Aug 26-28, 2025
Very slow day today, I guess it all comes with no clear plans. I used to know what I want for KaraOrchee, but not recently. There were many hurdles building a tech company — money, technology, people, logistics, and understanding the fluctuating market.
I sorted my thoughts into big chunks, prioritizing the most important ones.
Tech: 1. Technological breakthrough of Score-Following feature
2, Integrating functionalities onto one platform.
3. Community Features
4. Studio Management Tools
5. Software Version
6. Library Content
Sales: 1. Peabody
2. Levine Music
3. local Baltimore private and public schools
4. Maryland higher education institutions
5. DC private and public schools
6. Studio teachers, Individual Sales
Money: 1, Maryland Student Venture Showcase
2, BII Tedco
3, other Non-dilutive grants
4. Presidential
People:
Sales,
Tech
IP: 1. MDVLA, contract of interest
2. IPEC, copyrights
Alright, this was very helpful, let us dive into one segment a time:
1. Integrating functionalities onto one platform: fastest path would be website, and slowest but most ideal would be software.
Timeline decision: made with CTO. Website integration with Justin, and Software integration with Shidan?
What to include? browse library - log in, sign up/pay, find their score/upload a score in different formats/upload a recording and mute their tracks, score-following and/or recording (through headphone, need a video recording?), integrated cadenza points(CV, with backend edits) and little streches(pre-marked, smart prediction with rhythm)? Save recordings, and upload to community with texts, emoji, share button and thumbs up button.Private comments/chats. Educational courses. Vlogs
3. Community Features
Explore(non-friends, popular, algorithm-based pushes), Friends (Posts), posts support files(live photos, regular photos, videos, linked pages, scores), functionalities: likes, roses(ticket sales), comments, shares, save, and linked, courses (packages) alliances(by composer, by instrument, by genre, etc., daily tasks (timeline writing or playing or teaching phrase-to-phrase setting)? Small matching games?
My Base: My Uploads and manage my uploads, analysis, comments, reactions, income, bank of roses and coins, saves,
Aug 28
Continuing here. This morning I got deeply inspired by one of my piano students’ email. I have been experimenting with a new “Piano Dairy” homework — asking students to upload their recordings with a blurb of their feelings/observation/anything at all. Joaquin uploaded three recordings, which already showed rapid growth from number 1 to number 3, and wrote something I found very sincere — that is the purpose of making music, to be true to oneself.
I wonder if in the community feature of our app, we could facilitate this musical blog for all pianists — all musicians of all ages. First step upload a video recording or three, second write two paragraphs, attach score in PDF/XML/PNG(optional), third publish privately or publicly, and last, send a message to someone while sharing. Teachers/friends/whoever received this upload could then comment, save, organize saved videos as a list, react (perhaps share back something). Of course, people can also buy the original recording’s ownership — to keep the cideo even if the creator deleted their uploads, at a small (or large?) fee. I love it really.
So for the Music Blog page, we can sort by creator’s name, composer and piece name, Studio teacher’s name, a school’s name - then faculty’s studio. Then keywords, and dates, what so ever.
The only thing is how much does it cost to host such a platform, to enable these videos.
I asked GPT, it says:
Start lean: Use Vimeo API or Mux to avoid reinventing video infrastructure.
As community grows, you can shift to AWS S3 + CloudFront for fine-grained control.
Always compress and standardize video (mp4, H.264) → keeps storage & streaming costs manageable.
Likely 100 bucks per month, not bad.