Today is November 5, 2024. It’s been almost two years since I started working on Ampwall, a marketplace and community platform for music communities. It’s been more than a year since I walked away from my great job at Shippo to pursue it. And it’s been almost two months since we launched publicly. Things keep changing, we keep pushing forward, but none of this happened by accident.

My parents were both musicians. They told me stories about how they met as adults in New York: my mom was a folk singer and guitarist who wanted to learn to transcribe her music, my dad was a music teacher and jazz musician in the city. I remember watching my mom play guitar hearing my dad play saxophone in the other room. When I was around 10, I started learning on my mom’s old classical guitar. I got my first electric at 11 or 12, one of those Fender Squier packs with the guitar and little practice amp.

Guitar and songwriting took over my life. Creating music is like magic: you speak the incantation, you perform the ritual, and something new and powerful is born. I had a pile of cassette tapes of my own songs. When I was 14, I bought a used drum set and started learning because I was frustrated by my inability to record music by myself. I wound up joining a band with my friends. With them I got a taste of being part of a music scene. We organized shows, played locally, recorded demos, sold CD-Rs of our own music. I taught myself HTML and built our first websites.

Time went on. My high school band broke up but I got better at drums and joined other bands playing hardcore, punk, and eventually black metal. In my early 20s I got a new guitar for the first time in years and started writing my own music again. This turned into my band Woe, which came to be the most important music project of my life.

Along the way, I had to get a job but didn’t have a lot of options. High School and I never got along. I barely graduated, unable to focus on the future and prioritize my classes. Years later, I’d learn I had undiagnosed ADHD and discover I could weaponize my hyper-focus while leaning heavily on schedule and routine to help me thrive. But until then, work was a struggle because I had to be extremely engaged with something to focus.

Luckily, I could focus on technology. I got some certifications, I failed upwards into a good job with a local IT company. The founder taught me the power of unshakable commitment and determination. It reminded me a lot of the DIY attitude of folks in my music world, a confident “Yeah, I can do this, I don’t care if you think it’s crazy” that you really need to get most challenging things done.

I kept coding. Code is also like magic: you type the incantation, you perform the ritual, and something new and powerful is born. I learned PHP. When Woe’s first album came out, it started getting shared through unsanctioned music blogs. I built a pay-what-you-want website to sell it for donations. When this worked out, some friends asked to use it and I turned it into a little business! In a few months, I had a good dozen or so bands selling through it. It was the first time that my music and tech lives came together. Unfortunately (and unsurprisingly), I wasn’t prepared for something like this. Bandcamp arrived, they did everything I was doing but so much better, so I told everyone to use that and moved on.

Somewhere in there, I resumed sessions with the therapist I saw when I was a kid. The last session I remember, I was telling her about some event (doesn’t remember what) and she remarked, “Chris, when are you going to give up this music nonsense?” It floored me. This was one of those talk therapists who didn’t give advice or feedback, just offered a space for someone to talk… and this was what she wanted to comment on? It’s literally the only interaction I remember with her and one of my examples of why I think talk therapy is ridiculous! (Or at least it’s not for me. I like CBT quite a lot.)

Years went by. I kept doing Woe. I kept working in tech. I built the original Phillymetal.com, a website for people to submit metal shows. There was a little message board. Through Phillymetal, I made a ton of friends and learned a lot about building and releasing software. The original version was hand-rolled PHP. Eventually, I wanted to learn Ruby so I rebuilt it using Rails.

More time went by! By 2022, I was years past a move from IT to software engineering. I had left Philadelphia for New York City. I was (still am) happily married and had a wonderful daughter. But I was still playing music, still doing Woe and in a new death metal band Glorious Depravity. If anything, becoming a parent helped me focus on my goals more because it forced me to plan my time more deliberately.

Around this time, I was thinking a lot about the state of the tech world. Bandcamp had been sold to Epic Games and a lot of people were wondering whether its future was safe. I was also frustrated: being in a band is expensive and complicated enough without Bandcamp taking their 10-15%. It was one thing when they were an independent company, but now… fueling Epic Games? I realized that literally every option that a band had for sharing and selling their music online was owned by a gigantic corporation: Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and now Bandcamp. And beyond that… Bandcamp sort of… wasn’t that good? My software engineer brain started buzzing: I can do this better. My DIY brain chimed in: there’s no reason not to just do it.

In January 2023, I went to a Shippo offsite conference. There was this panel led by founders Laura Behrens Wu and Simon Kreuz where they talked about their experience founding the company. Laura made this remark that was so clear, simple, and powerful: “If you think you can do something better, you should do it.” So calm and confident. And… why not? If you can, you should. I believed I could so I did.

I started working on Ampwall right away. There was a new Woe album coming out later that year so that would be my target. I wanted to at least sell my merch by release date, then follow up with music, then expand it to let other people in. I had very specific product goals in mind: I wanted better looking pages, better shipping, a data model built for people in multiple bands. I wanted ways to help connect bands or music scenes together so things felt like a network and less lonely. I wanted lower fees so more money could get into the pockets of bands. And I wanted it to be built and owned by DIY maniacs, not corporate vampires – a sustainable business that would be on the side of the arts. I wrote an essay about Ampwall’s mission that goes deeper into why it exists, describes the problem more fully and how Ampwall is trying to fix things.

Fast forward to today. Ampwall is the first direct competitor to Bandcamp. We launched public signup almost two months ago and it’s exceeded all of our expectations. Note a key word there: “our”. There’s a team, there’s a community, it’s not just me by myself anymore. Every day we make progress. I’m happy, I feel like what I’m doing matters. Ampwall is making real money for real bands. It’s also building communities, helping people find folks who like what they do. And it’s building joy, helping our bands feel like they have a voice and a home.

I think back to my path and it really seemed inevitable that I’d wind up here. The kid playing his mom’s acoustic guitar became the adult touring with his band, living his life for heavy metal and art. The kid who loved technology became a software engineer who loves working with startups, building real products that help people. Ampwall brings everything together, it merges my separate music and tech identities into one. I couldn’t possibly be more proud to be here. The “music nonsense” that defined my life is still there, far from nonsense, and something I’ll never give up.