TextReads
Turn any article into audio, instantly.
It's been a quieter few weeks on the feature front, but life got busy. I haven't really developed any new features apart from bug fixes here and there. Still, some good things happened: I picked up several quality backlinks after other founders reached out asking me to list textreads.com in their directories.
I also got a nice surprise this week. A few months ago, I submitted a self-nomination for Chrome Web Store's Featured badge, then pretty much forgot about it. After almost 3 months, I finally got the badge. 🎉
This led to a spike in Chrome installs for my extension. I think it also brings a sense of trust to users, and it likely helped land my first 2 paying subscribers!
When I received the first transaction email on my first subscriber, that felt unreal. I'm very glad that 2 people thought that my MVP was worth paying for. This provided a tremendous feeling of validation.
I've just shipped a new update with improvements and bug fixes. Life's calmed down now, so I'm back to a regular shipping rhythm. Next up: streamlining the UX over the coming weeks.
Till next time!
This project started out to scratch my own itch. I love reading long articles, but screen fatigue makes it brutal. So I built a Chrome extension that reads them aloud for me.
I started small, just solving the problem for me, explored several Text-to-Speech models with a rough prototype. But I kept reaching for it daily, so I kept adding things:
A floating player to control speed and switch voices.
Word and sentence highlighting so I never lose sight of what's being read.
Clicking any sentence to jump straight to it.
Each feature was small, but together it started feeling like a real product. My background is in software engineering, so this part felt natural. That part was fun.
Then I tried to actually launch it. I had no idea how much I didn't know:
Registering a trading name
Getting a virtual business address
Setting up a support number and email
Picking a merchant of record
Writing Privacy Policy and Terms of Service pages
None of that is hard in hindsight, but each one was a new rabbit hole I didn't expect. This took way longer than building the product itself.
In hindsight, this process opened my eyes on how a product is built overall.
Now I'm learning marketing, distribution, and sales from scratch. It's gonna be a fun learning experience for me and IndieHackers seem to be a great resource to learn everything about growing your own product.
If you've been down this road, I'd love to hear what you wish you knew earlier.
Check out the demo in my landing page at https://textreads.com. You can also try it out yourself by installing it from the Chrome Web Store.
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