One year

Today, I complete 1 full year of quitting my first job. The ride since then has been adventurous to say the least. It has been a, *cliche alert*, roller-coaster year. 

Before quitting my job, I had certain fears. Not being able to maintain my lifestyle was the biggest one. While at work, I had gotten used to spending money whenever and wherever I wanted to. And I was afraid that I might not be able to handle losing that freedom.

That lifestyle did go away. But, I managed to pull through. Eating out now means roadside aloo paranthas, and rolls or eating in Dhabas rather than Pasta Arrabiata and Fondues in fancy restaurants. Maggi has become a staple part of the diet. Exploring new pubs and sports bars is replaced by drinking beer at home or scouting for happy hours in cheap watering holes. The waiter no longer remembers our usual drink. 

Honestly, it is scary at times. There have been times of immense lows, some which I had never experienced before. But the highs more than make up for it. The past one year has made me a better and wiser person, and I hope that the people whom I care about feel the same.

If I had a choice, I’d do it all over again because you know what, chilled beer still tastes the same at home.

What makes us a pirate

And my story from a pirate to founding a digital music store

In the last 6 months, two important things have happened:

1. I am more broke than ever before in my life

2. I have purchased more music than I did in my 23 years before that

This might seem odd. After all, who pays for music these days, anyways - just the rich kids and audiophiles, right? Certainly not a broke entrepreneur. It was my belief that people who pirate and later turn to buying music do so because they are financially more well off. Because of the simple reason that many considered ‘buying’ music a luxury but not a necessity. I did too. And boy, was I wrong.

Back in college, I did what any music loving, self respecting, on-a-small-pocket-money-budget college kid would do. I grabbed a senior’s hard drive and copied his complete music collection into my machine. I was so high on the shining new music collection of 50 GBs.

Watch Out! was the monthly student magazine of our college. It was what the cool kids read. For one of the columns called Almost Famous,they interviewed one famous student of the campus. All the young kids wanted to be on that column one day - it was the peak of popularity you could attain. I remember reading one particularly well where the interviewer asked this highly popular chap: “What do you consider your most prized possession in 4 years of college?” His answer:“My 34 GBs of hard drive full of amazing English music by bands from all over”. I was so amazed and blown away. I wanted to be that guy. Imagine having 34GBs of new music to listen to and show off. I craved for his music collection and more. It didn’t matter to me that it was pirated or not, which of course it was.

The important thing to note is that this answer came from a senior student of one of the best engineering colleges in India. He was actually proud of his feat. Whether he was unaware of the implications of his actions or was just playing the fool is anybody’s guess. The magazine editors who pride themselves on their slogan We have Issuesdidn’t seem to have any issue about him pirating music. That to me is the crux of the piracy problem - ignorance.

When we were young, a lot of us were ignorant about what piracy actually means for the artists. Unfortunately, some of us are even today. A lot of us don’t know that it is illegal and harmful to the artists to do so. I met the ex-head of a major record label once who told me that his teenage kid doesn’t buy music because he thinks it is stupid. And I found this a common trend with most people I spoke to. Very few seemed to have the idea that it was hurting the artists.

Earlier I used to think it’s about the money - that as soon as I start earning, I would start paying for music. I did, by going out and paying for gigs, but not so much for digital downloads or CDs. Then, Musicfellas happened.

My first music purchase was a CD by the band Sulk Station. I emailed them requesting their CD and they were kind enough to send me one with a hand written note on the envelope. It felt good. But it wasn’t until I started working on Musicfellas that I started purchasing music. I was completely unaware of how badly it is affecting the artists.

As I got to know the artists personally and hear their stories, it made me realize how hard they work to give us the music we love. Stories of having to worry about the next month’s rent - every single month were not uncommon. I met artists who sacrificed sleep, comfort and even food to do what they loved. And it changed me.

Thus, it is my opinion that, like me, there are others out there who need to be educated. Most people are not stingy, but simply ignorant. I have a seen a lot of my friends convert into paying users on and off Musicfellas and it warms my heart. We need to tackle piracy at the root level by educating the next generation and not merely by putting bans on torrents or releasing DRM-restricted music. People will always find ways to break the rules until they know in their heart what right thing to do is.

About that 50GBs of music, I am slowly deleting more and more of it and replacing it with legally bought music - Thanks to iTunes’ entry into India.

The gates have opened - redBus acquired by Naspers

redBus acquisition by Naspers group feels almost like my own. It is so heartening to see a big success story come out of India.

It is a great milestone for the Indian startup ecosystem. Complaints about the lack of exits here both from entrepreneurs (that includes some of us) and investors are pretty common. We need more optimism in our system and this is just the perfect dose.

Congratulations redBus team and Thank You for opening the gates. To my fellow entrepreneurs, let’s roll! 

On Flyte Shutdown

This article was originally published as a guest post on YourStory

India’s biggest e-commerce player, Flipkart shutdown its digital music store Flyte. This comes as a surprise to me given the fact that Flipkart had invested so much in building it. They bought a company navigating a can of worms, built the technology, made licensing deals with the labels which can take ages to close and of course built a whole team to do that. Then why did this happen? 

As a digital music entrepreneur, here are my thoughts on this:

1. iTunes: This could be the single biggest reason on why Flyte didn’t work out. A lot of people I know preferred iTunes over Flyte, I do too. The ease of buying and having it downloaded automatically into your Apple devices is one of the biggest reason to do this. This convenience even overrides the lower costs that Flipkart had for some albums.

2. High content acquisition cost: The record label-online store partnerships work in a way where the store has to pay a minimum setup/guarantee fees at the beginning which could be in the tunes of crores depending upon the catalogue size. This is to hedge the label’s risk in case the store shuts down (like Flyte). After the minimum fees is recovered, revenue share on the sales begin. So, even if the store makes huge revenue, it might end up paying most of it to the labels.

3. Few paying users: India is among the countries which pirate the most and it is not without reason. There are just not enough people buying music here. The funny thing is that a lot of people who are just getting into the music scene don’t even know the concept of buying music. They think that torrents is a genuine way of doing it. That is tough to change. 

4. Changing patterns for paying music: World over, people are increasingly paying for access to music rather than for its ownership. Spotify, Rdio, Pandora give the users access to a huge library on the fingertips without giving them the ownership of the content. And users have responded fairly well to that. Thus, digital downloads are also probably going to become lesser as the cost of music access comes down.

What this means for the digital music scene in India:

From our experiments in the Indian market with Musicfellas, we’ve learnt that, there are just not enough paying users to make it a big sustainable business. Sure, you can probably make it a decent lifestyle business. But, that’s not what Flipkat would want, right? They would probably want to focus their efforts in some other directions instead - would say it was a commendable move. To build a big business solely on digital downloads in India is super difficult. At Musicfellas, we entered the business thinking of India as a test market and with plans to expand into international markets. Our assumptions that there are just not enough paying users was kind of validated.

Sure, there are some among us who would disagree with me and tell me that they pay so much for music. I know, I am one of you. But, there are very few of us - few enough to not make good business sense. 

What I see as the future:

The future of digital music according to me is going to be more and more about being able to listen to any song whenever you want at the exact moment. Not 5 minutes later after you download it but right when your heart desires it. So, models like Spotify, Rdio or in India - Gaana, Saavn and Dhingana are probably the way forward. But, then again, these services have to be careful as to what happens to them once Spotify comes to India (which should be sooner rather than later, given its entry into Asian markets via Singapore). Because honestly, these services are not even half as good as Spotify when it comes to the product. 

As to what happens to services like us - we will continue serving niche yet large enough markets of independent content. We are not Gaana’s/Spotify’s competitor but are complementary to them. We are not fighting for the same listening time - we want to help you discover new independent music (which you probably don’t find on these services). We operate at lower content acquisition costs (since we don’t work with the major labels). And, our users are passionate music fans, usually willing to pay for the music they love. We will always find space in that hipster heart of yours wanting to find good new music and break the usual clutter of overplayed commercialised music. 

We are rolling out a mobile app pretty soon and would offer it on subscription only, hoping that a combination of downloads and subscription in the international markets should do it. 

Disclosure: Times Internet Limited, the parent company of Gaana.com is an investor in Musicfellas via TLabs. The opinions in this article are my own and do not represent TIL.

Observations from a post’s 2 minute stay on Hacker News

A few days back, one of my posts made it to the Hacker News front page. Here is a brief background to what had happened before that:

Behance tweeted about Musicfellas to its 500000+ followers but sent out a wrong link. I responded by tweeting them and writing a post on how it affected us and posted it on Hacker News. A lot of my friends retweeted, personally emailed Behance and some even raised a ticket. Behance responded, emailed us an apology, deleted the incorrect tweet and sent out a new tweet with the correct link.

The Hacker News post got a lot of hits. And based on Google Analytics, I was able to make some interesting observations. Also included are stats from the following 5 days:

1. After direct traffic from HN, the top three sources were: Feedly, Inbound.org and Hckrnews.
2. 80% of traffic was from US, India, Canada and UK.
3. In US, San Francisco gave twice the traffic from New York. 
4. Germans stayed on for more time than anyone else. 
5. Chrome was the most popular browser at 70% .
6. In the first hour, hits were way higher from Mac as compared to Windows. As time progressed, things got evened out and they are now almost equal.
7. iPad brought more than 80% of the mobile traffic.

Quick Note: HN shows up as direct traffic on GA instead of referral. More on it here.

6 Productivity Hacks that work for me

1. Eat That Frog

Do the most difficult or the task you hate the most first. I guess this is against popular advice but this truly works. Your mind is the most fresh when you are starting out, and getting that one tough thing out of the way leaves you with much more motivation to carry forward with the other simpler ones. The frog analogy comes from the assumption, that people hate eating frogs.

2. Wear a cap

This is something that I have just discovered. There is no better work setting than putting on a low set cap, with your headphones over them. The idea is to restrict your field of view and focus on the task at hand. If only there was something which could tune out the multiple opened tabs #wishful thinking.

3. Ambient noise is good

Believe it or not, moderate ambient noise is proven to boost creativity. An environment like a coffee house is proven to increase your productivity. And this app called Coffitivity does just that.

4. When you are tired, push yourself to do one more thing

It’s the end of the day and you just want to wrap it up. Or it’s the middle of the week and you don’t feel particularly inspired to work and want to just leave. A simple hack is to push yourself to do just one more thing. More often than not, you will find yourself back in the zone. One more thing works magic for a few people, so why not you.

5. Just start doing, it is OK for the first draft to be crappy

The writers among you would probably agree with me on this one. The first drafts are always crappy - they don’t have to be grammatically correct. My first drafts usually are just random keywords joined together. The first drafts are more like an empty playground for your ideas, let them play around and mingle with each other.

6. Keep your goals to yourself

Derek Sivers has delivered a very solid TED talk on this. The idea is that when you tell someone what you want to do, say lose weight, more often than not they would congratulate you for taking it up. That is the validation and ego boost why you wanted to lose weight in the first place. So, your plans and resolutions are best kept to yourselves.

An Elegy To Storylane

This morning, I woke up to this email from Storylane’s CEO Jonathan Gheller which said:

Dear Mayank,

I am excited to inform you that the Storylane team will be joining forces with Facebook. You can read more about it in my story here.

Best!

First things first - What is Storylane?

Storylane is a place where you can share stories about your life that are more thoughtful and serious in tone. And of course it’s social to the core. Launched in October 2012, it falls in the same league of Tumblr, Blogger or even Quora. But, the difference is that Storylane focuses on more personal stories - it asks you questions like “What do you know now that you didn’t when you were 18?" and even casual writers share stories about their lives like this one or this. But, what really interested me was the fact that it is such a beautifully designed product. Every experience interacting with Storylane is so fresh yet comfortable. Everything, right from the beautiful animation while the page loads or the way an image moves  when you hover over a summary of the story is very well thought of. And their recently launched iOS app is also groundbreaking since it brings a very new interaction to reading apps. They truly delight their users with the experience.

What has happened?
Storylane is “now joining forces” with Facebook. What this means I do not know - but what I assume is that Storylane is acqui-hired to ramp up Facebook’s attempt to capture the longform writing market. So, it’s more about the team rather than the product. This has a weirdly same connotation to what happened with Posterous joining Twitter. The CEO had then mentioned that Posterous would continue running as an independent service but we all know how that turned out. I was a Posterous user back then but had a foresight to move to Tumblr. I have a bad feeling about Storylane too. Not that I am a heavy user but I do visit it quite often if only to check out the design and new stuff they’ve done. Heck, I have evangelised it to as many people as I could.

Why this rant?
It is because it hurts to see good products die. They add value to our lives and as someone really famous said “They move the human race forward”. I don’t know what the future holds for Storylane (the product) but I just hope it’s not a bad one. We need good products in the system. Also, I am sure, there are many out there who have invested their time and energy into Storylane. Because of its serious nature, Storylane was never just a fad but an attempt from a lot of people to start sharing their feelings. Even at Musicfellas, we took inspiration from Storylane for some our features - most notably the bell icon and some other minute details. And always looked up to the Storylane team for doing such a great job.

Having said all this, I’d like to congratulate the Storylane team for joining Facebook and wish them luck. And here’s hoping (and requesting) that they keep the service up for many of us whose lives have been touched by them in some way or the other.

9 Free Tools To Help Your Startup Off The Ground

This post first appeared as a guest post on WATBlog.com.

It is a free world we live in with free access to information (read Internet) and cheap ways that make our lives better. It is now easier and cheaper to start a company from scratch. Open-source tools, free information over the internet (Coursera, Khan Academy) make it super-reasonable for usually near broke entrepreneurs that we become. And we at Musicfellas have taken full advantage of such tools to help build a scalable business without breaking our piggy bank too much.

1. Google Apps

This includes the full rainbow of Google products for your business – Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar, Drive. These tools are quite simply some of THE most important tools you would get around to using. And until some time back it used to be free but they have now stopped free signups.

2. Asana

Asana is a project and task management tool which is free upto 30 members – which obviously works well for young startups like ours. Founded by Ex-Co-Founder of Facebook, Asana is super easy to use, very crisp and makes collaboration very easy. And the instant gratification that you see on checking off a task is superb. It has an iOS app as well but it leaves much to be desired.

3. Trello

Trello is our workhorse. It is a completely free project management tool which looks a bit like Kanban Board. It is a great tool to see what tasks are assigned to whom and are in what stage of the development.  Best part is that it is transparent and gives you snapshot of your project status in a view. Here’s  a look at the Trello team’s board.

4. Dropbox

I am sure that most of you use it already. If you are not, then you are missing out on a great and free (to an extent) way to share files. Instead of sending out email attachments to everyone, we use it to sync design files between everyone so that everyone knows what is the next thing we are building.

5. Tweetdeck

According to a recent study, twitter is much better than facebook for music marketing.  And we use twitter quite extensively to seek feature requests from users, inviting new artists on platform and sharing new releases to our fans. But doing it from within the twitter app is a little painful. Hence we use a free tool Tweetdeck which is also owned by twitter. Although there are other tools also available in the market like Hootsuite, Tweetbot, etc. we find Tweetdeck to be most easy to use and good at whatever little things it does.

6. BufferApp

For the same reason as above, we use Buffer App to stay connected with people. Buffer App is a great free way to schedule your FB/Twitter/etc posts. You can add upto 10 items in each network before which it asks you to pay. This is a great way to share good content with your users without spending too much time worrying about the timing of the post.

7. Skype

I am sure you all use or have used Skype in some form or the other. Nothing much to say here except that for a team like ours, which is spread across different cities, a few skype calls always help – after all emails can only take you so far.

8. Tumblr

Having a blog presence for your business never hurt anybody. There is no better marketing than sharing your story with your audience. A startup is an interesting journey and there are people who would always be interested in a good honest story told well. And we use tumblr – a free tool to setup our blog. With absolutely zero coding, we have setup a blog and keep sharing good content it.

9. Mixpanel

Building a startup is as much science as it is intuition. And building a company which also takes decisions based on data is the mark of a good entrepreneur. So, apart from google analytics (which is a free tool as well), we use Mixpanel. It gives you information about events on your site very deeply and is free till 25000 data points a month – which can be extended after you put a logo on your site (which we have).

Building a startup is a time, energy and money consuming process. I hope that this post helped you in saving some of the money bit.

The crazy, twisted story of a logo

Rome was not built in a day. Our logo was built in one (month). There’s been some talk about our website design and the logo. And we are glad you all liked it. We have spent a lot of time working on it and it feels good to see some appreciation.

Today, we give you an inside view of how our logo was designed chronologically. None of the earlier versions was perfect but we learnt from each one of them. Apart from the ones mentioned below, there were loads which were discussed, created and scrapped. But, for the sake of this discussion, we’d like to share just these few.

1. The Pacman lookalike

This was the first one we came up with. The idea was to resemble ‘fellas’ as some character. This looked cool to us especially since we could do a lot of avatars of it - like one wearing a headphone or a hat or even one which looked like a girl. But, the music element was missing. And of course it looked a bit too much like pacman which was the reason we eventually had to scrap it.

Key Takeaway: Avatars could work if done well with a unique, well conceptualised base character.

2. The elegant circle

Simplicity, minimalism and elegance were always at the top in our list of words we wanted to associate with our brand. We’ve been fans of clean design and this appealed a lot to our senses. But the restrictive little that could be done with this design led it to be passed over as well.

Key Takeaway: The green to blue gradient which could be seen in our website design. Typography, which was retained for the final logo.

3. The cliched music tones

This was an attempt to make a play on the initials M and F. The element of music was of course front and center but we wanted to go for something more subtle.

Key takeaway: Retain the element of music in the logo but make it more subtle.

4. Complicated headphone + moustache

For some reason, we were very impressed with that crazy #LikeaSir moustache and wanted to put in the design resembling ‘fellas’. The music element was there with the play on the name resembling the headphone. But, we felt it was a little tacky and hence scrapped it.

Key takeaway: The moustache was a good way to resemble ‘fellas’.

5. Giraffe + Elephant

This was the one on which we spent the most hours on. How could you say no to a cute little fat elephant hanging out with his buddy giraffe and listening to music :)

Endless hours in a coffee shop were spent making the elephant’s bum a little broader, giraffe’s neck taller and the tails together. It was hard to let go of this logo. But eventually, common sense prevailed and we scrapped this.

Key Takeaway: Nothing - this logo was perfect. *Sob Sob*

But seriously, don’t get too attached to your designs. You lose the sense of what’s right and what’s wrong.

6. The final one

The final version looked perfect to us - of course not at first. Lot of different versions were tried, eyes were inverted, mole was added, borders removed etc. But, as time went by - it started growing on us and we are so glad we decided to stick with it.