In early 2025, Ally and Oz came together around a shared frustration. Having previously worked side by side at DesignMyNight—scaling a reservation system to thousands of venues, with Ally leading engineering and Oz heading up customer success—they knew what well-built systems could do. This time, though, the problem was closer to the creative world. As a songwriter and producer, Oz had experienced the black hole of submissions firsthand: demos sent out, never to be acknowledged. It quickly became clear this wasn’t just a music problem. Across publishing, exhibitions, agencies, and creative teams, submissions were piling up faster than they could be handled. Inboxes overflowed, spreadsheets broke down, outdated tools lagged behind, and new tech often made things messier, not better. After hundreds of conversations, deep industry research, and months of building, Dapple was born.