Startup Dunia

Dhingana has just launched a games section with games like Cricket, Holi Tamasha etc and have refreshed their landing page to a great new design.

As popularity of Dhingana soars, I thought this would be a good opportunity to interview the Dhingana founders on their entrepreneurial experience thus far. As per Compete, US traffic to the site is down ~5% from January 2008, but is up by about 700% over the last year.

Interview follows:

1) How old is Dhingana today ?
More then 1.5 years old.

2) Can you share any interesting insights into your audience - like which are the top 5 countries you are seeing the traffic from ?
Sure. Our user base is spread over the world in more then 185 countries. Top countries are India, US, UK, Canada, UAE, Australia, Pakistan, Singapore, Germany & Japan

3) Any interesting info related to how many monthly hits / pageviews ?
4) How many  MB/GB’s are you currently streaming a month ?
This is a very exciting time for us. We are experiencing phenomenal growth rate and we have grown by more then 880% in terms page views over the last year.

5) What revenue model are you following ? How do you cover hosting and streaming costs ?
Though we have a few interesting revenue models planned for the future, as of now, it is Internet Advertising. We offer CPM based advertising inventory as well as  ‘Exclusive Sponsors’ ads for advertisers. We drive a very niche audience all over the world, as most of the users who come to Dhingana are interested in entertainment.

6) What kind of response are you seeing from the community and users in general ?
Users are really enjoying the experience on Dhingana. 100s of users join Dhingana everyday and we receive a plethora of compliments via email feedback every day.

7) What kind of licensing issues do you guys need to deal with for streaming music, if any ?
We work with the licensing authorities in India and we have secured licenses for streaming Indian music over the net.

8 ) A lot of folks are curious - who is the team behind Dhingana ?
Can’t say much at this time :). All we can say is our core team brings a creative and diverse set of experience from Yahoo! and Microsoft. By the way, you are the first one to know this.

9) What features can we expect to see in the future from Dhingana ?
We started off as a music streaming site. We then went a step further and added a lot of interesting social features like Public SmartLists, Public mGreetings & Musical Profile Pages. We saw fabulous response from our users and got some nice feedback from them. We are now extending Dhingana even further & converting it into a social platform around entertainment. The main facets of our entertainment platform would be Music, Movies, News, Videos, Photos and Games. There are a lot of cool features planned and we will definitely keep you updated on this moving forward.

10) What are some of the challenges you’ve faced while developing and scaling a memory and bandwidth intensive site ?
Streaming media has its own challenges and requires a very solid infrastructure to stream reliably - especially if you are streaming high quality songs. It was not easy and we have learnt a lot as we have grown over the last year and a half. 6 months back we re-wrote Dhingana from scratch and what we have now is an extremely flexible & highly extensible platform. We expect to learn even more moving forward and scale & load-balance our platform as we keep growing to best suit our traffic loads.

11) Any word of advice for other wannabe web entrepreneurs ?
Follow your passions. Always try to make meaning and money will follow. Simplicity and reliability are the founding pillars for building a beautiful product. Lastly practice the 5C mantra http://www.dhingana.com/info/aboutUs

Thanks guys for your time && good luck with Dhingana !!