A thesis I've been noodling on lately:

Applied constraints, not unlimited optionality, creates wonderful strategy.

• You do your best work when you have 2 days, not 200 days, to ship.

• Companies with 3 people are more nimble, spontaneous, and creative than those with 300.

• Building an automation-first lifestyle business is easier, funner, and less stressful than figuring out how best to use $10m of venture capital (for many of us anyway).

Sometimes the limitation is self-imposed, other times it’s circumstantial.

In today’s piece we’re time-warping back to the early 2000’s to design a universal mobile app… before smartphones existed.

Enjoy.

— Tom

P.S. The most powerful limitation you can impose on your own business today is “what if we had to use AI for this?”.

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Before Shazam was an app…

Chess Move

The what: A TLDR explanation of the strategy

Before we had supercomputers in our pockets, identifying a song in the wild was nearly impossible. You'd hum the tune for hours, desperately trying to remember a lyric to Google later.

In 2002, Shazam introduced an elegant solution that worked on any mobile phone:

1. Dial "2580"

2. Hold your phone up to the music

3. Wait 30 seconds

4. Receive a text with the song details

That's it. No account. No internet connection. No smartphone.

What seems almost primitive today was actually a ‘mobile app’ ahead of it’s time - 5 years before the iPhone, and 6 years before the App Store.

Breakdown

The how: The strategic playbook boiled down to 3x key takeaways

1.  Interface minimalism

By eliminating every possible friction point - Shazam’s service was highly accessible.

• No choices or decisions for the user

• No manual setup or onboarding

• Worked on any mobile phone

• No downloads or installs

• No account necessary

• Rapid time-to-value

• No learning curve

The app’s ‘interface’ was a short, memorable, phone number: "2580" (which creates a straight vertical line down the middle of a numpad).

The service was so simple it could be explained in a single sentence: "Dial 2580 when you hear a song you like."

A simple user journey for a singular use case.

Extremely low friction to use Shazam also meant extremely low friction for users to refer friends to Shazam.

“Check this out!” [Dials 2580, receives SMS with song details]

“Woah. I just dial 2580 and that’s it?”

“Yup”

No download/account/onboarding/decisions etc = Viral word-of-mouth.

2. Universal constraints → Universal features

The typical approach to launching new mobile services in 2002 was building for the newest phones with the most capabilities. This meant targeting a tiny fraction of the addressable market of mobile users.

Shazam took the opposite approach, and used only universal phone functions (calls and SMS) as the platform for the ‘app’.

Shazam worked creatively within these constraints to develop a thoughtful and consistent experience:

• 30-second auto-hangup → Users didn't have to worry about accidentally staying connected

• SMS-only results → Standardised format that worked on any mobile

• Audio-only input → No complex menus or navigation

• Single access number → One action to remember

This "constraints as features" approach allowed Shazam to scale globally without worrying about device compatibility, operating systems, or user training.

3. Evolve the business with the tech

Initially, Shazam monetised by charging users 60p on their mobile phone bill for a successful Track ID, or nothing if there was no match.

(Pay-per-outcome pricing way before it was cool).

Their second revenue stream was an online affiliate store to purchase tagged tracks on CD or as mp3 downloads.

A few years later, as early BREW and Java mobile applications gained popularity, Shazam built a subscription offer for £4.50/mo, letting users Shazam as much as they like, keep an online record of every song they tagged, and download 2 free full tracks or ringtones per month.

But it was the launch of the App Store in 2008 that created hockey-stick user and revenue growth for Shazam.

From day 1, Shazam was a free app on the App Store.

The app enabled users to launch the iTunes Store and purchase any identified song directly, generating affiliate revenue for Shazam.

In fact, Apple wanted to showcase amazing apps that would show off their new phone’s capabilities. Shazam was particularly novel, so they featured it heavily.

This kept Shazam comfortably within the ‘Top Apps’ leaderboards:

The rest is history. Here’s the story in numbers.

• In 1 year, it was downloaded over 1.5 million times.

• By 2013, Shazam was driving over $300 million a year of music downloads on iTunes, and they became the #1 iTunes affiliate.

• By 2014, Shazam was generating around 500,000 daily song sales.

• Shazam was acquired by Apple in 2018 for $400 million, generating $40 million in revenue at the time.

• In 2019, Shazam reached 1 billion app downloads.

• In 2020, over 20 million tracks were being ‘Shazamed’ per day.

• In 2023, Shazam had 300+ million monthly active users.

• As of 2024, over 100 billion songs have been tagged since it launched back in 2002.

Rabbit Hole

The where: 3x high-signal resources to learn more

Shazam turns 20 ↗

[4 minute read]

Celebrating Shazam’s well-deserved victory lap in true Apple style.

The app didn’t just provide a valuable mainstream utility. It also helped launch and shape the careers of many successful artists.

Here’s the highlight-reel.

How Shazam works ↗

[3 minute read]

It’s one thing to understand how Shazam (the app / experience / growth playbook) works.

It’s another thing to understand how Shazam (the audio identification algorithm) works.

How does it work in noisy environments? How does it work so quickly and accurately?

This one’s for the audiophiles who enjoy words like “fingerprinting” and “spectograms”.

The story of Shazam ↗

[47 minute watch]

Chris Barton, founder of Shazam, shares his journey.

• Building software in 2002.

• Venture-fundraising back when it was novel.

• Getting acquired by Apple.

Helluva story.

That’s all for today’s breakdown - hope you enjoyed!

— Tom

P.S. I’m writing today’s article listening to this playlist (~50% of the tracks were Shazamed out in the wild).

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