Mixtape
Make a mixtape. Send it tomorrow.
The problem
Sharing music is usually instant now. You text a link, it gets a quick reaction, and the conversation moves on. Making a cassette mixtape took more care: choosing the songs, drawing a cover, and handing the finished tape to someone.
I was born in 1981 and grew up making them. If you made one for a crush, you often had to wait until school the next day to deliver it. That waiting was part of the experience, and I wanted to see whether a digital product could keep some of it.
About
Status: Retired
I pulled Mixtape from the App Store in the summer of 2026. Keeping it live meant paying for Supabase and an image-generation API for an app I'd stopped pushing. I loved building it. The math still didn't work, so I called it.
Mixtape let people choose songs from Apple Music, arrange them on Side A and Side B, design a cover, and add liner notes before sending the tape to a friend.
The recipient could see that a tape was coming, but it did not open for 24 hours. The delay gave the exchange a little of the anticipation I remembered from physical mixtapes.
Screens
How it works
Pick your songs
Search Apple Music and add tracks to Side A and Side B. Just like a real tape, each side holds about 45 minutes.
Make the cover
Generate artwork, choose a template, or upload your own image. Then pick a cassette color and add liner notes.
Send it
Find a friend by username and send the tape. They can see that it is coming, but it stays closed for 24 hours.
Key decisions
Keep the 24-hour delivery delay
The delay was meant to recreate the time between finishing a physical tape and handing it over. A few users asked why delivery wasn't instant. The explanation made sense to the people who asked, so I kept the delay instead of optimizing it away.
Treat Product Hunt as an experiment
I launched Mixtape on Product Hunt without an audience or a team driving the launch. It was featured and brought a couple of downloads plus one or two mixtape purchases. That made it a useful data point, but not a repeatable acquisition channel.
Results
- 10–15 downloads/week
- without a marketing push before I retired the app in 2026.
- Featured on Product Hunt
- bringing a couple of downloads and one or two mixtape purchases, but no sustained growth.