tsikot.com – For The Pinoy Lover of Wheels

 Interviewed: 

http://islandzine.com/sections.php?i=37
 

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.

Island: What is the secret to tsikot.com’s success?

Doc Noel: Take good care of the members, look after their needs, concerns and issues and they will take good care of the community.
Jedi: The real secret of an online community is proper handling and management of members as well as our volunteer moderators who selflessly share their time to moderate and manage the community.

Island: Tsikot.com seems to have grown so big, can you tell us the difference or connections between the ff: tsikot.com, tsikot.yehey.com, and tsikot.ph?

Doc Noel: Because of the success of the tsikot.com’s name, we bought all the related domains there are. It is just a matter of associating each domain to a particular service we try to tailor-fit for the tsikoteers’ different needs: tsikot.com (portal), tsikot.yehey.com (forums and classifieds), tsikot.net (auto shops directory), tsikot.biz (auto classifieds but targeted for used-car dealers), tsikot.info (auto and car industry news using syndicated content), tsikot.org (being developed for car clubs and associations), tsikot.ph (cars and auto products and shops review site) and tsikot.tv (being developed for car videos).

Island: Were you surprised by the popularity of tsikot.com?

Doc Noel: Yup, beyond my wildest dreams.
Jedi: Absolutely, six months after we officially launched, tsikot.com became the biggest and the fastest growing online automotive community in the Philippines. Currently, tsikot.com is one of the biggest online communities in Asia. This only shows that Pinoys really love cars.

Island: How many cars get sold in tsikot.com on an average month?

Jedi: Last year, tsikot.com averaged more than 300 sold cars and auto-related items a month. This year, it ranges around 500 to 600 items a month. Some sold items are undocumented because some sellers are not modifying their ads as “SOLD” from their control panel and it is not counted as sold on our database.

Island: What were some of the best deals ever posted in tsikot.com?

Jedi: There are those who are selling their cars as fast as they can – these are people who are migrating to other countries and have to dispose of their merchandise immediately. They end up selling their cars below the average price. That is why if you’re an active tsikot.com visitor you’ll surely get great deals like these.

Island: What are some of the more unusual cars ever sold/never sold in tsikot.com?

Jedi: It was the first ever ad posted in tsikot.com classifieds. The seller was a police officer, and the funny thing was he posted a picture with him posing with his car. The ad end up with 17,000 views and it became very popular and he received funny comments on his ads like “Pag hindi kasama yung mama magkano kaya?”, “mukhang impound garage yun background! sigurado bang may papeles yan?”, “libre huli ba yan Sir?”, “MGA BROS. BILHIN NYO NA, GUWARDIYADO PA”. We don’t have any record if it was sold or not. The lesson is, if you’re selling your car be sure not to pose with it.

Island: How do you deal with false advertising?

Doc Noel: We have an active, proactive and reactive community that does all the monitoring, self-regulating and protection. First, a member calls the moderators’ attentions if a suspicious post or ad rears its head in the forums or classifieds. Second, an administrator or moderator is always online at any time to catch, edit or delete such posts. Third, we at tsikot.com take such matters very seriously, and we don’t hesitate to warn (privately, of course), the persons involved.

Island: Aside from reviewing and comparing cars, what other services are you thinking of doing? TV shows? Videos? Consumer-rights advocacy?

Doc Noel and Jedi: TV Shows? Why not, if there’s an offer we will surely take it. Tsikot.com has tens of thousands of followers and they will surely watch that show.
Videos? Yes we are currently launching a new feature in tsikot.com and that would include video coverage and industry interviews. We will call it Tsikot Tv (tsikot.tv) which will only be available online.
Consumer-rights advocacy? That is one of the main purposes of the tsikot.com community: for members to help each other, share ideas, and share reviews of certain cars and auto services. On top of that, tsikot.com is there to assist anyone on car-related decision making. We also have a specific forum (Goon Squad HQ) that pushes for safety and courtesy on the road.
Offline Activities? Absolutely. We are also focusing on having offline multiple events this year, like Fun Runs, Organized EyeBalls and Car Shows. We are also planning to release a Tsikot membership and discount card in the near future.

We would like to thank Island magazine for featuring tsikot.com. We would like to greet our kababayans in Guam and to invite them to visit tsikot.com. Tsikot.com is not only an automotive community, it is a community for Filipinos around the world.

http://islandzine.com/sections.php?i=37

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I've been a member of this forum since 2005.  This site is very informative to car owners and non-car owners alike.  I encourage you to join this forum.  See you there!