I started working on my second venture, MusXpand (pronounced [mewzik’spend]), in 2010 right before leaving Brazil. The idea was to develop a business that would help indie artists, initially musicians, to distribute their art to their fan, through subscriptions. The premise was quite disruptive: why only get a few cents from music distributors, if you can make most of the money directly from your actual fans and provide them a better and closer service?
Based on my experience of CMS at the time, and in particular Joomla and Wordpress, I decided to write the whole site from scratch, using a similar core skeleton to Wordpress’ one. After designing a whole UI using uncommon technologies like web copy/paste for actions (e.g. moving the picture of an album onto a play button), and setting up the cloud infrastructure on AWS (EC2, MySQL and buckets), I spent some time advertising the site using both Facebook and Google Ads, along with gathering a few dozens artists from other indie music-oriented sites like ReverbNation, and helped them set up their accounts and upload their tracks into the system, considering any feedback at that point with regards to the interface or the features.
Unfortunately, for many reasons the main one being probably I was not the best sales person for the task, the service never actually took off, and I ended shutting down in 2012, the business I had registered in Vancouver in 2011, and worked on full-time and alone for 2 years. I still feel the development I did on this project was amazing, challenging, and pretty successful from a technical point of view.