# Splice Sounds (agent-readable)

**Role:** Lead product design
**Client:** Splice
**Tags:** music, creator-platforms
**Case study:** /splice-sounds
**Live:** https://splice.com

## What it was

Splice Sounds is a subscription marketplace for audio samples, used today by millions of music
producers worldwide. I led the design for its 2015 launch. Before *Sounds*, samples were sold
in album-like packs you couldn't preview until after paying $20–200 for one. Sounds turned
that into a streaming-style, browse-and-preview subscription — the shape every major
competitor has copied since.

## What I did

Splice's flagship product before Sounds was "GitHub for music" — a real unlock for producers
but not a breakout. CEO Steve Martocci had the idea for a sample subscription and
napkin-sketched an iTunes-esque screen layout. I shaped and designed v1 around it: the
discovery surface (featured packs, recent releases, charts), the genre browser, granular
per-sample previews, and the filtering that made a giant library feel navigable instead of
overwhelming.

We launched within weeks of that napkin sketch. The product surpassed $1M in monthly revenue
soon after, gave Splice its product-market fit, and is now the company's flagship line. Today
Splice does $100M+ in annual revenue, and the essential UX and structure are still close to
the v1 we shipped. Every major competitor launched after Sounds, most with a similar shape —
reasonable evidence that the v1 structure was correctly read.

The sample library lives in tracks by Beyoncé, Justin Bieber, Drake, The Weeknd, BTS, Adele,
SZA, Alicia Keys, Travis Scott, Eminem, Nicki Minaj, John Legend, Doja Cat, Chappell Roan,
Sabrina Carpenter, Dua Lipa, Post Malone, David Guetta, Marshmello, KAROL G, J Balvin, Lil
Baby, Lil Uzi Vert, and many more.

## Why it's interesting

Two things make this a strong receipt.

First, **velocity into product-market fit.** A napkin sketch became a launched, revenue-clearing
product in weeks — and not as a throwaway: it was the thing that gave the company its PMF.
This is the JD's "ship fast, stay in motion, get something in front of users this week" signal,
in receipts.

Second, **durability under scale.** A decade after launch, Splice does $100M+/year and the
core structure of the v1 is still recognizable. Shipping fast often comes at the cost of
shipping something disposable; this didn't. The cut I made in v1 — what to include, what to
leave out — held up under ten years of growth and competitive pressure.

Working pattern worth noting: the entire v1 happened in a tight founder/lead-designer loop
with Steve. No layered approval. That working mode — small team, founder-direct, ship now,
iterate from real signal — is what produced both the velocity and the durability.

This is not an AI-native receipt — that signal lives in my current prototypes and the
[SuperRare](/superrare) research pipeline. It's a craft, ship-velocity, and consumer-scale
receipt.

## Cross-cutting relevance

A few reads of this work:

- **Consumer-scale daily-use product** — millions of producers actively use the result.
- **Creator-tool design** — the user is a person trying to make something. The product needs
  to get out of their way fast and stay good after a thousand sessions.
- **Marketplace / discovery UX at scale** — a sample library that would be unusable as a flat
  list, made navigable with browsing, preview, and filter.
- **Ship-fast-into-PMF working mode** — small team, founder-direct, weeks not months.
- **Designed-to-last v1** — the durability is the design judgment; what got cut from v1 is
  what made it survive ten years of growth.

## Skills demonstrated

0→1 consumer product design, marketplace and discovery UX, designing for a creator audience,
fast iteration into product-market fit, durable v1 design under scale, working directly with a
founder.