Thoughts on personalised podcast concept

In general, I think reducing signal-to-noise is a nice-to-have for most folks. In other words, it's not intense enough to become a business that can sustain a reasonable lifestyle in a developed country (but ymmv). Speaking from personal experience working on the reverse: podcast -> text summaries. Have a handful of paying users, but flat/no growth on this one. Would work on other ideas if you have any others.

EDIT: we also initially launched on Telegram. Most of your market is going to be from EU/US and the penetration for telegram there is not great. If you are going to work on this, do NOT use Telegram as the main medium/platform.

Anything that saves time is usually a good idea tbh. Not really sure about the appeal to a wide audience as you mentioned it. I think it's really .. pretty niche. It really depends on how you market the product, as you start out. If I look around me, I know no-one that uses Telegram (or groups therefor) on a daily basis. And I know mostly business/founder types of peeps. But that's just my perspective.

One other thing to think about is revenue. If you're doing this a passion/learning project, go4it. You can always learn a lot of stuff from anything new you build. Otherwise, just write down how you would monetize it from the get-go. Doesn't mean it's a paid product form day 1, but you need to imagine a clear, winnable scenario where someone would see value in paying for it, may it be 10 cents or 5 bucks/mo.

Curious if you ever built anything regarding this idea? Have been pondering something similar myself.

Sounds like a good idea but like @iantanwx mentioned, this is certainly not a "burning pain" problem so your number 1 competition you are gonna have a really hard time beating is the status quo.

Both user acquisition and retention are gonna be hard to nail.

You may want to narrow your use-case to a weirdly specific niche who would care A LOT about this so you can have a chance to win.

Love the idea; the key will be the quality of execution. My friend has been working on something similar (not via Telegram, though). It fell short because they couldn't perfect the personalized ranking algorithm, which, to put it mildly, is a challenging problem. Additionally, ensuring voice streaming sounds natural without latency will be crucial. I'm excited to hear about your next steps, so please keep us updated!

Seems like a good idea to me. If you can build a quick demo, then that might be a good next step. Then use it for yourself, see if you love it. For this one I think it'll be one of those ideas where if it's poorly executed no one will want it, and if it's well executed many people will want it. So don't get confused if you build a v1 and no one likes it. Therefore, probably the easiest is to start by building it just for yourself.

Then notice - do you use it every day? Do you use it more over time? Or, is it fun for a few days, and then the novelty wears off and you stop using it? That'll tell you a lot about the level of promise it has.

Some random thoughts.

1. When thinking about ideas I think validating early is a good idea. With most ideas the primary thing to validate is "Will anyone want this?" For this idea it's safe to assume that people want this. The real question is "Can the product be built in a usable way?" So I think it's really important to validate that.

A great user experience would be really important. So figure that out before trying to get a lot of users IMHO.

2. Pocket has done an audio version of the articles that a user saves. It sort of works, but not great.

3. I don't use Telegram. I think being able to save links or tag links that are tweeted makes sense.

Hey, first time commenter here.
I honestly like the idea, especially as since Covid the podcast market got a serious boost. So I guess there is a lot of potential there. But I would not focus on telegram (too small niche), I would build a channel agnostic platform, maybe to sum up my RSS feeds / tweets / blog posts. I like to listen to podcasts while in the car (e.g. work commute), but I have to decide which one to listen to since my time is limited. I work with a playlist but it just gets fuller. A personal summary of the most interesting topics of my subscribed podcasts would also be an interesting feature.

But keep in mind that one of the reasons why podcasts are so successful is that level of intimacy. You are so near to someone, almost sitting in their ear. A automated podcast has to be very realistic, very human-like. With AI this is surely possible already.

Wish you all the best for you idea, just put out a quick prototype and validate your idea in the real world!

I’ve not used Telegram before but I do think summarization of information is an asset especially for those that want to be made aware but not interested in deep diving. A question that come to mind. How competitive is this space already? Hyper-customization is one thing but there might be an opportunity for something else to highlight addition benefit. An audible daily digest is an idea worth exploring.

So you are trying to build a bot that searches top stories, by categories, inside a telegram channel and saves a 5 minute podcast at the end.

Maybe this is good for:
notime to waste people
blind people

Maybe this is not so good for:
people that like to read
people that like to go to a store and read newspapers headlines

i wish you idea/project/app best of luck

Pedro

Even after so much overwhelming content online, some users still prefer long form content (if they wouldn't these long podcasts of hours wouldn't existed).

But yes, a lot of users still prefer content in short form, so this should work!
Maybe you could also add a paid chat functionality where a user can ask questions regarding the content that you are summarizing.

I think this sounds great.

Check out recapit.xyz.
They're doing something similar to what you have in mind.