AI Lab
Challenge
The Internet Archive holds nearly every Grateful Dead show ever taped, 15 terabytes of free recordings that only experts can navigate. Existing apps compete on catalog access, but the real problem is choice paralysis. Casual fans open a database, get overwhelmed, and only know a select few shows. LiveVault started as a personal experiment that I truly built for the joy of learning. Could I ship a native app?
Strategy
I designed and built it: gapless streaming, offline shows, CarPlay, soundboard-quality badges, and a cinematic design language that shifts with the band's eras. Once it was live in the App Store a fan who happened to be an Engineer reached out to me and I brought him on as a partner. We built a new roadmap including a cross-platform migration and dreamed up the two flagship features. The Guide is a daily AI-narrated episode anchored to the current date in Dead history, structured so a single shared episode serves every listener and content costs hold at pennies a day. MyTrip turns listening history into a personal journey of maps, stats, and badges that reward depth of listening. Along the way, the recordings themselves always stayed free.
Results
Around 5,000 downloads, all organic, on $0 spend. A 5.0-star App Store rating, with reviews that call out what the design was going for. "Simple and elegant UI." "Faster and easier to navigate than the archives site." One reviewer named it the best app they'd found for the Dead's catalog. I have a full-time design leadership role and no bandwidth to maintain a live product, so in August 2026, I handed LiveVault to my partner to run. It shipped. It was fun. People love it. It's still streaming. And for an experiment built on nights and weekends, it was a success.