Meet Clyp, the app that bills itself as an imgur for sound files.
Founded by two University of Texas graduates, Clyp has blown up since its launch in 2013 with 825,000 unique users playing with the app.
The two founders William Tyson Ferguson and Jordan Patapoff met at uShip, the online transportation marketplace in Austin.
Clyp isn’t the entrepreneurs first stab at creating a business. Patapoff began his entrepreneurial endeavors developing a project called Unjailme, an app to alert friends that someone had been arrested and needed to be let out of the slammer.
Not the money-maker either founder was hoping for, the two launched Audiour, the first iteration of Clyp. So far, the pair of developers have seen the site hit more than 2 million page views for the web version of their service, and users have uploaded 220,000 “clyps”.
“We are at uShip right now and we’re trying to raise this seed round so that we can work on Clyp full time,” says Ferguson.
“We limit by file size instead of time,” says Patapoff. “You can upload up to a 100 megabit file.” For a highly compressed mp3 file, users could upload an hour and a half.
Hardcore users have come from electronic music producers. Rather than download full sets or songs to a service like SoundCloud, producers are uploading their beats, according to Patapoff. Everyone can upload a file to the site, and it’s caught on as a tool to share anything from music, to lectures, to sermons, and even spoken word poetry.
The service is ridiculously easy to use. Simply drag and drop an audio file and it’s uploaded to Clyp. The company’s site contains sections for popular sound files, recently uploaded files, and featured files.
Although the service is still in its infancy, it’s managed to attract some high profile users. You might not recognize the riff, but it’s Eric Clapton who’s playing the notes.
“We’re working on the next generation of our native apps,” says Patapoff. “We want to try experimenting on Clyp… like having embedded audio content and optionally upload an image with your Clyp.”
The two are also planning to launch paid content and improve the search capabilities, which are now limited to hashtags.
Clyp’s one of several startups looking to give communications its voice back. Companies like Cord, a voice messaging service, or the walkie-talkie service Voxer, and even giants like Apple are bringing new voice services to market. Then there’s Sobo, the Giant Pixel portfolio company, which, like Clyp, wants to create a social sound board for sharing audio.