Slowed

Very happy to say that had the first paying customer today in silent release mode. This is a good indication that the product is being useful for someone as we offer 7 days trials on installation for the pro features. Excited about the upcoming major releases and marketing campaigns.

Finally, after 3 months of iterating on multiple versions and getting help from my brother and business partner, we came up with a set of features and bundled it for public release. I worked mainly on weekends and some spin-off projects also came along the way which took more time than expected. I wanted to launch as a freemium model from day one and that required more time for development. At the end of the day, it was such a relief to have this milestone achieved.

I took the project developed nearly one year ago and rewrote it on the same day to enable the functionality I wanted. The expected result was so gratifying, I immediately shared it with my friends for feedback. It was the fuel I needed to kick off the project towards profitability.

I was looking at a few Chrome Extensions unpretentiously and notice that one of them was able to perform the functionality I was looking for. This triggered me so I went over Google and discovered a recently new Web Media API that enabled what I wanted in the desired UX. That was the time I committed to code a POC with it given there were no hard blockers anymore.

I was trying to come back with my past personal projects and the idea of reviving Slowed came along with it. This time I decided to attempt using a different music streaming service and platform to come around the previous limitations that made the project stale. I started developing Chrome Extension for YouTube videos, but the APIs I used had also a few challenging limitations that made me realize, even though it was achievable the overall UX was not ideal. Again I put a freeze on the project.

The idea came up while experimenting with track pitch-bending techniques on Ableton Live Studio. Later on, I found myself discovering a whole new genre of music called (Slowed + Reverb) and decided to invest time in building a tool for Spotify music as a hobby project. Unfortunately, the platforms (macOS and iOS) I chose to build the tool back in the day had limitations and the project didn't take off. Still, the idea remained in the back of my head, waiting for the right time to execute.