It's a bittersweet announcement: Kris and I are ending Musivu, the online music school we started on in late 2012.
I'll do a separate post with the techie/startup-oriented postmortem, but most importantly this was a terrific journey with my brother.
(Edit: The tech postmortem is now up.)
We each started this from a place of frustration. We each found ourselves angry with the organizations for which we worked and craving independence. And of course, more income.
In 2012 I was soaking up the collective works of the Y Combinator community, learning all I could about startups and better ways of doing business, while working a day job effectively in a website factory.
With perfect timing, Kris called me on Skype one weekend and basically asked "I wanna teach music online... how can I do that? Can you help?"
It didn't take long for the light bulb to go off and for us to test the market. Our first course went on Udemy at the very end of 2012. It worked. We'd go on to acquire 2,000 users on Udemy, between our free and paid users there.
By early 2013 we incorporated, and by early 2014 we even had our own booth at one of the biggest music education conventions in the USA.
2014 might have been our best year. We had cash from Udemy still coming in but we managed to launch our very own site, run moderately successful ad campaigns, acquire customers... it really felt like we were on the verge of greatness.
Greatness didn't happen, though. Subscriber numbers ebbed and flowed as Kris and I tried new approaches to keep cranking up the subscriber numbers. In the fat months we built the bank account, and the quiet months drained it.
We never went broke and never had to add our personal funds back in. I never really thought about that until just now. I'm actually pretty proud of that. It proves that wealth can be created from nothing.
More importantly, Kris and I learned a ...wealth of stuff.
He can state his own case in his own words, but to paraphrase our previous conversations, he got bitten by "the [entrepreneurial] bug". He's gone on to build the Q escape rooms and they're performing fantastically.
I learned a huge amount of technological knowledge. I could throw so many technical terms out here that it'd look like a software engineer's resume. I think it was that, just as much as my day job experience, that qualified me for what I do now at Sony.
It would be easy to be regretful about closing up Musivu. It's in human nature to stress a sense of loss. Plus, we still believe that there are more economical ways to teach music to anyone who wants to be a musician, and it's like an itch that will forever go unscratched to know that we didn't crack that nut.
But when we look at Musivu's entire circle of life, Kris and I got exactly what we wanted: independence. We got out of the systems that were eating our souls.
And I had a great time chatting with my big bro, whether it was starting with the basics over a Skype connection in Tokyo, or talking about the future in paradise cities like San Diego or Fort Collins. Family business can indeed be a thing - but you need a great family to do it.
For me, it's much, much more sweet than bitter to be done with Musivu. It so clearly changed our lives for the better.