Scott Stevenson started where a lot of creative people do—he wanted to make video games. He built a bunch of them, but they didn’t go anywhere. Then he tried building an electronic music instrument, something to bridge the gap between traditional instruments and electronic music. He called it Mune. It was clever. No one could pronounce it.

Keep Going: How to Pivot From a Career in Music to a Startup

John Biggs · Apr 28

This week on Keep Going, I sat down with Scott Stevenson, CEO of Spellbook, a company that started with a frustrating legal bill and turned into one of the most widely used AI tools in the legal world. Scott’s story isn’t a straight line. He started building video games. Then musical instruments. None of them took off. But what stuck with him was the pa…

Read full story

The idea behind Mune was to give performers a tool that would show an audience they were doing more than just pressing play. He wanted to prove electronic music could be as expressive as anything played with strings or keys. The concept was solid. The product even worked. But the business didn’t. A huge legal bill nearly wiped them out. And that’s when Scott saw the real problem: legal work was expensive, slow, and largely untouched by modern tech.

That realization led to Rally, a small startup focused on automating the boring stuff in legal—contracts, templates, and the routine drudgery that lawyers bill too much for. But for three years, it was a grind. He and his team built 100 versions of the product, launched new webpages every two weeks, and barely scraped by. Investors wondered why they weren’t spending the money they’d raised. Scott’s answer: “We don’t have anything special yet.”

Then generative AI showed up.

Scott used GitHub Copilot and immediately saw what was possible. If code could be written with AI assistance, why not legal documents? They pivoted fast and built Spellbook, the first generative AI co-pilot for lawyers. Within three months, 30,000 people signed up. It clicked. Lawyers who saw it had that “pupils-dilating” reaction. They’d never seen anything like it. It changed how they thought about their work. That’s when Scott knew he finally had something that mattered.

Now Spellbook serves over 3,000 legal teams across 50 countries. The company is building tools like Spellbook Associate—an AI junior lawyer—and pushing toward data-driven negotiation, where AI can show what’s “normal” in a contract the same way markets show the price of a stock.

Scott says he still sees himself as a creative. He wanted to make things that had impact. Video games weren’t it. Music instruments weren’t it. Legal software? Somehow, that was. And that’s the point: if you’re moving from the arts into business, don’t stop being creative. Just aim it somewhere useful. Keep going until people grab what you made out of your hands.

Here are the rules Scott used to move from the creative life into the startup world. Check out our action plan based on Scott’s advice.

Action Plan for Artists Building Startups (Inspired by Scott Stevenson’s Path)...