52 Days: From Zero to Our First Customer - all our journey explained, with detailed costs.

What started as a simple experiment by our CTO quickly turned into a phenomenon. Armed with a no-code tool, Appsmith, we built a basic sound effect generator app in just two days (see : https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1fytcd1/ive_developed_a_sound_effect_generator_free_no/ )
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The response was overwhelming: on the first day, over 500 users generated more than 2,000 unique sound effects ! \  This early "success" inspired us to move forward, recognizing the potential to address a significant gap in the market and lay the foundation for what would become InfinitySFX.
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Understanding the Problem and Drafting the Business Plan 

The problem of sourcing sound effects is more challenging than it might seem at first glance. Video creators, app developers, and gamers require high-quality, royalty-free audio tailored to their unique projects.

Traditional options often involve costly licenses, extensive searching through massive sound libraries, or subpar results from free alternatives.

Furthermore, rapid advancements in content creation mean the demand for custom and diverse sound effects is growing exponentially.
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As we delved into the market, we identified key challenges and opportunities:

• Tough Competition from traditional players: Established platforms like Epidemic Sound (epidemicsound.com), Artlist (artlist.io), and PremiumBeat (premiumbeat.com)
• New GenAI competitors : ElevenLabs (elevenlabs.io) dominate the space with sophisticated audio-generation algorithms, backed by over $101 million in funding to this date, is a leader in this field with a team of around 90 employees !
• Open Source Rivalry: Free sound repositories like Freesound.org offer millions of free royalty-free sounds (yes, there are paid royalty-free sounds, which might seem odd in the first place...)
• Untapped Demand: Despite competition, the surge in content creation highlighted gaps in accessible and royalty-free sound solutions.

We realized the timing was perfect to offer something innovative, tailored to the needs of content creators worldwide and that there was a market to be tackled !

Building the Tech

In building InfinitySFX, we wanted to create a platform that was lightweight yet powerful. Here are some key details about our tech:

• Codebase: Over 10,600 lines of code written in React and Firebase, with 300 commits to date.
• Infrastructure: Powered by Firebase, costing just $1.70/month (entirely covered under Google's free tier), with Elasticsearch integration planned for the next release.
• Development Hours: Approximately 200 hours spent on back-end development and 100 hours on front-end.
• Core Team: Two dedicated developers driving the project forward

Sometimes, when you see the numbers are not moving, it can be a pain to follow the path of fighting in the big tech arena, sometimes, it feels hard and helpless. Yet, as the Good Seth Godin puts it :
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Attracting Traffic

Key Metrics: As of now, InfinitySFX has:

• 405 users
• 2,830 sounds generated
• 104 images-to-sound conversions
• 11 hours and 45 minutes of sound effects created

🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

Here's a more detailed view of our traffic:

The Website

To generate traffic, we launched a workflow-centric website using a $39/month CMS plan. Key strategies included:

• SEO Optimization: Focusing on low-competition keywords like "free sound effects."
• Lightweight Frameworks: Using free tools from marketplaces for fast deployment. We used the free template : https://webflow.com/templates/html/torch-saas-website-template. Kudos to its developer Bryn Taylor (pay him a visit https://www.bryntaylor.co.uk/ ) 

Marketing Highlights

• Analytics Insights: Our Google Analytics that India and the Philippines dominate our traffic sources, reflecting global demand for sound effects
• Conversion Focus: Google Ads help us monitor conversions and refine targeting, with a budget of 5€ per day from 10th of December 2024

Navigating Social Networks

Instagram, Tiktok & Twitter (or Bluesky, that's the same thing and colour, right?) :  We haven't thrived on Social networks yet, because this is hard and we haven't spent enough time there. I have tried to delegate it to https://www.blaze.ai/, hoping a GPT-wrapper would to the drill, but it's not. I have tried dull and mindless picture + text, it yielded less than three views, and I'm not proud of it...

Promoting on platforms like Reddit was a double-edged sword. Here’s what we learned:

• Avoid Fearful Communities: Subreddits like r/sounddesign are cautious of AI’s impact on jobs.
  
• Target Relevant Spaces: Posts in r/gamedev and r/videoediting resonated well, offering value to creators who embrace new tools.
• Building Trust: Authenticity and value-driven posts are key to overcoming skepticism.

Engaging Users with Smart Automation

To retain users, we implemented strategies like:

• Mailgun Campaigns: Automated emails remind users to revisit their sound creations and share our newsletter, achieving a 30% open rate. We are paying the 35$ plan on MailGun (but we didn't use it enough and it is not a new spend for us)
• Lemlist for Personalization: Tailored outreach emails offered a personal touch but proved less effective than LinkedIn interactions. We're paying circa 100$/month for 2 people on the app.

Understanding Our Clients

User feedback has been invaluable:

• Behavior Patterns: Most users decide within 20 seconds if the app meets their needs. Otherwise they leave. In our future release, we will add more sounds to listen to, in order to fight their leaving the application.
• Demand for More Credits: Our first paying-users bought actually more credits to explore more sound effects options and the fact that it is "one-time credits" was really important for them.
• Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs): Identifying them is a top-priority for founders. We have conducted 13 users interview so far, that we directly asked for as a response to people signing in. We send around 2 mails per month in a standardized way and more personalised mails based on user interactions.

The truth about costs

Here is the rough estimation of all of our costs on the road to getting on the road of monetization. From where we stand, the road to ramen-profitability is still a LOOOONG way.
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Tech $ Costs

• GPU : Around 400$ GPU (fine-tuning + inference)
• Firebase : 0$
• Github Copilot : 30$ $ (3 months subscription)

Tech Human Costs

• Back-end 200 man-hours (25 man-days) ~ 12k$
• Front-end 100 man-hours (12 man-days) ~ 6k$

=> That's it for the web app !

Go-To-Market $ Costs

• Webflow: 3months*39$ = 117$
• Google Ads : 50 days * 5$ daily budget = 250$
• Lemlist = 3months*100$ = 300$
• Mailgun = 3 months * 35$ = 105$

Go-To-Market Human Costs

• Visual assets self-design : 1 day ~500$
• Webflow building : 5 days ~2 500$
• Cold Mailing + User-Mailing : 2 days ~1000$
• Interviews (planning + interview + follow-up + summarization) : 4 days ~ 2 000$
• Content creation (video, blog posts, Reddit posts, social) : 3 days ~ 1500$

Grand Total cost of going from 0 to 1 : 26 272$

Disclaimer: this estimation don't account for the fact that the people that have built this are seasoned experts in the Tech domain (so the 18k$ budget is rather low, given the salaries in France).

Yet, it gives a

Grand Total money generated : 10$ (minus the Stripe commission) 🤣🤣

We still have a long way to go.

The Road Ahead

It's the start of a long road and what we're planning to do for our work ahead is the following : 

• Make more sounds accessible and drive the user interactions up, essentially with pre-generated sounds.
• Update the business model for a fairer pricing (to us), with price hikes for generation and lower prices for pre-generated sounds.
• Integrate infinitySFX within top-notch video-editors, like : Canva, DaVinci Resolve, Unity and X etc...

Looking for a SaaS mentor

If you have been reading up until now, I hope that you have enjoyed our journey and its description ! Now we have an honest ask : 

• Our road to be a top player in the space is far from finished !
• We're looking for a SaaS mentor (not a coach), that could guide us through monetization ?

A warm thank you to all of the team : Maddy, Paul, Amin, Mariem & Nahia !