What happened with Dirble
Håkan Nylén
Posted on April 14, 2020
I am the former owner and the founder of Dirble. I worked on Dirble from 2011 to 2019 on it with around 4–5 months in profit. The rest I paid from my own pocket to keep the whole service up and running.
Dirble was an amazing service, built to be your backend to handle all internet radio stations with search, categories, played songs and album covers. first it was built in PHP with Codeigniter and then in ruby with Ruby On Rails. A lot of systems and apps used Dirble to handle thousands of radio stations to their users. I got jobs referring to Dirble on my Resume.
Services like Rune Audio was using Dirble. You could buy a php code that was more or less a clone of Dirble, using Dirble's api. And you could use Iphone apps like soundseeder that was using Dirble's api for internet radio stations. And many more.
Now Dirble haven't been up since summer 2019. I will now tell you why.
I started getting tired of Dirble, it was a cool technical solution I was proud of but it have been costing a lot privately and I wanted to spend less time on it and spend more time on my future projects. I also felt stressed to losing revenue and some months here and there pay from my own pocket to make Dirble Survive. I was more or less tired of making excuses to my then fiancee, now wife, where all the money disappeared.
Then I got a mail of a young guy in USA wanting to buy Dirble for a okay sum, based on that the Dirble was going plus-minus 0. I accepted and prepared a 4 month long transfer of the project with some hiccups on the way.
I didn't announce this as we thought of the new owner should announce it together with me.
The transfer was done at around February 2019. I saw Dirble up and running and was waiting for the announcement. Nothing happened. Thought the new owner was busy and let it go, it is his property now so I guess it is fine.
Then in summer Dirble was down and I felt pretty sad. I thought it would flourish now with someone with more money and emotion to this service that I had.
Dirble has been down since then.
I am sorry for every platform, app using Dirble that now have to go to someone else that is most likely worse than Dirble to handle their internet radio.
I am also sorry for the end users, the people that used with or without knowing they was using Dirble.
I am also missing those developers trying to steal all the data on Dirble and I had to send out angry emails. That was stressful but in retrospect, I do miss that.
What I am trying to say is that I wish it could gone better and I hope everyone can accept my apologies. This should have gone smoother and more transparent.
My learning is to be more transparent but also with my future projects being clear why people have to pay for the service, so I can continue on it and maybe make a career and live on the project.
And once, again, sorry.
Posted on April 14, 2020
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