In early 2005 I was working with my partner developing special radio shows fully sponsored by a brand. We intended to offer this as a new way of communicating with consumers, and started trying to sell this to Nokia here in Mexico. The obvious issue we found with this idea came when they tried to buy the broadcast time on radio. It was too expensive for something that wasn’t actually proved to be effective yet.
Then I came across with an old friend, Eduardo Arcos, who pointed me to a new technology that was beginning to spawn new ways of communicating through the internet, and that it may help me with this issue. He was referring to podcasting.
Just a few months later we contacted Motorola and came out with the MOTOpodcast which had the same base idea, to create a space where Motorola could communicate with it’s end users directly by giving tips and musical recommendations to improve their experience as Motorola buyers.
Then we thought that it would be a great idea to use this technology to bring together different voices to one place, and since my partner, Fernando Benavides had been working for about 10 years on several radio stations he knew the right people for it. So we started Dixo which actually came out pretty quickly for a startup project. In about 2 months we already had the staff and the first round of investment with Dany Saadia (one of the early internet adopters in Mexico), and a month later we came out with the first public beta.
Today we are on our public version number three and we have a huge fan base which we love that visits us daily in a religious manner. Also, we have managed to be part of Prodigy MSN, the partnership between MSN and Mexico’s number one internet service provider, which has definitely affected us by its amazing reach (almost every internet user in Mexico uses in one way or another one of MSN’s products). This partnership is all about them selling the product for us and increasing the content offer for their portal so it really helped us into making Dixo, not just a success in traffic but also in the market as the first commercial podcast network in Mexico.
Last week I posted in Dixo that Apple had decided to give us a “room” (as they call it) on the iTunes Store. The room was already there, it was first created when iTunes Latino was launched, but with a new design (made by us). This room makes us one of the only four latin podcast developers on the iTunes Store, and the only ones who have this special room. So I was very happy for this and it pointed me to the obvious. We have been working on this non stop since 2005. We have published over 1500 podcasts, and over 1300 posts in the blogs section. We also have receive around 40, 000 comments and thousands of emails along with a number of companies that have started to use Dixo as an important space for exposure with a high credibility, along with other investors. All of this put together makes Dixo a successful online project within just a year and a half, and I’m very happy with the results. And I have to say, all of this was possible by having the right people on the team.
As for the next step, we believe that the best thing we can do is to keep posting new content, and bringing new voices to the project. The number of internet users in Mexico is growing every day and we always try to improve their experience on our site. I like to call this “the joy of good“.
Please take a second to visit the room, it’s pretty cool!
WHAT TO DO NOW?