Two Dev Teams. One Fragile Platform.

Sam James inherited a business running on code two prior teams had built. He needed to know if it could actually hold up, or if it was quietly costing him customers.

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Sam's Story

Who Is Sam?
Sam James is a musician first, business owner by necessity, and now, by his own admission, by habit. He studied composition at Birmingham Conservatoire, spent years teaching guitar, piano, and theory while co-running a folk wedding band, and joined Tunescribers back in 2017 as a part-time transcriber, fitting projects in between lessons and gigs. He never planned to run the business. Seven years later, in August 2024, he became its Owner and Director.

What He Inherited
What Sam inherited wasn’t just a company, it was a platform that had been built and rebuilt by two different development teams over the years, growing organically without anyone stepping back to look at the whole picture. It worked, in the sense that musicians could still order sheet music and backing tracks. But underneath, it had become slow, fragile, and increasingly difficult to maintain.

What It Was Costing Him
Sam, having spent years on the inside of the business, knew exactly how much that was costing the musicians and transcribers who depended on it. He couldn’t afford to start over from zero, years of customer data and business continuity had to survive whatever came next. That’s what brought him to Rubico.

The Challenge

The platform Sam took over carried the accumulated weight of two previous development teams' worth of decisions, and it was showing in almost every direction:

“Why does the site slow to a crawl the moment a feature gets complex?”
“Are we actually protecting customer data, or just hoping nothing happens?”
“How many customers are we losing to a checkout that doesn't give people real-time feedback?”

The platform technically worked, but it struggled under complex features, left sensitive data at risk, and had limited scalability. Its payment system also offered no clear path to modern upsells or new features. Sam had a working platform, but not one that could keep up with the business or the customers depending on it.

Documented Position

A full ground-up rebuild replaced years of accumulated technical debt, with every customer and business record migrated intact.
Prioritized Roadmap

A modern Next.js + Redis stack provides a faster, more secure foundation, with an encrypted backend built for continued improvement.
Ongoing Engineering Partner

Rubico continues to support platform enhancements and new feature development as an ongoing engineering partner.

What Rubico Delivered

Rather than patch a codebase two prior teams had already struggled with, Rubico fully redeveloped the Tunescribers application from the ground up, while preserving everything that mattered underneath it:

Performance & Security
A rebuilt, high-performance platform on a modern Next.js framework, with Redis powering real-time data management and session handling, plus a fully modernized backend with secure transactions and encrypted data storage, closing the vulnerabilities that had put customer data at risk.

Scalability & E-Commerce
Architecture built to support tens of thousands of users without the old performance bottlenecks, alongside e-commerce optimization, instant product add-ons, streamlined checkout, and support for upsells and rush orders the old payment system couldn’t handle.

Experience & Continuity
A redesigned experience built in Figma, with simplified navigation and real-time feedback replacing long, frictionless-in-the-wrong-way order forms, delivered alongside full data migration, so every existing customer and business record carried over intact.

19,000+

Musicians served worldwide

Prior development teams' codebase inherited

100%

Customer data preserved

What Sam Has to Say?

“When I took over the business in August 2024, I inherited a platform that had grown organically over many years — but had become slow, fragile, and difficult to maintain... After nearly a year of design, development, and testing, we've launched a site that puts our people first.”

— Sam James, Owner & Director, Tunescribers