I had an idea after sawing Tim Ferris’s Instagram Story. It was a short video from a part of his podcast, one smart quote from the guest. It was really interesting and I decided to listen the whole episode. I really liked this small promotional video he created and I asked one of my friend who has a podcast show that he would use videos like this to promote his podcast. He said absolutely but there are no good tools to make this at the moment. There is a web service called headliner which promises to do this, but it only works on desktop, and you have to upload the whole mp3 file to their server and what you get it basically a really simple video editor. Not exactly the short video made in seconds which was in my mind, so I decided to make an app like this.
At this point, I still wasn’t sure about the idea, so I decided to ask Courtland from Indie Hackers about the idea. He has one of the best podcast I always listen so he has experience with products and with podcasting too. He replied and gave me so many suggestions I am really thankful to him!
The MVP
Based on Infinite Stories I had a huge advantage, I already built a video editor app and I was able to reuse the video editing engine I built for myself. This made the development so much faster. When this happened I already had a deadline. I had my flight ticket to the 6th of April to fly to Spain and walk the el camino there. I had only two weeks to release something and I felt I can not wait until I come back to try out this idea. So I worked all the evenings and weekends to ship the first MVP on time, which I was able to do it, the 1.0 was out on the 5th of April.
It was able to do a simple user story: add your RSS feed, select an episode, select the timeframe and aspect-ratio, customize the final video and save it to your camera roll.
Product Hunt launch
I decided to quickly get more feedback about the application by launching it on Product Hunt. I got a few emails suggesting me features which I started to implement in the newer versions of the application. This was great because this was based on podcasters who are actually using the application.
Being Open
I decided to build this app with complete transparency. April was the first month for this application and I want to share the progress how I will try to make this app popular. Even if I fail it’s a fun experience and I’m happy to be open about the result of this small application.
In the first month the app got 166 downloads:
This doesn’t seem to much but you have to keep in mind that this is a super niche app so, in my opinion, it’s not a bad start! You can clearly see the results of the Product Hunt launch
According to the monetization, the app has a subscription model. It offers two kind of subscriptions, $5/ month or $40/year for the starter version and $10/month or $80/year for the professional version each has a 7 day free trial in the beginning. This might seem like a lot of money for this but my idea was that this app helps you to increase the number of downloads of your podcast which can make you money, so it’s a much easier value proposition.
In terms of revenue, I got 3 free trials after the product hunt release and two of them converted to paying customers, which made earn $35 after Apple’s cut.
Right now there is another trial for a starter monthly plan but that will elapse in May so I’ll include the revenue there if he converts to a paid user
Plans for May
In May I’m planning to focus more on promoting the application and try to increase the revenue to at least $100. In the meantime, I would like to make the user experience better. I already added two more ways to visualize audio:
Summary
This is obviously not the normal success story which people likes to share, but it’s a good starting point and gives me a reason to write about in the next month too.
You can find the app in the App Store or just clicking here!
If you are interested in the future, you can subscribe to my email list and I’ll let you know when the next update will come out!
