SendToPod

Last week after I finished the first draft of my landing page I have asked my friend on Twitter to roast my landing page, and the feedback are incredibles.

Here are the threads: https://twitter.com/tuancm/status/1542434774211473408

What I do is I focus on asking for "Brutal Feedback" with friends I have strong connection with, setting the expectation here is very important. I don't want people just say nice thing about it.

I even got a video review of my landing page from Gene https://twitter.com/cogentgene/status/1542519345506848770 which so awesome.

Most feedbacks are:

• Positive
  - Design look good
  - The value proposition is clear enough
• Negative:
  - Most people don't know how this works. Most people don't know that podcast app support adding private feeds.
  - Pricing is too complicated, and hard to understand especially the part about hour credits.

So I went back to work on Monday and fix all that.

Lesson learned:

• Get feedback early and often. I wish I did this even earlier. Because at this point my product has not gained as much engagement as I thought it would (I ran closed beta during early development)
• Setting expectation for getting feedback is important.

I finished my MVP with core features including:

• Landing page with basic features:

  • Hero, Features, Introduction video
  • A podcast page http://sendtopod.com/podcast that allows visitors to quickly try out the audio quality of converted articles

• Main functionality:

  • Add an article to your feed.
  • A decent text-to-speech engine that converts long-form articles to a natural sounding narration. I'm quite happy with the result. Personally, I think it's even more natural compared to popular apps like Matter (https://hq.getmatter.app/) or SubStack.

• User authentication

• A private podcast feed for each user

• An Onboarding page to walk users through steps of using Podcast app to subscribe to their personal/private Podcast feed.

So in number, it takes me:

• About 1.5 months to get to this point.
• During this time I alternated between coding and marketing early beta testing as well.
• In term of development, I would say it take about 1 month of full-time development by one person.

Tech-stack:

• Frontend: Javascript, ReactJS, TailwindCSS.
• Backend: NextJS, Supabase, Azure Cloud service, Google Cloud service

My development time was significantly reduced with the help of TailwindCSS. Highly recommended.

In the past, I always wanted to find more things to listen to while driving to work, especially listen to cool long-form tech articles. I tried to use service like Speechify, which is very very expensive and the voice is not that great. And all service have the same problem:

• It requires internet connection while listening
• It takes a lot of steps to convert a web article to an audio file
• It normally require you to open the app while listening to.

I'm a fan of podcast and I think it would be cool to create a service that can solve above pain points while taking advantage of advances feature of podcast:

• You can listen offline, online very easily
• You can resume to listen to where you left off quite easy
• You can pick and choose the order of article you want to listen to
• You can also use advanced features of podcast app like: Voice boost, CarPlay support.

Personally Carplay support is important to me. Because I drive a lot.

That why I created SendToPod.

PS: (Today, July 5th): I'm running beta program in July, if you are interested take a look: