On December 2017 I made the decision of retiring from developer marketing
I got into "developer marketing" (also known as developer relations or evangelism) back in 2009, at around the time when I published my 2nd book "EconomÃa y Productividad con Software Libre".
I really enjoy connecting with other individuals at the "code level". It's like our own club where we all speak a language that very few understand. I love that by being close to other developers, I grow at a much faster rate than what I can grown on my own, and that I can play an active role in helping others achieve success.
What started as a labor of passion, became a career that allowed me to engage with an immense amount of software professionals, having conversations at different levels, literally across the entire world. I wrote another book, and gave talks in the USA, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, UK, The Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Peru, Mexico...and probably a few others that I don't recall at the moment.
Then, by the end of 2017, I got burned out. I was broken. The reasons are not relevant to this story, so let's leave it at that. I simply had to put my career on hold - I needed to heal.
Music came to the rescue.
I have been into making music since I was in middle school - here are some photos of the band I belonged to in high school. Soon after these photos were taken, I put my guitar away and rarely paid attention it. I went to college, got my CS degree, got married, had a son and became a software entrepreneur.
In 2018, my guitar became my best friend once again.
I started getting into musician circles. I bought a better guitar - joined a band in San Francisco, CA : The Pieces of the night. I joined the Vai Academy and met musicians from around the world. I published the book Hacking Lead Guitar.
Then I got inspired when I realized that there were many similarities between the work I used to do in developer marketing and what independent artist should be doing to build their audiences. This is the moment when I started the research for my upcoming book.
At this point in the story, it is now 2019. I'm living in Mexico City. I'm mostly recovered from my burnout episode and I'm working on Bonobo (that's a topic for another blog post)
One day a friend of mine calls me up and introduces me to a person who has an idea for a software product for the music industry - woot!
This person and I started a process that we called "professional dating". Throughout 2020 we built an incredibly strong friendship. We talked almost every day - about pretty much anything - bouncing ideas back and forth and sharing our thoughts with other people over zoom calls.
Fast forward to one month ago.
In August 21, 2021, I finally met in person my co-founder, Beatriz Ayala, and we are in Miami, FL, having our official company kickoff.
That's right.
We raised our pre-seed round of VC money, we remotely hired a team, and we're getting together for the first time, to start building a product that was born out of brainstorming sessions over Zoom, during a global pandemic, by two people who had never met in person.
And that's the story of how it took me 3 years to make a career change : I am now part of the Music Industry.