Muziboo Interface Redesign
When we launched Muziboo.com, we wanted to get the website up and running really quickly so that we can see the initial user reaction and understand our market better. In retrospect, I think it was a good move as that gave us good insights into what people look for, how our service can be different and it also helped us build a strong community. I was (am) inspired by the getting real book and Muziboo was a true getting real project. We got the website up in about a month since we hit upon the idea and in about two months, more than 100 people were using the service.
However in order to get the service up and running quickly, we could not spend too much time on the interface. We did make sure that the service is usable and the design is not so cluttered but the design did not have a long life. We have already reached a point where our users feel we need a new redesign. As I wrote in one of the earlier post, we have been thinking/working on the new design for almost last two months and its finally almost ready. We have had a great discussion at Muziboo.com about what features to add and we have added a few of those in the current release and will be adding more over the next month or so. The design should go live sometime next week and we are quite sure that it will be a visual treat apart from being much more usable than the current one.
As an early peep, I will put a few screenshots from the new design here and let everyone comment on it
Barry wonderbrawl
That sure is a weird name for a song title! or so i thought when i casually clicked to listen to wonderbrawl for the very first time, a few hours after the upload.For a second or two it made me wonder if it was the original Wonderwall number…phew, i slowly started crinking the corners of my mouth and half way through the song smiling real wide and by the time it ended I was really laughing out loud!!. Thats “Wonderbrawl”!! and it definitely lives up to its description,”A mad mix of Wonderwall” 
Prateek and myself got to know that Barry(Bharat) sings in Bangalore in Opus on its Karaoke nights and this was reason enough for us to make a trip to that place and we insisted he sings Wonderbrawl…I swear he is a good showman and he just doesnt sing it, he PERFORMS it. Guys, if you ever have a chance dont miss it
Muziboo: The Journey so far (Part 2)
Part 1 of the series can be found here
Around November of 2007, we took a small break to visit Mumbai. We decided to club this with a Muziboo Mumbai Users Meet and finally we met three of our users, Nagesh, Ashwyn and Sooraj there .. it was certainly fun as Nagesh has been a very encouraging user right from the day he stumbled upon Muziboo. Nagesh runs a very popular music community himself called RadioIdli. Mumbai meet was great fun even though we could not meet a lot of people due to the diwali time. Below is a picture from the meet
After coming back from Mumbai, we attended the Barcamp Bangalore, 5th Edition. Barcamp was the first time we talked to so many people about Muziboo and we even conduted a session on online community building in India. There was a lot of discussion on blogging in barcamp and several bloggers mentioned us after that. We saw a lot of the barcampers signing up and even uploading .. most notably Sandil, Joseph, Prasanth. Below is one of the great songs from Joseph from the movie Om Shanti Om. We met Shourya in barcamp (an early Muziboo user). In fact Shourya was kind to shoot a video of me talking about Muziboo and host it on his blog
Barcamp gave us lots of good insights and we made some changes to our song page based on the recommendations people gave us. To our suprise and ofcourse delight, our activity went up a lot of the barcamp .. especially in terms of comments. It was around the same time that we increased the upload cap from 2 songs a day to 10 songs a day and that caused the music on Muziboo to double in just two months. Even before we attended the barcamp, we had been thinking of doing a redesign .. but after barcamp we knew that this has got to be our priority number 1. We started working on our redesign but not just on a cosmetic redesign even though that will be the most visible change once the new design is rolled out. We also started thinking about how we can make the service more “musical” and ofcourse more useful for our users. One of the key points we have identified was that we need to let users take and use their music in whatever form they want once they have uploaded the track here. It could be letting people download (if they want) .. embedding the music on their blog or one of the several other things they can do with their music. Last few months we have been working at the new interface and several of these and more exciting features .. such as the ones suggested by our users here. This year will see a lot of new things coming to Muziboo and we are sure Muziboo will become an exciting place for all the budding musicians.
This has pretty much been the journey so far .. I am sure there are exciting times ahead for us and for Muzbians (Vasudha used this term for the first time I think) …. so keep uploading and keep exploring great music
Muziboo: The journey so far (Part 1)
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. Btw, thas Nithya and me in the picture standing up and telling about our Muziboo experience. 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!
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