Dream SAAS Business - Baby Developer Needed for First Steps
I have this really remarkable, awe-inspiring, life changing idea, that I'm not going to pursue.
Right now at least...
It's called Spread and as of last week a freelance developer who was developing this grand SAAS product fobbed me off, 100's of £££'s down the drain which hurt, badddd.
So here I am, begging on Indiehackers like the rest of the guys below me, all after the golden Tech co founder to make an entrepreneurs dream a reality.
The grand business idea is a content repurposing web application, that turns any long from content into any sort of micro content. E.g YouTube video into a podcast, Instagram post etc...
I only want to create a very small chunk of the pie right now. That being an online application that turns blog articles into Twitter Threads... That's it. A very simple application that can be used by many professional authors to simply promote their blog article to their twitter fans in a content marketing style.
Instead of the usual promotional tweet "I have just uploaded a new article, check it out with this link..."
Authors will be able to easily create a Twitter thread that contains highlights or even all of the article, with a link to the original post at the end. Saving them time and increasing conversion rates on blog promotions.
Simply turning blogs into micro blogs (thread format).
Message me if you have any questions you lovely baby developers!!!!
(I am looking for somebody to co-found the whole idea eventually when the time comes. I also have experience in online business, I have a very small revenue generating business active right now so I do know a thing or two, especially about marketing.)
Thanks for reading, looking forward to being in touch with you!
Hi Louis,
Are you looking for this Role. Thank you.
Sounds like something not too difficult to pull off. Although I think strategically instead of expanding to text, video and audio which would be 3 very different development skillsets it should look into being one of the three and expand to different social platforms instead.
I love what you're saying - much more streamlined and effective.
Go depth instead of breath?
Is this a startup that interests an experienced developer like yourself?
I'm coming off a SaaS project dealing with text transformation and analysis, so I have some gravitation to this but I have some reservations. Seems this idea does a bit more on the social sharing part than SproutSocial for example by threading and slicing a post. Then again is that functionality 10x better than the existing popular products functionality? 10x reference: https://www.saastr.com/what-does-jason-lemkin-think-is-the-best-way-for-an-early-stage-saas-company-to-get-its-first-1-3-pilot-fortune-500-paying-customers/
That was a great read, thank you for sharing.
I love the reference to SproutSocial. However they are a content scheduler, I wan't to make Spread a content repurposer.
Two very different tools. The blog to twitter thing is just one small feature of the total pie, and this doesn't even have to be the first step in development. Perhaps a repurposing tool closer to the top of the content marketing funnel would work better....
Such as turning long form youtube videos into podcasts that become scheduled with title and description copies - the only thing that exists close to this is a YouTube MP3 downloader... is this "10x" better though?
Not to bash the idea but it seems Google has banned successful youtube to podcast services before. (https://appletoolbox.com/so-long-protube-is-podsync-a-viable-option/) Otherwise Podsync is an open source tool available for self setup and use but was an online service earlier, before it got a Youtube API ban:(https://www.reddit.com/r/podcasts/comments/cbm4iw/cant_make_podcasts_from_youtube_anymore/).
On another note looking at a tool called Trint https://trint.com/ right now which seems a pretty novel audio/video trancsription service with text editor based highlighting and splitting of the transcript. Could this service with its extracted audio and text bits coupled with social sharing and personal podcast page maybe be something? All the legwork of downloading Youtube videos would still be the users pain though.
THANKYOU. Thank you so much for this In-depth reply (especially with the links), you have helped me so much. Now I can properly analyse possible competition and make my product 10x better...
Okay so Podsync and other tools such as listenbox are consumer centric not creator centric (imo). Correct me if im wrong, but after using Listenbox, the youtube video downloaded into a podcast to my own library, not for me to upload as my own podcast from what I can tell?
The reason im creating Spread is so YouTube/content creators can repurpose content to reach new audiences. Not so consumers can watch it on a different format, if that makes sense? So I don't see Listenbox or Podsync as direct competition at all, but the API thing does worry me (although users may just have to manually upload to podcast sites).
Now, Trint is where this gets a lil interesting.... But a bit of competition is just what im after. Knowing that what im trying to create is a service that people are actually already using is very comforting, and even more so knowing I can do It just as good or better for less than $50 a month (and they're enterprise fronting not individual).
Trint does a more than amazing job of turning videos and podcasts into text, and their highlight/strikethough feature is something I can only dream of having in my product for now, but they're completely orientated around subtitles, so much so that when you download transcripts it's in a weird format that wouldn't work when uploading to your own blog. I can't seem to use the social sharing in their free plan but I have messaged support, so I will investigate asap.
There are plenty basic YouTube to text downloaders, but none are anywhere near as sophisticated as Trint with their highlighting and strikethrough features, I want to strike a balance between the two with Spread. Create something that really brings value to individual content creators.
I'm going to search for some more competition to validate my product even more so, thank you so much for your response again, means the world to me that somebody would even take the time out of their day to reply! :D
Edit: Check out this Google Sheet I made that shows competition features VS Spread
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fA-tVLcSVs3iJSAZeYbvbqB41a1C9YicwkAfbaWfGmw/edit?usp=sharing
No problem :) I can send you a personal email if you wish to know what I think this still needs before considering developing this, maybe there is more already that I don't know of? Let me know if you want to chat over email?
Yes that would be more than beneficial thank you
loujtromans@gmail.com
Do you know how to actually build something like this? It seems non-trivial to be able to automate this. For something like this, I think you might need a solution built using machine learning that can extract summaries of highlights from content.
I guess you could maybe extract a dataset for training this solution by using data from Twitter where there are links to articles for a machine learning model to know how to promote articles that also maybe gets reposted often.
How about something like this?
That does not seem like it would do what you mention but maybe I misunderstood. Should the user themself extract each highlight and write the tweet?
I think it would be best if the user themselves extracted the relevant data (probably by highlighting and clicking enter) and added tweets to the thread in this manner
Still takes time out of their day and does not cost an arm and a leg with hefty AI involved