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  1. Join Date
    Oct 2002
    Posts
    22,658
    #1
    http://islandzine.com/sections.php?i=37



    A portion of the interview:
    Island: What drove you to create tsikot.com? Is it correct to say that tsikot.com is the pioneering site devoted to Filipino car enthusiasts?

    Doc Noel: I started tinkering with online communities when I created an interactive bulletin board/forum in February 2002 for a school I graduated from and currently teaching at. It was highly successful and set the course in my developing more communities for different interests. By August that same year, Jedi and I started thinking about creating an online community for Filipino car enthusiasts. We envisioned it to be a site by, of and for the lover of cars, thus the slogan “For the Pinoy Lover of Wheels.” It basically evolved into a one-stop shop for information on everything and anything about cars. We owe much to Dr. Joseph Rivera (aka Doc Otep), who really made the difference in nurturing tsikot.com, especially during its first few months. We know tsikot.com is not the first, but it did grow very fast to become the Philippines’ biggest online community of car enthusiasts.
    Jedi: Tsikot.com is one of the pioneers in the online automotive community industry, and in terms of online members, unique visitors and page views, we are the biggest. It is the fastest growing, as well.

    Island: tsikot.com is filled with helpful information, how many people work on it full time?

    Doc Noel: There are only two of us who handle all the back-end work, that is, bulletin-board system maintenance, upkeep and upgrading, server-issues and the like. However, the bulk of the work we really owe to our loyal legion of community administrators and moderators who do the hard (and shall we say, dirty) work of monitoring and policing the community against rogue members and visitors. I believe tsikot.com owes its success to this group who painstakingly and lovingly watches over the community from its infancy to the lively, dynamic and robust state it is now. They are the real parents of the community. Jedi and I just see ourselves as the “grandparents” of tsikot.com.
    As for the wealth of information found within the site, that we attribute to the thousands of members (which we call “tsikoteers”) who post pieces of advice and tips that make tsikot.com a “helpful, sharing and caring” community.

    Island: Did you have any web design experience prior to tsikot.com?

    Doc Noel: Nope. I am a doctor, with no formal education and training in web design and programming. I learned everything by reading and by trial and error. I started with zero knowledge but eventually worked myself to the tons of information available on the web. I started creating and managing communities from a low-power desktop using prepaid dial-up internet access cards.
    Jedi: I am not really a designer. I’m an Electronics and Communications graduate, the only thing that I designed for tsikot.com is the logo and it took me a month to do that. Imagine if someone would hire me to design a website, it will surely take me a year to finish. I owe a lot to my friend Jouel Lacampuenga (Island magazine’s web designer), who helped us with some of our design needs.

    Island: What were the difficulties you encountered during the early days of tsikot.com?

    Doc Noel: I learned that starting a community is different from what was said in the movie “Field of Dreams” where the lead character played by Kevin Costner built a baseball field in the middle of nowhere and the people just appeared. Our greatest challenge was to make people come, take notice and return. During that time, there were already three or four big established websites with similar concepts.
    Maybe it was just luck, but the biggest community in our niche had problems and was always offline. People were leaving the site and slowly coming to our new community. Of course, Doc Otep helped a lot in bringing people in to our site. He was our No. 1 marketer and our only administrator and moderator. Slowly, we started gaining momentum, and everything went from there.
    Jedi: We never thought that tsikot.com would grow so fast. During those times we didn’t know much about managing a server. As a consequence of too much growth with limited server and bandwidth resources, we experienced frequent downtimes. Because of the tremendous growth in traffic, server resources and bandwidth usage, we kept on exceeding our allocations. Thus, we kept on changing webhosts almost monthly.

    Island: On an average week, how many people go to your site?

    Jedi: The tsikot.com community receives an average of 400,000 unique visitors and five million page views a month. Not bad for a community that is niched in the automotive industry, right?

    Island: Is tsikot.com’s popularity translating to financial rewards for its makers? Do you earn for every transaction or solely from advertising revenue?

    Doc Noel: Tsikot.com’s success has its own rewards. But much more than the financial aspect are the psychic and psychological rewards of having created and nurtured a community that is helping tens of thousands of Filipinos, not only on car-related matters, but practically on every aspect of life.
    Jedi: We don’t earn from transactions being done in tsikot.com. On our classifieds alone, more than 11,000 items have been posted and three billion pesos worth of cars and accessories have been sold. If we charged just a percent in commissions, we would have been millionaires now. But we concentrate on value for our members and we believe that tsikot.com will not be this big if we started charging for each ad posted. We rely solely on our local and international advertisers to support our operational expenses.
    Tsikot.com services will always be free. But special features might be added in the future as a premium for those who want greater exposure for their merchandise.

    http://docotep.multiply.com/
    Need an Ambulance? We sell Zic Brand Oils and Lubricants. Please PM me.

  2. Join Date
    Nov 2006
    Posts
    2,389
    #2
    coolness!!! ang kulit ng pic ni jedi! ahehehe!! :D

  3. Join Date
    Feb 2004
    Posts
    775
    #3
    nice! ok na ok. pwede ng artista!!

  4. Join Date
    Mar 2006
    Posts
    17,507
    #4
    ok ah! makes me real glad i stumbled onto this website! more power to the pioneers of tsikot.com and to us tsikoteers!

  5. Join Date
    May 2006
    Posts
    3,722
    #5
    Wow! Super galing

    Finally the complete story of how everything began here. Every member should read this!

    The Saga continues...

  6. Join Date
    Sep 2003
    Posts
    21,384
    #6
    Naks naman......

    We're really proud of you!

  7. Join Date
    Oct 2002
    Posts
    3,790
    #7
    If I may add (but not really discussed much)... most tsikot members (like Otep) were originally posting sa KOTSE.COM ang kaso, nagkaroon ng unruly members duon and the owners of the site wasn't seem to be very interested in PROPERLY moderating the problem... then came the invite of OTEP to look (join) into TSIKOT.COM which was an alternative (a better one)... so most left KOTSE.COM and stayed and frequented on TSIKOT.COM

    The most famous then (from KOTSE.COM) was the "Everything Diesel..." which was started by Doc Otep.... and I would say that when most peeps migrated to TSIKOT.COM... the bulk of the core were the "Everything Diesel..." people too... that is why nasa top of the list ng forums yung Diesel....

  8. Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Posts
    1,985
    #8
    Nice interview. I didn't realize the interviewer website was for Guam and the Philippines. Well I hope that it promotes Tsikot in Guam enough, don't want to be the only member living there after I move to Guam next month(would be real boring EB).
    Last edited by redorange; May 28th, 2007 at 03:09 AM.

  9. Join Date
    Oct 2002
    Posts
    6,796
    #9
    Quote Originally Posted by wildthing View Post
    If I may add (but not really discussed much)... most tsikot members (like Otep) were originally posting sa KOTSE.COM ang kaso, nagkaroon ng unruly members duon and the owners of the site wasn't seem to be very interested in PROPERLY moderating the problem... then came the invite of OTEP to look (join) into TSIKOT.COM which was an alternative (a better one)... so most left KOTSE.COM and stayed and frequented on TSIKOT.COM

    The most famous then (from KOTSE.COM) was the "Everything Diesel..." which was started by Doc Otep.... and I would say that when most peeps migrated to TSIKOT.COM... the bulk of the core were the "Everything Diesel..." people too... that is why nasa top of the list ng forums yung Diesel....
    korekek!

    I was one of the supoorters of doc manyak..este...doc otep then....totoy pa namin nun.....hhihihihihi

    congrats to doc noel, jedi, otep, mods and especially the members!

  10. Join Date
    Dec 2005
    Posts
    39,162
    #10
    Great article!

    Feels good to be a member....

    2801:clap:

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Islandzine Interview of 'tsikot' and 'jedi'