Todays Business Bloopers:

• 👑 The 19-year-old Who Built a $1.5M Ai SaaS in 7 Days

• 💭 Quote of the week

• 🌍 AI News Roundup

• ❤️ My favourite AI tools this week

• 🐦 That’s a wrap

Read Time: 10 min

The 19-year-old Who Built a $1.5M Ai SaaS in 7 Days

The Bloopers: Meet Arib Khan, the 19-year-old who took an idea from nothing to launching in 7 days, and then 7 days later got his first 100,000 users. 14 days to a million. This is the ambitious story of Musicfy...

A Little Backstory

15 Years Old: Arib worked at a Web3 company that raised 2 million dollars. (Web3 is essentially a business that deals with various aspects of the third-generation internet, including blockchain trading, metaverse experience, and NFT price tracking)

16 & 17 Years Old: A few years later Arib went to work at Buildspace which is a free place for entrepreneurs to network, learn and build businesses with people that have similar interests to you.

18 & 19 Years Old: After leaving Buildspace Arib started learning to code, refining his coding abilities by completing a little coding project every month that he would post on the internet. He did that for 5 months before creating a multi-million dollar software on accident - Musicfy

What is Musicfy?

In short, Musicfy is an AI-powered music creation platform that allows users to create music with their voice or other voices.

It offers features such as AI voice artists (e.g. Turning your voice to sound like Drake’s or Kanye’s), stem splitters, and AI text-to-music. The platform also allows users to clone their voice and create their own AI music.

The Birth Of The Idea

It was April of 2023, starting just another one of his fun little side projects that he had been doing for the past 5 months. Arib did not think much of it.

Arib had seen many signs that were encouraging him to pursue this AI music software

Initially, he came across a research paper that was talking about the vocal style transfer’ (Someone who seeks to modify one speaker's voice to generate speech as if it came from another person) and he realized this could be used for music

Around this time he had also seen random AI Kanye songs on TikTok back in early 2023. Some of which had a description that said, and I quote, “Made with AI Hub Discord.” Intrigued Arib decided to join this “AI Hub” Discord server to see what it was all about.

In the Discord chats, he found people saying “What’s a print error?” (this is like the simplest error in coding) People were trying to convert their voices to Drake or Kanye. He realized that these are non-developer people who are trying to convert their voice to Drake or Kanye. If he just built a simple site with the tech that was already out people are gonna want to use it because they are trying really hard to do it themselves anyway.

After 7 days of coding Arib ‘finally’ released Musicfy thinking it would just be cool for those struggling people who were building them themselves. He didn’t think that it would have high retention, so was not monetizing this tool at all, it was completely free to use to the public. He never planned on it being a proper company. But that was the complete opposite, people were liking it, people were sharing it! And at this time the site was really simple, it was just, select a voice (Drake, Kanye, etc) and convert your voice to sound like theirs.

With this mass growth, Arib found himself losing $3000 in GPU credits every - single - day for the first few weeks after launch. Initially, this software idea was planned to maybe lose $5000 and then have this big cool project that he made on his resume when going for a job. But very quickly he started losing upwards of $10,000. So he decided to put a $1 paywall in order to cover some of the cost and within the first hour 90 users had paid up and within that first day, 2000 users paid

Marketing The Software

Arib has never run Ads for Musicfy

He says to give your audience a reason to share your product

So that’s what he did…

Arib wanted some guaranteed distribution so he went to the Discord founder of AI Hub and sent him a message saying “Hey I’m going to build this out, it’s going to be really useful for everyone in this Discord. it would be great if you could make an announcement about it.” And from that message, when the Discord owner shouted out his software, Arib got around 20,000 users

(The first users at Musicfy were all A-list celebrities, one that Arib and Musicfy have publicly is Louis Bell who is Post Malone’s producer, and Bell is said to be one of the best producers in the world.)

Now, that only got the ball rolling, so what did he do next?

He started spending lots of time with a lot of UGC creators (just think content creators like Mr Beast) and came up with a ‘crazy affiliate program.’ 

He noticed people were already posting about AI Drake videos and AI Spongebob videos so he thought, “How could I make the incentive for people to post about Musicfy?”

This is when he came up with the idea to give these AI video creators affiliate links. Arib went to them and said “Hey, you are already posting about this stuff anyway, why not make some money while doing it” Their affiliates got a 25% cut most of the time.

So they basically went up to everyone who was posting AI-generated content on TikTok and asked them to chuck in their affiliate link in their BIO which would turn out to be a win-win for both Arib and the creator because they would both make money 

But not all was good with TikTok, Arib found TikTok only brought in low-quality users. They would be getting around 300 million impressions on TikTok which would ‘only’ bring in $20-$30 thousand dollars per month. So then he partnered with some YouTube influencers that made videos like “Here are the top 10 coolest music AI tools” and things like that. To his surprise, one of the YouTube influencer’s videos that got around 300,000 views braught in a staggering $30,000 alone via an affiliate link.

Now Musicfy is coming up on 5 thousand affiliates. His biggest affiliate has brought in $50 thousand dollars for them alone.

Affiliates were a huge unlock for Musicfy. He says if you can understand how affiliates work and give people a reason to share your product that is a really powerful skill to harness.

The 3 Big Shot Publishers that tried to shut down Musicfy all at once

Raising Money/Investors

Musicfy has ever only had 2 investors who were Jaroslav who is the founder of Beat Saber which is the largest VR game in the world which was later sold to Meta for 2 billion dollars. He invested $100,000 into Musicfy. His second and last investor was Huber from Founders Zinc (not sure how much they invested.)

But Believe it or not, Arib didn’t need these investors to raise money for monetary reasons but for the ✨ CONNECTIONS ✨

Aribs 2 investors Jaroslav and Huber from Founders Zinc all have great connections in the gaming industry. From these 2 guys alone, Arib now has access to the top gaming leaders out there. “Wait, gaming, I thought this was Music?” Yep, I’ll take you through why this is important 👇

What is Musicfy working on now?

• They expect to launch another model in the next 3 months which will take the quality of Musicfy from 95% to 97%.

• Since music software is less than a billion-dollar market and Arib wants to build a big company he sees an opportunity to solve other audio problems across other industries, whether that’s audio in games or audio in animation movies. 

• What he means by this is that all of these characters in games and movies all have their own voice actor. Imagine you never have to hire a voice actor again, imagine 1 person can voice act an entire movie. That is what Arib is going for

• They are also working on the ability for people to generate music for their games and movies because these companies have to pay for huge amounts of soundtracks which cost 10’s of millions of dollars.

• Another big thing they are working on in beta is AI sound effects. Movies and games have heaps of sound effects, “A man running with lightning in the background.” For someone to generate sound effects for that they would have to go into a studio and make that sound. Imagine being able to generate that via text, text to LLM, and audio comes out.

• Arib really wants to focus on B2B products that are for gaming companies since he has already gotten heaps of attention from gaming companies with Musicfy. And with the Gaming market being a $250 billion Market compared to the Music’s $25 billion Market, working with gaming companies B2B suddenly becomes super appealing.

• He has a team of 4 that works at an incredibly fast pace. He says since they are a startup they have really high standards for the amount of code they should be writing which is why they will always be creating something new to set them apart.

What Tools does Arib use?

• Discord - Communication platform for public or private communities (Link)

• Notion Calendar - A Great Calendar for desktop and mobile (Link)

• SuperHuman - A tool for Gmail and Outlook that saves you hours when reading and/or sending out emails. Segment different groups into tabs, get great analytics, AI writing assistant, snooze emails for later, check your calendar on the fly. So so so many cool things in Superhuman. Arib says and I quote, “Superhuman is like the f*cking greatest email tool. It’s what you call a great product.” (Link)

• PostHog - 1 line of code that you add to your site for what Arib says to be “the best analytics tool.” It includes heatmaps, video recordings of what your users are doing, where in the world they are located, what device they are on and a bunch more analytics. (Link)

• Customer.io - Messaging automation. Arib uses it for whenever someone signs up for Musicfy, Customer.io will send out an automated email. (Link)

• Retool - A database of your users, conversions or subscriptions. Make really nice graphs of what is in your database. See how many new users you gained, how many more subscriptions you gained and all that. (Link)

• Supabase - Pure SQL database that is hosted in a nice way with tables. (SQL = Systems that store collections of tables and organize structured sets of data in tables.) (Link)

• Tolt - Super good referral software that allows you to set up affiliate programs easily. (Link)

• Paddle - Payment platform. Quick story, he switched from Stripe to Paddle for payments because he couldn’t accept payments through PayPal on Stripe. PayPal being a big thing worldwide this was becoming an issue. So he switched to Paddle and saw a 20-30% increase in subscription conversions. (Link)

These are the main tools that Arib uses

The speed of Arib and Musicfy’s success is the mind-blowing part.

Imagine going from nothing to a million users in just three months!

(Netflix took 3.5 years, Twitter 2 years, even Facebook needed 10 months!)

Key Takeaways:

• 🔊 He Built a voice-to-music AI software

• 🛑 He found a problem - and solved that problem

• 🚀 7 days to launch. Then 7 days to 100,000 users

• 📈 Good referral programs are great but only if your product is great.

• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 He didn’t need to raise money, for the times he did it was for the connections

• 🎮 He is starting to tap into the Gaming industry along with music since there is a bigger market

💭 Quote of the Week 

❝ 

Success is 80% consistency and then 10% luck and 10% skill

^{Arib Khan}

🌎 AI News Roundup:

🧠 OpenAI tests new ChatGPT memory capabilities (Link)

🤖 San Francisco crowd violently destroys a Waymo robotaxi (Link)

🏈 AI featured in a lot of ads at the 2024 Superbole. From Microsoft promoting an AI assistant in Windows 11, to Pixel 8 showcasing an accessibility tool for visually-impaired photographers. you can see them here (Link)

🔮 Sam Altman revealed GPT-5 will offer advancements in intelligence, speed, and potentially multimodal processing. Altman stresses the model's focus on generalizable intelligence rather than narrow task specialization (Link)

💰 ElevenLabs (An AI text-to-speech tool) now allows you to earn money if you share your voice (Link)

❌ OpenAI co-founder quits (Again). Renowned AI researcher and founding OpenAI member Andrej Karpathy just announced he is departing the company for a second time, posting on X that he plans to pursue personal projects. (Link)

❤️ My Favourite AI Tools this week:

• 🚀 BuildShip- Streamline app development with AI-powered backend workflows and APIs (link)

• 🔑 Fixkey- A Grammarly alternative for macOS power users (link)

• 📝 NotesGPT- Transform voice notes into clear and concise action items effortlessly (link)

• 🛍️ Shop That Look- Upload a photo of an outfit you like, and find stores that offer similar items (link)

I hope you guys enjoyed this weeks Business Bloopers.

I decided to switch it up a bit as I found so many people have an AI newsletter that focuses solely on the latest AI developments/news

I am thinking I will keep doing this AI story focused newsletter, let me know what you guys think. But I think this is good just as it is something a bit different from all the other AI newsletters out there that just talk about the latest AI news

If you enjoyed this post it would mean the world to me if you gave it a share with one of your friends or family members.

And as always,

Keep Embracing the Future, One Byte at a Time! 🔄

See you next week