Validate Monetisation Strategy

Hey Indie Hackers!

I was hoping to get some feedback on a monetisation strategy that we’re thinking about for our upcoming SaaS. We’re currently in the phase of validating/testing the market, and only have a landing page.

The service itself is called Narrator, and essentially is an “Audible for articles”. An app that will allow people to narrate online articles, so that other users can have the option to listen to an article, rather than having to read it. Great for people who can’t find the time to sit and dedicate their attention to reading something, they can instead listen to it while commuting, working out, etc. This isn’t AI, and we’re specifically leaning into the fact that it isn’t AI, it’s real humans, using real human voices, adding real human emotion to the audio.

The strategy that we’ve got planned is the following:

Free accounts will occasionally hear an ad before a narration plays, and will be served lower-quality audio
Paid accounts will remove ads and also be served higher quality audio feed
Potential revenue for referrals to the original website with the article, when/if traffic gets to a noticeable level
Potential fee for integration into a website, allowing the website to style the integration to their liking, and to allow people to listen to an article while staying on their site, and not popping over to the Narrator app

Further to this, the idea in the long term is to profit share:

With the people who create narrations, like the OG YouTube Partner Program, whereby if people are listening to a users’ narrations, they’ll get a cut of the profits from either ads that are heard before their narrations or from the subscription fee that paid users pay
With the website/blog/online space that the original article appears on

We think this is an alright model, but we’re admittedly a little naive about what we could/should do to get the most out of this product.

Hoping to hear some feedback on that approach, or whether we should target a different strategy.

Thanks!