I built the platform, and it has paying subscribers.

Okie Music Collective is a songwriter-first platform: songwriters showcase their work there, and get discovered from it. I joined as Founding CTO in September 2025 — fractional, and the only engineer.

That last part is the constraint everything else is built around. There is no engineering team to divide work across and nobody to hand a problem to, so every decision about what to build is also a decision about what not to build, and it is mine to make.

There is no team here. I am the Founding CTO and the only engineer, and the engagement is fractional — so the technical decisions are mine by default rather than by delegation.

I build this AI-assisted, with Claude.

There are three applications. The marketing site is Next.js. The product is a React and TypeScript web app. The mobile app is React Native and still in development.

One engineer across three applications only works if they are predictable in the same way. The shared decisions — data shapes, types, the words the product uses for songwriters, work and discovery — get made once and reused, and I would rather repeat a pattern I know than introduce a second way of doing something I will be the only person maintaining.

Subscriptions are where correctness stops being negotiable. People pay for this, so the state that decides whether someone is a subscriber has to be right, and right in the same way everywhere it is read.

Today there is a Next.js marketing site, a React and TypeScript web app, paying subscribers, and a React Native app in development.

The figure I would point at is one: one engineer, on a platform that charges money and gets paid. That is what Founding CTO means in practice here — no team to run, and the whole technical surface of a product that has to work for the people paying for it.