Hearling

Thanks to building a sustainable business from the beginning, I was able to let Hearling grow on it's own while I pursued a stable income (👋 hi Evernote).

It is a relief to be able to let Hearling run in the background while I take care of myself as a founder and know that it will survive on its own. I attribute this mostly to having incredibly low expenses.

After three months of steady growth, we finally hit 4-digit gross total revenue!

I have started to work on Hearling again, and hopefully more of these updates are coming soon :)

I had never done a Product Hunt launch before. It is bringing in quite a bit more traffic than I anticipated, given that my site is so niche (text-to-speech)

Things I learned:

• probably should have scheduled my launch for ~7am rather than letting it get set to midnight
• should have embedded the "Featured on Product Hunt" into my site as soon as possible
• definitely worth launching on product hunt

At 14 hours in, I have gotten just under 200 users from Product Hunt visiting my site.

This was my initial goal with trying to start my own business. I like to set goals that are low enough that they are almost impossible not to hit! This allows me to set new goals frequently.

At only 3 customers (two yearly subs and one monthly sub!), Hearling has crossed $100 in revenue 🥳

After the MVP launch, I wanted to get a Pro plan out as soon as possible. I had never worked with Stripe Billing before, so I had a lot to learn in front of me.

I had already decided on a pricing model, so most of the work was simply implementing a way to allow customers to subscribe (and cancel) in an automated fashion.

After over two months of working alone, I finally reached a point where I was ready to start taking users. The purpose of the MVP for Hearling was mostly to start bringing in free users and start getting feedback.

At this point, there was no way to even pay me for Hearling. I "launched" primarily by including a banner on my other related website, soundoftext.com, asking users to check out Hearling.

After deciding to work on a successor to soundoftext.com, I wanted to see what people would want from it.

I designed a Google Form with questions picked to tell me whether or not people would actually be willing to pay for a new service in the text-to-speech space. In order to get feedback, I simply added a large banner at the very top of Sound of Text asking users to lend me some of their time.

Rather quickly, I started getting responses, and they were looking positive. More than half of respondents said that the pricing model that I wanted to pitch was the "right price" or a "great deal". Of course, responses are free, so I didn't put too much weight on it.

Within two weeks I had reached over 200 responses. At that point, I had already decided the vision for Hearling, so I closed the survey.

I have been running another website (soundoftext.com) for over 5 years that lets users generate audio from text (aka text-to-speech). It uses the "unofficial" Google Translate API in order to get the audio.

I received an email from a user wishing they could submit up to 100,000 characters. For context, Sound of Text is limited to 200 characters, because that is what Google Translate supports.

I get a lot of feature requests for Sound of Text, but I don't spend much time working on it, mostly because it doesn't make me any money. It has been free, and I plan on leaving it that way.

However, when responding to this email, I simply asked if they would be willing to pay for a feature like they were requesting –and they said yes. This is when I decided to try to monetize the users I had on Sound of Text, by building a successor website.

I was already unemployed, trying to recover from the burnout of a previous job, so I decided to commit some time to working for myself on a new project.