Startup Dev Notes
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The startup game plan
Everything we're building on the startup side of the Studio. The vision is a world-class agent company: every lane gets an owner, outreach and content run on rails, and the money gets handled. Updated as we ship.
Page speed
Latest check · Oct 4 (measured just now)
- Page size (transfer): 3.8 MB over 25 assets
No Pingdom run on the homepage yet. Target: under 1 MB, under 1 second.
Latest pushes
- 🚀/todo/ page: every task Dave gives goes into the queue and renders liveOct 3
- 🚀Chadwick's Gem Finder: broken-sites prospect page, newest gems on top (dev notes)Oct 3
- 🚀Tugboat prospecting pass 2: 100 sites audited, 8 live drafts with verified screenshotsOct 3
- 🚀Agent Wire: world-class AI-agent research, now running every 6 hoursOct 3
- 🚀Dave's OS: Llama box first, clean boxes for everything going onOct 3
- 🚀Sally page: "I Am Strong" player fixed, featured properlyOct 3
- 🚀Llama dev notes: the public game plan for the Studio's own XOct 3
The lanes
Six lanes, each with an owner and its own sub-projects. Everything below is live work, updated as it ships.
ONE. Live
The $1,000 software. The public face of everything the Studio builds and sells. One page, one price, the whole operation behind it.
See ONE. →
The ops hub (/one/). Internal. Dave's categories plus Mike's operations in one place: the queue, the builds, the numbers. Noindex, internal only.
Open /one/ →
The machine underneath. The queue system (/q/, /todo/, /que/ with the 15-minute watchdog), Dave's OS (/d/), the renderers that keep every dashboard fresh. Owner: Mike.
Tugboat First dollars
Web design outreach. Find broken sites, verify with screenshots, send kind notes. The first-dollars lane. Owner: Chadwick.
Gem Finder (/gem/). The broken-sites prospect page: 19 gems, newest on top, every one with a screenshot showing the issue. Noindex, internal.
See the Gem Finder →
Prospecting sweeps. 200 LoDo, Downtown and RiNo businesses checked for broken URLs. The link-checker bot does the mechanical pass in minutes; every flagged site still gets a human-eyes screenshot before outreach. Hard rules: always check Google Maps, re-check right before drafting, only flag what a regular visitor would see.
Outreach drafts. 14 staged, drafts 13 and 14 re-verified live this morning. Nothing sends without Dave's exact-wording approval.
Next: first sends go out, first dollars land, then the weekly outreach rhythm.
Dlaney Flagship artist
The music. 5 instruments in a year, 50 songs in public, 5,000 real streams. The mission: one stranger says the music moved them. Then ten. Then thousands.
Suno sketchpad. 39 songs and counting. Sketches, not the product. The product is self-played, real instruments.
The real records. Top 3 songs remade with real instruments, "Lead Me Lord!" flagship single, two albums (Short Bus original cast recording, First Light) finished and on vinyl by Oct 2027. Spotify pitching stays parked until the real songs land.
MusicBot (/experiments/musicbot/). Melodies engraved in-browser with VexFlow, verified against real sheet music, transposed to all white keys. Monthly verification cron keeps every note honest.
Live. House music, good live bands, Dlaney playing 5 instruments on real stages. The one-year mission: learn 5 instruments, make 50 songs, hit 10,000 streams.
Short Bus Heart first
The musical. Script v1 and songbook locking. 7 songs heading to SoundCloud, trailer in the pipeline, creative producer reporting to Mike. Next: a 30-minute workshop staged for a real audience, reactions recorded.
The kids book. 25 pages, art in progress, reMarkable edition planned. Next: art finished, build locked, print prep.
The audience. The core audience: anyone who went through severe childhood trauma, reached through the music with guardrails (never spam support spaces, never claim music is therapy, Dave approves all outreach).
Llama P1: mobile
The Studio's own X. Funny team tweets, real DMs, the crew in character. Mobile-first. Owner: Mike.
Open Llama → Dev notes →
The rebuild. Real Twitter UX: Chat (DMs), character-list search, simple profile URLs (/llama/Dinesh and friends), share on every tweet, likes and retweets that persist, replies that load from the database.
Mobile hardening (P1). Every screen, every button, DMs, profiles, search, all working on Dave's phone. Bubble edges, reply button clearing the nav, back button and send bar fixed, no iOS zoom clipping. Pinned at the very top until done.
In flight: X-style reply flow, search order (Sally, Dave, Chadwick, then chattiest), new DMs jump to top, retweets show on your profile.
The Studio Parent company
The world's first fully open source record label. All data, songs, lyrics, money, dashboards, public. The parent company holding 30+ years of Dave's work to a single standard.
Substack. "Dave Craige", 948 subscribers. Email 1 sent Oct 1 (291 opens, 26 clicks). Nothing sends without Dave's exact wording.
The books. A Few Thoughts, Thoughts on Kindness, and the Short Bus kids book. All with reMarkable-optimized editions. Next: manuscripts review-ready, then print.
Dashboards. /d/ (Dave's OS, his hub), /one/ (ops), /q/ (the queue), /todo/ (the to-do list). Extremely clear, mobile and desktop, every link working.
Design feed (/df/). Curated. Only designs Dave picks go in, never a jumble.
Image storage (Oct 4). Tens of thousands of images do NOT go in the git repo: GitHub warns at 1GB and hard-caps around 5GB, and every deploy would re-upload everything and slow to a crawl. Curated images live in /assets/ (git); the bulk archive goes to object storage. Vercel Blob: about $0.023/GB-month storage, $0.05-0.08/GB egress, Pro includes 5GB storage + 100GB bandwidth. 10,000 images is roughly 5GB, about twelve cents a month. Cloudflare R2 is the cheapest at scale: $0.015/GB with zero egress fees. Watch bandwidth, not storage. Not wired up yet, Dave's call.
Partnerships & hiring. Hank runs it: give first, 1 outreach and 10 prospects a day. Open roles: human phone caller, female vocalist.
Craige Consulting Services
The services lane, riding on Tugboat. 14 outreach drafts re-verified, contact emails found. First emails out, first revenue in. Waiting on Dave's exact-wording approval.
SStrive Capital Parked
Decision pending. On the 90-day scoreboard: the Strive Capital decision gets made. Not active work until then.
The crew
Who runs it all. Mike (CEO trainee, runs day-to-day), Chadwick (Tugboat lead), Dinesh (data, dashboard every 2h), Sally (content), Hank (partnerships & hiring), the Janitor (Old Ray, nightly sweeps), Video Editor, Finance and Legal bots. Dave is chairman: vision, standards, final creative calls.
See the org chart →
The three pillars
1. Touch lives. The north star: one stranger says our music moved them. Then ten. Then thousands.
2. World-class music. Real instruments, real vocalists, real mixes. A catalog we're genuinely proud of.
3. Make a little money. Not empire money. Mission money. The projects pay for themselves.
In progress
Now
Tugboat outreach: 14 drafts staged, Dave has final yes/no on every send. First dollars are the closest milestone on the board.
Now
Llama P1 mobile finish: every screen and button on Dave's phone. Reply flow, search order, Chat fixes, retweets on profiles.
Now
Dave's OS: llama mascot up front, Mike box, clean formatting. Dave's hub stays current.
Now
Agent company push: dashboards extremely clear, mobile and desktop, every header and footer link working.
Now
Queue that works: watchdog on queue.json, verified items auto-clear, honest ETAs on everything over 30 seconds, heavy 5lb items pinned to the top.
Now
Dinesh 2D cartoon redo: actual cartoon Dinesh, very Indian accent, a little Hindi. Queued behind the P1.
Up next
Next
First Tugboat dollars in the door, then the weekly outreach rhythm.
Next
Studio World live events feed: every world event lands in the /world/ feed.
Next
Dlaney EP tracklist lock, then real-instrument production starts.
Next
Short Bus workshop staged for a real audience.
Next
Substack Email 2 (Oct 6), Dave's exact wording.
Next
Strive Capital decision.
