Ever since launching in March 2024, I’ve often referred to working on the project as “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic”. Well after a year of full-time work in a Michelin starred kitchen and completely ignoring anything to do with the site I can tell you with confidence that the Titanic is now firmly resting on the bottom of the ocean.
What went wrong? What could I have done differently? And why won’t I stop?
All these questions and more will regretfully not be answered.
Instead, I’m following a three-prong approach:
blog
publish music
code
So twitter used to have has cards.
Really, this was something I wanted to add around a year ago, so when
starting up again it seemed like a good first project to tackle.
It took me a few days but I hacked together a decent little embedded player.
https://dj.exchange/tracks/embed/53
But of course I go to test it once it’s done and it doesn’t work.
Our Benefactor removed this feature entirely except for a few websites like
soundcloud ~_~
UPDATE: Turns out I’m blind and the card *does* work: https://x.com/dayvonjersen/status/1899282544677294478
I found a pretty obscure imageboard on the Wired that had a “soundcloud share” thread that dated back to 2020. I manually scraped the contact info for ~70 music makers and blasted them with invite codes.
Recently I was awestruck by how personalized and honest this one founder’s emails were and so I thought long and hard about what to say and ultimately resolved to not say anything.
Subject: let’s build the future together | Invite ✉
Body: https://dj.exchange/signup/rareness-emigrants-maidism-gobbo-originated
My superpower is being vague and mysterious 👻
Unfortunately these people in particular are very paranoid and anti-social and have a strong distrust. Not one single person bit. A few responded with “what’s this? a scam? who are you leave me alone”
The next thing I want to fuck up is SEO. I want to add payments using either bitpay or Stripe. I want to make tickets for events with lots of QR codes.
All of this seems insane to do when I have zero users and been open for a year 💀
So I need to build up karma on a reddit account so I can post links which will get me banned. I need to continue cold emailing random people on the Internet. I might have flyers printed up.
But at some point you have to ask yourself: what’s wrong with my value proposition that seemingly no one is interested?
And for me I think it is the chicken or the egg. Need to have content to attract users, need users to upload content.
It’s also the fact that you can do everything and more on existing platforms. There is no killer feature.
Also I think I’ve been unable to communicate clearly my vision for dj.exchange being a central hub for underground dance music where anyone can share what they’re working on, listen to what’s out there, connect with other producers and DJs, find shows, like everything you can do now without it being disparate or shallow. Like everything and everyone in one place, like it used to be online when people had websites about model trains and shit.
I am aware that it won’t happen. That I’m being delusional and stubborn. Wasting my money on hosting. Wasted money even getting this far (nowhere). No one cares and I should just fuck off. I’m sure if I made the source publicly available on Github it would get 0 Stars. I’m also sure that if anyone ran the code themselves they’d see immediate success and traction.
I’m sure no one is reading this either. I have become a pariah. Too many burnt bridges; too much wasted potential.
This isn’t what you want to read. You want me to blow smoke up your ass and tell you everything’s coming up Milhouse well it’s not.