I started Sounds Just Like as a simple WordPress blog in 2009 off a suggestion from my first boss. He noticed I maintained a list of songs that sounded like other songs, and said “You should publish that online”.
The first version of the site had a meager twenty posts. Traffic, however, was promising — linear growth to 20,000 unique visitors a month within a year, entirely from organic search. Sounds Just Like was scratching an itch.
In 2013, YouTube sensation VSauce published “Will we ever run out of music” — an investigation into the uncanny similarites among songs. Traffic exploded, topping 8 million unique visitors in two weeks following the video.
The deluge of traffic also spiked soundalike suggestions from visitors. I recieved 40,000 suggestions of soundalikes via email during this period.
From late 2013 to 2014, I rebuilt Sounds Just Like in Python as a true user-generated-content site. In late 2014, I sold Sounds Just Like to H1tcher, an NYC-based project with similar goals.
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