I just thought there had to be a more intuitive way to learn music theory than the very boring and jargon-heavy alternatives.
It uses Tone.js to include little interactive pianos, guitars, and other demos.
I've done no marketing, it hit the HN front page for a day, and after that initial spike in traffic has been fairly consistent over the past 8 years.
It uses Stripe for payments and for the first few years it was only Stripe. 3 years in I decided to add PayPal support... revenue doubled overnight, mostly from international customers.
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Sometimes I feel Packt books are not the highest quality. Happy for anyone to disagree and tell me a different impression.
I was reached out by Packt a few times on LinkedIn with something like: "hey, if you want to write about stuff, let us know".
"Machine Learning with PyTorch and Scikit-Learn" by Sebastian Raschka et al.
"In-Memory Analytics with Apache Arrow" by Matthew Topol.
What you're describing here is your perspective from within the small and insular group busily developing and advocating new technology, always focused on the next new thing that was cool and interesting and succinct and powerful. What I'm describing is my perspective from well outside that pale. Both can be true at the same time.
It’s also odd to see your long rant of whimsical vs professional when some of the most well-known companies were built with that community of so-called non-professionals. We have a difference in opinion on what constitutes “professional”.
I wouldn't be so quick to claim Twitter, either, even among zero-interest-rate phenomena more generally. It might be easy to forget these days, but that's been harmful to society on net since long before Musk bought it.
The speed of trying stuff out (even if it wasn't super efficient) why startups used it. So it was a community of highly productive people sharing their love of building new things. That's my memory of that time period.
History is cool yo. And apparently lucrative - it currently makes ~$5000/mo and is slowly but surely growing through word of mouth