Is there product market fit?

It's all well and good me having this problem but do more people share this same issue? I reached out to other non-fiction audiobook enthusiasts in my circle and asked them if they experience any problems. It was really important to not lead with “Hey, do you like this solution” as it just biases the answer that you get.

Instead I simply asked them about how they listened to audiobooks and guided the conversations subtly towards the topic without biassing.

5 replies, 3 expressed a similar annoyance with the same problem.
Hmmm… It seems I may be onto something.

I took to reddit and found multiple conversations expressing frustrating at the same thing. I also reviewed keyword volume in SEMrush which gave me a stronger indication that this was a wider problem.

Creating the landing page

Before writing a line of code I promised myself I would get email signups of people ready to try the software.

So now it was time to don the headphones (high octane drum and bass for x10 design speed) and get to work copywriting, designing and building a mini brand and landing page.

It was an intense, caffeine fuelled frenzy but at the end of the day I had a landing page.
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You can view the landing page here

As you can see, the landing page was focussed on speaking to the visitors problems and how we could solve them, rather than focussing on features

Day two done.

Let's get some customers

Now I don’t profess to be an expert in Facebook ads but there nothing like just getting stuck in and figuring it out. My plan was to run ads to my new landing page where interested visitors would leave their email address.

I whipped up a few ads that captured the essence of what the product could do for potential customers. I targeted people who interacted with book groups. Im sure theres better targeting I could of done but I was against that clock so that was my best attempt.

Here are the ads that I used.

I gave myself £100 budget, scheduled the ad and waited impatiently like a kid at 5am on Christmas eve.

To my surprise after 7 days I had 83 signups. Obviously this was only a signal of interest rather than an actual conversion, but my CPA was around £1.20. Not bad.

I was over the moon that it had worked. I had a validated idea.
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Ok now it’s time to build

Heres where the pain hits.

So i jump into my code editor to start creating the idea.

Spotify API is linked up and we are capturing bookmarks. Good start.

Next for Audible and Apple podcast. The 2 biggest by market share. Both APIs were super restrictive. No ability to see what the user is playing or add a bookmark. With the 2 biggest providers out of the picture, I had to go back to the drawing board and explore other options.
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• Just launching with Spotify.
This was such a small market that it likely wouldn’t be worth the time to build the solution

• A listener function that is constantly collecting audio.
Nope, IOS was strongly against this for privacy reasons. Fair enough.

• A physical bluetooth device that you connect to an it records audio input.
This felt like I was losing to convenience that I was looking for. I would never remember to always have this thing connected.

I started to realise why competitors ended up creating their own podcast platform instead of being a standalone tool.
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What I learnt