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)...

Founded by journalist and engineer Arikia Millikan, CTRL+X is a startup building a blockchain-based licensing system to help independent journalists protect, distribute, and monetize their work.

Millikan started working on the idea nearly a decade ago, when she saw firsthand how media companies neglected digital infrastructure and treated editorial content as disposable. With the collapse of legacy media and the rise of AI, she believes protecting original journalistic content is more urgent than ever.

"We're at a fork in society — pre-AI and post-AI — and the value of archival journalistic content is only going to rise," Millikan said. "If we don't enable journalists to protect their assets now, they’ll either rot or be stolen."

The Problem CTRL+X Tackles

As traditional outlets shed staff and shutter archives, independent journalists are left without meaningful ways to preserve or profit from their work. Meanwhile, tech companies and AI models scrape old content for free, without rewarding creators. CTRL+X addresses this by offering journalists direct ownership and control over their archives.

Unlike previous attempts that focused on ads, micro-tipping, or NFTs, CTRL+X uses blockchain to register licenses for each piece of content. The text itself stays encrypted off-chain, while access is managed through token-gated systems. This structure keeps control in the hands of the journalist — not a platform.

"It's the license for the content that's going on-chain," Millikan explained. "The text stays encrypted and protected. Journalists maintain access control, not some platform."

Why Now?

Technological barriers that once kept journalists away from blockchain are falling. Embedded wallets and easier-to-use Web3 tools mean that users no longer need deep crypto expertise to participate. Millikan sees this as the right time to bring CTRL+X to market, offering a "gateway" into Web3 for people who care about ownership and sustainability rather than financial speculation.

How It Works

Journalists first upload and license their archived work, protecting it against deletion or loss. Once archived, they can sell or license their content through the CTRL+X marketplace, receiving micro-payments directly into custodial Web3 wallets.

"We're building the marketplace now — like a better Google Reader," Millikan said. "Every time a reader unlocks an article, a small payment flows back to the journalist. No subscriptions, no platform skimming half the money."

The system is designed to be peer-to-peer. Even if CTRL+X were to shut down, users would still retain control of their content on the blockchain.

"Unlike Apple or any centralized service, Control X is built so the creators keep ownership forever," Millikan said. "Even if we vanish, the content doesn't."

The Vision
Millikan imagines a future where journalists can back up their life's work securely, unlock new revenue streams from their archives, and rebuild a reading ecosystem outside of today's fractured paywalls and ad-driven models.

"I've seen so much abuse in the journalism industry — people working their whole lives just to have their work forgotten or mined for free," she said. "I decided to dedicate my living energy to chipping away at this problem until I die."

CTRL+X just launched its MVP and is now live at CTRLX.world.