Cory Scheviak

Sometime in Fall of last year, I conceptualized the very broad idea of a pay-what-you-want music website based on my love of Humble Bundle and Bandcamp.

Back in December of last year, I first pitched the idea to my talented musician friend Punchaface, who fell in love with it immediately. We would chat every night about the idea, solidifying the details and getting each other more and more excited about it. I then pitched the idea to a few more artists and my music-loving friends who all thought the idea was really cool and that I should go for it.

From January through May, development of Panoplay took a back seat to my studies, even though I still managed to squeeze out 20-30 hours of development per week.

Since then, I have been working between 8 and 14 hours every day of the week on Panoplay, and we are still so far from launch. I have learned everything from the various complications of working with lawyers to how to change which table row is highlighted using jQuery. We have gone through a complete redesign of the website, several changes in project contributors, and experienced the frustrations of expecting people to always email you back. There have been so many times when I have had to think past the struggles of today and visualize the successes of the future. So many times, in fact, that it has started to become repetitive and sometimes frustrating. Today, though, I finally got to see a screenshot of what my friend has been working on for the past month integrated with the new design.

And it was amazing.

It is the little things, like when an artist emails me back saying how excited they are to be a part of this, or when I see a screenshot of a new feature being completed, that really make this all worth it.

I’ve never worked on a project for this long without some sort of launch before, and nearly every aspect of this entire experience is a new one to me. It’s been slow-going even at the fastest pace I can possibly sustain, but that’s alright.

This is going to be awesome.