The call discusses the challenges and strategies for promoting two products: Hello Notes and Cast A Lot. The speaker reflects on the difficulty of finding an audience in a crowded online space and emphasizes the need to engage with communities discussing competitors. Hello Notes is designed to avoid apps and subscriptions, targeting users who prefer minimal tech solutions. Cast A Lot aims to help users manage podcast consumption by providing summaries via email. The speaker plans to explore communities like Reddit and Hacker News to find potential users and create a landing page for Cast A Lot to gauge interest and possibly collect initial funding.
This post is entitled I want to be where the people Are. So thank you, Ariel.
I haven't posted in a while for two reasons. I haven't found my cadence. I often think I have a lot of things to say until you realize putting yourself on a regiment, you really don't have lot of things to say all the time. So that's the first reason. The other reason is I forgot what the other reason was.
But we're gonna try to pick this back up. Holidays are over. It's time to get back to work. So when I. I still do.
I have a small microgreens business and one of the things that I had to do was to make sure I had a good product was I went to where the people were. People were, in this case the farmers markets. Problem with the Internet is that it's huge. There's a lot of noise, makes it difficult to find the signal. So let's see.
For hello notes, it's going to be difficult to find where the people are. And why we want to find where the people are is what we want to go and see what people are talking about and see if we can solve their problem, get involved in the conversation. We need to organically grow this traffic. We don't have a social media following. Again, our LinkedIn connections are, let's say, close enough to zero to be zero.
And therefore traffic is not going to be high. And therefore opportunities are not going to be high. So with that said hello Notes, it's going to be a little bit more difficult.
So how are we going to approach finding an audience for hello Notes? Well, I know for me it was I wanted something to where I could do exactly what I'm doing now, which is record my stream of consciousness, to transcribe it and give me the gist. The thing is, is that as a technologist, I am burnt out on apps and I am burnt out on subscriptions. So the two big things for me was to not have an app and to not have a subscription. And that's what I built hello notes around.
Those were the requirements that I assembled the technology around. This is in contrast to something, for example, like Wave, which has an app, which has a subscription. Most of the other transcription applications as well have, let's say, browser extensions for things like Otter, AI and as well as subscriptions. So I think the best methodology at this moment, we can go find a community that doesn't want apps and doesn't want subscriptions. But the problem is, do they want transcription software?
The best methodology may be at this moment as I'm thinking about this, to look for where posts were talking about competitors, because this is a direct. I mean, there's a lot of competition in this market. That's okay. We are doing something different. So let's go look at competitors, let's go see where they're talking, and let's go get involved in that conversation and put ourselves up as a differentiator or having a different set of features and a different agenda, a different set of priorities.
The other thing is, I'm also going to talk about this as well now. It's early, but it's fine. We're trying to get in this methodology of too early. There's never too early. Just put stuff out there.
It's never going to be as right as you want it to be. So I believe the next product that I'm going to start working on is something I call Cast A Lot. Now, the problem that Cast A Lot is attempting to solve is that I have a lot of podcasts which include, by the way, YouTube videos that I want to consume. But problem is, I work from home and I do not listen to podcasts while I'm writing software because it distracts me mentally. So when I'm the only time I listen to them is when I'm driving.
So that doesn't happen very often, only happens when I'm doing deliveries of microgreens to restaurants. So at the same token, I do want to still consume a lot of these content creators content. I just don't want to spend the time figuring out what I want to consume. So what I do now is I'll go to the different creators pages and I'll go look through videos that are new. I'll maybe do this once a week, by the way.
You'll see, you'll see the the feature set slowly develop. As I talk about this, the problem is I don't know what it is, what video I'm going to enjoy. There's only so many, so I have to pick and choose. So Cast A Lot is going to be minimum tech again. So in this time we're going to use email.
The idea is you could share a podcast with a service specific episode. Let's say the service would find out the channel, we'll just use that terminology and would quote, unquote, make a subscription for you. Every time a new episode comes up, the service grabs the audio, transcribes it and gives you a summary. So, and then you get one weekly email. Let's say it's Monday morning and that on Monday morning you will get an email that shows you the list of episodes for the channels that you have subscribed to, quote unquote subscribed and what the descriptions for those episodes are.
The title as well, obviously, as well as a link to that episode so you can listen to it. And the goal here is to give you the ability to pick and choose which episodes of content creators that you like to spend your time on because not all of them are going to be something that you care about. The goal of hoping to save you time. Now again, the topic of this blog post was I want to be where the people are. So here's what I'm going to do with trying to find the audience for Cast A Lot.
We're going to go to places like Reddit, Hacker News and we're going to do a search and we're going to say I don't have enough time for podcasts, let's say as just a question and see what pops up. And we're going to tweak that question as well. Could be podcast summarization, these sorts of things. We want to find communities and we want to jump in and we want to reply to those communities. I have the same problem.
Here's what I use. Etc. Etc. Etc. Now before I go do this, or maybe while I'm doing it, I also want to create a landing page for castleot.
I need a place. This is the first product, right? We need a landing page that allows us to qualify a lead. We want to collect, we want the user to turn over something. My first goal with Cast A Lot is that I'm going to attempt to get people to turn over money.
I don't know how much and I don't know what they will get in return. But the goal is, let's say for example, the first individuals of certain amounts. Let's say it's the first 100 that give us $39. We'll get a 20% lifetime discount. Now I don't know what that means because I don't know how I want to bill for this.
My gut tells me usage based billing. Remember I hate subscriptions. So let's say it's a dollar an hour. I'm throwing numbers out here. I have no idea what this is going to cost.
So, so there's the, the. The two experiments with hello Notes. We're going to go, we're going to go follow competitors. So we have a clear list of competitors that I've collected that are doing transcription software because it's pretty easy to do with the the LLMs nowadays. We're going to go interact with our competitors products or the people talking about our competitors.
On the other side, we have this new product that has a clear and personal problem that we are attempting to solve. And we're going to go find other people who have that same problem. Because I've talked with, let's say, a handful of friends and they all said, yes, we have that problem as well. Everybody's time is limited, There's a whole lot of content out there, but we know it's a problem. We just have to find the community and we've talked to them and we have to give them the product.
I think that's going to wrap it up for this post. Till next time.
