Our music startup idea had just been rejected from YC... here's how we pitched it to SoundCloud.
Alex BB.
Founder, Visual Binary
Context
Back in summer 2020, I took the opportunity of lockdown to finally work on a project that involved two of my passions: iOS apps + DJ sets.
During a two week 'hackathon', along with two friends Modest & Thomas, we built Audiex.
Audiex intended to be a way to easily discover new DJ mixes and a convenient way to store, share & listen to them.
The idea went from a fun hobby project to a concept we even pitched to Y Combinator, to 10 key UX ideas we ended up sharing with SoundCloud.
Here's a summary of what happened during those wild weeks.
Audiex original logo I made & app screenshot
Why do we need another music app?
Not everyone goes about their daily life wishing they had an app that made exploring and listening to DJ sets easier. Well, back in summer 2020, we did.
There were basically three existing ways to listen to long-form DJ sets:
YouTube
Mixcloud
SoundCloud
YouTube hadn't really developed its YouTube Music app capabilities yet, so we felt there were practical limitations with using the app to stream DJ sets on the go.
Mixcloud was meant to be the purpose-built app, dedicated to long-form sets and mixes. The problem with Mixcloud, in our humble opinion, was that it lacked the extensive catalogue that YouTube and SoundCloud boasted, and the freemium user experience was so restricted that it felt uninviting to use.
SoundCloud was the app we all used regularly. As frequent users, we'd come to be frustrated with certain aspects of the user experience. SoundCloud was trying to cater to both individual songs (like Spotify) and long-form mixes; in 2020, its UX clearly demonstrated it was prioritising the former over the latter.
This frustration turned into inspiration: what if we made a better app experience than SoundCloud, more suited to DJ sets?
This was the kernel of an idea that we leveraged, working on the idea in our spare time during the summer lockdown.
Within two weeks, we had an MVP of the app - which we called Audiex - ready for TestFlight users.
During this time, we were in the process of organising an interview with the startup accelerator Y Combinator. Due to the excitement and initial momentum we experienced with Audiex, we decided to pivot from our initial idea (which ultimately went on to become Jelly Tutor) we applied with, to present Audiex during the interview….
So what happened?
YC ended up rejecting the idea, on the grounds that trying to navigate the legal rights in the music industry is so difficult, and they couldn't justify it. I don't blame them.
The day we found out the news from YC, we were pretty deflated, for about an hour.
Then we got the idea:
we wish the features we'd built were inside SoundCloud, so why not try and get the features to be built inside SoundCloud?
Within the hour, we were cold emailing one of the founders of SoundCloud, telling them what we'd done (that we'd reverse-engineered their API to build a brand new streaming app, with UX dedicated to the use case of DJ sets).
Fast forward five days, and we were in a meeting with SoundCloud's product team based in Berlin.
For the meeting we had collated 10 key features that we believed should be incorporated into the SoundCloud app.
Some of the top recommendations were:
Recommendation 1
Create distinction between sets & songs
As mentioned, it felt like SoundCloud's UX was treating DJ sets and mixes - for which there are LOADS being uploaded everyday - as an afterthought.
Why are all my 'liked' songs stored in the same place as my 'liked' two-hour DJ sets?
What if I really enjoyed a particular part of a set (e.g. the second-half of a radio mix, where a new DJ plays) - do I have to treat it like a single song and scroll to the correct timestamp in the middle, every time I want to quickly listen?
We proposed a UX framework to allow for categorisation and distinction between songs and sets inside the SoundCloud Library and Discover tabs.
Recommendation 2
Allow for song discovery within sets
If you create a distinction between songs and sets, then you can start the leverage the relationship between them.
If it wasn't obvious before, a set (or mix) is just a collection of songs, played in an intertwined continuous stream of audio. Sets are an amazing way to discover new songs. Sometimes, you like a song you hear so much, that you want to go a find it and save in your library directly. But in SoundCloud's interface, there was no information related to what song is being played at a given point in a set. There is a massive community and culture around identifying particular songs inside mixes (there are forums on Facebook & Reddit with millions of members dedicated to this cause).
We proposed a clean, simple way of showcasing user-tagged songs that are being played at any given time inside of a long-form mix. This encourages further discovery and exploration inside the SoundCloud platform.
Fast-forward to 2025
I am still a frequent user of SoundCloud to this day.
Now, I don't take any credit for any of the UI/UX improvements or changes that have been made to SoundCloud since we spoke to their product team. They probably thought we were a bunch of overly enthusiastic users, too focused on DJ sets…
However, it has been pleasantly surprising to see certain features we discussed start to take shape inside the app. For example, comments that identify the song being played at a given point in the mix are now more cleanly displayed and easier to interact with inside the SoundCloud player.
Hopefully one day I will open the app to find even more changes that resemble the improved SoundCloud we had envisioned when we set out to build Audiex in summer 2020.
As for Audiex: it exists as a fond memory, and an app our friends and I often play with to this day, through a private TestFlight link.
Fin.