Music Jotter

After some interviews with potential founder candidates and discussions around raising money via accelerator programs, I made the decision to bootstrap my business and run things solo for now. I'm going to launch a Kickstarter campaign in March 2022 while I work on Music Jotter and try to finish as much as I can before my Kickstarter is launched. In the meantime, I will be collecting leads in order to raise awareness of this campaign.

My decision to remain solo and bootstrap my business has nothing to do with greed. In fact, quite the opposite. It has everything to do with control over the initiative at the expense of growing too quickly. I don't want to run this business with the intent of selling in a few years, otherwise, what is the point? As a voice for this underrepresented community, I want to build long lasting trust and create solutions to major problems largely being ignored.

This will create a much more difficult journey, but it is the path that must be taken.

I made the decision to stop development of Music Jotter for cloud at this time. It is more important I find someone who believes in my vision so I can begin the process of building a company and accelerate development. With this MVP, I think I can raise enough money to get started and bring out a cloud version of this product within 1-2 years after the first hires.

I decided to recreate Music Jotter from scratch and develop my own midi API for full control. I also decided to code my own micro MVP platform. Why? True, at first it seems like nonsense to recreate the wheel. However, this decision has paid off because I am no longer bound to someone else's coding structure. If I want to do something that let's say React can't support, I don't have to hack this framework to do what I want.

Initially development was painful because of my decision to code everything from scratch. But as the product matures, I am finding out that I can add new features so quickly now! This is really a godsend when you are developing a consumer based application.

Furthermore, I can pinpoint exactly where inefficiencies are because all of the code written is owned by me. This means if I am ever to hire a team in the future, I can optimize Music Jotter to the fullest extent. I can even outsource and optimize algorithms to be written in C in the future. How cool is that?

There was a small period of time I explored developing Music Jotter for IOS using another API called "Core MIDI". About 6 months into development, I decided this wasn't the route to take. A true native cloud application would have to be created in order to achieve maximum accessibility.

After creating the website, drafting the user manual and coming up with a mascot for Music Jotter, I decided to take a small break and close up shop temporarily. The prototype for Windows would remain under my care until I found the time and opportunity to begin the real work of creating a cloud application from the ground up.

With the aid of an API, I spent 3 years researching and developing a full application prototype in Windows. This product was aimed to model a real application that I knew I wanted to build for the cloud + all operating systems in the future. I developed core features such as midi scrubbing, semi realtime recording (which is a technology I think I can patent), and the smart playback of scores.