“You have emoji instead of text, gifs instead of videos, but there is no such thing for sounds yet. We want to become that. Sure, there are many sites with audio clips, but they are often outdated, work poorly and they have not what you’re looking for. There are a few competitors with sounds from games, but we really want to become a kind of mini-Google for short audio” says Xander Kanon, one of the three founders of the Rotterdam startup Voicy.
At Voicy, users will find funny sounds from well-known memes and viral videos, as well as short fragments from films, series and games. From Squid Game to Borat and from Fortnite to famous YouTubers like Mr. Beast and Pewdiepie. Users can also add sounds themselves, by uploading them or by selecting bits from YouTube videos. You can also create audio gifs that combine image and sound. “We have more than 100,000 registered accounts, including fanatic users who regularly add sounds themselves,” says Kanon. “We’re happy with that community. In the beginning, we had to upload all the sounds ourselves.”
Students made noises in class
The first ‘breakthrough’ for Voicy came last year when the website was discovered by American students, Kanon says. “There was a challenge going around on social media in which children made strange noises in the classroom. That suddenly caused a lot of traffic to our site. We saw peaks in the number of visitors when American schools had breaks.” That was no coincidence: funny sounds and memes are especially popular among young people. “Eighty percent of our visitors are under 35. They also use the sounds they find with us in chats, or in their own TikToks, live streams or YouTube videos.”
Voicy also hopes to capitalize on the growing popularity of voice messaging on chat apps. “More and more people are using voice memos. In the Netherlands, perhaps not so much, but elsewhere it is very popular. In Asia, 1 in 5 chat messages is a voice memo. 7 billion voice memos are sent every day via WhatsApp.” Sharing the sounds via Voicy is currently only possible via the website, but the startup is working hard on its own iOS and Android apps. “We wanted to get the site up and running first. We expect the first version of the app in July.”
Collaborate with major apps
To really go big, Voicy needs integrations with popular apps and social media. These collaborations also form the strength of the large GIF platform Giphy, which was acquired by Facebook for 300 million euros. “We want to work with all the major chat services and social networks. But that is not easy. It will take time. But if we succeed, it can suddenly go fast.”
Voicy already works together with one app: Viber, a competitor of WhatsApp, WeChat and Telegram, which has 800 million users per month worldwide. Viber users can find and share the Voicy sounds right in the app. The Rotterdam company, which started in 2020, has the time to grow larger and arrange more app integrations thanks to an investment of 1.2 million euros. “We can now survive for about 18 months without making any money,” says Kanon.
Licenses and Copyrights
In the longer term, the startup wants to earn money from collaborations with well-known creators, such as YouTubers, streamers and other influencers. In addition, Voicy wants to earn money by sublicensing clips. “We want to manage the rights to audio clips from popular creators. Then we become a kind of Sony or Universal for sound memes, where we take care of the distribution via all kinds of platforms and the creators also earn from it.”
Before that happens, Voicy itself may also have to deal with high costs for copyright licenses. Kanon isn’t too concerned about copyright claims just yet. “Because we have short fragments, we appeal to ‘fair use’. We often only use a few seconds, for which the right to quote applies. Many fragments come from films and series and that industry is less concerned with the copyrights of the sound, certainly compared to with the music industry. And like all major platforms, we comply with the law, taking content offline as soon as we receive a complaint.”
Kanon convinced the venture capitalist Global Founders Capital (GFC) of Oliver Samwer, co-founder of the German tech giant Rocket Internet, to invest half a million in Voicy. The other part of the 1.2 million comes from top executives from Spotify, Snapchat, Deezer, Reddit, YouTube and Twitch, among others.
let’s go
“When I told GFC that I think Voicy could be worth 1 billion dollars, they laughed at first, but we finally convinced them. Many investors get it right away, Voicy is also a simple idea. They say: why is this there not yet?”
Even in the chat conversations with investors, Kanon uses the sounds of his own site. “While we were waiting for our investment from GFC, we sent them a snippet of Shia LaBeouf’s ‘Just Do It’. And moments later we got a Voicy back, from DaBaby’s ‘Let’s Go’.”
Tonie van Ringelestine
