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.
By the end I was running product, engineering and the money. I built the team from one to about seventy, owned an operating budget of two to two and a half million a year, and acted as CFO and registered treasurer because someone had to. Infrastructure alone ran to forty-eight thousand a month, most of it AWS bandwidth and storage, then MongoDB, which I sharded myself when it needed doing, then payment fees and on-chain gas. I instituted quarterly board meetings before anyone asked for them, because I wanted the company to have the habit before it needed it.
The hardest year was the last one, by a distance. We were raising a Series A at the end of 2022. It was a major round, fully committed and oversubscribed, and we were close to closing. It was our first priced round, so none of it could be drawn until it closed. Then FTX collapsed. 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.