Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!
Hunter S. Thompson
Renaissance started in 2018, with the goal of bringing audiences and creators closer, to rise together.
Everyday, as soon as I woke up, I would work on it until I went to bed. I paid almost zero attention to myself, missing out on deadlines for utility and insurance bills. I even went a few months with no insurance coverage without realizing it.
Fortunately, I got to work with the most amazing team I’ve ever been with. Although we only had five people at our biggest scale, we’re able to achieve more than a much larger team.
At the begining, we just wanted to build an app that we ourselves would use. We never imagine that today, Renaissance has tracked over 318 millions of songs played. We had a 70% first week user retention rate and a 30% 20 week retention rate, both incredible achievements for a mobile app nowadays. You may have downloaded many apps, and stopped using them after a day or two. On Renaissance, a signifiant amount of users are constantly active after 20 weeks.
All of this was achieved by our focus on users and continuous pursuit of a high quality service.
It has been you, our users, who have kept us motivated.
We won’t forget a user from Europe who got up at 5am to participate our streaming parties. Another user got a tattoo after events to leave the memory with her forever. One user said she found out about our app half a year ago, and has been using it everyday since then, without missing one single day.
We can feel how important our product is for our users. That’s why we’ve always strived to provide the highest quality service.
And that is why we decided to sunset the app.
In the music space, making money is hard. However, we need revenue to maintain the quality of the service and cover the server cost.
Instead of letting you down, we would rather leave you with a good memory of the year that we were lucky enough to share with you.
We hope the memory can live on as proof that Renaissance left a mark on this world.
All living forms will die. If God experiences emotion, it may also age and die.
A product is just like a living form. To say goodbye to a product is like seeing the end of a life you birthed. If we say we are not sad, then we must be lying.
However, death is not the end of the world. Instead, it makes space for the new lives.
