In the summer of 2020, Ellen Hodges and Omayya Atout started a personalized song company called Songlorious. Fifteen months, 11,000 songs and over $2 million in sales later, the now-married couple won a $500,000 deal on ABC’s Shark Tank.
Here’s their story and their advice to other entrepreneurs.
Jill Griffin: What is Songlorious and how does it work?
Ellen Hodges: We create personalized songs. People go to our website, choose the length and genre, specify the mood they’re looking for, and provide details like what the occasion is and what story they want the lyrics to tell. One of our artists will create an original, studio-quality song from scratch and deliver it in as little as four days.
Griffin: How much does a song cost?
Omayya Atout: It depends on the length and whether you want full instrumentation. A 1-minute song costs $99, and a 3-minute song is $265.
Griffin: Who owns the rights to the song?
Hodges: The artist retains the rights. Songlorious is licensed to give the song to the customer, and the customer get a personal use license. It’s the same arrangement as buying a song from a service like iTunes.
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Griffin: How did you come up with the business idea?
Atout: We’re musicians – Ellen is a singer and I play guitar – and a while back we decided to write a song as a wedding gift for a friend of Ellen’s. The reaction when we played the song at the wedding was amazing. When the pandemic hit, our music gigs dried up, the coffee shop where Ellen was working as a barista closed down, and I had a pay cut at my engineering job. We started talking about what we could do to bring in some money, and we decided to see what kind of demand there would be for a service that wrote custom songs.
Griffin: So you saw what you did for your friend and you thought you might be able to replicate that as a business, is that correct?
Atout: Yes. I’d been producing music for a while and I knew that a lot of musicians had the ability to produce music from home and make it sound pretty much like it’s from the studio, so it was something that people could do while they were out of work. We launched the website within a week after we came up with the idea, initially just with Omayya and myself fulfilling orders.
Griffin: Where did the name Songlorious come from?
Hodges: We were sitting on the couch and Omayya was spinning out ideas that had the word “song” in the title. One of the ideas he threw out was “Songify,” but it was too much like Spotify and Shopify. He kept brainstorming and then he said, “How about Songlorious?” It clicked with both of us right away. It’s fun, it’s upbeat, and it’s different from everything else out there.
Griffin: Do you consider yourself a B2B or B2C company?
Atout: Both, actually. We’re mostly B2C, with a lot of songs for celebrations like holidays, anniversaries and weddings, but we do a significant number of songs for businesses, too – both as jingles to use externally but also to use internally for motivation.
Griffin: Give me an example of a song you’ve created for a business.
Atout: One company orders a song any time they hire someone new or promote someone to a new position. We’ve created over 100 songs for them so far. Each song welcomes the person to the company and tells a little about their story and their personality. It’s a way of introducing people to the team and it’s also a gift because the employee gets to keep the song.
Griffin: What was it like to be on Shark Tank? Were you nervous to be out there in front of premier businesspeople like Mark Cuban?
Hodges: It was very nerve-wracking. We had prepared as much as possible, we had gone through our pitch hundreds of times so we could practically do it in our sleep, but we were nervous for the Q&A afterwards. Also, part of our pitch was singing a song, and I was nervous that Omayya was going to play the wrong chord or I was going to sing the wrong note and look like an idiot.
Griffin: What song did you sing to the Sharks?
Hodges: We wrote an original song that had a verse about each Shark who was there. The first verse was about Kevin O’Leary, and it said “Kevin, oh Kevin/ Your bald head reflects me / But that doesn’t mean you ain’t sexy!” Another verse was “Hey Mark Cuban / We don’t want to hear crickets / Let’s make a deal and throw in some court-side tickets!” We got a laugh out of all five Sharks. It went over really well.
Griffin: I’ll bet the Sharks loved it! What did they ask you in the Q&A?
Atout: We expected a lot of hard questions, but they didn’t challenge the business model at all because they saw the potential immediately. They just asked for basic information like how Songlorious works, the price per song, our sales numbers and whether we had competition. They were impressed by the fact that we had generated over $2 million in revenue in roughly 18 months even though we are not businesspeople. We wound up accepting a joint offer from four of the five Sharks on the episode – Mark Cuban, Daymond John, Kevin O’Leary and guest Shark Peter Jones. For us, it’s a dream team.
Griffin: How much startup money did you invest before you got on Shark Tank?
Atout: It cost about $10,000 to create the website, set up ads, and start marketing. I put all that on my personal credit card. We were able to start reinvesting the money from our first song immediately, so we really haven’t had to put additional money in.
Griffin: Where did your first customer come from and what was that request?
Hodges: Our first customer came from a Facebook ad. She was from Australia, she had a blended family, and she wanted a song for her husband who was a surfer. We wrote the song ourselves, but we had so many requests that we had to bring on other musicians after just the first month.
Griffin: How did you attract other musicians, and how many are working with you today?
Atout: In the summer of 2020, a lot of music venues and businesses were shut down so musicians not only had no income from their music but also had no day jobs, so they were looking for ways to make money. We initially got inquiries from musical artists who saw our Facebook ads and said they could write songs. Then we started recruiting because the business was growing so fast. We were working with about 50 creators by August and 80 by Christmas. Now we have 120.
Griffin: How do they earn money?
Hodges: They receive $100 for a full song plus 100% of the tips, and the average tip is $51. We’ve paid our artists more than $800,000 to date.
Griffin: What advice can you give people who have an idea to start a business? What are some things do they need to think about?
Hodges: We had experience with a couple of business startups in the past, and I think the biggest lesson we learned from those is to find a way to start generating revenue right away. You don’t want to get frustrated with having ideas and not being able to execute them because there’s no money to do it.
Atout: I know there are a lot of companies out there that are pre-revenue for a very long time, and that may work for some businesses, but I think the best way is to start small and try to generate revenue from the very beginning. Not only will you get revenue to spend back into the business but also you can get a gauge of what people think of what they’re buying from you.
Hodges: You get to see your customers’ reactions immediately. They’re invested because they’ve spent real money on what you have to offer. They’re not just focus groups or beta testers.
Griffin: What’s next for your business?
Atout: There are a lot of big things coming. We’re now known as the premier custom song company and we are in the process of expanding into other languages. A lot of growth as more people hear about us, and a lot of fun making our customers happy and supporting music artists.
