Why I love Soundly

I came across Soundly in 2015 when I was looking for a quicker way to find sounds I needed. I was leading a post production team of 6 back then and it was a struggle to use Mac’s Finder or Windows Explorer. Within hours of installing the app, our workflows improved. In that month, the analysis was that our turnaround time had reduced by a 1000% but it didn’t stop there: Before Soundly:

• We realised that a lot of our energy was getting wasted in redundant non-creative activities such as “waiting for search results” in Finder / Explorer.
• We also noticed that the energy drain was directly hindering the quality of work. Because we were exhausted finding the sound we needed, whenever we’d find something close, we’d just use it with slight tweaks instead of doing more creative stuff on it due to strict release deadlines.
• Even when the number of videos we were receiving had so many creative visuals that could have been fun to bring to life with sounds, the team started to see them more as “number of tasks to complete”

After Soundly:

• The focus immediately jumped towards finding best sounds, instead of okayish ones.
• The team could finally use their good sonic taste rather than having to make do with what they found as a first search result.
• The energy got used for creative decisions, more immersive sound design and much better quality of work, despite spending lesser time. The team finally started to enjoy sound design and saw beautifully done visuals as something to cherish with audio

Since the frequency of incoming videos & games were still the same, we had more time on our hands to:

• explore skill upgrades
• record our own libraries (yes, you need TIME to do this)
• ideate more on audio direction
• come up with automations & processes
• participate in pre-production of projects lined up months in advance
• collaborate with writers, video editors, game developers and producers to use sound creatively as a feature itself

All of this led to better ROI for the company and the team over the years grew from 6 to ~50 covering 8-10 high production projects in parallel — TAT stayed up to speed with all of this and Soundly played a huge role in that. This isn’t a product promotion, though you’re welcome to take it that way. I’m just expressing what Soundly contributed to my own growth as a team leader & audio director in my past-work-life, and continues to for any sonic projects that I have ongoing.

Now that I’ve joined the Soundly team as the product-person, my view of “scaling up” doesn’t just mean scaling up app’s features or revenue or user base — it instead means helping our users scale up the value of their time. And I’m proud to be in that frame of mind.

I’m a fan for a reason.