During the rainy Amsterdam winter of 2018, I was spending a lot of my evenings with my friends playing guitar and singing. I have quite a low voice and often struggle to sing modern songs which are mostly written for tenors. In that kind of situation transposition normally helps.
Technically, transposing chords for guitar is a pretty straightforward process. You just have to put the capodaster on the proper fret, and voila! The issue is that finding the proper key normally takes some time. Especially if you haven’t tried to sing the song before.
Solving my own problem
So this is how the process would normally go for me: my friends would ask me to play another recent masterpiece. I would google some chords and start identifying my key. In the meantime, the audience would be waiting for me and yawning.
The process of finding that key was frustrating almost every time. I have an engineering degree and more than 10 years of work experience in the IT industry. As you might imagine I have a tendency to automate things. So at some point, while struggling to figure out where to put my capo, I thought: “It would be great if there was a service for this.”
I tried to search for one on the internet but I didn’t find any. So I decided to create one.
The problem looked fairly simple. I know what my vocal range is. If I know the range of the song I want to sing, then I can make the computer tell me how much to shift the notes! Eureka! I started collecting a database of vocal ranges for songs.
While I was busy preparing the database I talked with some musicians that I knew personally to check if they had any similar problems to mine and if they were looking for solutions. Here is where community power showed itself. People started giving me suggestions on what other features might be useful to add to my service after I prepared my database.
Some people wanted to know which songs they could comfortably sing in karaoke, some were looking for challenges, some for a part in a musical. One of the vocal teachers I talked to was struggling to put together repertoires for her students based on their musical genre preferences and singing capacities. There was one common thing in all of these requests. People wanted to find songs to sing based on their vocal range. And that’s what I’ve built.
Singing Carrots, a website that started connecting singers to a song.
The website started with two main features. Both features first required a user to enter their vocal range. After that users can either explore songs based on the song genre and difficulty; or they can find any particular song through the text search and check in which key it would be optimal for them to sing the song.
Adding features
On top of that, I started trying to add more features that could come in handy along the way. First I added links to youtube videos, lyrics, and music sheets, then the interactive vocal range test, then the artist ranges, and so on.
When Singing Carrots started to gain a more significant following, I took some time to really listen to what users like you were saying. Many of you expressed an interest in self-guided singing study. This feedback got me thinking and experimenting with different ideas.
One day, I had this idea of creating something that felt a bit like “Guitar Hero,” but specifically for singers. I also wanted the experience to be as intuitive as using an app like Duolingo. After some trial and error, and feedback from beta testers, I decided to introduce a premium version. It would allow me to make Singing Carrots my day job and continue to improve the site.
I’ll never forget the day I made my first sale. It wasn’t just about the business; it felt like a sign that I was on the right track. That moment was a turning point for Singing Carrots, and it’s been a journey of growth and learning ever since.
From solo to a company
After working solo for some time, I realized there’s only so much you can do running a one-man show. In parallel, I kept seeing how many people still believe they can’t sing. So I picked an ambitious goal: unleashing one million voices.
And I started building a team. A permanent singing teacher came on board first, then support, then a developer, then marketing. Step by step, the company became real, and we are steadily floating toward the destination.
The birth of the Singing Carrots AI Vocal Coach
And then… it seems we didn’t realize how we accidentally entered the singularity. In late November 2025, we unleashed the power of AI into the world of singing education. It’s a mixture of luck and hard work that I ended up being the person who discovered how conversational AI can be applied to singing training.
I’m doing my best to stay responsible with it and make sure we harness the goods of the technology. I’m proud and honored to be the pioneer in this space.
I was extremely excited to speak about it with Voice Teacher Linor Oren right after our first release.
A word of appreciation
I would not be able to walk so far without the help and support of these amazing people:
- Gonzalo Gonzales – UX researcher, who is helping with design, customer development and songs content moderation
- Dominika Zawada – singer, actress and coach, author of our educational course From Zero to Singing Hero for beginners.
- Celina von Wrochem – awesome, energetic author of our educational course All-Round Vocalist
- Leo Maia – illustrator, who created all these funny carrots pictures and designed a big portion of this website
- Sergey Alimsky – designer and photographer, who came up with the idea for the first feature on this website, and who constantly helps me with advice and brainstorming
- Sandra Dominguez Ortiz – wonderful person who inspired me to create this project and motivated me to keep going. Without her support Singing Carrots would not exist.
- Claudia Rolando – my first singing teacher, who prepared a list of exercises for our pitch training
- Beth Aggett – singer, composer, arranger and teacher, who constantly helps me with feedback and ideation
- Linor Oren – singer and voice expert, who helped with preparing warm-up videos and gave a lot of useful feedback and advices on how to improve the website