All of them copied 15.ai

ElevenLabs was a commercial version of 15.ai. It's crazy, because 15.ai could have had the venture-scale outcomes if he'd fundraised and turned it into a SaaS product. He was in the right place, right time, with tremendous attention, but missed the opportunity.

The other "labs" followed the trend. The {number}labs / {number}.ai domains all quickly got squatted.

I was in the same space and watched it happening. I launched FakeYou about the same time as 15.ai, but 15 had the backing of 4chan and a better model. I still made it to 7M MAU and a million in revenue despite that.

Just last year, Fish Audio picked up where 15.ai / FakeYou / UberDuck / Weights.gg left off and made it to $20M ARR, which is a lesson about abandoning under-served markets when you still have tremendous gravity.

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rozab an hour ago | parent | next [-]

For context, 15 was some brony tf2 player who cracked deep voice synthesis in order to make My Little Pony characters say funny things. He then offered this for free on his site. It was never a clever branding thing, it was just his username.

It's funny seeing HN types being genuinely confused as to why someone would just make interesting things for the sake of making them, and then offer them freely for the good of others. He used to be on HN, there's good insights in his posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=15ai

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inigyou 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I got 99 labs but bringing value to society ain't one

	▲	jrexilius 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[flagged]

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sph 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I literally have no idea if this is parody.

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zachthewf an hour ago | parent [-]

Nope, not parody. Very accurate description of early-2020s consumer TTS websites.

	▲	possibilistic 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		^ Zach is the founder of Uberduck, which was massively popular. He got into YC with it. More story: ElevenLabs launched a few years after FakeYou and Uberduck. ElevenLabs got a lot of attention for their remarkable zero shot model, but their pricing and enterprise focus created an enduring niche. Companies like Musicfy.lol were what ultimately drew the ire of the music labels and created a lot of friction for consumer UGC audio tools. They ruffled feathers and that created headwinds. I distinctly remember talking to their founder on a Monday at Founders, Inc. in SF. They were in talks with a16z to raise $10M or so after their first few weeks of wild success - viral marketing and clever positioning for the first RVC music models. By that same Friday the music labels had them shut down the majority of their offering and the funding offers fell apart. A year or so later, Suno and Udio ultimately took that side of the market. They were more consumer-friendly than raw vocal models and appealed to a broader set of users. Both companies launched to great success despite the risk of lawsuits. 15.ai, FakeYou, UberDuck, and Weights.gg (a latecomer) all gradually wound down due to the founders being pulled in different directions. Weights.gg joined OpenAI, Fifteen.ai became anti-AI and built an art community website, I went into movies/film, and Zach (Uberduck) forged a new path too. ElevenLabs kind of lost the plot with audio. They've been building a bigger, more comprehensive offering that has scaled their revenue well beyond just TTS and audio. But it also left something of a void to fill. Last year, Fish Audio launched in our old segment (consumer / UGC TTS fine tunes and zero shot) and built a massive user base and revenue stream. The market was wide open for it. They raised a $40M seed round.

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krackers 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>It's crazy, because 15.ai could have had the venture-scale outcomes if he'd fundraised and turned it into a SaaS product

Or equivalently could have gone down as a "deepseek" moment in TTS if the model was open-sourced (I don't think even a paper was published). It's a bit strange, he never made any profit but also never ended up publishing anything even after it was shut down.

	▲	echelon 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		He's seemingly anti-AI now on Twitter and recently built a "no-AI" artist marketplace. His users convinced him to close 15.ai, so it's unlikely the model will ever see the light of day. There are thankfully a lot of high quality open source TTS models now.

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idontneedcoffee 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This world of cheap (vc) money, huge private equity sells and high revenue early in the products development phase is so distant to me(geographically and even more so, mentally), I need some help deciding what to do with my project and I'd really appreciate if you could DM me

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quantumwoke 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You were a year behind 15.ai with FakeYou. I know, because I was six months ahead of you and didn't execute in time. Momentum is everything.

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possibilistic 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I wasn't after them, I just changed my product's name. They had monumentally better distribution.

I launched as vo.codes (and two prior names) before 2020 and later rebranded to FakeYou.

https://thenextweb.com/news/celebrity-voices-deepfake-ai-app

Rebranding a domain with traction is a mistake, in retrospect. I think Magnific is learning this lesson now after undergoing a change from the popular FreePik.

I'm a filmmaker and I wanted to get into video models, and FakeYou felt more like a pivot to UGC video (vo.codes was too audio centric) that I could ultimately swing me into cinematic video. I was too slow and that was not a good choice.

But Higgsfield and Bytedance showed you can be late and still win a lionshare of the market.

My video product launched in February and is at $5M ARR / 67% MoM growth.

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quantumwoke 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I was six months ahead of vo.codes, well aware. Anyway, UGC was a good pivot and wish you all the best.

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narrationbox 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Are you still working on it?

	▲	possibilistic an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I found my way to where I want to be. I'm working on https://getartcraft.com which is open source: https://github.com/storytold/artcraft We're in use by a few film studios and some pretty popular AI artists. There are a couple of theatrical releases coming out that use us, but I can't talk about it. (Under NDA for the individual projects.) It's at $5M ARR and growing 65% month-on-month by word of mouth. ArtCraftX (launching soon) is a new UX that lets you bring your own compute from every single platform and vibe code your own workflow UX. You can clone the repo and easily add/remove things you want. It's okay that people can bring competitor compute - we'll be generous and open. https://artcraftx.ai/ Think of it as "ComfyUI, but comfortable" and geared to high-volume creators rather than hobbyists. It's written in Rust. Critically, people should be able to not only own their apps, but be able to deeply customize them. I've also built an open source FAL/OpenRouter which I eventually want to build RunPod/Featherless (fine tunes) features into. It's called "Foundation", and it's in private beta but launches GA soon. I think it could have good positioning vs. Stripe / OpenRouter since it's open source and is meant to be extensible. Fully BYOK, too. I'm looking to hire someone to help me build a social layer for creators that ties all of this together. YesAnd got funding to pursue this, but I think they're taking the wrong approach. I think it should be open and hackable. More like Github, but still artist friendly. A lot of platforms either target B2B enterprise (Runway, Krea) or UGC / "everyone can be a creator" (Higgsfield, OpenArt), but I think creators look more like the Github set. Intentional, and in need of tools they own.

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itsthecourier 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

damn, what a rollercoaster you had there, man