Community, events and creator-economy operator - Maine, USA - remote
Four things I have built and run: a free music festival, an onchain battle platform, a build event for creators, and the community behind all of them. Each one is below with the problem, my role, what I did and what came of it. For the short version, read my resume.
Open to: salaried, fully remote roles
Tap a card to read it. Where I directed agent lanes instead of writing the code myself, I say so.
I organized and ran a free, one-day music festival on the Franklin Street Parklet in Ellsworth, Maine, on Saturday 3 October 2026, livestreamed on Twitch.
The ZAO is a music community that mostly lives online, and I live in Ellsworth. ZAOstock was the attempt to put that community on a real stage in a small Maine city, for free, with independent artists, inside an existing local weekend. A free festival has no ticket revenue, so it depends on partners and voluntary support. The venue was public space, so it depended on the City of Ellsworth and Heart of Ellsworth. Most of the community is remote, so it needed a good stream as well as a good stage. The team was small and spread across time zones, so coordination had to be written down.
An onchain music-battle platform on Solana where two songs go head to head, listeners back one, and the losing artist is still paid. I am a co-founder on the ZAO side and built the analytics layer that explains its money.
Independent artists mostly compete for exposure and get nothing if they lose, and streaming pays fractions of a cent per play. WaveWarZ is built around a different structure: every battle pays both artists, and listeners who read the music well can earn from it. A platform that handles money has to be explainable. Press, grant reviewers and artists outside crypto need a plain account of where each unit of SOL goes, and that account has to match the chain. The platform also needed an audience and a supply of artists, and I had a community to offer both.
A free, three-month build event for Farcaster creators, run by The ZAO from June to August 2026: recorded workshops, an open build month, and finals decided in head-to-head battles on WaveWarZ.
The ZAO wanted to bring Farcaster-active builders and creators into its community by having them ship something real, in public, instead of asking them to join. It had to be free and open with no token to buy, so the first version led with a public leaderboard and recognition and left token mechanics for later. It had to be more than a weekend hackathon: built for a community that needs the tools, with the repository kept afterward. And it needed a way to pick winners fairly without one central judge. Three tracks, artist, builder and creator, meant nobody needed to be a developer.
The independent music and creator community behind the rest of this work: governance, live shows, battles, festivals, a daily newsletter, and operations run with Claude Code agents under written rules and a human merge.
The ZAO grew out of an earlier talent-agency model that proved insufficient, and became a collective in which independent artists keep their margin, data and rights. A community like that has to solve a few things. Participation has to last without an employer or a paycheck holding people, so governance has to be light, regular and fair. There are many projects and few hands. The story has to be told every day, in public, without making it up. And AI agents can take on the repetitive work only if you can still tell what is true, what is decided, and who approved it.
Open to: salaried, fully remote roles. Email zaalp99@gmail.com, message on LinkedIn, or book a call. Also on Farcaster, X and GitHub.