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Endlesss
Social music creation platform
Endlesss first came to my attention as a musician. After joining an online discussion about music tech early in the pandemic, I was invited to a jam afterwards using the platform, and was blown away. After speaking with the founder, Tim Exile, I was hired to work on a website exploring their roadmap, and that relationship snowballed into a position as their Head of Design.
Endlesss is primarily a music making app for iOS and Desktop. It's based on the idea of building loops — popularised by loop pedals in the guitar world (though Endlesss focuses more on the electronic side of things). The power of Endlesss as a connected looper is that once connected online, musicians can be in the same 'jam' and build loops together.
I was responsible for all aspects of design from user research, to UX and UI for the apps, through to marketing and social media, web design and video production. I worked closely with Tim and Aftab Hussain, a talented project manager on product and strategy.
The app wasn't always easy to work on, as there was a significant amount of legacy code that sometimes got in our way, so I needed to reduce the friction involved in updating the UI. The first thing I did was to restructure everything into a design system, which helped tidy up a lot of the interface by unifying and consolidating styles. I created a streamlined workflow that would allow us to iterate faster. Compromises still often had to be made to ensure we were moving quickly, so I worked closely with developers to ensure designs made efficient use of our software architecture.
I was proud to help bring a whole new range of social features to the app, such as user profiles, following, comments and a notification system, which made the experience far more social and significantly improved engagement. We also built powerful additions to the music making experience, such as a custom sampler for sound pack creation.
"Designer doesn't do justice to Josh. He was basically our CPO — excellent communication skills, fantastic team player and always able to find the path forward under extreme uncertainty. A rare bird which you should absolutely catch if you can."
We needed a way to bring the music created on Endlesss to an outside audience, and so the Endlesss Charts were born. The charts would show the most popular loops on Endlesss each week, but the real power here was in a weekly Twitch show we put together with two of our community members, that showed the chart results off. They were very entertaining and made our artists feel heard as they bopped along to their creations each week. I would follow this up with social media posts, taking Endlesss loops beyond the walls of the platform.
During my first year at Endlesss we achieved a huge amount, as can be seen in this end of year 'bento' grid from the time.
Investment though didn't come easily, and we were often balancing the needs of our passionate user base against stakeholder interests and VC preferences. For better or worse, we were convinced to go down the 'NFT Marketplace' route. The hope was that we could provide a way for creators on the platform to make money from their music, and control the distribution of it. This led to development of a marketplace beta that had a promising debut — but when the crypto market tanked, it became clear this was not the future of the company (or perhaps anything else), and we moved away from the idea. While I regret that this project diverted energy away from the core product, there were interesting sides to it, and I think the NFT boom appealed to some artists because it offered a potential solution to the sad situation creative industries are in. It wasn't the answer, but I enjoyed the simultaneous shift in design aesthetics, and am still very proud of the website I built for it:
After the marketplace, came another significant pivot. Development on the main apps was too slow for us to achieve the growth we needed, so it was decided that we would keep the focus on web and explore ideas around the community side of Endlesss more deeply. This led to the birth of Endlesss 'Clubs' — a loop sharing experience that married some of the Endlesss 'jamming' concepts with a community aspect similar to apps like Discord. This experience would never come to see its full realisation, but was an exciting design project involving a huge amount of work in a short period of time. I was tasked with designing interfaces for loop sharing, playlist creation and managing music licences, all within a group chat interface.
Our devs created an amazing WASM based environment that had audio capabilities beyond anything I'd seen on the web, and we had some successful moments in early testing, but ultimately this concept was a solution in search of a problem and was not the overnight success we needed.
There was something else going on. For all our pivots and attempts to adapt (I've not even covered the Beat Machine here, which deserved its own case study) — the real force that kept Endlesss going in a time where investment in music technology was scarce, was our CEO. Tim Exile's vision is what Endlesss was built on, and he worked tirelessly to keep the company rolling. In 2023 Tim was diagnosed with cancer. Thankfully he has since made a full recovery, but the illness and operations he had to endure made it too difficult for him to keep the company afloat, and Endlesss finally shut up shop in May of 2024.
I'm eternally grateful for the opportunity I had at Endlesss — it was a truly original and excellent idea that touched many people's lives. It was humbling to witness the power of the community that grew around it, and I've made lifelong friends via my time there, who have become more than just screen names on the other side of a jam through various real life encounters.
Of course, it is called Endlesss... so it couldn't disappear completely. Imogen Heap was a long time user and decided to purchase the company assets. There's no full time team these days, but the former team and I have worked with Imogen to keep the app alive. Tim, meanwhile, is still coming up with excellent ideas and building them extremely quickly (see timexile.com), and is still a client and close friend.
The core Endlesss team was excellent, we built so much that I have barely scratched the surface of here, and it's an honour to have worked with them:
- Tim Exile: Endlesss founder and creator
- Aftab Hussain: Product management, operations
- Christopher Lerch: Software engineer
- Ragnar Hrafnkelsson: Software engineer
- Adam Stark: Software engineer
- Jaimen Laitha: Backend engineer