Bootstrapping ChoirMate: a solo founder's journey

Two passions align

I discovered the joy of singing as an adult, while working as an independent IT consultant. I've always enjoyed building things, from Lego Technic as a child to websites and software later on. What started as a simple side project to scratch my own itch has since grown to serve over 100,000 singers and conductors worldwide. Here's how it happened.

The Sunday evening frustration

The year is 2018. It's Sunday evening, and in a spare moment I want to practice a song for the next choir rehearsal. Ever since I joined the choir, I've been frustrated by how cumbersome everything is organized in our shared cloud drive. Sheet music in one folder, audio files in another, messages arriving through various platforms. Nothing is connected. The result is predictable: motivation, and whatever time you actually have to practice, quickly evaporates.

That combination of joy and frustration became a turning point. Instead of continuing to be annoyed, I started building the tool for choirs I wished existed.

A hunch confirmed

After attending MicroConf in 2019, a conference and community for solo founders, I finally had the push I needed to explore whether this odd idea about software for choirs had real potential. Sitting in a small cove in Dubrovnik after the conference, I began reaching out to choirs in different countries to understand what tools they were using. I was struck by how similar choirs are regardless of geography, and how open and helpful choir singers are once you make contact. It quickly turned out that I wasn't alone in my frustrations.

Dogfooding from day one

I now sing in two choirs, and it all started with Oslokoret, a choir of over 100 singers. After rehearsals, I would often head straight home and code improvements based on fresh observations and pain points (to be honest, I still do). This tight feedback loop became the foundation of ChoirMate.

Over time, ChoirMate evolved into an app for choir administration and practice that covers most of what a choir needs, both organizationally and musically. Most of ChoirMate is built on the principle of scratching my own itch: I made what I myself needed, and as an active choir member I've been dogfoodingWhat is dogfooding?Dogfooding (or "eating your own dog food") means using your own product as a real user would. It's a way to discover issues and improvements firsthand - nothing beats experiencing the same frustrations your users do! the app ever since.

The Flutter bet

Bootstrapping a product alone was both scary and overwhelming. I was the developer, investor, designer, support team, product manager, and CEO all at once. What saved me in building and evolving the product efficiently was the decision to bet on Flutter. A single shared codebase for iOS, Android, and web made the path from idea to finished feature remarkably short.

Hot reload alone kept me hooked. Seeing changes instantly made late-night coding sessions feel rewarding rather than tedious. Beyond that, being part of a thriving ecosystem mattered: watching Flutter and Dart evolve, discovering new packages on pub.dev that solved problems I was about to tackle, and using Firebase's local emulator to develop safely and quickly. In recent years, AI has become another accelerant. Combined, these tools enabled rapid iteration and experimentation without sacrificing stability or user experience.

As an early adopter of Flutter for Web, it felt almost magical to see the same components developed for mobile platforms work directly in the browser without any special adaptations, including full backend integration. Hot reload on web was admittedly painful for years, but recent updates have finally brought it up to par with mobile. This made it possible to build mobile and web in parallel, with minimal additional cost.

Going all in

In 2022, I launched ChoirMate fully and left consulting to go all in. Today, the app is used by over 100,000 singers and conductors around the world, and it has been translated by dedicated choir members into 13 different languages. The app has grown organically, driven by real needs, without big sales budgets.

Now we're a team working toward the same goal as when it all started: giving choirs more time and energy for what truly matters - singing together.

Curious how ChoirMate works? Try out a live demo below, right in your browser - both the mobile and web versions (thanks, Flutter for Web).