Welcome to Record Club
tldr: I’m building a startup
Record Club is a place to share your record collection. It’s still very much a work in progress. I’m going to share all of the inner workings of creating this startup here on Medium.
More to the story
Last year, right around the time I joined Postmates, I heard about a company called VNYL. I visited their store in Venice Beach and listened to a vinyl record for the first time.
I was immediately obsessed with the fact that I needed to get a record player and start collecting vinyls. I bought my first vinyl. The same album I can say that got me introduced to hip-hop for the first time: Jay-Z — Vol. 2… Hard Knock Life
Two weeks later, I was gifted a record player. I went out and bought a Marshall speaker. I joined VNYL and they started sending me vinyls every month. They curate stuff for you. But there was one problem: how did they know which vinyls you already had? They could use Discogs, but I thought that I wanted to build something cleaner, and simpler; a digital shelf, where you could showcase your collection, and discover collections from others.
Your vinyl collection represents your favorite music. It’s not something you can stream, or hear randomly on the radio. It’s a physical medium that sounds better than anything. And you spend good money to maintain it. I’ve always wanted to create a community where people can share something they are passionate about.
Most importantly, this is a weekend side project. I’m not trying to make money, or compete with anyone else. It will probably not get updated as fast as you expect. I just want to do a few things:
- Improve my front end (Javascript, CSS, React/Redux) programming skills and back end infrastructure skills
- Learn how to build a native mobile app (I’m gonna use React Native)
- Build an online community where people share and discover content
- Have fun
Here are some of the technologies used to build the site:
- Infrastructure: Google Compute Engine, Github
- Design: Sketch, Bulma, Flexbox
- Front End: Node, React, Redux, Webpack, Babel
- Back End: Node, bcrypt, JWT, Passport
- Social: Twitter
I want to show off the process of building a website/startup/app/community here. I’ll share tips and tragedies, great ideas as well as dumb thoughts. I will show random shit for no reason. For example, here’s my code editor right now:
Anyway, I’d love to hear what you think of the idea. Excited to see you follow along. Say hello in the comments here, or on Twitter at @recordclubxyz.
