[0] https://youtu.be/IijpmHlGzXA?si=bELHeYmcwk6L6Jpi

Ted: Yeah, sure, 8-Minute Abs. Yeah, the exercise video.

Hitchhiker: Yeah, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: 7... Minute... Abs.

Ted: Right. Yes. OK, all right. I see where you're going.

Hitchhiker: Think about it. You walk into a video store, you see 8-Minute Abs sittin' there, there's 7-Minute Abs right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?

Ted: I would go for the 7.

Hitchhiker: Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk.

Ted: You guarantee it? That's - how do you do that?

Hitchhiker: If you're not happy with the first 7 minutes, we're gonna send you the extra minute free. You see? That's it. That's our motto. That's where we're comin' from. That's from "A" to "B".

Ted: That's right. That's - that's good. That's good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you're in trouble, huh?

[Hitchhiker convulses]

Hitchhiker: No! No, no, not 6! I said 7. Nobody's comin' up with 6. Who works out in 6 minutes? You won't even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel.

Ted: That - good point.

Hitchhiker: 7's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 dwarves. 7, man, that's the number. 7 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea. It's like you're dreamin' about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly Brie time, baby. Step into my office.

Ted: Why?

Hitchhiker: 'Cause you're fuckin' fired!

from There's Something About Mary

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

https://artistalley.org/

> Twelve Labs and ElevenLabs are co-hosting the 23Labs Hackathon

Check out their docs for a glimpse: https://elevenlabs.io/docs/api-reference/introduction

If you wanna hook up a voice agent to Twilio for support for example, 11labs is probably one of the quickest and least painful ways to integrate while still maintaining control over your agent and behaviors.

Yes you can vibe code your own glue code, but try that in a large enterprise where you have to consider your team now taking on perpetual maintenance; and not having a vendor/SLA to just send tickets to when something breaks (or you want something new).

Oh well

I was trying to come up with a name and it was exhausting, everything was taken, I was trying "clever names", eventually after strategizing with ChatGPT it gave me the suggestion along the lines of:

"Many people just use their initials, birthdate, or area code, plus the word 'software', 'tech', or 'labs'"

And I went ahead with that and called it a day!

I was eager, and knowledgeable enough, to register a unique domain name for the entire household. It wasn't clear how we'd use it, with no permanent Internet presence, and we didn't have any hosting, DNS, or BGP capabilities, but a domain name sure seemed like a nifty thing to have, and it was free. So I aimed to register under .ca.us.

Perhaps I was not feeling creative enough that week, or it was quite difficult to capture the zeitgeist of four completely different college kids sharing a house, but I decided that the best name for us was <street address>-<street name>.san-diego.ca.us. Fictitious example: 1234-main.san-diego.ca.us.

Another curiosity about this particular name was that it may have been on the cusp of standards compliance. In the original DNS specification, a label could not begin with a digit, mainly because of parsing from bare IP addresses, but as you can see, eventually it was permitted, and our domain registration went forward.

It was a real bummer, though, because our household domain name languished, as I argued with my roommates, and we had no means of even setting up email addresses, but for a few shining years I did own a wacky, unique, but very generic street-address-based domain name.

And (unlike many of the <number>-labs companies) at least there's some logic behind using your physical address for a domain.

> 6.90 CHF - locks your Mac's keyboard, trackpad and mouse and shows a black screen while you clean. Free 7-day trial.

> 4.90 CHF - opens macOS's color loupe on any pixel on screen and instantly copies its HEX, RGB or HSL code to the clipboard. History of your last 8 colors, with a real magnifier that zooms into pixels. Free 7-day trial.

That's weird that the more techy thing is cheaper.

we can assume all of that is AI-generated rip off code anyways.

People argue that it make it more "memorable" than a "theme-based" name, because it's less expected.

But when everyone does it, it becomes less so

I think this is the most obviously AI designed website I have ever seen.

From the nonsensical logo, the bland generic design language, overlapping support chats to mix and match of different landing page patterns. Misaligned avatar circles.

in any case, pretty much all of those sites look like boilerplate vibe-coded startup templates.

[0] https://41labs.ai/logo-nav.png?v=2

Weird.

(I'm not affiliated with this company and know nothing about it)

(there were multiple bands with that name over the years)

One shot

https://minusonelabs.com/

https://minus3labs.com/

https://minus9labs.com/ (borked but existed at one point)

It's getting ridiculous, frankly

> 52 1ab (Pronounced 52 Lab) is a Software Research group dedicated to interoperabilty research in India. It is named after the Section 52(1) (ab) of The Copyright Act which states:

>> The following act shall not constitute an infringement of copyright:

>> the doing of any act necessary to obtain information essential for operating inter-operability of an independently created computer programme with other programmes by a lawful possessor of a computer programme provided that such information is not otherwise readily available.

  onemusic.com.au
  twomusic.it
  3music.tv
  fourmusic.com
  5music.com.tw
  bbc.co.uk/6music
  seven-music.com
  (8 appears to be vacant?)
  ninemusic.net
  tenmusic.in

I'm disappointed that sixseven.ai is not joining the Gen-Z brainrot revolution.

[1] - https://youtu.be/rqSq3qTjFd8

so...

Long live *VectorHeart Style™*

At the time it was a reference to a combination of IPv6 (which I was fond of) and that my birthday is on the 6th. Was like a little mini self-hosting project for web+email that had me and other friends on a real physical box (was also early days for VMs :)

In any case, this write-up is amusing.