aMUZE - MVP 1

After winning the award for the prototype, I went on to develop the first MVP of aMUZE.

I could not find a frontend developer, so I had to become proficient with full-stack web development. My experience with Swift helped, but the web stack brought a very different set of tools, constraints, and design decisions.

Learning React and Express was a great experience, but the startup responsibilities made it intense. I was interviewing candidates, managing costs, preparing pitches, redesigning the deck, meeting investors, and leading backend development at the same time.

Eventually we got there. aMUZE could generate original lyrics, artwork, and music from simple input.

The goal was a music-oriented social network where people could generate original art and music, share it with friends, and import or reshape music created by others.

I tried to make the UI intuitive and visually strong while keeping the infrastructure serious. Virtual machines were protected by VPN, user files were stored in private blob storage, and we had backup and monitoring practices in place.

For music generation we created our own native solution. The results were not perfect, but they made musical sense, and for simple styles like lullabies and arcade music they were genuinely useful.

For lyrics and artwork we experimented with native solutions as well, but time was short. We eventually used off-the-shelf models, and with careful prompt engineering they produced strong results.

For aMUZE I implemented authentication with JWT tokens, role-based access control, and a notification system with websockets.

Looking back, I would have kept the product more open and focused even harder on music generation. I was eager to prove revenue potential, but the deeper proof was always the creative future of the idea.

The $150,000 award for the prototype lasted one year for a team of six, three of whom were not getting paid. I spent two months in San Francisco pursuing further financing, and while I did not manage to fundraise, I remain grateful to the GRS foundation for the experience.