Utopos - Voices of History

We integrated the subscription screen into the iOS app and we set 7/10 stories as premium and the other three ones free to listen. We didn't invest in any marketing activity, the downloads came organically from the App Store search result. Our initial price was of 3,99€ for the monthly subscription and we know that it's too high because the app is just a prototype with just 10 stories.

I learned React Native thanks to a course by Design+Code and I developed the app again from scratch. At the beginning I asked for some help in UpWork and some devs from India coded the app, but the quality of the code was very low and so I decided to do it from my own.

Utopos remained sleepy into my head for a lot of time. I worked for other projects and startups but nothing interested me so much. So I decided that it was the time to pick up this idea once again, for the last try, also because the audio market industry is growing incredibly fast in these times and a lot of interesting audio products have been successfully launched.

We had an app, we had the first stories and we had the first users. The feedback were great but we needed to be able to produce new contents to retain the users and charge for the service, and our audio content cost a lot to produce, or at least more than we could personally afford. So we looked for angel investors and seed investment, but no one was interested. So I decided to put everything in standby and wait for better times, also because I started to work full-time for another company.

I hired an iOS developer paying him with the money that I gained selling all my bitcoins (yes I know, if I had kept them, now I would be rich!!). The new version of the app integrated an initial system to make some money, there was no possibilities for subscription on iOS at that time, so I sold all the stories for few cent each. Few users spent some money for them, but that model wasn't working very well.

Almost being just a prototype, Apple chose the app among the best of the week and of the month, and this leaded to almost 10.000 downloads for free in that month and the next one. We weren't absolutely ready for that, the stories were free to listen and the user experience wasn't good. Anyway we collected a lot of feedbacks.

It took months to be able to have the first 10 stories, carefully written by 10 young authors, illustrated by 7 illustrators and recorded by two professional voice actors (now one of them is very famous here in Italy and it was an honour to work with him, he is the voice of the main character of Assassin's Creed Black Flag in Italy). I made the app with a real trick using Aquafadas, a publishing platform for InDesign, to build a sort of magazine that seemed an app. It wasn't beautiful and the UX was terrible, but it worked and some users have been able to download and listen to our stories.

It's incredible to think that the idea came to my mind 8 years ago, a lot of time has passed and maybe it's a bit too late now. Anyway I remembered that I had just watched "The Tudors" on TV and I thought that was amazing the amount of things I discover about Henry the VIII and his family just watching and enjoying a tv series. Then I thought about how it could be to live in such age, what did people eat, or think, how did they live their lives. Starting from these kind of questions Utopos began to rise in my mind.