I was still at Google when this started. It was the side project that eventually tripped my own wire. The moment I was thinking about it more than the day job, I left and went full time. It reached more than 10,000 creators and processed over $2M.
The hardest year was the last one, by a distance. We were raising a Series A at the end of 2022 with commitments from funds and ventures and we were close to closing. Then FTX collapsed, and every commitment went to zero. Everyone pulled out, not because anything was wrong with the product, but because of how the whole crypto space suddenly looked from the outside.
What followed was four months, not one bad day. We laid people off in stages, deliberately, to stretch the runway in case it could still be saved, and we stayed optimistic while the market kept getting worse. I put a lot of my own money in trying to keep it alive long enough to find an investor still liquid enough to come in. And underneath it is the trap nobody warns you about: if you look desperate, it is very hard to raise. Eventually we let everyone go and it was just the founders.
Artists were financing their careers with everything except the thing that actually appreciates, their own future work. ace.fan let an artist leverage their fanbase directly: fans could buy and trade tokens, and the transactions generated a return that funded real things, like studio time.
Two lessons, and they are not the tidy ones. Don't put that much of your own money in. That was the real mistake. And freeze sooner: rather than prolonging it we should have paused the company cleanly and kept the optionality. The company isn't dead, which rather proves the point.
Revived after the market recovered. I stay involved, but not day to day.