NOTE: This was a post migrated from my previous Ghost blog. If links don’t work and you would really like to see it, it’s probably posted somewhere in this blog.

All good things come to an end, and today I am announcing my withdrawal from my first corporate endeavour, Mooziq. While it was a tough decision to make seeing that it was my brainchild and first attempt at a business of sorts, it was also a relief in many ways.

When Mooziq was first conceptualised, it was intended to be a platform that supports local original music wherever local may be and facilitate its discovery and consumption by respective communities. But as we found out in Singapore, that’s not where the money was, and well, businesses tend to need to make money by its very definition. So we changed our focus to connecting lesser known/new cover bands and entertainers with bars, establishments and events that needed live music, and it was there that we found an arguably substantial market to serve; but it was also there that I realised I wasn’t satisfied with what I was doing, and for awhile, I couldn’t figure it out.

After some time, I came to the realisation that merely serving market needs was not my calling - I wasn’t making the world a better place, my actions were not letting the right people breathe easier at night. I want to help those who dare to dream, who dare to create, who dare to bare their souls to the world through writing original music and then performing it for others to lay judgement on; but there I was, servicing establishments that see music as a tool to boost sales, businesses that were ventures of people who were already ahead in life. It didn’t stand well with me. Our final direction after more than a year of bootstrapping was eventually not my calling, and I decided to call it quits with two of my most capable friends who will continue running Mooziq as a business that connects establishments and event organisers with live music entertainers.

For those who knew me, Mooziq was my life for the better part of the past two years. From bringing a simple idea through to the semi-finals of Startup@Singapore 2014, to refining that idea and testing it out with a prototype based on my needs as a musician, to actually creating it myself from what little I knew about web development, and then to bootstrapping the business and bringing it to market; the entire experience of ideation, creation, realising of mistakes made along the way, re-creationx, pivoting, and then putting it out there for people to use has been nothing short of positive.

Through doing pitches to panels and having a reason to network at events, I was forced out of my relative introversion to learn how to communicate ideas and build rapport with people more effectively. By creating, iterating on and operating/maintaining the platform instead of outsourcing it (well, I was but a poor student with only a laptop then), I was pushed to go beyond the theories taught in class and it was there that I gained most of my software engineering skills in the context of web applications - well, that is after revising the platform no less than 3 times and going through 3 completely different frameworks and 2 runtimes because of bad design decisions made from inexperience - but it was making those mistakes that allowed me to develop my thinking and see beyond the online bootcamp sorts of tutorage which work for small projects but which begin to falter at larger scaled projects. Nothing taught in school will prepare you to do product development, deployment, management, marketing and operations and I am thankful that I got to experience a complete, albeit amateurish, lifecycle in my industry of choice. However, times change, and because of business constraints, goals have been set and efforts have shifted in ways that make it difficult for me to contribute as an engineering type in the company and it is time for me to move on.

The local music scene has been an awesome community to work with, and to those whom I’ve crossed paths with during my journey in Mooziq, it has been a pleasure. I’ll be taking a break for now from the whole #startuplife fiasco and focus on preparing myself for the huge opportunities in tech that lie ahead; To end off, I’ll definitely be back to help those that I originally wanted to once I’m ready, but please hit me up if you’re interested in helping the local music scene too, regardless of skills, and lets see what we can make together.