It is true that great talented people are about to lose their jobs, and maybe your competitors are already thinking about dropping their projects. Many potential clients will be looking for good deals and the sense of freshness of a great new idea is always a plus.

 

“Don’t look for the next opportunity. The one you have in hand is the opportunity.”

Paul Arden

 

(Quote found via Paul Isakson)

It has also helped a lot by allowing me the time to take a look at Contenidos En Línea and Dixo.com.

We’ve recently had to cut out about 45% of our content developers at Dixo, and although this has nothing to do with the US, it is in direct response of the significant cuts in marketing investment by our clients (which may or may not be a way for them to cover their ass for what is next to come).

This has lead us to reestablish much of what’s been going on with Dixo, its way of creating revenue, getting to know the mexican market, and the focus on the product. More importantly, we’ve been concentrating on seeing Dixo as a product and not as the company for the first time, which has pushed me into exploring the possibility of creating new projects.

This strategic thinking came out as a response of a very difficult position that meant laying off lots of great people and it was not an easy thing to do, but hopefully this decision will lead us into creating a strong platform for Dixo, and then of course we can gain back all this great talent onto a much healthier status of the company.

Preparing ourselves for all this has meant a lot of growing. For most of the partners this is our first ever company, and for me it is my very first idea, so I’m really happy that this happened since it helped me to take a much broader look at the business. It is true, there is a lot of work that has to be done from the inside, but also we have now the opportunity to evolve this idea into something much stronger. As Jason talked about in his Startup Depression essay/mail/post: 

“Your first idea is rarely your best”

So I’m really excited of what is next to come… I have a couple of projects I’ll be announcing very soon. Both of them I’m happy to say are born from all the knowledge we’ve acquired so far. As for Dixo, we will continue to work on it and to take it closer to it goals.

While we are at it, we’ll try to survive what ever comes out from this situation in the US. It is true that Mexico always gets affected to whatever goes on with our neighbors, and as you already know, this crisis has already started to leave some casualties on the tech and web business area. As Martin Varsavsky (FON) puts it here, we may experience a period similar to what went on from 2001 to 2005. Calacanis points out in the same essay that the market will not be healthy until 2010 (personal bet), but hopefully Rafael (CEO @ Substance) is right while saying that the internet provides better ROI than any other media and since this is true, the online marketing industry won’t be as affected as others.

My bet is on perfecting the strategy, setting goals and finding great new talent to work with. Not an easy task, but definitely the best way to get yourself around.

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!