Musicfy History Timeline

• April 4 2023 - AI-generated Drake song "Heart on My Sleeve" was released
• April 10 2023 - Musicfy AI website launched as a simple waitlist
• April 20 2023 - Musicfy AI website officially launched with 12k emails already collected through the waitlist
• April 27 2023 - 100,000 users
• July 23rd 2023 - 750,000 users
• August 2023 - 1,000,000 users
• December 2023 - Musicfy AI reached $100,000 MRR

Finding inspiration: the Drake AI song

Arib Khan a 19-year-old entrepreneur, stumbled upon a cool AI-generated Drake song that caught his attention. Around the same time, he came across a research paper on the arXiv website about using AI to generate voices, which could be used in music.

This sparked an idea.

Finding new AI trends

ArXiv is a site where new research papers are published. Arib sorts through the latest ones and checks their popularity to see if he can build something from them.

He also uses HuggingFace to spot trending models and HackeNews for cool new stuff.

Why reading research papers on AI?
Every new thing that AI can do it is so insane to people that it instantly goes viral. When your product's "wow" factor is off the charts, all it needs is just a little push, and it markets itself.

Spotting opportunity

While browsing TikTok, Arib discovered the AI Hub Discord channel with 8k users. Non-techie musicians there were struggling with basic coding issues while trying to make AI-generated music.

Arib saw an opportunity: sick tech + tech entry barrier + huge demand = viral product.

Going lean - the birth of Musicfy AI

Arib quickly whipped up a simple website called Musicfy AI, added a waitlist, and asked a moderator on AI Hub to give his site a shoutout. This got him 12k people on a waitlist.

10 days later, he launched his website. The site was simple: no authentication, no login, no rate limits, you could select between Drake, Ariana Grande, and Kanye West voice, upload a vocal file, and press convert. That was it.

At first, it was free. Arib and his team didn’t think it would turn into a full-fledged company. They just saw it as a side project and didn’t expect high retention. But they quickly realized they were wrong. People loved it, shared it, and within 7 days, they had 100k users. However, they were burning through $1,000 - $3,000 in GPU credits daily.

After the first few days, to cover costs, Arib introduced a $1 for 10 credits paywall. He made $95 within the first hour of launch and $1,300 by the end of the day.

The power of controversy

Arib realized early on that creating a viral product requires stirring up some controversy. The AI Drake and Weekend song had already sparked debates, with people on both sides—pro-AI and anti-AI—engaged in heated discussions. Controversy drives engagement and attracts users.

Initially, he didn’t advertise that the Drake song was made by Musicfy, but about 1-2 weeks later, after his official launch, people started connecting the dots, and he was even nicknamed "the guy behind Drake AI song."

Legal issues and a pivot

3 weeks in, Musicfy received cease-and-desist letters from major music labels like Universal, Sony, and Warner for using AI models of popular artists without permission.

That same day, they deleted all the celebrity models and replaced them with the ability for users to train custom models. Now, if people wanted to convert their voice into those of famous artists, they had to train custom models themselves and pay for it.

They replaced the famous artists with 100 custom voices. Each voice was created by blending the voices of 2 different people. This technique, called linear interpolation, creates new, non-copyrighted voices. These custom voices are now available on their site for artists and producers to use in their music freely.

UGC creators & affiliate marketing

Arib partnered with 4,000 UGC creators as his affiliates. There were people already making AI videos on TikTok for free, so he told them, "You’re posting this stuff anyway. You can make money from it. Just put our link in your bio."

The top affiliate brought in $50,000.

Arib manages all his affiliates through Discord. He hired a 16-year-old for $500 per month to manage them.

Arib used using tolt.io for the affiliate program.
He liked it because anyone can do affiliate link in less than 5 minutes, plus it has an awesome analytics.

YouTube vs TikTok

TikTok brought a lot of low-quality users who didn’t convert well. YouTube, however, turned out to be better for conversion. 

Arib reached out to YouTube influencers, and one video, featuring the coolest AI music tools, got 300,000 views and brought in $30,000 in revenue in a month.

In comparison, their 300 million views on TikTok only brought in $20,000-$30,000.

Example of videos:

• 700k views
  
• 12k views
• 3k views

Viral demos did the job

He also created viral demo videos, like converting his voice into an instrument, which got 4,000 likes on Twitter.

If you have a novel idea and can express it in a demo, it’s a great way to go viral.

SEO

In August Arib started creating blog posts in the AI music niche. All of them (400~) were AI written using byword AI. And it was enough for them to get 150k~ clicks from google per month (Dec 2023).

Very early on, Arib also added Musicfy to any AI tools directory to get high-quality backlinks and free traffic.

Tools of the trade

Arib used Paddle instead of Stripe because Stripe isn’t available in most parts of the world, but PayPal is.

Paddle has both Stripe and PayPal built-in, which helped grow conversion by 20%-30%. 

For analytics, he used Posthog, an open-source tool that’s easy to set up and provides insights like heat maps, user behavior, and device details.

For high-quality landing page, Arib used Framer. They have an AI templates, and that's what he used in MusicFy.

The team: small but MIGHTY

For most of the time, it was just Arib and one other person working on the project for 4 or 5 months. They slowly brought in more people to save costs, eventually adding two more developers.

Novelty Effect

AI-generated music was a new and exciting concept, and the novelty of being able to create music with the voices of famous artists like Drake and Ariana Grande captured people’s attention. The unique nature of the product made it more likely to go viral, as users were eager to share this new experience with others.

Stirring the Pot - Controversy and Polarization

The AI Drake song sparked debates about AI in music, with people on both sides of the argument getting heated. This controversy brought a ton of attention to Musicfy. When people are talking, whether they love it or hate it, it’s good for business.

Authority Bias

Arib partnered with popular influencers who knew their stuff in AI and music. When these experts endorsed Musicfy, it gave the platform more credibility, making people trust it and want to use it.

Riding Familiarity Bias

Using Drake’s voice in the AI-generated music tapped into something people already knew and loved. Since everyone knows and loves Drake, hearing his voice in a new and cool way made people sit up and take notice.

Associating Musicfy with a big name like Drake made the product instantly more interesting and relatable. It’s like if your favorite artist was suddenly part of something new—naturally, you'd want to check it out. This made it way easier for Musicfy to catch on and spread quickly.