dopeloop.ai

Yesterday the first person signed up to an annual subscription on https://dopeloop.ai/melody-generator!

I recently tweaked the pipeline so that all of the Melody Generator Plus instruments appear in the instruments list. If somebody selects a "plus" instrument it shows them the sales copy for signing up. I'm trying to make it really clear to users which features are included in the "plus" subscription by demonstrating it directly in the app.

I've had a couple of new subs since this change. Today I'm going to add some analytics logic so I can see which sales page subscriptions are coming from. That will help me refine this kind of change in the future.

Today I was fixing the analytics on dopeloop.ai and I noticed my little music tool has reached half a million visitors over the past year!

It is truly humbling to have half a million people use a piece of software that I wrote.

The success of Melody Generator has convinced me of two things. First, it's possible to rank in search without SEO tricks and without any content at all. Melody Generator is a simple web app with nearly zero content and yet it ranks highly in search for a bunch of keywords. For me that shows that the search engines prioritize for "time on site" most highly of all. If you put an app up that a lot of people linger on, you will rank.

The second thing I learned is you really don't need a big server or a complicated stack. Melody Generator is hosted on a low spec Digital Ocean VPS with about 30 other apps. There is no cluster or separate database server or queues or anything complicated like that. I purposely made the app run almost entirely in the browser client so the compute is offloaded to the user. This architecture works well and I've used it in a handful of different projects now. Of course running full-stack ClojureScript really helps here too, and node.js allows for tremendously efficient back ends.

Anyway, just wanted to share this little success, thanks for reading!

Last year I stalled on the iOS port of one of my apps due to technical issues (Safari bugs). So I pivoted away from making individual music apps to focus on a micro-SaaS called Jsfxr Pro instead. Now that it's out I am switching back to small music apps.

These apps have shown to be a reliable way to make a small but steady stream of income. They seem to be relatively evergreen and people keep buying them long after release (in one case 10 years after!). So I decided to try and ship 4 more music apps in 2023.

I just released the first one. It's a free app to sync pocket operator devices. I made it to try and give something back to the community of people who buy these apps.

I used Cordova to port this webaudio app to iPhone and Android, released it, and I just got my first 5 star review. \o/

Now it's time to work on the next one.

A quick recap of where things are at with the dopeloop.ai music apps.

I'm porting PO LoopSync to iOS at the moment. That means I'm fixing a lot of Safari bugs.

Melody Generator is going well. The app is selling on Android and iOS and the web version gets 500 to 700 users per day and is slowly growing.

I had my first DDoS a few of months ago which you can see as the blue spikes on the graph. What a milestone.

I've also been working on some prototypes for new apps that I review in the video. Enjoy!

After many days of debugging (and filling out a bajillion forms) Melody Generator is finally available as an iOS app!

This follows the Android port which you can download on the Google Play store too.

The web app version is still free to use without installing anything at dopeloop.ai/melody-generator.

After launching the free web app some months ago, it has seen steady traffic of several thousand visits per month. I built the Android port in order to try and convert some of that traffic. That worked pretty well and I am seeing sales. I've been experimenting with price to try and optimise that a bit.

I am looking forward to seeing how sales of the iOS version compare to the Android version. I've heard from other music app devs that their sales on Apple devices usually do better than Android.

I finally got the Android port of Melody Generator finished and I hooked it up in the free web app.

Melody Generator is front page of search for the keywords "melody generator" and it gets about 9k visitors per month. I'm testing the idea that some visitors will purchase the paid app.

The closed beta of my melody generator has been getting some great feedback from producer/composer friends of mine who are testing it. It's exciting and very motivating to get so much positivity from people who know what they're talking about. Turns out that thing that successful founders always say about "talk to the users" is very good advice.

I just finished implementing a bunch of their suggestions. Here's a video of progress so far.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBNUZswJUYY

I'm working towards the first public beta. Can't wait to get it out there!

For a while now I've been making procedurally generated music as a hobby. In 2009 I was living in London and I met some very nice people there who went on to start a movement called "Algorave" - dance music generated by computer programs - which is now famous enough to have its own Wikipedia page. I wrote a couple of albums using these techniques (search for "squeakyshoecore ep" and "hacksilver album" if you're interested) and over the years I've built up quite a pile of code for generating melodies and beats and samples with algorithms.

For some reason I didn't connect the dots between that music generating code and the Indie Hacker bootstrapping ideas we're all sharing here. Since joining this community I've learned so much about shipping MVPs, launching, marketing, pricing and sales. There is so much great information coming from this community. Founder posts and blogs and tweets and the IH podcast are full of amazing and useful and inspiring info. Because of this community I've shipped an SVG animation utility, a TODO list app (of course), and a couple of office plugins. I've even managed to make some sales - just 8 so far, but I've learned so much getting to this point.

But I've focused on these boring business type of applications because I thought that is what people would want. I didn't think about my work with procedural music as a bootstrapping opportunity until a couple of weeks ago. It dawned on me that the ability to quickly generate the raw ingredients that musicians use to write music - beats, melodies, chord progressions, samples, synthesizers - might just be a valuable service to producers and musicians.

It turns out it is. I turned the first of my music generating algorithms into a web application. It's a melody generator which produces an infinite selection of melodies you can filter through, and then download as a MIDI file. I got the MVP done in 3 days and gave it to a bunch of producer and composer friends of mine. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. I had 23 feature requests! I'm excitedly working through those at the moment.

I'm cooking up the first public beta now, so if you're somebody who knows what a MIDI file is or you've tinkered with Abelton or Fruity Loops, keep it locked, you might dig what I'm building. I'll post an update very soon with the first public MVP of the app. Can't wait!