Creating something from the ground up is hard.

Everyone has ideas, and all of those ideas have potential, but to actually make that idea, and make it work – trust me, it’s hard.  There are a million things that go in to creating a product like hypetree that no one thinks about; the legal work, the broken code, the 5AM nights figuring out why one feature isn’t working, literally thousands of emails between service providers, angry people who email you for stupid reasons, angry people who email you for totally legitimate reasons… the list can go forever. Not to mention life, which tends to meddle with your product in unexpected ways.

That’s why I’m so proud of our team, and what we’ve created. When we started this, as a bunch of naive college students, we had no idea what we were doing. We didn’t know what an LLC was or how to set up a server or how to optimize online advertising for increased conversion rates. I mean, look at this:

That’s what we looked like when we first started. And then, slowly, we started to figure things out. We talked to everyone. We talked to musicians, entrepreneurs, designers, music fans, industry reps – everyone from random street musicians to Usher’s manager to some of the biggest names in online entrepreneurship. We realized that there’s a massive gap in the music industry right now; independent musicians, talented or not, aren’t being heard. Some of the best music on hypetree is made by college students, high school students even. They aren’t on the radio, they aren’t on Pandora, they aren’t on Spotify, because those systems – awesome as they are – aren’t open. So we made something open.

And since the beginning, we’ve been bound by one simple concept: Musicians shouldn’t be famous because of who they know. They should be famous because they are making great music.  

With less than a thousand dollars, about nine months, and no real promise of any return, we made our beta site. And it looked and functioned a little better than our proof of concept:

We put up a beta page, told our friends, and ran a very low-budget ad campaign. And somehow, magically, very quickly, it went viral. 200,000 hits and a couple of sever crashes later, we had so many people signed up. That’s when we knew this was going to work, that people wanted this, and musicians needed this. We worked our asses off, for months, juggling school and work, fighting all the time and occasionally agreeing, eschewing other responsibilities for the sake of the product. Randomly, we were nominated by Intel as one of the Top 20 startups of December 2011 in the Intel Innovators competition (sadly, we came in 7th, just two spots away from a sweet cash prize). We brought on more people, smarter people, and spent our money carefully and well.

At the end of it all, we made what you see now. I think the difference is pretty noticeable.

So here we go, the first edition of the public site. There are still dozens – hell, hundreds – of features that we want to add, and rest assured we will keep working our asses off. If you care at all about hypetree, participate in our feedback forum; let us know what you like, what you hate, what we should add, what we should take away. We really do listen to you. It’s the little orange tab on the left of every page on hypetree.

Now, I want to publicly and unabashedly thank everyone who believed in us and helped make this happen. As hard as it is to admit as the founder, this did not happen because of one person. In no particular order, here’s a shoutout to everyone who was there for us through this whole process –  Trevor Collins, Michelle Panzironi, Benjamin Sklovsky, Stuart Sklovsky, Charles Garrett, Brandon Pietras, Stephen Williams, Christopher Castro, Rebecca Willmott, Carol Lee, Lauren Beckwith, Jeff Cooper, Dan Small, Bruno Trinidade, Danny Rooney, Anthony Porretto, Michael McCurdy, musicians and bands like Cosmonaut, The New York City Collective, The Kronos Quartet, English Army, Ben Ruttenberg, and Average Girl; Rhazes Hernandez, Caroline Seghers, Rebecca Decker, Daniel Quinn, David Wall, and of course, all of our wonderful and patient parents.

This story is far from over. I’m tempted to say something like “this is just the beginning,” but that would be lame. So instead, I’m going to say go use hypetree right now.

Let’s change the way people find independent music.

P.S. Thank you, Fordham University, for rejecting my research proposal to create a web-based system of learning user preferences for the purpose of discovering independent music. It was clearly a waste of time.