We Shipped an AI Song Generator. The Hardest Part Wasn't the AI.

We launched Magical Song a few weeks ago. It's an AI song generator where you describe a story, pick a genre, and get a studio-quality track with real vocals in under two minutes. The AI generation part? That was the easy part. Seriously. The part that nearly broke us was everything around it. The UX flow, the payment model, and a fundamental misunderstanding about who our user actually is. Three steps sounds simple. It wasn't. Our flow is: describe your story > pick genre and mood > get your song. Three screens. Should be straightforward, right? The first version had a long form. Name of the person, occasion, details, inside jokes, mood preference, tempo, vocal style. We thought more input = better output. Users thought "this is homework" and bounced. We cut it down to the bare minimum. One text area for the story. A grid of genre cards. A generate button. Conversion went up immediately. The lesson wasn't new but it hit different when you see it in your own data: every extra fie