Founders Note #1

2016 – Started my first company while in college: a practice app for musicians created during the “Start Up Lab” at Berklee College of Music. It had the (very catchy) name IWantToPractice.

2018 – Began working on my second product, DEX, a flashcard app for musicians. It displayed a chord, scale, or arpeggio and gave real-time feedback by analyzing the pitch of the notes you played against what was on screen. (It never got released.)

2019 - Shut down IWantToPractice

2020 – Launched Muzie.Live as an online tutoring platform on January 10th, 2020. Little did we know what was about to happen to the online teaching market. By February, we had abandoned the marketplace model and focused entirely on making Muzie the best virtual classroom for music lessons.

2024 – Released Thinking.Cards, my first physical product: a pack of 50 thought-provoking questions, scenarios, and discussion topics. Successfully funded on Kickstarter.

2025 – Launched Hiyve.io—an expansion of what we learned from Muzie, but a whole new platform in its own right. Leveraging AI and years of experience, Hiyve brings powerful communication tools to every industry.

But here’s the reality behind the milestones:

2015–2016 – Drove for Lyft to stay afloat.
2016–2019 – Worked sales jobs to keep going while learning more about the education industry.
2020–2022 – Took no salary from Muzie, scraping by with the support of my girlfriend (now wife), who believed in me.

Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart. It’s for those who never stop, never give up, never back down. You admit when you’re wrong, pivot fast, and keep forging ahead.

I can’t wait to see what Hiyve brings. It won’t be a straight line up, but each step gets easier when you build on lessons learned from past mistakes.

Muzie is still going strong, and Hiyve is ready to do to Zoom what Zoom did to Skype.

What’s your journey?