Musical.ly acquired for $1 Billion (!!!) 🤑

Three years ago, Musical.ly didn’t exist. According to the Wall Street Journal the company was just acquired for $1 Billion. The official Musical.ly Twitter account retweeted Gary Vaynerchuk's tweet linking to the WSJ article, essentially confirming the acquisition. 💰👏

The acquirer is Bytedance, maker of the popular Chinese news app Toutiao, which recently raised money at a valuation of $20 billion. This is the same company that acquired Flipagram earlier this year.

Musical.ly has taken off with the teens and tweens, who use the app to make lip-syncing videos, and use Musical.ly's live streaming app, Live.ly, to hang out with friends virtually.

The Winners: The company's co-CEOs, employees, investors like Greylock and GGV, and @GaryVee – who has been loudly singing the company's praises for over a year.

The Losers: Facebook's M&A team will have a stern talking to for missing out on this.

Social is hard, and staying power is even harder to achieve. A billion dollar exit in three years is a wonderful achievement. Congrats to the founders of Musical.ly and the team. 🎉

P.S. Musical.ly cofounder and co-CEO Alex Zhu may have the best Product Hunt username there is. 😬

Download Musical.ly 💃

Grow your app with Setapp: revenue, users, & AI

You shipped the app. Now comes the part nobody warns you about.

Billing across dozens of countries. Licensing agreements. Tax compliance. Customer support for users you haven't met yet. And if your app does anything with AI, add provider management and infrastructure costs to the pile. None of that is why you started building — but all of it is now your problem.

Setapp is trying to take it off your plate.

You probably know Setapp as the subscription marketplace — one monthly price, hundreds of Mac apps. On May 21st, they turned toward developers. The pitch is simple: list your app, reach users who are already looking, and let Setapp handle the business layer.