- What my product does? It converts web articles into audio (text-to-speech) with quite a natural voice. Then send it to a private podcast feed, that users can listen on almost any podcast app.
- Since I introduced payment feature, about a week ago, No one has paid for it yet. Currently, I have about 300 users signed up, About 200 of them add at least one article (to try out), about 20 - 30 users coming back from times to times
- My major cost comes from TTS API I used to convert articles to audio, roughly 16$/ 1,000,000 characters.
- I can charge based on number of words, or duration of converted audio, but I wanted to make it easier for my users, so I just charge base on number of article. And I also want to make it a peace of mind for users so I use one-off payment basis.
The product sounds really interesting and I just converted my first article. The narration is not bad but haven’t listened enough yet to be able to say if I’d be using it long term but I’ll be playing around with it a bit more for sure.
Have you considered asking your users why they didn’t use the product more? Might be worth finding out what their issues with the service is, might not be cost.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 15.0 ms ] threadSome context:
- What my product does? It converts web articles into audio (text-to-speech) with quite a natural voice. Then send it to a private podcast feed, that users can listen on almost any podcast app.
- Since I introduced payment feature, about a week ago, No one has paid for it yet. Currently, I have about 300 users signed up, About 200 of them add at least one article (to try out), about 20 - 30 users coming back from times to times
- My major cost comes from TTS API I used to convert articles to audio, roughly 16$/ 1,000,000 characters.
- I can charge based on number of words, or duration of converted audio, but I wanted to make it easier for my users, so I just charge base on number of article. And I also want to make it a peace of mind for users so I use one-off payment basis.
Here are link to my product: https://sendtopod.com
Would love to hear your thought on whether this is too expensive. And why do you think so?
To put this on perspective: My closest competitor is https://audioread.com/ and they charging for $5 for 5 HD audio hours.
(Sorry for adding the link directly to the post, I wanted it to show up in "Ask HN" but it's not very obvious to me how )
Have you considered asking your users why they didn’t use the product more? Might be worth finding out what their issues with the service is, might not be cost.
I'd love to hear more feedback once you use it enough.
Haha. Part of me is too scared to ask. But I think that's the only way to know. Yes I'll ask them over the weekends.