial stages, spend more time on fine-tuning your service than going offline to increase user base.

5)You will always encounter extremes of opinion about your service. No point getting carried away or getting low for either of these

6)Dont spend too much time on refining your UI. Make sure the colours are comfortable and the navigation is intuitive. Most people find it easy to put your service down on the basis of UI. If they are not users of your service, dont even care hearing them out. If they are users, explain as to why you stuck to a particular design. At the end of the day, people come for your service not for those frills that u managed to add

7)Web 2.0 is only associated with ajax, gradient colors, drop shadows and shiny buttons. They all can go only so far in acquiring or retaining users. Concentrate on providing a service where the content generated by the users means something. If you are running a service just to plot the social graph, its a bit too late. All possible combination of graphs that need to be created are already created by the biggies. Its hightime one banked on the value of the generated content.

8)Try not to run a service which has already failed multiple times elsewhere, especially the US. The US market is a good indicator. Unless you really have something in the local context, its not a great idea.

9)If you are the first of the kind to start something, please look around as to why it doesnt already exist. sometimes some services don’t exist for a reason!

10)Last but not the least, it takes some guts to bootstrap and believe in your idea. Web is not the quick buck as most people perceive it to be. Its a long haul if you are aiming to run a sustainable business. Hence stay put!