Nice work! This is an impressive product - the voice sounds human and it’s easy to understand. Allow me to make a few suggestions:
A low effort improvement to the landing page would be to move link to a sample from the bottom to the top. Make it the first thing a visitor sees. Let the product speak for itself.
You shoukd charge more too. $.50 on a for-life value add feels like you’re only capturing a teensy tiny fraction of the value you provide. You’ll probably have to deal with way fewer support requests too if you charged ~$5/article.
Think about it - someone could record the audio themselves which might take ~1 hour all-in? If their hourly rate is $60, your service is still providing ~$45 of value per use if you increase the price to $5. The customers you want won’t care about the increased price and it makes it more likely you can continue to support your users and grow the company far into the future.
Finally, a natural product expansion would be automated distribution to podcast platforms. IMO you should invest in building this out instead of supporting the audio embed. A new distribution channel is a lot more valuable for a blogger than a new feature on their existing channel (think about it: if you were a blogger would you rather embed a video to go along with each post or post an accompanying video to your YouTube channel and link to it/link back to the article from the video?).
Product braindump done. Again, awesome work on the product and good luck growing the business!
Please do remember global reach. That's quite an amount for someone in Bulgaria, the Philippines or most of Africa. Yes pricing for Americans/Western Europe is one good idea - but if it's still profitable why not do open up to a price range affordable to many?
If this is a concern, you can do variable pricing based on IP! Though I’d be willing to bet that at this time the creator is more interested in having a profitable business than serving every possible customer. That can come later when cash flow is stable and abundant.
Note: $45 of value bc it will still take ~10m/article (using friendly numbers for convenience) to convert the text to speech with this product then upload/embed the audio file.
I am taking the following steps to convert it in audiobook.
1. Split Doc into chapters
2. Feed the chapter into TTS
3. Join the audio chapters into the book.
I working on the solution for 1 and 3. It would be really helpful if you can provide some suggestions for 1 and 3.
Love the initiative. I think it will help a lot of bloggers gain additional distribution with very little effort.
Unfortunately, as a regular listener of podcasts, I just can't bring myself to listen to TTS voice.
It's great and has advanced leaps and bounds in the past few years. But if you're used to listening to real human voices on a regular basis, any TTS speech is an instant nope.
Other people have said it already, but you are charging too little for your service. You should increase the price by at least 10 times. People use price as a proxy for value, and things that are priced too low are perceived as low quality. Increasing the price may even increase sales!
Google's TTS charges much higher than 0.5$. And you're providing lifetime hosting too. How does it work? I'm afraid that I'd start using it and at some point, you'd go bust.
Congrats on shipping! It would be great to listen to a sample with a single click right on the home page. Also pricing could probably be higher -- sell a Mercedes, not a Chevrolet...
Nice work! This is an impressive product - the voice sounds human and it’s easy to understand. Allow me to make a few suggestions:
A low effort improvement to the landing page would be to move link to a sample from the bottom to the top. Make it the first thing a visitor sees. Let the product speak for itself.
You shoukd charge more too. $.50 on a for-life value add feels like you’re only capturing a teensy tiny fraction of the value you provide. You’ll probably have to deal with way fewer support requests too if you charged ~$5/article.
Think about it - someone could record the audio themselves which might take ~1 hour all-in? If their hourly rate is $60, your service is still providing ~$45 of value per use if you increase the price to $5. The customers you want won’t care about the increased price and it makes it more likely you can continue to support your users and grow the company far into the future.
Finally, a natural product expansion would be automated distribution to podcast platforms. IMO you should invest in building this out instead of supporting the audio embed. A new distribution channel is a lot more valuable for a blogger than a new feature on their existing channel (think about it: if you were a blogger would you rather embed a video to go along with each post or post an accompanying video to your YouTube channel and link to it/link back to the article from the video?).
Product braindump done. Again, awesome work on the product and good luck growing the business!
Please do remember global reach. That's quite an amount for someone in Bulgaria, the Philippines or most of Africa. Yes pricing for Americans/Western Europe is one good idea - but if it's still profitable why not do open up to a price range affordable to many?
This is a great point that I hadn’t considered.
If this is a concern, you can do variable pricing based on IP! Though I’d be willing to bet that at this time the creator is more interested in having a profitable business than serving every possible customer. That can come later when cash flow is stable and abundant.
Note: $45 of value bc it will still take ~10m/article (using friendly numbers for convenience) to convert the text to speech with this product then upload/embed the audio file.
+1 Auto podcast distribution
It doesn't mention it anywhere on the website, but this is using Google's Text to Speech (https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/). I recognize the voice.
I've used Google's TTS to convert books into audiobooks. Surprisingly listenable.
I am building a product on the same. Can you help with your advise?
What do you need help on? It's just a few lines of calling the Google TTS API. I can find it when I get off from work.
I am taking the following steps to convert it in audiobook. 1. Split Doc into chapters 2. Feed the chapter into TTS 3. Join the audio chapters into the book.
I working on the solution for 1 and 3. It would be really helpful if you can provide some suggestions for 1 and 3.
Why do you need to split the chapters? And isn't 3 just concatenation of audio files?
Well done! This is made by Miguel, Blogcast is one of the most unique awesome product, congratulations! much love from Singapore
I just featured another product, exactly opposite Blogcast. Giving a vote for Blogcast as well.
Care to share a link?
This seems pretty cool. I might give it a try at some point, once I have a blog again.
$.50 per article? "Unlimited article length" - I'd be concerned about abuse. Surely you're paying Google for parts of paid usage?
Love the initiative. I think it will help a lot of bloggers gain additional distribution with very little effort.
Unfortunately, as a regular listener of podcasts, I just can't bring myself to listen to TTS voice.
It's great and has advanced leaps and bounds in the past few years. But if you're used to listening to real human voices on a regular basis, any TTS speech is an instant nope.
I would make the sample available on the homepage. I had to scroll up and down twice in a row to realise it's in the tabbed FAQ.
Yes, the sample should be the top thing. I wanted to hear an article before anything else.
Other people have said it already, but you are charging too little for your service. You should increase the price by at least 10 times. People use price as a proxy for value, and things that are priced too low are perceived as low quality. Increasing the price may even increase sales!
Increase the price but give a free tier to users to taste it first.
Google's TTS charges much higher than 0.5$. And you're providing lifetime hosting too. How does it work? I'm afraid that I'd start using it and at some point, you'd go bust.
Congrats on shipping! It would be great to listen to a sample with a single click right on the home page. Also pricing could probably be higher -- sell a Mercedes, not a Chevrolet...
Interesting product. I have tried http://voicepods.com previously and its a neat experience.
Well done!
Impressive product with very natural voices.
This is such a great idea!! Awesome work!!
This is better than I expected. Actually pretty cool, and would like to see it more places.
Okay, this is awesome!
Great product! ️