I Built A $9,054/Month Meme Soundboard Platform With 700K Monthly Users
Who are you and what business did you start?
I’m Michael Lakostik, the founder of SoundboardGuys, a platform where people discover and play meme sounds, sound effects, gaming clips, and viral audio. Users can also create and browse custom soundboards built around those sounds. I started SoundboardGuys as a side project in 2019 and have since grown it to more than 700,000 monthly active users. Our primary users are gamers, streamers, content creators, and people looking for recognizable sounds to use, share, or enjoy.
What makes SoundboardGuys unique is the combination of a large and constantly growing sound library with tools that let users do more with that content. Alongside individual sounds, the platform includes custom soundboards, mobile apps, audio editing tools, user accounts, and community features. Today, SoundboardGuys generates around $14,000 USD per month through advertising, subscriptions, mobile apps, and licensing.
How do you come up with the idea for soundboardguys.com?
I came up with the idea for SoundboardGuys while studying computer science in college. I wanted to build something simple that I could launch quickly and that people could actually use. I also had experience running meme pages and making social media videos, so I already knew how frustrating it could be to find popular audio clips and memes to use in content.
The real “aha” moment came after I had barely worked on the site for more than a year. I checked my AdSense account and noticed it was generating close to $10 per day on its own. People were finding and using the site organically without me advertising it. That was what convinced me there was real demand and that SoundboardGuys was worth taking more seriously.
How did you launch soundboardguys.com and get initial traction?
When I first launched SoundboardGuys, I tried to promote it by creating Instagram pages and posting memes, videos, and clips showing the website and apps. Those efforts never really gained much traction. Most of the growth ended up happening naturally through Google search and people sharing sounds and pages across social media.
One of the biggest lessons I learned was that solving a simple problem can be more valuable than having a perfect launch strategy. People were already searching for specific meme sounds and audio clips, and SoundboardGuys gave them an easy way to find and play them. My first dollar came after I added advertising to the website, roughly a year after launching. Even then, growth was extremely slow at first. I was making less than $1 per day for the first few months.
As the site grew, I learned far more than I expected about building and scaling web and mobile applications. I’ve had to handle infrastructure outages caused by traffic growth, improve performance as the user base expanded, and build systems for managing user-generated content. Those challenges taught me that launching the product was only the beginning. The real work was learning how to operate and scale something that people kept coming back to.
What was the growth strategy for soundboardguys.com and how did you scale?
The main growth strategy for SoundboardGuys has been SEO. I focused on building a large and diverse library of sounds that could appeal to users with completely different interests, from memes and gaming to viral clips and sound effects. Each sound has its own dedicated page with the features someone would expect, along with consistent titles, descriptions, tags, and formatting. This gave Google thousands of useful pages to index and made it easier for people searching for a very specific sound to discover the site.
I also tried to make the product as shareable and sticky as possible. Users can share individual sounds, create soundboards, and use our mobile companion apps to bring the same experience to their phones. I added emails around important actions, such as notifying users when a sound they uploaded was approved. I also introduced stats like total plays and likes on uploaded sounds, which gives contributors a reason to come back and see how their content is performing.
Another feature I added was the ability for users to link their YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and Instagram accounts to their profiles. That way, when someone discovers a sound they uploaded, they can also discover the creator behind it.
The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that growth does not always come from one big marketing campaign. For SoundboardGuys, it came from making every individual page useful, searchable, and shareable, then adding features that gave users reasons to return. My advice to other founders would be to understand exactly how people discover your product, then build both your content and product experience around that behavior.
What were the biggest lessons learned from building soundboardguys.com?
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that quality matters more than quantity. I manually review uploaded sounds, avoid duplicates, and keep titles, tags, and metadata consistent. I’ve seen similar sites mass-upload content, but I think maintaining a cleaner library creates a better product and also makes things like API integrations much easier.
One of my better decisions was reaching out to other businesses in related spaces and finding ways to collaborate through the SoundboardGuys API. Some luck was involved too. I happened to pick a niche with real demand, and Google started sending users organically before I fully understood how valuable that traffic could become.
My attention to detail has probably helped the most. Small improvements like better metadata, accurate trending systems, and simple quality-of-life features can make a big difference over time.
I’ve built more than 40 apps and websites that never really went anywhere before SoundboardGuys worked. My biggest advice is to just start building, keep learning, and don’t give up too early. Most ideas may fail, but you only need one to work.
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More about soundboardguys.com:
Who is the owner of soundboardguys.com?
Michael Lakostik is the founder of soundboardguys.com.
When did Michael Lakostik start soundboardguys.com?
2019
How much money has Michael Lakostik made from soundboardguys.com?
Michael Lakostik started the business in 2019, and currently makes an average of $109K/year.
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