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By MarshallStokes

A Failed Startup and a Magical Guitar

I recently came across this photo from late 2009 (below), right aroundthe time I launched Uvumi.com. Easily my greatest business failure,Uvumi is a platform for musicians to share their work and connect withfans. At the time, we were gunning for something that was along thelines of what MySpace was up to in terms of music discovery andartist exposure but with better technology and a better userexperience (we began building this thing in 2008, so don’t laugh too hard at the MySpace reference). While we pioneereda number of cutting edge technologies which were probably ahead of their time to some extent – “seamless” musicstreaming, allowing users to queue up and listen to music while they browse the site without any interruptions (we wereliterally the second-ever web service to release this feature); a fully ajaxified platform; ajax file uploads and in-browserphoto cropping; a DIY press kit creation tool that outputs PDFs and ZIP media bundles; and a handful of other neatfeatures – I failed to create a business model that would keep us growing after we ran out of cash.

Active development of Uvumi.com ceased near the end of 2010, but the site remains online today, paid for out of my ownpocket because I can’t bring myself to shut it down. I patch the occasional bug here and there, but we haven’t built orreleased any new features or major fixes in the past four years. There is also a part of me that thinks the project couldhave a second life, given the right ideas, the right team, and of course some fresh capital. Shortly after our official launch,we saw an influx of users when the site went semi-viral among the indie music community. While Uvumi doesn’t currentlysee a lot of daily traffic, there are still thousands of artists and bands and over 14,000 songs hosted there, of which 90%I’d wager you have probably never heard. Many of those indie acts have become some of my favorite bands andmusicians, purely through Uvumi. There’s some seriously good stuff there. To name a few: Grammar Club, Frantic Clam,Woodsboss, and so many more… here’s my list of “favorited” songs.

Photo of an Era

What Uvumi.com was to me: loads of DIY technology meshed with indie music

To me, this photo represents what Uvumi.com is all about. Pictured are two primary subjects: a rack full of servers andnetworking gear and a junky acoustic guitar.

The Tech

While we hosted the actual production website from a data center in California, backup services like slave DNS andsecondary MX were hosted at our office. More importantly, though, the rack in this photo contained our developmentservers, file servers, and code repositories. The little stuffed penguin hanging out atop the cabinet reveals our use of linux,however much of the core internal infrastructure was running on FreeBSD. This server cabinet represented much of what Iloved about running a scrappy and innocently ambitious tech startup. I found the cabinet itself on Craigslist, and everyserver inside was a DIY project of some sort. We were on a tight budget, so I had to piece together working systems from

Taken sometime in the mid-2000s, me holding the ten-dollar “magic guitar” at myoffice in Eureka, CA

whatever I could afford. That said, it was indeed a complex and busy infrastructure, and back at the data center Uvumi ranon a cluster of roughly a dozen dedicated machines. Needless to say, I learned quite a bit about devops and productionweb clustering thanks to this project.

The Guitar

In the early 2000s I moved to Eureka, CA, a deceptively beautiful city on the coast of northern California where I landedafter dropping out of college. I say “deceptively beautiful” because, while Eureka is a very pretty place – lush and greenand surrounded by redwood forests – it has such a seedy underbelly of meth-fueled crime and, at the time, illicitresidential pot growing, that I didn’t enjoy living there after a couple of years. But I had decided to go freelance with mytech skills, and Eureka was a place that was far enough away from where I grew up and where I had some friendsattending the nearby university who convinced me to make the move. As a bonus Eureka’s primary industry wasmarijuana-related, which resulted in a lack of skilled IT professionals in the area. This made it pretty easy to make a solidliving as the local tech expert servicing local businesses.

I have been playing guitar since about 1993, and while Idid already have a decent guitar I had crammed into mycar upon moving to California, I was on the lookout forsomething a little more scrappy that I could toss aroundand for which I would not need to worry about takingspecial care. One afternoon, I believe in 2002, I waswalking through a rough part of town and wasapproached by a man who I had once met through anacquaintance named Prison Dave. As you mightimagine, Prison Dave got his name after a number ofstints in prison, probably for stupid offenses like drivingwithout insurance and probation violations. He was,however, a really nice guy who paid me to help him doelectrical work from which I gained a solidunderstanding of residential electrical wiring. He alsotaught me many things about fixing cars, though I havesince learned that Prison Dave didn’t exactly do things“correctly”. He was more a results-driven kind of guy. Inany case, the man who approached me was surely ameth addict, and he was carrying this guitar. While Iassume he had stolen it – judging by the sparkly nailpolish painted on the pick guard, by reaching throughthe open window of a teenage girl’s bedroom – Iinquired about it. Probably something like “Soooo, whyare you carrying that crappy guitar down the street?” Hesaid he was looking to sell it. I told him I had $10 on me,and he instantly handed me the guitar. Ten dollarswasn’t exactly pocket change to me at the time, but theinstrument had no signs of major damage and wasinteresting enough that I didn’t hesitate to pay whatturned out to be the bargain price of a lifetime when it comes to random guitars bought from wandering drug addicts on thestreet.

Over the following weeks, months, and years, I played that guitar relentlessly. I played it hard. I played everything on it. Iwrote countless songs with it. Some of my favorite shitty old recordings were made late at night in the detached garage ofthe house I was living in (so I wouldn’t wake my roommates), giving that guitar everything I had while heavy rainhammered the metal roof over my head. I played frequently with an old friend who had a superb voice and was quite goodwith a harmonica. We took it on road trips, once spending an entire day drinking beer and playing the streets of Portland,

OR during a blues festival where we drew large crowds outside bars and near the festival grounds.

The guitar was magical. It didn’t have a great sound, and it has never traveled in a case the entire time I have owned it. Ieven had it repaired once after a careless friend sat on it, and the luthier I brought it to almost refused to repair such a lowquality instrument (probably because I took it to Steve Helgeson, who builds utterly breathtaking instruments). Butsomething about the action on the fretboard, the way I could make it sound nice and light or loud and nasty, and how itgradually broke in to my particular style of play… it seemed to channel a kind of raw musical energy from me I hadn’texperienced before. And so I eventually began referring to it as The Magic Guitar. I still played my other guitars, but notwhen it was time to consume many drinks and wail out some depression-driven bluesey jams with my harmonica-totingfriend.

This whole concept of the ten-dollar magical guitar and the effect it had on my music during my early- and mid-twentiesdefinitely played a role in the rise of the Uvumi.com project. The guitar brought forth such raw, emotionally-driven musicfrom within, and that reminded me of envisioning (in the 1990s) a website devoted to amateur musicians like myself,hosting a massive online library of low-fi recordings and connecting like-minded artists. I had been recording my owncrappy music since I was a teenager and in my early twenties spent much time recording music using cheap equipmentand open source software. While you can hear some of my (admittedly embarrassing) old recordings on my Uvumi profile,I think my best recorded works were created with my old friend with the golden voice and a pocket full of harmonicas. Wereleased a couple of demo songs under the name Going To Austin. In the end, it was fun that we did eventually move toAustin, specifically to launch Uvumi, even if it did fail as a business. The experience was priceless and there is noquestion that one can learn a LOT from failure. I certainly did.

Back to the photo real quick: it was shot at dusk in Uvumi’s office in Austin with the overhead lights turned off. No flashwas used. Here are the details:

Equipment & Settings

Nikon D50

Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 (shot at 18mm)

Exposure 30s at f/3.5

ISO 400

Copyright 2014 Marshall Stokes. All rights reserved.