Table of Contents
- Tell us about your product and what inspired you to start it?
- How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?
- Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?
- What are some of the most essential tools that you use for your business?
- What have been some of the biggest insights you've gained since starting your entrepreneurial journey?
- Your recommended books/podcasts/newsletters etc.:
Tell us about your product and what inspired you to start it?
Poddin is a podcast transcription tool. Lightweight, accurate and cheap.
Poddin was actually created initially to solve my own problems. I am a podcast enthusiast, but unfortunately, English is not my native language. So I have more or less trouble listening to some podcasts. So podcast transcription is very important to me.
After trying some transcription tools, I found that they are either too expensive, costing over a dollar per minute, or simply inaccurate, with lots of transcription errors, or have a weird UI/UX (I'm a designer). So I was like: fuck it, I'm gonna build one on my own.
How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?
I haven't reached 50 paid subscribers yet. That's because Poddin is independent and self-funded. This means I don't have much of a marketing budget, or to advertise anything. Of course I've tried Google and reddit ads, but $200 is really a drop in the bucket.
So our growth strategy is more of a word-of-mouth thing. My early three or five subscribers came from my postings on reddit. The later subscribers were just word-of-mouth referrals from them.
The advantage of word of mouth is that it's more solid and has a high conversion rate. But the disadvantage is that growth is slower. That's one of the reasons we haven't reached a very high volume of users.
Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?
PHP, Tailwinds, Laravel, VUE.
I don't really encounter any limitations at the moment. Because Poddin is light and simple enough, we don't have a lot of complicated and fancy features.
But actually, when planning the roadmap for the next quarter, I do feel that some features may be a bit harder to develop.
What are some of the most essential tools that you use for your business?
Ahrefs for seo
Slack for communication
Livechat for customer support
Figma for design
Trello for dev management
These are the most most essential, the other tools can be abandoned haha. But I really can't play without the above.
What have been some of the biggest insights you've gained since starting your entrepreneurial journey?
Some would say it's important to have an audiences. But Poddin's perspective is that it's important to be part of the community.
As I said before, at first I created Poddin just for myself, but after I thought there was a possibility of monetizing the app, I posted it to the reddit podcast community to try to get some views.
The feedback I got was very positive, no one talked shit (although the redditor loves that), they said they were excited to see what Poddin would look like when it was officially released and even gave me some guidance on pricing.
I've even met some influential people in the podcast industry. This gave Poddin some traction at the start, not much but enough to give me the confidence to keep putting resources into it.
The podcast community has given me much more than I have given the podcast community.
Your recommended books/podcasts/newsletters etc.:
Podcast: My First Million hosted by Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
