Interview with Allan Flores of Pinoy.FM

We first featured Pinoy.FM as one of the music web applications to watch out for. Pinoy Web Startup gets the insights of Pinoy.FM founder Allan Flores, who used to work for torrentspy, Fandango, and Myspace. Aspiring tech-entrepreneurs are sure to learn a lot from their product and programming expertise so bookmark this page.

Congratulations Allan. We can see that Pinoy.FM has been steadily gaining popularity since you first came out with it. Tell us about Pinoy.FM.

Pinoy.Fm was originally a private site for sharing OPM music. It was built to share new releases and old hits between me and my friends who are scattered all over in Singapore, Philippines, United States, Canada and the Middle East. We used to divide the tab for buying original albums and posting them on the private site so everyone can listen. When my friends in Singapore began spreading the word about our site, the demand for a powerful streaming medium becomes necessary. In respect to the industry, we need to legalize the concept so we decided to acquire licenses for it.

The site was privately launched on December 2007. But just weeks after that, we formally launched it as a invite-only website while we were processing the licenses. It was made publicly available on February of 2008 when we were finally approved for a streaming license.

Our main product is OPM Music, but we are gearing more towards being a social network. We have discovered so far that everyone wants to connect to anyone, get more friends and share more ideas and stuff. We think we will follow in that direction. But this doesn’t mean we will be less concentrated on Music. In fact, our next release will feature more stuff on music such as Indie Genre and Free downloads. We are still working on the legal part, but we are getting there. We would go as the law allows, to provide Free music to everyone.

There are currently 150+ artists on Pinoy.Fm but it is growing really fast. On our 4-months in public operation, we were able to register 65,000+ users. We have streamed approximately 200 Million songs. In 4 months, from 2 servers, we have grown into 8 full-time servers. At any time, we are running these 8 servers. During peak hours (that’s I think between 8-5 in Manila), we are running between 10 - 15 servers. We use EC2 Cloud Computing to scale our servers during busy hours.

Who’s behind Pinoy.FM? What’s a typical day like for you and your team?

Pinoy.Fm is a virtual company. We do not have a physical office. All our servers are in the cloud.

Pinoy.Fm is a startup and has 7 employees. Pinoy.FM has no full-time employee, in fact, all developers, designers and moderators have full-time jobs on their own. A typical working time would be on MSN. IM here and IM there. We have an internal centralized activity system where the team members can see what they need to do for the day. For the moderators, they just perform their jobs on the site cleaning up content. We would like to keep it this way, it’s simple and the environment is more relaxed, We wanted to go away from the “complexity” of being a corporate entity. After all, we are not doing this for the profit, although we need some to sustain the operation.

The key people include 3 co-founders: myself, Jamie Dungca, and Chris Bahilango. (Read more about the Key People in the INFONET Company Profile)

The typical day would start by reducing the number of servers running. Since we operate on the cloud, we have the leverage to scale up and down our servers as we wish.

As I have mentioned, members of the Pinoy.Fm Team are scattered all-over. Most of the team are based in Singapore, United States and the Philippines. We use collaboration tools from Google, our main repository for codes and website design is kept in a private SVN on EC2 cloud. Most of our systems are automated, we use Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) to process these automation. Our encoding servers are linked to the automation system. If any task grows so great that our regular time schedule is being affected, we collaborate immediately to automate that process. So basically, the whole system will run without human intervention. This makes it easy for us to concentrate on new features and not on the maintenance of the site.

Our working day will end firing up more servers. At around 8pm (California Time), users from South Korea, Singapore, Philippines, Dubai and Japan start crawling in their way to the site so we need to beef up the streaming service which would normally mean adding up 5 to 8 streaming servers.

Who are your core users? How did you spread the word about Pinoy.FM?

Our core users are Pinoys overseas (although Pinoys in the Philippines get a good cut of our traffic). Its fulfilling because this site was meant exactly for these type of audience. We started a plugin on Friendster that gets everybody to discover our site. Although it brought little growth, it is still helpful and is bringing in some 5% of our new signups. Most of our users discover the site by word-of-mouth; we have provided a feature on every track listing page to share the track to anyone with an email address. And that’s the key to people discovering our site. Our users share 1000+ tracks each day using this feature which leads to the recipient discovering Pinoy.Fm. Search engines provide little help in promoting our site since we don’t have a good page rank yet.

I’m sure a lot of aspiring techpreneurs are pulling their hair out on how to make money from their web applications. Have you hit upon the right revenue channel?

As i have mentioned, let it not be about the profit (at least at the start). If you focus your attention on profit, you will lose the essence of your idea. But it is very important to earn something to sustain your operations. We have received a couple of funding proposals from media companies based off San Francisco but we have decided to keep this site privately funded (at least for now). With 3,000 streams per second (peak time) and over 1 million page views per month, Pinoy.FM is paying for its operational expenses (and some) through commercial advertising.

What are the quirks of your users? What makes Pinoy.FM…. Pinoy?

Our main product is OPM. And as long as the law allows us to, we will provide Free Streaming to our listeners. We are trying to work with local bands for some distribution deals but we are not there yet. While we register quite a handful of foreign users (Indons, Malaysians and Vietnamese), a lot are requesting to allow their music scene to be public, we have no plans at this time to stream non-OPM music (except for Indie Music which will be included in next release).

Anything exciting brewing this 2008?

We are launching version 3 of our site. We are 85% done and is on our way to beta testing. More features, better navigational interface, easy to find music and a lot more. But the more important feature will be the introduction of Indie Music. We will feature a lot of Indie Music and with some that we have arrangements with, we will allow free downloads too. We know how Pinoys like Free Stuff. So we are going the extra mile of scoring a deal for free downloads. Its gonna be fun but we are still preparing our platform for we are sure it’s gonna be a hit and will require more than 15 servers.  

How do you see the web startup environment in the country? What do you think holds back the growth of a Silicon Valley-like hub for web startups because there are still so few?

Its very hard to establish a startup in the Philippines. First off is economics. There are NO affordable resources in the Philippines for someone with a great idea to start a business. And sadly enough, the government does not put extra effort in providing support in this area. To achieve a conducive environment for startups, Manila has to come up with some sort of a Young Tech Society that will help breed great ideas, meaning help promote ideas, acquire start up funds, and even provide an incubation platform. YouTube was a by-product of these types of social mingling and was technically born out of a Saturday night get-together party.

We need incubators in Manila, this Pinoy Web Startup website is a good start, if you guys can take the extra mile of organizing regular brainstorming casual get together (gathering), that could probably lead somewhere. We should organize more informal support to get these thing going. Ingenuity is a great trait of Filipinos. Let’s start from there. 

Thanks for your kind words and for taking the time to answer our questions. Any final words for young web companies starting out?

I know that economics plays a major role in every one’s life. If you have a great idea and economics is stopping you in fulfilling it, search out into the web for cheap alternative solution. For example, you do not need a physical office to collaborate. You don’t need full time employees to get things done. Make technology work on your favor. Start planning the reality of your ideas by making small steps and don’t be afraid to try it. If you fail, be better and try again, “No one makes the first jump” (quote from The Matrix).

But before you do all these, first ask yourself if “Do you really believe it will work?” As you might need the answers to that when you present your ideas to potential venture capitalists.

At Pinoy.Fm, our greatest expectation was to get 1,000 users on our first month. It turns out that we hit 15,000 just after 21 days. So your idea could be greater than you thought it’d be. Just go for it.