Omayya Atout, Founder & CEO of Songlorious, a Shark Tank featured company that hit $5 million in revenue after only 2.5 years. You can hire their roster of musicians to write and record custom songs for any occasion to tell your story. How did Omaaya find their first customers?
Show Links
In addition to YouTube, you can listen or watch the First Customers podcast episode 18 with Omayya Atout on any of the major podcasting platforms:
- Spotify (audio & video)
- Apple Podcasts (audio only)
- Google Podcasts (audio only)
- Audible (audio only)
- Amazon Music (audio only)
- iHeart Radio (audio only)
- Radio Public (audio only)
Learn more about Omayya Atout and his company, Songlorious:
- Songlorious Website: https://www.songlorious.com/
- Omayya on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omayya-atout-30558b4b/
- You can watch Omayya Atout on SharkTank Season 13 episode 2: https://g.co/kgs/RS5X78
Topics Covered in this episode
- Optimizing Facebook Ads
- Taking risk and Going all in
- Their full Shark Tank experience from getting on the show to working on the deal afterwards
- Learning to code
- The future of Songlorious
Show Transcript
Paris Vega (00:00.98)
welcome to the first customers podcast today we have Omayya Atout founder in co of song glorious song glorious as a company that was featured on shark tank and they have a roster of musicians that make custom songs for you for any occasion to help you tell your story and in just two and a half years they’ve already hit five million in revenue so he’s got a lot of things we could learn from him from his story and how they got started mia welcome to the
Omayya Atout (00:31.756)
hey paris thanks for having me
Paris Vega (00:34.06)
now i said o maya but i’m just thinking about what we talked about before it’s o mea isn’t it oh mea okay
Omayya Atout (00:38.656)
oh yeah but i mean i mean if anybody gets her right at this point i’m shocked even my my own mom i make that joke all the time because she doesn’t fully say it correct
Paris Vega (00:44.4)
yeah
Paris Vega (00:49.24)
right o ma a tout right not eight out a tout
Omayya Atout (00:53.416)
yeah that’s right unless you’re in alabama then it’s out
Paris Vega (00:56.44)
yeah okay mea where’s that name from what’s your ethnic background or where you from
Omayya Atout (01:03.336)
yeah so my dad is actually a palestinian so my mom is american so i’m like a mute of some kind and yeah and i’m named after his grandpa after his dead and it’s a very rare name even in the middle east so they made fun of me over there too so it doesn’t matter
Paris Vega (01:07.14)
wow
Paris Vega (01:09.42)
okay
Paris Vega (01:18.16)
okay
Paris Vega (01:23.04)
now were you born here in america or
Omayya Atout (01:26.216)
well yeah it’s like a long it’s kind of a long story but i was born in i was born in tuscalusa alabama d c hospital and then when i was five my dad got he’s an engineer and he got a job in the middle east so we moved there and then when i was eighteen i graduated high school over there i went to an american school and then came here to go to college and never moved back since
Paris Vega (01:31.54)
oh wow
Paris Vega (01:34.7)
crazy
Paris Vega (01:52.2)
okay so that’s not what you expect to hear from somebody kind of a palestinian name that i don’t know how big the palestinian community is in tuscaloosa that and just for everybody that’s that’s where i’m recording from is tuscalusa and so um that’s kind of how we got connected though linked in yeah
Omayya Atout (02:09.116)
yeah we got a connection there yeah so if you ever eaten at hooligans let’s on by palistinians
Paris Vega (02:15.86)
oh no way i wasn’t sure what their ethmistyor nationality was the hooligans guys okay popular local restaurant for all those outside of this area
Omayya Atout (02:17.316)
yeah yeah yeah
Omayya Atout (02:27.396)
you good food after drinking for a lot of people alabama
Paris Vega (02:30.5)
for sure
Paris Vega (02:33.98)
so man your story uh is pretty incredible i haven’t talked to anybody from who’s been on the show shark tank yet so let’s jump right into how did you get your very first customers for song glorious
Omayya Atout (02:48.376)
yeah so i mean it’s not it’s not like amazing story there’s no like magic that we did we didn’t have kind spell that i was just go back just a little bit my cousin works on commerce stores and has some commerce stores and he was just telling me about it and how he does stuff with commerce and you know i didn’t want to we didn’t really want to go the route of commerce just because you know it wasn’t something real passionate about and i was thinking you know what are we passionate abou
Omayya Atout (03:18.396)
we talked about music we play music me and my wife we lived in brooklyn at the time and so one day i was sitting on the couch literally just came up with this idea i was thinking like hey we’ll make funny songs for people to give to their friends like some kind of joke songs and stuff and we record music all the time from home like you know it sounds like something straight out of the studio so like it doesn’t take long you know we can make a website so i make the website quickly on just on shop and you know shopifiis built for products not service
Omayya Atout (03:48.176)
it’s really you know i don’t know how it is now but that’s how it was when when we started summer of twenty twenty and we just started i started the website very simplistic didn’t look great um and my wife was like you know she did feel like starting company and i told her what about the name song glorious and she was like all right i’m an after that just because it was such a great name so that’s how i talked her into it and then so we put the website up and because i talked to my cousin with commerce i set up facebookads
Omayya Atout (04:18.436)
i just set up a first my first ad was just a picture something like get your customer song and we advertised you know we tried to advertise all over the world and we got our first customer from australia and it just came like within the first like five hours selling the website up
Paris Vega (04:36.96)
did you say you were you did any advertising to put it out how did you get the word out about it
Omayya Atout (04:42.576)
facebook advertising yeah so so it was just i set up a facebook advertising account with very minimal knowledge on it put up and put some money behind it and with hen you know five hours we got our first purchase and it was at a very bad lie so like i d like maybe i had because i was working on the railroad at the time and i was using all my money that i saved up for this stuff nd i put like five hundred dollars behind it just like
Paris Vega (04:43.96)
facebook advertising okay
Paris Vega (04:55.96)
wow
Omayya Atout (05:11.816)
just going to blast it and see what happens and we only got one customer and you know we didn’t make our money back on that so i just wanted to get
Paris Vega (05:19.48)
what was the price point for the service how much did the service cost when it first launched
Omayya Atout (05:24.076)
yeah when i first launched it was like we were like we’ll do this for anything really so we were setting a like ninety dollars for a full song and that’s us writing the song mixing it mastering it recording it um singing it everything so it takes a lot of work and you got to really kind of be a fairly experienced um producer and know how to use daws when daw is just like a home m it’s basically the program you used to record music one’s called a d
Paris Vega (05:32.34)
no
Omayya Atout (05:54.096)
w
Paris Vega (05:55.12)
how many hours do you think goes into recording one song
Omayya Atout (05:59.596)
yeah so it varies for so that when we started then i was already pretty good at it just you know very efficient and it would take me about you know if we were sitting down solidly and my wife together writing the song doing all that it would take total probably an hour and a half back then maybe two hours just because we’re kind of very experience we’ve been recording a lot of music and at the time right before the pandemic we were you know we were doing like
Omayya Atout (06:29.396)
gigs in brooklyn and stuff like that but for our artists and we have like we have about three hundred artists now on our website and it depends on the artist it can take somewhere anywhere between thirty minutes to four hours to record a song from start to finish it just depends on how experience they are and you know even for one with the you know people who can do in like thirty minutes to an hour there’s till standards they have to meet so they can just turn in you know garb
Omayya Atout (07:00.436)
that they did in thirty minutes it still has to meet standards but if you can meet standards in thirty minutes then you know that’s great because basically you’re making more money per hour
Paris Vega (07:09.38)
yeah so did you spend a lot of time like on the design of the initial website did you have experience there or did you just use like a random shopify theme and throw it up there
Omayya Atout (07:18.916)
yeah i mean literally just threw it up there no design experience in fact i’m very bad at bein my wife is much better at design so she tells me but i believe her i think she is and yeah like i just threw it up there and for the logo i got some somebody hired somebody on line to just create a logo for us that kind of saw like we gave him a little detail in what we’re looking for and he gave us a logo
Paris Vega (07:48.56)
how much did you spend on the logo you think
Omayya Atout (07:51.616)
i don’t remember it wasn’t a lot it was less than a hundred dollars yeah but it came out solid and exactly what we were picturing in our heads so stuck with it
Paris Vega (07:55.3)
wow
Paris Vega (08:03.14)
yeah was that still the logo today the same one pretty much okay um the first customer came through the facebook adds for five hundred dollars and then how do you get the next customer
Omayya Atout (08:06.156)
still still until this day
Omayya Atout (08:19.156)
from then on it was a long series of figuring out how to run digitous media adds and how to reach also how to reach customers as organically as possible because we could quickly realize so much of our cost end up going towards advertising you know digital advertising can be expensive but you can make you can you can make a lot of revenue i mean you know if you want to make profitable revenue you got to really get
Paris Vega (08:40.719)
for sure
Omayya Atout (08:48.576)
our ad cost down and that’s that’s the hardest part and that’s really where it comes down to you know i’ve always said that i find the marketing part i don’t find the marketing heart because i know what i want to market i know what you know what our product is i know what’s good about us and all that it’s the it’s the skill of digital advertising and add buying that’s the hard part and that’s when you need experts that know how to really run adds and test adds and all that kind of you know anything that has to do with digital advert
Paris Vega (08:51.72)
eh
Paris Vega (09:10.76)
m
Paris Vega (09:16.42)
for sure
Omayya Atout (09:18.676)
and that’s the real skill in my opinion
Paris Vega (09:23.52)
definitely
Omayya Atout (09:23.536)
yeah so so so yeah i mean i guess to answer your question we just started getting tried to get better at running as ourselves before we ended up trying hire out the marketing and eventually we got we started making enough money to where we could both quit our jobs i was i’m a civil engineer you know graduate from alabama like you and i was working on a track at the time i was on this pen station project and we were rebuilding
Omayya Atout (09:53.356)
at jrackonpen station but anyway it’s born that’s why i left but we got to the to a point where we were like i could quit my job today and i remember i told i told my wife ellen who as a co founder by the way i told her and she was with me on short time but i told her if today if we make eight hundred dollars this was like a month and i was like if we make eight hundred dollars by like noon today revenue i’m going to quit my job in
Omayya Atout (10:23.696)
and that day we made like twelve hundred and i called i called in and gave my two weeks put in my two weeks notice and it was like the most nerve racking time of my life because i’d never quit a job before well that’s not true i quite job before but not without having another job wind up
Paris Vega (10:39.8)
right so why did you make that ultimatum for yourself at that day that was
Omayya Atout (10:45.656)
because it was a risky moving honestly it was just you know for anybody working a job i’ve been working on the railroad for ten years in railroads it’s very hard work and i loved railroading you know is enjoyable or but
Paris Vega (11:00.16)
i think they need your help these days man we’ve had some issues here lately with the railroads all these crashes that’s crazy
Omayya Atout (11:04.596)
yeah yeah yeah i got something to tell you about that though if we’ll get to it but yeah so i just decided you know like if i if i want to do this properly i got to be full time but i don’t want to do it full time i don’t want to do a full time unless it can be justified you know i don’t want to make a crazy decision and quit my job and then not have anything and then we go under so i said a number and honestly it was still a little too early because i feel like that
Paris Vega (11:09.32)
okay okay for sure
Paris Vega (11:18.38)
yeah
Omayya Atout (11:34.416)
could have still went wrong and i would have been totally screwed you know what i mean but it worked out so i’m glad i quit my job that day
Paris Vega (11:43.86)
so how did you get the money to go from losing four hundred and ten dollars on that first sale like and that was all your ad budget at the time did you just have to save up until you had more money and then run another add before you got another customer to start off like how did you scale your ad spend if you were just personally funding it
Omayya Atout (12:02.836)
yeah i mean i basically like i had credit cards just like you know just like anybody else had credit cards and i was just starting to put facebook adds on my credit cards and i was rocking up credit card that when we started out yeah it was it was a horrible move that’s why when people asked for advice i’m like you know don’t ask me maybe i might not be the best person i just i might have been lucky but uh yes yeah i went all in and i mean we really really believed in the idea
Paris Vega (12:08.64)
really
Paris Vega (12:17.72)
yah
Paris Vega (12:22.86)
yeah
Paris Vega (12:26.48)
for sure yeah you went all in
Omayya Atout (12:33.496)
and we started seeing a lot of customers early on and we became profitable very quickly although you know wasn’t a crazy amount of profit but it was enough to start like being able to survive and paid that off quickly so you know our cost was very low at the time other than you know paying the artists
Paris Vega (12:55.28)
so at first you were doing all those songs yourself how long before you know you’re just swiping the credit card to get people to request songs and you’re just kind of floating that that money until you’re you’re making enough two questions when did you have were you able to stop using the credit card to float your ad spend and then also when were you able to start outsourcing some of the song making
Omayya Atout (13:23.116)
yeah like so honestly within maybe like three like within a month we started getting artists contacting us because they saw ad and saying like hey i’m an artist are you looking for people to join the team and we’d be like yeah because we started to get to a point where our facebook guys were so successful that we were getting too many orders that you know too any orders and couldn’t handle the orders right
Paris Vega (13:49.44)
now are you still that first after the first month they were that successful the facebook adds
Omayya Atout (13:54.376)
yeah probably after a month two it it was very quick
Paris Vega (13:57.56)
so okay let’s pause for a second because ve got a lot of experience in facebook add so i’m curious how did you iterate your add creative or whatever to figure out what worked better than five hundred dollars per sale
Omayya Atout (14:15.296)
yeah it’s we did a horrible job out i’m telling you like if i had any advice to give anyone that wants to do digital advertising really really try to figure out how to do it properly because i wasted a lot of money early on trying to just messing around with it so early and look facebooks changed a lot so i’m sure you know a few used facebook adds it used to be it seemed like it was throw money at facebook adds and just customers would be rushing
Paris Vega (14:38.8)
has
Omayya Atout (14:45.056)
towards you like like they show the exact person you want that you want to see our ad so at the time we had like three add sets not at sets but three add creative just like pictures of like a couple and with one of the customer songs playing over it and just you know the copy would be you know something about you know get a customer song for your love to one something like that and
Omayya Atout (15:15.096)
that worked for us well especially when we’re doing the songs ourselves we could afford to spend a lot on ads even though customer acquisition cost was high would still be able to make some money on the back and because we were just we didn’t have to pay anybody we were doing the songs ourselves you know so we’re kind of just creating songs for money
Paris Vega (15:36.9)
and what was that very first add was it that similar format like a couple in a song in the background
Omayya Atout (15:43.056)
yeah the first and was just a guy playing guitar it was a picture i still remember the picture and it was just like get a customer song something like that it was just a picture and we use those and actually those were very successful back in the days back in the in the day it seems like once the is changes happened and for anyone who doesn’t know that you know is change their policy for as they basically can’t track users across apse anymore um
Paris Vega (15:51.48)
okay
Omayya Atout (16:13.376)
once they did that change uh it became you have to really really focus in on um honing in your ads and perfecting them and testing them for them to be profitable at all and have any decent kind of um as opposed to before you could really just go anything out there and it wouldn’t be amazing but you be able to make money if you have a big product
Paris Vega (16:37.undefined)
yeah and so the like what was at twenty twenty one the privacy issues hit facebook really hard and then that probably hit you guys just like it hit everybody else
Omayya Atout (16:45.516)
yeah
Omayya Atout (16:49.036)
oh yeah i mean immediate like as soon as it came in like within six months we started we could it felt it was really bad because we had to but we had to make an adjustment it’s just something you know you got to do with the business anyway you’ve got to always be ready to make adjustments but yeah it really hurt better and when people i understand people’s like concern for you know privacy on facebook and stuff like that and i try not to be biased and of course i am because you know i have a business that depends
Omayya Atout (17:18.836)
on facebook adds i mean among other ones but a lot to facebook adds and i just sometimes i just want to tell people like you know i’m not a hundred percent of this opinion because i don’t know what facebooks doing exactly but i know that mainly they’re tracking people to sell them adds and if they want to get adds that are relevant to them then facebook is going to have to track otherwise you’re going to get some random adds here and there that doesn’t mean anything to you you know
Paris Vega (17:37.54)
yeah
Omayya Atout (17:49.176)
nother than that but it also facebook is huge for small businesses because any small business can launch and then become very popular through facebook adds but when the cost of d is going up you know it’s hard to get your feet off the ground and we kind of got lucky starting before this happened
Paris Vega (17:53.76)
yeah
Paris Vega (18:07.44)
yeah i think so i started i think i ran my first facebook adding like two thousand eight and for like i was doing i was doing like freelance graphic design at the time and i got i spent fifty dollars and got uh like five hundred dollar logo design job from it and a one thou one thousand dollar website job from it back then and but i wasn’t in the marketing mind set back then at all and i was just like awesome but i can
Omayya Atout (18:14.516)
oh wow
Omayya Atout (18:27.276)
wow
Omayya Atout (18:30.596)
wow
Paris Vega (18:37.28)
afford to keep spending this crazy fifty dollars for adds an so i never add gain back then until later in my career when i was doing marketing and stuff and closer to like twenty thirteen or fourteen started running adds for a client i was working with and it was still kind of the golden age of facebook adds it wasn’t as good as it was in the early early days where you could upload like one email address to ten email addresses and target that small of a list of people
Omayya Atout (18:42.476)
oh wow
Paris Vega (19:07.32)
um but you know now you got to have at least a thousand or a hundred or whatever it is now and there’s all the privacy issues so a lot of the targeting options went away but but yeah it’s crazy how much it’s changed over the years and i think somebody’s starting out definitely has a different just it’s like a higher entry level or learning curve or whatever starting a new business now
Omayya Atout (19:22.276)
yeah
Omayya Atout (19:29.776)
yeah
Omayya Atout (19:32.796)
yeah a big time learning curve and costs wise it’s hard it’s hard to like people i’ve helped people start like they want to start a business like i try to help them with the facebookads it’s just like it’s expensive to get started now
Paris Vega (19:39.02)
right
Paris Vega (19:48.34)
yeah so you focused on trying out different creative different types of ads until you found something that was a better cost per sale cost for conversion um and that took about a month before well you said within a month or two the ad started generating a lot of lead so i guess even less than sounded like a couple of weeks you guys iterated must have iterated through several different types of creative
Omayya Atout (19:59.036)
h exactly
Omayya Atout (20:09.176)
yeah
Omayya Atout (20:14.276)
yeah i mean but here’s the thing we weren’t iterating that much back than we were just i was just launching and trying different targeting i wasn’t like changing i wasn’t changing the creative as much which is why it wasn’t like the best return on aspen
Paris Vega (20:22.88)
okay
Paris Vega (20:29.98)
so it’s partly maybe the facebook picks or whatever learning who’s who’s buying and then you’re also testing targeting and so it’s getting okay
Omayya Atout (20:33.976)
yeah just
Omayya Atout (20:38.856)
exactly and the facebook pico mostly you know that that thing is powerful and it knows it really knows who your customers are sometimes i feel like it doesn’t give us you know back in the day it wouldn’t give us customers i’d be like the pickle doesn’t like us today or something you know it’s like it’s against us but yeah mostly just epical learning and i mean the most inefficient way like i want to say most efficient way to start a business but really it was efficient is just when it comes to marketing we didn’t
Paris Vega (20:52.72)
yeah
Omayya Atout (21:08.616)
the money to hire marketing experts early on so i was just learning as i was going and trying to spend as little as possible while while making money without you know without throwing too much money at it and you know if you put too much money on facebook and they’ll just spend it and you’ll get no customers so
Paris Vega (21:30.74)
all right so you figured out something that worked on facebook and then twenty twenty one hits everything gets harder on facebook did you pivot to other platforms because i think that’s right around when tik tok was starting to spike and everybody started looking elsewhere to see it yeah
Omayya Atout (21:47.236)
yeah yeah
Omayya Atout (21:51.036)
yeah i started we started looking for so we were we were barely we had really good so from the beginning very early on and that’s because i hired just once again you got remember like i didn’t know anything and i still mostly don’t know anything but at the time i was just like you know you google like how do you improve co and the people come up there like we can fix your co i find a decent person that’s like you know like not a company but a guy
Omayya Atout (22:20.876)
who does so help because he had he had lower costs than he seemed like he knew while he was talking about and i just told him he got the website song glorious and i want you elped with co and co is something really hard to learn for like people is just starting businesses and it’s like it’s complex to understand i’m just trying to put myself in the mind set back then how long it took me to understand what co is and and it’s all it is
Paris Vega (22:40.4)
sure
Omayya Atout (22:51.336)
isoptimizing google basically it’s not it’s mainly google because nobody’s using i mean there’s people using other ones but google is the main one and it’s just trying to show up at the top when people search key words that are similar yours that’s how i understand it and anyway this guy helped you know launch some i don’t know key words and certain blogs and stuff like that to get us better co so co started getting better pretty quickly but we now
Paris Vega (22:59.46)
yeah yeah for sure yeah
Paris Vega (23:05.06)
right
Omayya Atout (23:21.036)
advertise on google so once the you know it’s early it’s january you know early twenty twenty one i’m thinking my mind set which is when i searched for something on google i automatically scrolled past the adds to the top thing and i thought everybody did that but i was very wrong and not everybody does that so once i realized that and we launched google ahead again very bad at launching google as everything is not running well still early in the company
Paris Vega (23:38.16)
yeah
Omayya Atout (23:51.516)
and it’s it’s expensive and and our return on aspen is so bad um but that’s when we started doing more google ads which right now is like one of our best sources of customers
Paris Vega (24:07.64)
add it’s not just the so the organic trap
Omayya Atout (24:10.596)
yeah both i mean google adds is very good the organic is good and i mean yeaharegoogle as good as facebookta bring us customers
Paris Vega (24:23.64)
now is it
Paris Vega (24:27.2)
both of them like facebook got harder so it came up to kind of what google’s level was or did google get down you know what i mean like did facebook just get harder and more expensive to where it rose up to what googles level was you think or was it google improving as well
Omayya Atout (24:45.576)
i just think well at this point i mean it’s it’s a really long running story up to you know where we are now but it’s all about that’s why i say the ad buyers so important the person who’s at buying because they have a set of skills that are it’s like it’s like i feel like a four year university degree in ad buying wouldn’t be enough to know what some of these people know because they constantly have to update their knowledge but i think
Paris Vega (24:51.66)
yeah
Paris Vega (24:59.96)
m
Paris Vega (25:11.5)
yeah
Omayya Atout (25:14.776)
just optimizing the ads is kind of equalized it may actually our google adds a little better than facebook when it comes to return on investment but now our facebook is catching up again
Paris Vega (25:25.9)
and so now you’ve got people running those both of those things for you
Omayya Atout (25:29.956)
yeah yeah i got i’ve got a guy who’s amazing at running as probably i’ve never seen anyone out there better than and he’s not like a known guy like you know there’s a lot of famous gouos out there and stuff
Paris Vega (25:40.24)
wow
Paris Vega (25:45.86)
yeah awesome all right so october twenty twenty one you got under shark tank season thirteen episode two you’re on there how that happened
Omayya Atout (25:47.096)
yeah
Omayya Atout (26:00.096)
yeah so you know when you’re we’re running a business and we’re just like trying to come up with we’ve always got ideas you know everybody s always putting ideas on and we’ve been suggested shark tank a bunch of times and i’m just like i’m not a pessimist but i’m kind of a pessimist but i’m kind of like a trying to be a realist and like what’s possible and when you see the amount of people that applied to shark tank and that get on it’s like it’s like
Omayya Atout (26:29.876)
most impossible to get on so i always dismissed it and then one day we’re just like let’s let’s let’s just apply and see what happened so we applied for a short tank we got a call back was like oh okay that’s crazy there’s like ten steps before you even get approved for the that you’re going to be on the show so there’s like ten separate steps that are separated by like months you know so we probably applied in january of twenty twenty one and then we were on the show
Paris Vega (26:49.44)
really
Omayya Atout (27:00.796)
or maybe like yeah yeah probably around january to march of twenty twenty one and we were on the show by july twenty twenty one so there’s months of separation
Paris Vega (27:09.34)
and then the show aired in october
Omayya Atout (27:11.616)
you’re goin an october yeah yeah so we just apply it and every step we kept getting pushed through um and you know they assign you to some junior producers and they kind of walk you through everything and they you know one day submit a video then you submit a pitch and then pitch to the producers and and then it just gets more and more in depth until they’re like you’re going to be on the show and then they tell you just so you know even even if you record the episode you still might not there so don’t like get your hopes up so
Paris Vega (27:13.06)
yet okay
Omayya Atout (27:41.316)
they said you know you’re not guaranteed to be on the show until you see your face on the t v that’s said very last second so you’re like so the whole time i’m like this is never going to happen never and then it happens
Paris Vega (27:50.84)
so they’re okay
Paris Vega (27:55.94)
did they give you so do they give you any hint like once it’s going to be on the show do they tell you like what the possible date is or episode or something like that
Omayya Atout (28:05.356)
yeah so they tell you two weeks ahead of time they tell you your episode is going to grant two weeks but they tell you that that’s still not a guarantee you know but they give you two weeks two weeks notice and the only reason they do this courtesy just so you can prepare your website and stuff for this surge of customers
Paris Vega (28:08.04)
okay
Paris Vega (28:12.68)
got you
Paris Vega (28:23.68)
okay and so it was purely just you guys was thinking hey we could get a little marketing you know get the name out there and i guess best case scenario would be get one of the sharks to invest and help scale it even more um can you talk about that experience of actually doing the show
Omayya Atout (28:24.096)
yeah
Omayya Atout (28:38.116)
yeah exactly yeah so
Omayya Atout (28:43.976)
yeah so so we had our pitch ready and we practiced it you know a million times at least and even in the hotel room you know they flows out to l and in the hotel room all night we slept like three hours maybe obviously could not sleep at all and we’re just practicing the pitch over and over and over the pitch was me and my wife together and you know we finally go to day and you know in our minds we know we got an amazing company where we’re go
Omayya Atout (29:13.876)
and fast you know we’re profitable at a very early time or know the company’s lifetime um so we’re confident but we’re always you know we’re skeptical like if we we’ve got all these we’ve practiced all our answers to the hard questions because you know there of course there’s gonna be hard questions and we’re ready for the answers because we’ve watch sharp tank and we’ve seen people get totally destroyed and we did not want to be the people on t v forever that got destroyed you know and have a com
Paris Vega (29:43.54)
over and over
Omayya Atout (29:43.836)
lation on youtube or something so yeah exactly so you would have seen us probably by now if we’ve done something stupid but you know we just very careful about it and we went up and not expecting much our expectations weren’t high because we don’t like to be disappointed so and we you know spoiler alert for anybody should i spoil it right now find i mean it’s old episode yeah so it’s all
Paris Vega (29:48.14)
yeah i’ve seen those
Paris Vega (29:56.06)
right
Paris Vega (30:10.46)
up to you
Omayya Atout (30:13.836)
episode so so ah we get up there we pitch and the the sharks out there with mark cuban damon john m peter jones who’s a british shark from the t v show dragons then back in england kevinolery and then i forgot her name laurie so those are the five sharks that were up there and you know
Paris Vega (30:14.7)
okay
Paris Vega (30:32.3)
okay yeah i’ve heard of that girl
Paris Vega (30:40.56)
yeah
Omayya Atout (30:43.756)
we give we give our spell and stuff and they ask us just a couple of questions and then they asked us our numbers and at the time you know we had we had generated one point seven million i think at the time i don’t remember you know don’t have a good memory of what we were back then but so they were very impressed by that and then we get a offer from peter jones and what people don’t know is in the background you can hear all the producers
Paris Vega (30:59.7)
yeah
Omayya Atout (31:13.776)
that helped you get on the show they start cheering in the background is very distracting actually but so they’re they’re on your side it’s really it’s really nice but yeah and you know then we’re like well we got off like you know we’re like shocked that we got off because we watched so many episodes of people just getting destroyed so it’s like you have that worst scenario in your mind and then you know then then another sharp damn john offers to offer
Paris Vega (31:22.16)
that’s cool
Omayya Atout (31:43.776)
makes a deal or makes an offer sorry that you know beats out peter jones’s deal and then kevin and mark they’re whispering in the corner really distracting while i’m trying to talk to one of the sharks and then they come in and ask to come in together on the deal both of them so we’re like our minds are blown at this point we’re just we don’t even know to do because you know we’re in shock on t v it’s honestly like a very weird feeling just watching that for so long and then being there and then they decide like they want to get all
Paris Vega (32:03.32)
yeah
Paris Vega (32:09.02)
can imagine
Omayya Atout (32:13.816)
four of them together everybody but lay on a deal for forty per cent for five hundred thousand which brings down our valuation we went in with a ten per cent for four hundred thousand so brings it down from like four million valuation down to like one point two million or something
Paris Vega (32:33.2)
so what would be what was your profit at the time
Omayya Atout (32:36.436)
so our profit time was nine percent uh yeah and on the show
Paris Vega (32:39.68)
nine percent so it’s in profit margin
Omayya Atout (32:43.976)
yeah yeah and even they asked us they said is that before you pay yourselves he said that’s obviously before you after you pay yourselves and i was like no that’s before we pay ourselves and they’re like oh um you know but you know we’re a young company at that point really just been around for a year at that point yeah just just a year at that point so it’s a very young company and we’re still young so yeah we get we get a deal and we take a deal with four sharks for forty percent for
Paris Vega (32:58.undefined)
yeah
Paris Vega (33:01.1)
kit
Paris Vega (33:03.72)
yeah
Omayya Atout (33:14.056)
five hundred thousand yeah and to make a long story short you know it’s a long process that takes afterwards and we were getting to the point where we actually we actually start like we have a lot of things we need to do to move forward we’ve got like we need to re design or website we’ve got a you know our orders are increasing and we still have a very pretty primitive website it’s not on chopofie anymore
Omayya Atout (33:44.536)
so it’s like but it’s not good enough at all to handle the orders are getting so that takes we moved to wit and the nice thing about wit is it’s very programmable
Paris Vega (33:49.48)
what do you move to after typify
Paris Vega (33:54.26)
really
Paris Vega (33:57.84)
really i’ve never heard that move before from shop of wick okay they must have made it more flexible now okay
Omayya Atout (33:58.976)
yeah
Omayya Atout (34:03.036)
yeah and because because we’re a service yes it’s a lot more it’s a lot more programmable so we you know
Paris Vega (34:11.52)
i think so changed a lot on that program ability front lately but go ahead sorry
Omayya Atout (34:17.556)
yeah they might have been obviously they might be it might be good now it might be something to look at but i mean were a service were kind of like you know if you’re a service you have to have pretty good technology to deal with customers and stuff like that with shop of five you have a product is perfect but if you have if you have a digital service it’s not not so great maybe it’s changed but so anyway it took very long for them to to get back with us and they’re just you know because they’re reviewing stuff and their busiest
Paris Vega (34:22.139)
yeah
Paris Vega (34:32.86)
yeah
Paris Vega (34:38.84)
yeah
Omayya Atout (34:47.416)
it’s nothing you know nothing we’re resentful over but we really had to tell them like hey either we get this deal like now or we just get no deal at all and we literally sent an email telling them this and they basically they basically just said all right you know
Omayya Atout (35:06.376)
you know like we feel like the help you need other than monetary help we don’t feel like we can provide them and we told them at the time on the show that you know we’re looking for business help in general because we’re not business people we’re learning as we go right now you know but we’ve already made a company this successful with very little business knowledge we’ve we’ve learned what we’ve learned as we’ve created this business and basically the deal was done at that point
Paris Vega (35:24.36)
got you
Omayya Atout (35:36.296)
and were we were actually at the time after waiting so long we were we were happy very happy about that because we wanted to get hit the ground running with stuff we wanted to do um and we ended up what happened afterwards was to update the website which is one of the things we told the sharks we wanted to we wanted the money you know to use to upgrade the website i basically spent the next like five months learning job of script while creating the website
Paris Vega (35:36.34)
wow
Omayya Atout (36:06.376)
programme the entire website myself while my wife did the design literally learned job of script from scratch and knew nothing about it and just did it myself
Paris Vega (36:08.98)
really
Paris Vega (36:11.68)
whoa
Paris Vega (36:16.7)
that’s crazy so what made you choose to go down that path instead of hiring a web developer or something like that an agency here
Omayya Atout (36:25.056)
yeah so we initially hired a web developer for our wet site but it just wasn’t can you hear me by the way
Paris Vega (36:33.82)
yeah it just clipped for a second but i can hear you
Omayya Atout (36:36.576)
yeah okay yeah because i think my headphones are dying and i’ll just have to switch the different microphone yeah we hired one of actually but you know it was a very low cost programmer and they didn’t do a great job and i just started messing around with it and over time i just started to figure it out the coding for it and just started doing it on my own and it was it was it was a very long i mean i was working twelve hours a day trying to optimize this and i decided to do this because of saving money creating a customer
Paris Vega (36:41.36)
oh
Paris Vega (37:05.82)
yeah
Omayya Atout (37:06.496)
so i cost probably something like a hundred a hundred thousand dollars i got a couple of quotes before i started doing that and i was like that’s just too much money for us we have no outside funding this is still our own money we’re putting all profits back into the company and we got to do this efficiently so
Paris Vega (37:22.22)
at that time you were both full time into the company okay okay well that so i guess if you ask if you’re spending five months full time learning job of script that that makes sense
Omayya Atout (37:25.956)
yeah we’re both full time to the company yea so we’re spending all day on this non stop
Omayya Atout (37:35.716)
yeah and and it wasn’t learning job job of script like independently i was doing it as i was building the website so it was just like watching a video doing it on the website watching and doing testing it constantly and that’s why i say if i could go back to school i’d be a program one hundred it’s such a useful skill there’s nothing like it if you’re doing civil engineering like i don’t do it and i’m just getting you should still do it but but programming is so useful
Paris Vega (37:42.76)
yeah
Paris Vega (37:54.02)
yep
Paris Vega (37:59.3)
uh uh
Paris Vega (38:04.14)
yeah for any digital business or just business in general you can leverage digital media or the internet much better if you have those programming skills for sure get the robots on your side
Omayya Atout (38:12.396)
no big time big time
Omayya Atout (38:16.436)
yeah and i’m still not like obviously i’m not amazing at it but i know enough to do a lot of stuff you know our websites completely customer does a lot of things
Paris Vega (38:28.56)
wow and are you still working on the website yourself or you have you outsourced that part
Omayya Atout (38:34.736)
no i still still do it on my own when i when i need to but really it kind of runs itself at this point but you know obviously there’s small manant stuff here and there and changes that we do and i do it and doesn’t not a lot of stuff that takes me long but obviously with you know eventually we’re going to get we’re going to have some major updates and and then we’ll probably hire that out
Paris Vega (38:43.26)
wow
Paris Vega (38:57.88)
yeah
Paris Vega (39:00.7)
incredible story uh and so once you en to the deal with the sharks
Paris Vega (39:10.12)
that was how long after was it you said about six months was it after being on the show that that deal was opened
Omayya Atout (39:13.976)
yes six months run around december
Paris Vega (39:18.86)
okay and then how much did it grow or how fast did it grow from that point on to show them what i out on okay
Omayya Atout (39:27.016)
yeah a lot of people ask like like what happens after shark tent airs and when sharktcairs obviously it’s just like the most traffic we’ve ever had on the website it initially after and every time it rears you get a huge boost like about half of the peak every every time it airs so there is like so far it’s aired like every two or three months so every time it airs it’s like a huge like boost for us it’s really great um yeah zero
Paris Vega (39:43.08)
wow
Paris Vega (39:52.18)
it’s amazing i never thought about that with being on a show like that a series that is an indication yeah you’ll get the residual bump every time it airs
Omayya Atout (40:01.756)
yeah it’s pretty it’s pretty great it’s pretty great and it costs us nothing every time so it’s it’s really great
Paris Vega (40:03.64)
wow
Paris Vega (40:09.66)
so is it free to be on the show or do they pay to be on the show or can you give any of that kind of inside what’s that part
Omayya Atout (40:15.456)
yeah i mean it’s free it’s free to be on the show and you don’t pay and they don’t pay you i mean they give you yeah yeah it’s a benefit for for both yeah but i mean all they pay for is a ticket to fly there and they give you a stipend for the day that’s yeah hat’s that’s all it is but it’s a huge goose for us so we’re very grateful for shark tank and and we love the show i don’t know if you watch it often
Paris Vega (40:20.2)
right because they know the marketing boost you’re getting
Paris Vega (40:31.94)
okay
Paris Vega (40:40.22)
wow
Paris Vega (40:43.94)
oh yeah yeah that’s one of my favorite for sure um okay so you got the shark tank boost giving you the every couple of months spike what are some of the other channels that you’re seeing you said google facebook are there any other things you’re using to get leads and customers
Omayya Atout (40:45.896)
yeah it’s a great show
Omayya Atout (41:05.596)
yeah we’re starting to tappin to tiktok for the in the past you know six months or so and this is why like again with the ad bying so important to hire someone who knows how to add by really well if you want to get adds at a at a good cost and once you get once someone gets to a point to where they can hire that out i think they should immediately do it it’s just hard to work through um you know you gotta you got to sift through a lot of advertisers
Omayya Atout (41:35.516)
out there who are just very mediocre and you need someone great to be able to get you a good return on your aspen and basically that’s what we did about a year ago we hired someone to run our ads and you know so our avenues or tiktok facebook instagram and google and that’s our main four right now um we haven’t tried podcastadvertising um a lot of that can get pretty pricy early on but something we’re probably going to be looking into soon
Paris Vega (41:58.96)
okay
Omayya Atout (42:05.736)
um but you know we once we hired that guy to runner ads uh are revenue and our you know our return on ad spend has increased like three fold it’s been it’s been it’s been so much better and it’s just it’s just growing since
Paris Vega (42:20.24)
wow
Paris Vega (42:26.36)
amazing i think i’ve seen adds i don’t know if it’s your ads but i’ve definitely seen adds for a service that does this i think some kind of long writing or like like highly they look ike highly produced commercials have you guys done anything like that or is that a competitor
Omayya Atout (42:34.236)
yeah yeah yeah i’m sure
Omayya Atout (42:43.616)
yeah so i mean we’ve done we’ve done some highly produced commercials but what you’re i don’t i’m not sure if you’re talking about ours or not there’s there’s a lot of people like so the customer song space is basically new i mean the way the way it is now like we said on shark when we were on shark tank they asked us about this and we told them you know customer songs are a very old thing i mean they used to do the
Paris Vega (43:03.56)
yeah
Omayya Atout (43:13.896)
i forgot what they were called but they used to tell the what they called the grams with the songs yeah
Paris Vega (43:20.54)
oh yeah like a yeah like a song gram or whatever telegrams the
Omayya Atout (43:26.636)
yeah yeah something like that but i forgot what they’re called yeah singagram something like that and uh yeah that stuff was you know it’s been going on for a long time so even when we came in the space there was a couple of other most of it was individual musicians just doing themselves not not offering a lot of musicians and the price was kind of high and then there was a couple of businesses that are doing what we’re doing now except it wasn’t custom but it was like you plug in your
Paris Vega (43:28.6)
singagram yeah yeah
Omayya Atout (43:56.436)
an it’s a chorus like for example you get the same course every person gets the same course you just change a name in the verse or something like that so you choose your song and that’s kind of what mainly was there back then but we do have one main competitor now and the they’re highly highly highly funded supposed to us to have enough funded at all so they have a lot of money to spend on advertising and stuff but you know
Paris Vega (44:22.3)
yeah got ya
Paris Vega (44:26.42)
because you guys are boot strapped i mean because you didn’t get the shark tank investment so you’ve totally boot strapped it all the way wow
Omayya Atout (44:26.456)
or all
Omayya Atout (44:31.576)
yeah we’re both yeah boche boot strap from the beginning but i will say that percentage wise our reviews are the best in the custom song industry and i’m not just saying that it’s for a good reason and my wife and i you know we did the first five hundred customer songs for the company and we’ve also and we’ve also done you know we did five hundred when we first you know around when we first started and then we’ve done a thousand in total and so we have a lot of experience with stuff people like and stuff they don’t we’ve got a lot
Paris Vega (44:41.04)
there you go
Paris Vega (44:48.36)
wow
Omayya Atout (45:01.376)
feed back from customers which is such an important thing to take and try to optimize the product and we’ve just we’ve approved you know over thirty thousand songs through our quality control system with the artists so we have very stringent standards and procedures to creating songs we’ve specifically have we have very detailed handbook for the artists on what guide lines to follow and created is creating a song although they stick
Omayya Atout (45:31.376)
their creativity and their style but there’s certain things that we make sure that every song has before we send it to the customer and that’s why our review we have you know we have like seven thousand reviews total including like google reviews and or our own reviews and it’s like four point nine out of five star rating and a lot of that because of those standards that we set
Paris Vega (45:57.6)
how many customers have you had over the course of the business so far
Omayya Atout (46:02.776)
about thirty thousand
Paris Vega (46:05.38)
who thirty thousand customers and that’s over two and a half years totally bora that’s awesome man uh how big do you think you’re headed like what do you do you have an idea of how the size that you’re aiming for or you’re just kind of going for the ride
Omayya Atout (46:09.716)
yeah
Omayya Atout (46:12.856)
yep
Omayya Atout (46:15.876)
appreciate it yeah yeah it shocks us too
Omayya Atout (46:30.996)
well we definitely you know that’s it’s a hard question to answer because m you know once again like me personally i’m a skeptical cal person and i try to be realistic about but but we’re looking for you know this year were our revenue goal this year is ten million um and and within the next five years we want to be a five years from now
Paris Vega (46:46.26)
m
Omayya Atout (47:00.796)
we want to be hitting eighty to a hundred million per year and and the reason why i think we can do this is for a couple of reasons um we’ve seen it we’ve seen you know this customer song industry grow and we’re we’re one of the first people in this industry and and not only that but just for example if you so wis like you know just to see who’s popular in the space where we’re number one when you search customer songs on google
Paris Vega (47:05.04)
wow
Omayya Atout (47:31.116)
organic um so we’re at the forefront and it’s growing a lot uh so there’s a lot of revenue to be made there but also this is only done in english so far i mean where yeah so for example we advertise in india english english speaking like customers for english songs but
Paris Vega (47:48.28)
oh wow
Omayya Atout (48:00.756)
i mean you know the hindi music industry is massive and you know people in india just love bally wood music and it’s massive over there and something like this would be really a great fit for um for india and we’ve already were already in the talks with some people that are from over there to get started on our hind version of this and then you know there’s arabic there’s spanish spanish we already kind of delved into a little bit
Omayya Atout (48:30.896)
but all all these other areas of expansion there’s just you know there’s so many people to reach and our customer bases really anybody
Paris Vega (48:41.16)
yeah so what’s the price point now
Omayya Atout (48:44.396)
so right now for example a um it starts at one eighty one hundred eighty dollars so for a for an acoustic song that’s two minutes long professionally mixing you know professionally home mixed and mastered it’s one eighty dollars
Paris Vega (49:00.28)
yeah and do they have the rights to it like if they wanted to put it on i tunes or whatever distribute it
Omayya Atout (49:07.716)
uh they can’t distribute it we can distribute it the artist the artist keeps the rights and yeah so we elan and artists are you know we’re not artists but we’re you’re music artists at least we call ourselves that and keeping right to something a lot of artists find you know that’s very important to them i mean they hold that they hold the rights of the song very sacred and even just talking to them you know they even they really really care about it even more than
Paris Vega (49:14.72)
okay
Paris Vega (49:21.74)
yeah
Paris Vega (49:29.18)
sure
Omayya Atout (49:38.476)
ellen and i initially cared for ourselves our copyright um you know it’s just it’s the ownership to the song and so we decide very earlier on they keep the rights of the song and but if they if the customer wants to distribute it to spotifyand stuff we offer that as an ad on so we can put it we have a spotify page and we put it on there so they can play it from anywhere you know in their car and stuff like
Paris Vega (49:56.02)
i see
Paris Vega (50:00.86)
okay but so the customers just paying for the song to be created but if there’s any like money from down loads or you know the little small percentage that all those platforms pay that goes to the artist
Omayya Atout (50:12.976)
uh well because of how many streams we get we don’t even we didn’t we don’t even have that set up and the reason is it gets there’s never more than ye such a small part and i mean spotify pays almost nothing so we we basically yes like zero zero zero three eight something like that it’s it’s ridiculously low and we have basically their pay out built in in the in the pay that we give the artist
Paris Vega (50:21.24)
got ya such a small
Paris Vega (50:27.2)
yeah yeah it’s point zero zero zero something
Paris Vega (50:34.52)
yeah
Omayya Atout (50:42.836)
first place so so they’ll make more money just from that payment than they’ll ever make on spotifyed because they’ll never be enough stream
Paris Vega (50:47.94)
right yeah right because it would be a rare situation unless some maybe celebrity paid you guys to make a song and they put it on their social profile and i got a million down loads or something crazy like that
Omayya Atout (51:02.776)
yeah if that in that case they still own the copyrights of the song so they can register it themselves and and get paid you know how they want to
Paris Vega (51:08.18)
yeah
Paris Vega (51:10.9)
have you noticed anything similar to that where may be like a notable person used the service and you saw it get some social attention or something
Omayya Atout (51:20.696)
um a couple a couple yeah we’ve early on we had someone from my nine d fiance were seen that show
Paris Vega (51:23.16)
okay
Paris Vega (51:29.7)
oh okay i think so yeah
Omayya Atout (51:33.716)
yeah so it was actually i don’t know nothing about ninety day fiance or sixty day fiance whatever it’s called but he made he had a song made announcing his his baby he was having another baby with the ninety day fiance woman that he married and and i didn’t think it was a big deal at all but then he posted it and it got thousands upon thousands and there was articles written about it about how he announced he’s having a baby was like a big deal
Paris Vega (51:41.14)
right
Paris Vega (51:48.42)
okay
Paris Vega (51:51.02)
okay
Paris Vega (52:03.04)
so that just creates more exposure and people checking it out
Omayya Atout (52:03.836)
so yeah yeah exactly let me i think my headphones are dying let me try to switch this over
Paris Vega (52:09.8)
okay yeah
Paris Vega (52:16.44)
okay i can hear you
Paris Vega (52:23.66)
there he is
Paris Vega (52:31.42)
m maybe we can give in a second now we’re going to echo
Paris Vega (52:37.62)
let’s see mute your mike for just a minute
Paris Vega (52:44.56)
all right um we covered a good bit of stuff so maybe this is a good place to end it um so that gives us a chance to figure out some technical issues uh but mea just want to say thank you for being on the show has been incredible story and definitely want to stay in touch and learn more about how you guys are doing and how you guys grow from here
Paris Vega (53:10.12)
and you can unmute and respond as you feel too
Paris Vega (53:15.36)
yep
Paris Vega (53:24.56)
no it was good man
Paris Vega (53:28.06)
all right thanks
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