Congratulations on your re-launch at the recent World Food Expo! That must have been a big investment for a product launch for a new site. Is Manila Guide the core product of your company or do you have also other services that sustain your company?

Thank you very much. We are truly happy to finally have introduced our services to the market, and the World Food Expo was one great site to do just that since all food enthusiasts, restaurateurs, food and beverage managers – pretty much everyone in the food business was there so it was easier for us to reach our target market.

Our company, CALCMENU Philippines, has a lot of other services aside from this online dining guide. We also develop desktop and web-based software applications for the food and hospitality service industry as well as handle other Food Recipe websites.

Tell us more about Manila Guide.

Our website Manilguide.com is an online guide which answers the perpetual question: “Where shall I/we eat?” It provides a way for people to search for restaurants according to their preferences in cuisine, ambiance, budget – to name a few—and to express their views and experiences in these restaurants through ratings, comments and reviews. We have over thousands of restaurants in our comprehensive listings complete with their branches, information like the price range, menu, promos and even a map.

Our mission is to provide the low-down on all the food haunts in the cities around the metro and nearby provinces. We tied up with restaurants to try to provide site visitors with all the information they will need to have the best dining experience.

The website was started out by CALCMENU Philippines Inc/EGS Switzerland owners Mr. Sandro Grandjean and Marc Enggist sometime in 1997. It was launched in 1998 as initially a guide around the cities, providing information on restaurants, events, hotels, business, nightlife, etc., but things didn’t turn out quite well and so it was set aside for a few years. It was until 2008 of this month that we decided to re-launch it and to just focus on restaurants, with plans of expanding to other things as we go by – that is why we also decided to keep the name ManilaGuide. So far it is going very well since Manilaguide.com has gained thousands of users and members in its community while still continuously growing.

What’s a typical day like for you/your team?

Right now while on beta stage, our typical day usually involves improving the website. The day usually starts and ends with us doing some checking on the website for errors and other concerns, answering inquiries, coming up with promotional strategies for the site and brainstorming for new features and services. We know days will get better but crazier as we go along and we’re looking forward to more days like these.

Who are your core users? How did you spread the word about Manila Guide?

Our core users are mostly food enthusiasts who love to find new or different places to try out and who love to talk about their experiences on it. Foreigners and travelers also frequent the site, as well as restaurateurs who want to gauge how their business is faring in the market.

Spreading the word about Manilaguide required us to enter online social networks like Facebook and Twitter to name a few as well as public promotions like the one we did at the recent food expo. We also rely on Online Search Engines, link exchange, exhibition, and on word of mouth. We will also be advertising through different media later on if necessary.

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?

We have some ideas about how to go about it since we have been developing websites for more than 10 years now. However, things keep on changing in that field and we need to adapt and reevaluate our options constantly. We have several possible schemes for revenue in mind and we will be testing and trying them. Manilaguide is definitely a great promotion tool for restaurants and since it has and will have more and more value in the future, we hope to convert this into revenue.

How did you come to decide the features that are live right now? Are you happy with it or are you planning for more intense future versions?

Our features are decided upon by what we think our site’s visitors and clients would need and what they find convenient. We tried to put ourselves in their shoes and thought of what certain features we would be looking for in a dining guide. We wanted it to be concise-so the visitors can take in all the information about a restaurant in one glance–and convenient—we’d like to spoon-feed our members. Like for restaurateurs, we’re sure that they would love to be able to advertise their restaurants and thus we have provided them with their own profile page wherein they can upload all their information, pictures, menu and latest promos.

We are certainly planning to have more intense features for our members and partners. We are continuously working on providing an easier guide to dining. Just watch out for these new features.

Anything exciting brewing in the next 12 months?

There is a whole lot of new and exciting stuff lined up for the delight of Manilaguide.com visitors and members these next months. We are working to on introducing a reservation system – but since it is quite an advance technology and a unique concept, we do not want to provide more details about it for now.

We are also aiming to do something that will recognize the best restaurants and food enthusiasts featured in Manilaguide. Visitors can also watch out for new features, which can be considered firsts in the Philippine dining scene.

How did you raise funds to begin Manila Guide? What areas/cities do you cover now — and how far do you want to expand in the next 5 years?

Manilaguide is developed by CALCMENU Philippines Inc. and EGS Switzerland. We are in the food service business since 1989, so the website is a normal extension of our business. We want this to become the #1 source of information for anyone looking for a place to eat and more. Right now we cover cities in Metro Manila and neighboring provinces like Batangas, Laguna, Pampanga, Bulacan, Rizal and Cavite. Although we definitely have plans to expand to other cities and countries.

What do you think holds back the growth of a Silicon Valley-like hub in the Philippines for internet companies because there are still so few?

Little is being done to promote and encourage this growth. Internet access in the Philippines is still very poor compared to Europe, Japan, Singapore, etc. Internet is slow and expensive. In Switzerland (an expensive country), an Internet connection for home use is 3 times cheaper and 20 times faster than here in the Philippines. On top of that, it is not reliable as we saw the major disturbance that was created by the rupture of a cable near Taiwan a year or so ago. Of course, the main issue is also funding. It is very difficult to find investors for local companies which are willing to create a start-up in the field.

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

It is important to think “global”. Create a website that touches on the interest of as many people as possible, or a localized website concept that can be easily reproduced in other communities. Translate your website in other languages, not everyone can understand English.

• Find out more about CALCMENU Philippines by visiting their Company Profile
• Check out some of the Manila Guide restaurant reviews and maybe add your own.

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From: Pinoy Web Startup Team

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.

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From: Pinoy Web Startup Team

In photo (L-R): JP Dela Torre, Alvin Tan, Mau Molina, Marie Casas

What made you take the plunge? How different is your life now with before founding your company?
I have always wanted to build a product from scratch and have been fascinated with the web (and the business around it) since high school. An opportunity came my way last 2006 that entails both so I took the plunge.
My life right now is not much different from before. I still work during regular hours and try to get out of the office by 5 or 6PM. Interestingly, I look forward to Mondays now and hope that time is much slower so I can do more work. Of course, I also enjoy the freedom of not having a boss now.

How did you get the word out about MunchPunch?
On our first day, we sent hundreds of SMS to friends to announce our website. We also distributed stickers around Makati business district area to promote it. Right now, we are growing organically through word of mouth (both online and offline).

What’s a typical day like for you/your team?
On a typical day, our data team is busy calling up restaurants and managing our restaurant data. Howell, my co-founder, handles sales inquiries, marketing, or other business that needs to get done. As for me, I have a bizarre work schedule, I start work at around midnight until 2-3 AM to answer emails and do some coding/maintenance for our website. During the day, I usually set a particular task to accomplish like designing or writing.

Anything exciting brewing in 2008?
Yes, there is. This is the year that we’d like to put it all together, product-wise, based on our lessons from the past year. You can expect a refined “feature-set” and richer business listings, in short, more semantics and metadata.
We are also trying to improve our processes so that we’ll be in a position to grow as a team/company if needed.

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?
Honestly, I have little clue on what’s going on with other local internet startups. I’m sure this website will give people a better picture of the startup scene here in our country so I’m also looking forward to your growth.
Luis of syndeo::media touches well on what’s holding back startups and I share the same sentiments. To add, although making money is the ultimate motive of any business – technology-based or not, it should be more than that to make a technology startup work and fulfilling. If it’s only money, it won’t take you far and some don’t even take the first step because there are other ways to make money. I believe a lot of people lack this extra motivation (or meaning) so it definitely holds back the number of local startups.

3 points to think about for people with ideas for web startups
Ideas are nothing without execution and more often than not, ideas change during the course of your startup. If you have the time and money to develop it, then go for it. Don’t forget that you should also spend time finding people who can materialize the idea aside from dwelling on “the idea”.

3 points to think of when taking on business partners for your web application
Find someone who shares and understands your vision. Know their commitment beforehand, in terms of money (if they are investing money) and/or time (if they have an operational role). You don’t want to be bailed out during critical times of your startup. Lastly, find someone who you can deal with during your startups’ bad days. It is for sure that you will run into issues that you need to discuss and settle.

3 points to think about financing your web application
For self-funded startups like us, always be thrifty. A lot of stuff can be outsourced and it’s usually cheaper so always explore that option (i.e. don’t host your site in your office). Skip a meal or turn off the aircon if that’s the only way to cover your hosting fee. Okay, that’s exaggerated. My point is, don’t be cheap when spending for your server. After all, your server runs your business.

Final words for young web companies starting out
Just do it and be relentless. However, if your alternative to a startup is better than the time/money you spend on it then I suggest that you think twice before continuing. Life is short and technology startups take time to blossom.

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From: Pinoy Web Startup Team

In photo: Global Trade Philippines Founders Jerry Perez, Jr. and Kimberly Ting

Tell us about Global Trade Philippines. How did you come up with the idea?
After our research and sourcing of ideas from the Internet, we found that Philippine products lacked adequate product information online. We therefore thought of ideas that could improve the situation. We encouraged each other and dreamed of venturing into a business that could do that.
GlobalTradePhilippines.com works like an online trade exhibit, conducting international trade and allowing the ordering of product samples between suppliers and buyers. It provides customized online trading tools to both local suppliers and international buyers, who come mostly from the United States, Canada, and Australia.
Philippine suppliers can choose from two membership packages: the micro package for P400 a month, and the professional package for P600 a month. The micro package entitles the supplier to post o nthe portal a maximum of five products with corresponding images and product information, and to maintain an account on the site for monitoring product views and communicating with interested parties through e-mail. The professional package allows exporters to post on the portal an unlimited number of products.

What made you take the plunge? How different is your life now with before founding your company?
Going into business at a very young age was rather difficult and risky. It took a lot of courage and determination to see things through. What made us take the plunge was our determination to succeed, our passion for providing valuable service to our clients and most of all support from our family.
We enjoy what we’re doing, and work does not seem to be like work. We can work for 12 straight hours and still not feel tiresome, I guess its all about the entrepreneurial spirit and our passion for our work that pushes us to continue to move forward.

What’s a typical day like for you/your team?
A typical day for our team.. Check our emails, check the system, attend meetings and presentations with clients, set team and individual goals for the week. Meet up as a team to discuss and brainstorm, and finally analyze the goals we have achieved, problems that we encountered or are encountering and make an assessment for future recommendation/action.

Anything exciting brewing in 2008? Where do you see your company going?
We have several projects we are working on which helps to improve the service we are providing for all our members. We continually strive to find ways to improve our company operations, improve our team and most importantly find ways we can help our members promote their company and products worldwide.

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?
We see that the web startup environment in the Philippines to be very fruitful. We’ve met so many programmers, graphics artists and techpreneurs who are very talented and are at par with international standards in web development. I think that what is holding us back is the lack of sufficient funding to backup our techpreneurs. We also need to educate our fellow citizens of the potential and advantages of the world wide web to encourage people to go online and make use of the internet to their advantage.

3 points to think about for people with ideas for web startups
Do as much research as you can on the industry you wish to go into.
Study the financials you may need and make a financial plan, businesses on the web don’t have an immediate return, some wait 2-5 years. Its important to have sufficient funds to keep your company rolling during the infancy stages.

3 points to think of when taking on business partners for your web application

1. Its important to know the skills and capabilities of each partner. Know what he/she can bring into the company and help contribute.
2. Work ethics is also a point to consider. You need to make sure that this person can comply to your company pace and help you achieve goals and get work done.
3. Trust. Make sure that this person is a person you can trust and is reliable. Because as you go on through businesses, you’ll hit some rough turns and its important that this person has the same passion and determination to succeed as the founders.

Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions. Any final words for young web companies starting out?
Be creative, have passion, and know who your competitors are.

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From: Pinoy Web Startup Team

Tell us about your product/s and how you came up with the idea.

syndeo::media in its current incarnation is 95% a services company and 5% a product company. This is more for economic reasons than anything else. Since we’re completely self-funded (and indeed, started up with nothing but a bunch of empty bank accounts), we needed to build up enough capital to bring our ideas to fruition. At this point in time, we’ve made some progress in that general direction, but not enough to completely do away with the services aspect of the business.
Our first in-house product is currently in private alpha-testing stages, and is called moomai. It’s a social network with some small bits of innovation that we hope people will find interesting enough to try out. The core idea for it was inspired by a sociological concept from the early 1900’s called “the looking glass self” (yeah, I have a secret love affair with academic obscurities).

What made you take the plunge? How different is your life now with before founding your company?

I personally have no concept of working for someone else (problems with authority and all that), and this is my third startup in 4 years. Prior to that, I was freelancing since I was 18 so I’ve never held a steady job. My two other co-founders – Hunter and Hans – have also been in multiple startups themselves, so you could say that we’re fairly experienced bootstrappers. (Which is not to say that any of our previous attempts were successful though

How did you get the word out about your product?

We only have a little bit of time to work on moomai.com (mostly evenings and weekends, unless we happen to be working on client-projects during those periods) so progress has been really slow. As you can imagine, broadcasting its existence is not a huge priority yet.

What’s a typical day like for you/your team?

I think we’re fairly typical for a technology house. Work is pretty much around-the-clock because everyone on the team has slightly different sleep cycles. (Some of us sleep at 3 or 4am, which is right around the time Hunter in Australia wakes up. Work continues throughout the day, with most of us putting in 9-10 hours each. I usually do my last commits around midnight.)

Anything exciting brewing in 2008? Where do you see your company going?

Our roadmap is a dusty crystal ball right now. Client-work is going to account for the biggest chunk of our revenue for some time, so as far as anything exciting happening, it all depends on how much time we can spend working on our own products. If there’s anything I’ve learned over the past 3 years, it’s that forecasting is largely a waste of time, particularly when you have no investors or board to b.s. “Big picture” discussions are best reserved for chill-out sessions at the local beer garden, because what really matters at this stage is making sure you survive day-to-day. (I suppose that my pragmatism is a function of our size as well. When there are so few people in a company, reorienting yourselves so that the big picture always stays within view is easy.)

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?

Investors don’t really know what to do with us, mostly because there’s no baseline for successful local web startups (i.e., no startup has become an unqualified success) as of yet. As soon as one company breaks through, it’ll be a lot easier, because there’ll be something to refer to. The real trick, you see, is believing you’ll succeed where nobody else has. And if you can do it without investment, then you’re pulling off a minor miracle I think.

3 points to think about for people with ideas for web startups

I only have one: An idea is only 0.1% of the solution (maybe less). The other 99.9% is comprised of hard work, patience and a healthy amount of luck. The fact of the matter is, ideas are really, really cheap. Don’t be lulled into the notion that the strength of your idea will carry you through. That didn’t work for Edison (2 years and over 3000 experimental filaments before he perfected the lightbulb), and it won’t work for you either. So I suppose the correct way to look at a startup (of any sort, not just web-based), is not whether you have a good idea or not, but whether you have the will to see it through to the end.

3 points to think of when taking on business partners for your web application

Again, I only have one: choose people who fill out your weak spots. This makes it easier to delegate responsibilities, because it’ll be more obvious who should handle what. This seems like an obvious bit of advice, but I see too many small companies where both of the leads are designers, or where the entire group are composed of programmers, or where the founders boast that they are “like-minded individuals”. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, because a business is enriched by diversity, not similitude.

3 points to think about financing your web application

Start really, really small. It’s not called “small enterprise” for nothing. The nature of business is that you will often find yourself in situations that were entirely unexpected, even after all your “meticulous” planning. This is another reason why I hate forecasting; events often conspire to render your prediction completely irrelevant, and usually in the most embarrassing manner possible. Taking small, measurable steps allow you to pace yourself, and hopefully prevent your actions from plunging your company into bankruptcy at every turn.
Try to keep in mind that it’ll take at least 6 months to build anything halfway decent, and over a year to make it really sing. So what you need to ask yourself is how you’re going to keep the company alive during that period. Sometimes the answer is to do other work on the side, and other times it means reorienting your product concept so that it has some means to generate revenue sooner rather than later. And other times it means deferring production until such time as you can ensure that you won’t kill yourself launching the thing.

Final words for young web companies starting out

About 95% of all startups never make it past their first year. And less than 1% will be around for their third birthdays. That’s not meant as a discouragement; merely a statement of truth. The reasons are as many and as diverse as there are startups, but at the heart of the matter is the fact that bootstrapping is, well, kinda tough.
I have one small bit of practical advice here — make sure you have enough personal funds to cover your behind during that first year. The very first thing to be sacrificed by startups are the individual salaries of the founders, so I can’t recommend it to anyone who relies on monthly income for their personal survival.
I guess the other more general bit of advice is to concentrate on what you know. The definition of “young company” is that you often will not have any idea what the heck you’re doing, so you want to focus on getting better at a specific thing first, before branching out to other areas. In syndeo::media’s case, that meant social networks. For other people, it might be business applications, or (god forbid) Flash websites. The idea is to build your human capital and make sure you’re good at something.

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From: Pinoy Web Startup Team