Pompom

Production studio for podcast-creators.

No Employees
Founders Code
Solo Founder
B2B
B2C
Content
Marketing
Music & Audio
Podcasting
SaaS

Audio editing software is stuck with an old mindset - it's built for music-only creators. Pompom focuses on a new growing niche: audio-creators who record podcasts, audiobooks, etc.

March 9, 2022 Traveling to SF to meet investors /podcast hosts!

I was lucky to be invited for the Pioneer Summit (pioneer.app) in March to SF. I'll be joining 20 other founders from all around the World. We'll enjoy the city and work in the same coworking space on our products.

My goals for that time:

  • meet podcast hosts and show them Pompom. Get them to be my ambassadors!
  • meet investors who are interested in audio/podcasts market

If you're in the area and wanna grab a coffee, DM me!

March 9, 2022 Traveling to SF to meet investors /podcast hosts!

I was lucky to be invited for the Pioneer Summit (pioneer.app) in March to SF. I'll be joining 20 other founders from all around the World. We'll enjoy the city and work in the same coworking space on our products.

My goals for that time:

  • meet podcast hosts and show them Pompom. Get them to be my ambassadors!
  • meet investors who are interested in audio/podcasts market

If you're in the area and wanna grab a coffee, DM me!

March 9, 2022 Traveling to SF to meet investors /podcast hosts!

I was lucky to be invited for the Pioneer Summit (pioneer.app) in March to SF. I'll be joining 20 other founders from all around the World. We'll enjoy the city and work in the same coworking space on our products.

My goals for that time:

  • meet podcast hosts and show them Pompom. Get them to be my ambassadors!
  • meet investors who are interested in audio/podcasts market

If you're in the area and wanna grab a coffee, DM me!

January 9, 2022 $100 MRR

I’ve added a $7/mo subscription to my product in early November. In early December I reached $100 MRR.

It feels great to finally earn some money after putting so much work into this project. I should have done that earlier.

The goal for January is to reach $150+ MRR.
Things will probably slow down for a moment because I'll spend some of my time on hiring Pompom's first employee. But when it's done, I'm sure the revenue growth will accelerate rapidly! :)

November 11, 2021 Raising a pre-seed round.

The time has come when I clearly see that raising money would give Pompom a huge boost.

Retention is steadily growing and I just got a 1st paying customer. Pompom hasn't reached a product-market fit yet but I'm confident it's getting closer and closer. However, having no team really slows me down.

I aim to raise $150k and use it to hire 2-3 employees (dev / design / marketing). I believe a 1-year of runway will be sufficient to get into raising a seed revenue with a solid revenue numbers.

If you folks know anyone who's interested in that space - please let me know, and keep fingers crossed! :)

November 11, 2021 1st paying customer.

I just added a paid subscription to Pompom. One day later, we had our first paying customer! :)

It's exciting news and I hope I'll get to the ramen-profitability within next months.
Pompom was free for over 6 months and I spent that time talking to users and improving the product. I've released over 50 updates to the app. I'm proud of where I am now with this product.

When I started, retention on Week-1 was around 1%. Now it's at 10-15% and improving steadily.

Next goals? Revenue, Revenue, Revenue.

September 27, 2021 Incorporated! Pompom, Inc. - a Delaware company!

Things are getting real. Pompom is now officially incorporated as a Delaware company.
Now I'm just waiting to receive EIN. When I get it, I'm all good to start fundraising.

Over the past few months, I've released dozens of Pompom updates and I feel the product is in a very solid shape. It's a great foundation for future innovations. Plus, I get more and more emails from users that they love the app so it makes me very optimistic about the future.

What are the next steps?
• Monetization - introduce Pro plan and get first revenue.
• Raise a seed round and accelerate development

August 9, 2021 Pompom launched on iPadOS

Pompom - an audio editing app is finally available on iPad!
Here's a link to download:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pompom-podcasting-studio/id1555726764

Pompom was originally built for macOS and it had some complicated interactions that were sometimes a challenge to support on a touchscreen. Nevertheless, I think I did a fairly good job :)

As for the technical struggles - although I can't say it was easy, it was for sure simplified thanks to using Apple's new UI framework - SwiftUI.

June 29, 2021 280 WAU. Retention is increasing.

• 280 weekly active users
• Retention slowly goes up. At the beginning it was about 2% on Week 1. Now it's about 9% :)
• One of the user reached out to me and offered to translate the app into German! This is absolutely amazing! :)))

So what's next?
• macOS Monterey and iOS 15 are coming! It's a great news for me because it gets lots of improvements in tech I use: SwiftUI / Speech recognition / Text editing / etc. I hope to implement many of the new features offered by new systems.

Dreams?
YC maybe? Raising a round and building great team here in Kraków? Will see...

May 25, 2021 Pompom weekly update - +170 users, 6 app updates

Weekly update:
• +170 users
• Now total of 870 users signed up
• I'll switch to tracking MAU next month.
• 6 app updates (that's almost one update per day! :))

I'm really happy that some of the users are starting to reach out to me. Some of them offer help, others report bugs etc. I treat is as a subtle product validation.

Hustles:
• Getting a hear around all the audio formats and codecs is damn hard. I started using FFMPEG library for some of the audio processing.
• Free On-Mac Transcription is a big value for users but its quality is far from perfect. I wonder how could I improve it? Are there any better ML models I could get for a fair price?

About

Audio editing software is stuck with an old mindset - it's built for music-only creators. Pompom focuses on a new growing niche: audio-creators who record podcasts, audiobooks, etc.