What started out in 2012 as small project, has turned out to be a full blown experiment on how real companies run.

Some History

In 2012, a friend started a web-based audio streaming site, Sautun Noor. A few days later, I got invited to a braai by his house, where he showed me it running, on his laptop. After realising this will not last, we found that there are companies that offer Icecast and Shoutcast hosting. We then got one up and running, that offered a full playlist and reporting system (kinda like cPanel for ice cast). Throw in a Wordpress site, and annoor.co was up.

Barix

We then wanted to live stream some talks that were happening at different Masjids. Sending out a live broadcast (ala Radio Islam) did not scale very far. We started toying with the idea of having live streaming setup in the Masjids.

I think a few Masjids have a PC, so we setup [butt] to stream. That also, did not scale very far

We then used a Barix device, which used to be used as an intercom and remote monitoring. It supported icecast, had an ethernet port, which we connected to a 3G modem. Each Masjid then had their own icecast server, with the same provider as annoor.co

Aswaatul Masaajid was born

That too did not scale. The costs were quite heavy for each masjid. We then made a bold decision to host our own icecast server. Someone sponsored a physical server, which was setup and housed in a company with internet access. However, it never worked. The day before Ramadaan, we decided to take out a cloud hosted VM. We registered livemasjid.com (was actually first livemajlis.com) and named the venture Aswaatul Masaajid - Voices of the Masjids (plural), being a play on Sautun Noor (Voice of Light)

Until now, the team was only 2 people, with only 1 techie. Still, we managed to build an impressive list of features:

• Probably about 50 Ulema, using apps on their phones, or their PCs to stream
• Email notifications
• Recordings
• A very cludgy wordpress site, that attempted to have automated updates for new events, but did not really work
• 1 attempt at a Rasperry Pi, to replace the Barix, that did not really work. Version 0.1 beta kinda stuff, but atleast the concept made sense

Expansion

In about 2015, we onboarded two new Devs. I was promoted to Lead Underwater Stunt Coordinator. We therefore had a working technical department, and a Marketing and Sales Executive. The making of a real world company!

We started rolling out many new features:

• replaced wordpress with a proper site, that showed
  ++ live streams
  ++ recordings
  ++ web player
• fully features Pi Streamer, that supported:
  ++ local recording
  ++ web interface to configure
  ++ remote management
• Telegram notifications
• lots of back-end improvements: transcoding, better codec,

Experiment in how an IT company runs

At this point, we realised what we were really doing - an experiment on how to run a company:

Business Requirements:

We had requests from marketing, devs complaining that requests made little sense, request tracking on [trello]

Operations team not in sync with Business

Marketing and Ops not in sync with Financials

Development making their own requirements