Hey listenandlearn. I like your site and app - I think they both look great. I tried out the app a few weeks ago and I liked it, although I didn't really enjoy the English accent of the reader's voice. Are you using Google's WaveNet? I slowed it down by 80% or something because I think the full speed is too fast. Amazon Polly's "Matthew" has been my favourite so far - less high frequency artifact IMO, although he sounds a little sedate.
I've been working blogreader.com.au, which has a very similar concept to articulu for the last few months, but I have recently given up trying to turn it into a business. I ended up stopping because of a pretty underwhelming response from potential users. Most people I've talked to in-person don't really care about it - they might say "oh that's cool", but they're not beating the door down to use it. My site has a _horrible_ bounce rate as well - but this could just be a problem with my landing page, rather than an intrinsic issue with the product. I've found the marketing really hard, which has been a positive experience. My primary concern is that our services solve a small problem for a large group of people. Don't get me wrong, I listen to an article every day using my own service, but my friends and family don't care enough to create an account, submit an article, etc. Meanwhile, people on Google don't appear to be searching for "listen to web articles", so finding motivated users online seems quite hard. I can't comment on your marketing because I found your service in my reddit thread or /r/podcasts. I will note that Audm and Curio are also both trying to get into the "listen to articles" space. I now look back at my napkin math of "if I can get 1000 users to pay $1/month..." and realise how naieve I was to assume that getting so many users was easy.
Another issue is that when a service only solves a "small problem", then people will only put up with so much bullshit - ie. the UX has to be pretty good. I struggled with this, although I found your app prety nice. In particular I like that you hijacked the "share link" functionality in chrome to allow a user to convert an article.
Finally, I've found that people hate paying for content - who knew right? Perhaps your freemium model will get around this, whereas mine was a little more aggressive about getting people to pay. I'm interested in the economics of your app though. If you're paying for the text to speech service (I assume you are - if not let's talk about that!), then you're operating at a loss. What's your end game? How many subscribers do you need in proportion to your free users to make this profitable? What's your model? I think it's a really interesting problem because you're providing a nice UX wrapper around a paid commodity service, and so if you charge too much you'll be undercut or lose users to free content, but if you charge too little you're losing money.
In summary I found the following problems with this kind of service:
- many potential users + small problem = lots of marketing effot required
- small problems = relatively high standard of UX, low friction required
- people hate paying for content, but the content costs money to produce
I'm really interested to hear your input on what I've said. Did you have the same issues? Do you agree with the problems I identified, or do you have a different perspective?
I've been working blogreader.com.au, which has a very similar concept to articulu for the last few months, but I have recently given up trying to turn it into a business. I ended up stopping because of a pretty underwhelming response from potential users. Most people I've talked to in-person don't really care about it - they might say "oh that's cool", but they're not beating the door down to use it. My site has a _horrible_ bounce rate as well - but this could just be a problem with my landing page, rather than an intrinsic issue with the product. I've found the marketing really hard, which has been a positive experience. My primary concern is that our services solve a small problem for a large group of people. Don't get me wrong, I listen to an article every day using my own service, but my friends and family don't care enough to create an account, submit an article, etc. Meanwhile, people on Google don't appear to be searching for "listen to web articles", so finding motivated users online seems quite hard. I can't comment on your marketing because I found your service in my reddit thread or /r/podcasts. I will note that Audm and Curio are also both trying to get into the "listen to articles" space. I now look back at my napkin math of "if I can get 1000 users to pay $1/month..." and realise how naieve I was to assume that getting so many users was easy.
Another issue is that when a service only solves a "small problem", then people will only put up with so much bullshit - ie. the UX has to be pretty good. I struggled with this, although I found your app prety nice. In particular I like that you hijacked the "share link" functionality in chrome to allow a user to convert an article.
Finally, I've found that people hate paying for content - who knew right? Perhaps your freemium model will get around this, whereas mine was a little more aggressive about getting people to pay. I'm interested in the economics of your app though. If you're paying for the text to speech service (I assume you are - if not let's talk about that!), then you're operating at a loss. What's your end game? How many subscribers do you need in proportion to your free users to make this profitable? What's your model? I think it's a really interesting problem because you're providing a nice UX wrapper around a paid commodity service, and so if you charge too much you'll be undercut or lose users to free content, but if you charge too little you're losing money.
In summary I found the following problems with this kind of service:
- many potential users + small problem = lots of marketing effot required
- small problems = relatively high standard of UX, low friction required
- people hate paying for content, but the content costs money to produce
I'm really interested to hear your input on what I've said. Did you have the same issues? Do you agree with the problems I identified, or do you have a different perspective?