Three years ago, Musical.ly didnāt exist. According to the Wall Street Journal the company was justĀ acquired for $1 Billion.Ā The official Musical.ly Twitter account retweeted Gary Vaynerchuk's tweet linking to the WSJ article, essentially confirming the acquisition. š°š
The acquirer isĀ Bytedance, maker of the popular Chinese news app Toutiao, whichĀ recently raised money at a valuation of $20 billion. This is the same company that acquired Flipagram earlier this year.
Musical.ly hasĀ taken off with the teens and tweens, who use the app toĀ make lip-syncing videos, and use Musical.ly's live streaming app,Ā Live.ly, to hang out with friends virtually.
The Winners:Ā The company's co-CEOs, employees, investors like Greylock and GGV, and @GaryVee ā 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.Ā Congrats to the founders of Musical.ly and the team. š
P.S.Ā Musical.ly cofounder and co-CEO Alex Zhu may have the best Product Hunt username there is. š¬

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HIGHLIGHT
Watch out Yelp and Foursquare. Today Facebook launched a direct competitor to discover events, restaurants, and fun things in your city. It's called Facebook Local. šŗ
PROMOTED
You ship the headline, then read the analytics two weeks later and guess at why. Articos builds a simulated audience of your exact buyers instead: describe who you're building for, it generates personas of those people, and you put a headline, a landing page or a whole concept in front of them. About thirty minutes later it comes back with what worked, what missed, and where your segments quietly disagree with each other. Articos puts it at 86% theme recall against Baymard and Nielsen Norman studies. It runs from Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor as well, it's free to try with no card, and it was the number one launch on Product Hunt on October 13.
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