Zillionears.com
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Zillionears was a flash-sale platform that let musicians release music through Groupon-style pre-sales with dynamic pricing. Founded in 2010 in California by Jordan Nemrow, Dan Polaske and Justin Mylander, it gave artists commerce software to engage fans and sell directly, incentivizing social sharing: the more fans joined a sale, the cheaper the music got. It onboarded over 100 artists before the founders shut it down in 2013.
02 / Zillionears.com FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Co-founder Jordan Nemrow wrote a candid post-mortem in April 2013, and his verdict was blunt: people did not like the product. Nobody who used the service thought it was cool, and even the dynamic-pricing gimmick fell flat — fans joined sales to support the artist, so saving a few dollars did not excite them, and they could get the music free elsewhere anyway. A beta test was a disaster: Amazon, their payment processor, suspended their account, so the team paid the artist out of pocket and gave the music away free. The team also concluded they were not music-sales domain experts. This concerns Zillionears' specific product, documented by the founders themselves.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
Jordan Nemrow, Dan Polaske and Justin Mylander found Zillionears in California to build a flash-sale platform for musicians with dynamic pricing.
- Operations ended
In April 2013, Nemrow publishes a first-person post-mortem announcing the shutdown; the company had already gone under after failing to build a product people liked.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
2010: flash-sale platform for musicians, dynamic pricing
- 02
Onboarded 100+ artists; beta wrecked by payment processor suspension
- 03
Fans didn't like the product: 'no one thought it was that cool'
- 04
April 2013: founder's post-mortem announces the shutdown