Decided to Commit

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.