I officially have a startup
I know I’ve been spending the last couple of weeks mostly talking about Trump and how to get rid of him… But, in the meantime, here’s something to get your mind off that depressing topic — and into the far more refreshing one that is music: we officially launched the project we’ve been working on for years (7, to be exact): Sondz.
OK, so, quick recap:
In 2013, my brother, a couple of friends and I started this music website idea. In short, the plan was to be the Imdb of music: a massive database of every piece of music (and every musician) ever recorded (and who ever lived). It’s still the plan, by the way: call that consistency.
In 2015, we realized that was a massive undertaking. We had a couple other people get involved in the project to speed things up. That was in part due to the fact that we decided to use state-of-the-art technology, including a graph database system that allows you to search for any related piece of content: say you wanna know every guitarist who ever played with David Bowie, and was born in Manchester? We can tell you that. Well, we technically could, but we still have to push it live — give it a couple more years.
In 2017, we decided to scale down the project a bit, and start with a slightly simpler first version: originally, we wanted the whole website to be editable, like on Wikipedia: you could change any piece of content, create your own artist page for that punk band you started in your garage… For those old enough to remember, that would be a perfect MySpace killer. Even though MySpace is already long gone.
In 2019, we realized we were simply not going fast enough. That’s when my brother decided to quit his day job and take on back-end development of the website full time — he was mostly handling the database side of things up until that point (and what do I do in all of this, I hear you ask in your head? Write posts like these, and they take an awful lot of time, let me tell you!).
In 2020, it slowly dawned on us that we could actually be ready to launch by the time the next US president got elected (see what I did there?). And we essentially did: yesterday, November 17th 2020, we released Sondz Alpha. And president-elect Joe Biden made a speech.
A brand new era is starting, guys. An era full of better politicians — and great music!