Lisssen

Lisssen was a 0-to-1 attempt at building the digital music infrastructure Tunisian artists never had: distribution, a marketplace, and merch. Stitched together fast enough to learn before the runway ran out. I co-founded it and ran the product side.

The Problem

Independent artists in Tunisia were stuck. Streaming was the only real digital income option, but getting there was a nightmare. Platforms like DistroKid required foreign payment methods that most Tunisian artists simply couldn't access. And even when artists found a workaround, labels and middlemen took 30 to 50% of an already tiny payout (we're talking fractions of a cent per stream).

Outside of streaming, the only alternative was concerts. That was it. No merch platform, no fan donations, no Bandcamp equivalent. Artists were building real audiences with almost no infrastructure to actually make money from them.

The problem wasn't just a missing product. It was that Tunisian artists had been structurally excluded from the global music economy, and nobody was building for them specifically.

What I Did

I led the product side of Lisssen from the first line on a napkin to three shipped products. My co-founder handled GTM and communications. The roadmap, the sequencing decisions, what we built and what we didn't, that was on me.

Marketplace (WordPress MVP) This was the starting point. I designed and built the first version targeting beatmakers, a community I already had real connections with from years in the Tunisian urban music scene. That network was the unfair advantage that made launching here the obvious first move.

Distro Tool As the marketplace grew, we needed to actually generate some cashflow. I spotted the distribution gap and decided to move on it fast. The MVP was essentially a wrapper around existing services like Venice Music and Amuse, with a WordPress interface on top and a part-time specialist handling the manual work behind the scenes. Not pretty, but it worked and it proved people would pay for it.

Merch Tool We tried on-demand manufacturing first. Too slow, too complex. Pivoted to a model where artists brought ready inventory and we handled fulfilment. One artist came to us with a fulfilment problem and we used that as our proof of concept. That was enough to validate the idea without over-building.

Platform Rebuild While Distro was growing and Merch was being tested, I was also managing the transition from WordPress to a proper MERN stack. One fullstack developer, no downtime, platform stayed live throughout. It was a lot to hold at once.

Ads and Acquisition Ran Meta campaigns for Distro. Hit 5x ROAS. Also tried artist partnership deals early on, paid mid-level artists to join the platform hoping their audience would follow. It didn't work, had no clear KPIs, and was eating time and money we didn't have. Cut it and moved the budget to paid ads instead.

Why We Built in That Order

The Marketplace came first because it was the fastest path to real signal. I had existing credibility with beatmakers. I didn't have to convince anyone from scratch. We got 500 signups and 90 active users in the first 24 hours, which confirmed we weren't imagining the demand.

Distro came second because we needed revenue, not more users. Rather than raise money or sit on the idea, I decided to ship a wrapper product in weeks and figure out the proper build later. 40 artists signed up, 100+ tracks distributed, and we had our first real cashflow.

Merch came third because it was the natural next layer of the ecosystem. Test fast, learn fast, cut what doesn't work, keep what does.

Each launch validated the next one. That was deliberate.

What Didn't Work

The artist partnership channel was a mistake. We were paying artists to join the platform with the hope that their followers would come along. There was no clear way to measure whether it was working, no defined success criteria, and managing artist relationships took a disproportionate amount of time with no guaranteed return. We dropped it and reallocated the budget to ads where we could actually track what was happening.

The on-demand merch model was another one. We assumed we could manage manufacturing logistics without it becoming a bottleneck. We were wrong. The pivot to fulfilment-only was the right call and we still got to prove the concept through a real partner.

The bigger lesson from Lisssen as a whole: competing in the music ecosystem without serious capital is a hard game. You're not just building a product, you're convincing artists to trust a new system over platforms they already know. That education cost is real. If I was starting again I'd either raise significantly more before entering, or build tools that sit on top of existing platforms rather than asking artists to leave them.

Results

The week we got both the Minassa Lab grant and the AIR funding was the moment things felt real. 42,000 TND in the same week, two months after launch, from programs that had seen hundreds of projects. It wasn't just money. It was confirmation from people outside our bubble that the problem was worth solving.

The first marketplace sale, an artist selling his album through the platform, hit differently too. And hitting 5x ROAS on Distro ads meant we were reaching people who genuinely needed what we built.

What I'd Do Differently

Build speed was our biggest constraint. One developer and a co-founder doing no/low-code trial and error is a slow engine. Today I'd go AI-first from day one, use it to move faster on features, reduce the dependency on dev cycles in the early stages, and test more ideas in less time.

The other thing I'd change is how we validated ideas. Our process was too informal. Some bets got tested quickly, others sat around too long before we got signal. I'd set up a proper system from the start, clear criteria, time-boxed experiments, defined success metrics. That way you're not learning by accident, you're learning on purpose.