I passed The Great Filter of Startups by building a product that I use everyday!
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Now, for my latest product that I just launched – ytpodcast: The easiest way to convert YouTube channels to podcast.
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This is exactly what Eating your own dog food means.
How you guys are doing? are you guys building for an [...word removed] person or for a real one? 👀
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Interesting you posted this today, as I woke up this morning thinking EXACTLY the same thing. My project is a CRM application without cloud backend (produktyf.com), and I have been using it since early dev release for my own personal and business relationship and note taking exclusively. This is the only way to truly design something that is actually usable because you can best think about how to improve it if you struggle yourself with it on day to day basis. Good post and good luck!
That's it! It's nice to see others thinking it as well.
Nice product. I wanted to build the same thing but don't know how.
Could I use this to auto build RSS of a channel and host with you? I've seen a similar service but pricing was too high for me.
Hi there! I hope you're doing well. I would like to let you know that YTPodcast now allows it. Take a look: https://ytpodcast.com.
Jack, send me an email with a list of features you would like to see on ytpodcast, and I'll build them. My email address is alfonmga at icloud.com. Don't worry about the price of the service btw.
Yes, you can do that at this moment on ytpodcast. Auto-generated RSS URL is available for any YouTube channel. I'm planning to add extra features for creators very soon. Pricing for these extra creator features will be super affordable too.
Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t imagine building a product that I wouldn’t at least use myself haha glad it’s working for you though!
Watched your promo video for the failed SaaS attempt—seems like you put substantial effort into that. Did you do user testing for it? What was the feedback?
Anyway, I like your newest product ytpodcast! Though, I can’t say I’ll use it. I joke that I read podcasts instead of listening to them (I read 15 episodes of a show before actually listening to one). Maybe some day
To be honest I shut it down too soon. After 4-6 months of dev work on it (+10 core features, i18n aka internationalization in two languages, UI design, UX optimized, SEO..etc) I was exhausted. Besides that I didn't have intrinsic motivation in the problem that the product was solving to continue futher and I didn't even know anyone interested on it or how to promote it without spending thousands of dollars. It was a great product and at that time it was x10 times better than his main competitor PhoneWagon (recently acquired by CallRail) this guys were doing around $1MM ARR. I learned a ton of stuff building it, so it's not that bad.
Awesome product! I'm bookmarking it for the next time I need to download podcasts to listen to on a trip. I wholeheartedly believe that solving your own problem is the best way to come up with startup ideas.
I noticed you've got an status page + monitoring with Upptime. As someone who's working on a similar uptime monitoring product (to solve my own problem), I'm wondering why you chose Upptime and what your experience has been with it?
Thanks! I have chosen Upptime because it's open source and this means that I have full control of the source code. Also I don't need to pay anything because it's hosted on GitHub (https://github.com/ytpodcast/status). I would not use Upptime for a critical service or until I have a lot of traffic on ytpodcast though (I would go with PagerDuty).
Love that approach, few months ago I was on travel I found myself searching for phone hotlines everyday .. thought others might be doing the same I collected them on one site and in a couple of month I'm receiving 40k/month hits from google and growing.
I like your product by the way, I'm using an app called newpipe for similar purpose will give ytpodcast a try as well.
Wow amazing, it's very inspiring! About newpipe, it looks like a nice android app but it's not exactly like ytpodcast so it's cool to see other softwares in this ecosystem :)
Awesome!
Awesome perspective, I also see the value in it (I have youtube premium though).
YouTube premium is nice, but for listen it can't beat your loved podcast app features (sleep timer, Apple Watch integration...etc) ☺️
AWESOME. I found the video I wanted, entered it into the box on your homepage, two clicks later it's playing in my podcast app on my MacBook. Just checked my iPhone and its there too. Too easy man, nice work.
Then I googled "convert YouTube to podcast" -- there's nothing really. Nice.
A little confusion about the connection between the Library and Listen Later tabs - Learned that I had to recreate the podcast from the video to get it into my listen later. Would be nice if I could click the podcast in library and select "add to listen later" or some such thing. Just a thought.
Either way, I've got it bookmarked, and will share with the other devs at work. Searching for podcasts is trash on most apps, but video search on YouTube is great, especially when looking for dev/tech related content.
Also, happy to say I'm "dogfooding" my current project www.fundkit.io, and posted about it here if you want to take a look!
Thanks a lot for this review Casey, you made my day!
I'll add an option for this in the next hours, thanks for making ytpodcast better ❤️
Ohh, I like recurring investment services. I have been there too. One of my failed SaaS business in 2016/2017 was DCABot.io – Automatic dollar cost averaging bitcoin on any crypto exchange. I have been in the same boat like you -- dealing with exchanges integrations..etc I wish you better luck than me, my timing was very bad, now in 2021 I'm sure you can get traction/users easier as crypto is mainstream this days.
Hey @fundkitco I just finished coding the improvement you mentioned. Check out this demo video:
https://www.loom.com/share/3d1b6e6b12004b8aad145bfe0ccc5678
That’s exactly what I was talking about. Just tried it, works great! Thanks!
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Love your story! I have a similar one, I built my product for solving a personal daily problem, now I can't live without It, all features It has was designed for me, at least the core ones, then with some feedback from other users I have added new features, but I mean... If you solved a problem for yourself, there will be some people with a similar situation, those will become your users!
Great to hear Victor! thanks for sharing.