TalkNotes
Turn your voice memos into clear content fast
Talknotes.io reached $100 MRR, yay!
Sure, it is ridiculous compared to other big apps, but I’m proud of it!
It's a necessary step toward something bigger.
Here is how I did it:
- First, I focused on having the lowest possible friction at launch.
I only added a one-time payment (one year pass), with the cheapest price I could. - The landing page required only one click to purchase. No signups, no redirect, just one click that sends you to Stripe.
- I spammed every directory I could find to get some traffic. I ended up getting featured in a few media & a huge telegram channel that got me consistent traffic (see my previous post in my “Highlights” tab)
- I only focused on getting more traffic until I got consistently 2-3 sales every day. 💸
Then, I switched from one-time payments to a subscription model and raised the prices.
Sales took a massive hit from that, from $150/day to $0 🥲
But it was necessary to grow the app. Recovery is super slow, but now I have recurring revenues.
💡 The strategy is to start with as little friction as possible to test the market, and push more to see how far you can go until you find the “balance point” between volume & price
My goal is to reach $1000 MRR within the next 6 months.
Going to add more channels to bring traffic, add a new plan based on requested features, and just try a bunch of things.
As always, I'll post (almost) everything publicly.
The (bad) behind the scenes :
Those last few weeks were the hardest since I started my Indie-making journey. 😵💫
I got badly depressed by the lack of progress after removing one-time payments.
There were days I didn't even want to get out of bed because it felt like crap 🥲
The #1 thing that helps me go through it is to do at least ONE little thing per day:
Write one post, add one tiny feature or fix one bug.
I couldn't focus more than that, so the rest of the time I played video games with indie hacker podcasts in the background.
I constantly doubted, not knowing if I should keep going or move on to another project.
Shipping lots of products as I did is an amazing experience to learn & test the market, but I want to try something different.
I'll see how far I can grow this little app starting from zero 😁
Still trying to grow my new app to transcribe audio to text content
Sales are nice, but I was selling a one-year pass only, meaning that after 1 year, I would have nothing again. Since I'm playing long-term here, I decided to switch to a subscription model (since I have high costs, it also make sense financially).
I first tried to offer a free plan + upgrade, but almost no one upgraded, so I directly removed the free plan and put the paywall popup directly on the landing page
It slowed down sales A LOT compared to the yearly pass, but now I get some recurring $, so I think it will be worth it in the long run.
Next goal: Reach $100 MRR
I made $1500 with TalkNotes by simply listing the app on various startup directories.
Process is simple: find directories, fill out forms, and pay if the site had a high domain authority.
Most traffic comes from these directories, but it's not sustainable in the long term.
I also collected valuable user feedback through automated welcome emails, which helped shape upcoming features.
Plans for September = releasing top-requested features, introducing a subscription model, and launching on ProductHunt.
Blog version: https://talknotes.io/blog/reached-1500-revenues
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Amazing work! As someone looking to build something new, was curious about the initial launch, before you started to promote it on directories, did you work with an initial set of beta users, and if so how many and for how long (and how did you find them), while building this out?
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No beta, I made the first version of the app in a couple of days then launched
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Congrats on the earnings!
One UX tip for your landing page: I expected that clicking on your logo would take me to the homepage, but nothing happens.
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Thanks! 😄
And yes, good catch, I will fix that
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Why would that not be sustainable? Can't you be active in communities related to those?
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Because those are repertories, not communities, so they promote you once then it dies out
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Yea i get they promote you once, you get an initial bump. But if you continually engage with the right communities, that initial bump will take you to a higher level than before that is sustainable.
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Yeah, but then it's a different strategy, it's not "posting on repertories" anymore :)
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My new app is live: http://TalkNotes.io 🤩
🎙️ Record yourself & turn your voice into organized content
The AI will transcribe & convert your voice into the kind of content you want (clean transcript, list, video script, etc...) 🤖
I got the idea when I tried to write content using the Google Docs transcription tool... but it was terrible 😭
So I made my own tool to help me with that.
📔 It's perfect for recording your thoughts, writing a blog without typing everything or just making a recap of your day
I would love to hear your feedback about it!
You can access it here 👉 http://talknotes.io
If the app works, I plan to make a Desktop app, Chrome extension, and maybe a mobile app.
Super excited about this little app!😁
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Hey Nico! 👋
Well done. I'm actually recording this feedback with your own tool. I like the user interface, very clean, very understandable, it's pretty cool.
Maybe one little advice is that when you change the style, there is a pop-up that is a bit too small. It could be nice to use more space depending on the screen size available.
Other than that, that seems to be really cool.
Wondering about the pricing though.
What are you using in the background? I bet it's the amazing Whisper AI 🔥
Cheers from 🇨🇭
– R
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Dear Nico i have successfully created note with it. Here it is:
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Oh, amazing!
I can't access your notes, but I'll add a share option!
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I just tried it out. Love that you have a fully featured demo on the homepage without requiring any sign-ups!
Wow that's a really inspiring story Nico, thanks for sharing! Really cool to see how someone built something from scratch and hit a nice milestone :) I was just wondering how did you do market validation for a product like TalkNotes before launching or development?