DryTabs
Fastest, most accurate, community driven guitar tablature.
Online guitar tablature is ruled by clunky websites featuring distracting advertising, with no incentives for the creation of guitar tabs that users actually want.
After being selected for the Big Sound competition, I used the news as a springboard to get the word out in other media, and got a successful hit with startupnews
https://startupnews.com.au/2019/08/15/drytabs-chosen-to-pitch-at-bigsound/
If only my analytics was setup to see if it generated much interest...
There is a huge music conference/festival in Australia called Big Sound, and part of it is an expo called Big Tech. 9 startups across Australia have been selected to present there, where we get mentoring from music industry professionals, a booth to showcase to the public over 2 days, and an opportunity to take part in a pitch competition with first place winning $5k. Need to start building my pitch presentation!
https://www.bigsound.org.au/conference/tech
I've used this opportunity to get an article written about my website in a startup email newsletter for my city, and also started making LinkedIn connections for people that I could meet there that could help me out. Fingers crossed I get the chance to meet up with the editor of Australian Guitar Magazine, an article in that would go straight to my target market!
As I am just starting out on Indie Hackers, here are my proudest achievements thus far:
- Came up with the 'final' idea, after pivoting around with different thoughts.
- Completed multple web development courses, including ReactJS on codecademy
- Using ReactJS on the front-end, can now parse guitar tabs to highlight useful parts and bring that to the user's attention, while making repetive visual infromation more dull. This was a huge moment for me, I really felt like it was such an important improvement on normal guitar tablature that it would be a struggle to go back to using plain text.
- Created the ability to expand and contract the tablature for different views. Was very nice to see this in action without the page needing to be reloaded - my vision was finally coming together.
- Learnt about front-end vs. back-end. Decided to use Ruby on Rails as my back-end, completed some courses including RailsTutorial. Got my back-end looping through database references, constructing json and sending that through to my front-end, where my React code was displaying it nicely :)
- After struggling with wrapping my head around user authentication, I discovered Firebase, and subesquently ditched the Ruby code. This effectively halved my projected development time! I'm here to ship the product, not just learn programming.
- Integrated the Spotify API with my website, so that guitar tablature is now displayed for the song the user is listening to. Another great moment that I felt was a step change in finding the tabs you need, so quick and simple :)
- Huge visual upgrade by switching over to a Creative-Tim ReactJS template. Learnt a whole bunch of CSS and SCSS in order to slightly style it the way I needed it.