
Show HN: Blogcast – Generate audio versions of your articles - teaguns
https://blogcast.host/
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Evan_Hellmuth
Nice work! This is an impressive product - the voice sounds human and it’s
easy to understand. Allow me to make a few suggestions:

A low effort improvement to the landing page would be to move link to a sample
from the bottom to the top. Make it the first thing a visitor sees. Let the
product speak for itself.

You shoukd charge more too. $.50 on a for-life value add feels like you’re
only capturing a teensy tiny fraction of the value you provide. You’ll
probably have to deal with way fewer support requests too if you charged
~$5/article.

Think about it - someone could record the audio themselves which might take ~1
hour all-in? If their hourly rate is $60, your service is still providing ~$45
of value per use if you increase the price to $5. The customers you want won’t
care about the increased price and it makes it more likely you can continue to
support your users and grow the company far into the future.

Finally, a natural product expansion would be automated distribution to
podcast platforms. IMO you should invest in building this out instead of
supporting the audio embed. A new distribution channel is a lot more valuable
for a blogger than a new feature on their existing channel (think about it: if
you were a blogger would you rather embed a video to go along with each post
or post an accompanying video to your YouTube channel and link to it/link back
to the article from the video?).

Product braindump done. Again, awesome work on the product and good luck
growing the business!

~~~
pergadad
Please do remember global reach. That's quite an amount for someone in
Bulgaria, the Philippines or most of Africa. Yes pricing for Americans/Western
Europe is one good idea - but if it's still profitable why not do open up to a
price range affordable to many?

~~~
Evan_Hellmuth
This is a great point that I hadn’t considered.

If this is a concern, you can do variable pricing based on IP! Though I’d be
willing to bet that at this time the creator is more interested in having a
profitable business than serving every possible customer. That can come later
when cash flow is stable and abundant.

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ipsum2
It doesn't mention it anywhere on the website, but this is using Google's Text
to Speech ([https://cloud.google.com/text-to-
speech/](https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/)). I recognize the voice.

I've used Google's TTS to convert books into audiobooks. Surprisingly
listenable.

~~~
striker_axel
I am building a product on the same. Can you help with your advise?

~~~
ipsum2
What do you need help on? It's just a few lines of calling the Google TTS API.
I can find it when I get off from work.

~~~
striker_axel
I am taking the following steps to convert it in audiobook. 1\. Split Doc into
chapters 2\. Feed the chapter into TTS 3\. Join the audio chapters into the
book.

I working on the solution for 1 and 3. It would be really helpful if you can
provide some suggestions for 1 and 3.

~~~
yorwba
Why do you need to split the chapters? And isn't 3 just concatenation of audio
files?

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fajarsiddiq
Well done! This is made by Miguel, Blogcast is one of the most unique awesome
product, congratulations! much love from Singapore

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middle1
I just featured another product, exactly opposite Blogcast. Giving a vote for
Blogcast as well.

~~~
aylmao
Care to share a link?

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cableshaft
This seems pretty cool. I might give it a try at some point, once I have a
blog again.

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hiei
$.50 per article? "Unlimited article length" \- I'd be concerned about abuse.
Surely you're paying Google for parts of paid usage?

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grwthckrmstr
Love the initiative. I think it will help a lot of bloggers gain additional
distribution with very little effort.

Unfortunately, as a regular listener of podcasts, I just can't bring myself to
listen to TTS voice.

It's great and has advanced leaps and bounds in the past few years. But if
you're used to listening to real human voices on a regular basis, any TTS
speech is an instant nope.

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skilled
I would make the sample available on the homepage. I had to scroll up and down
twice in a row to realise it's in the tabbed FAQ.

~~~
paulmendoza
Yes, the sample should be the top thing. I wanted to hear an article before
anything else.

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ermir
Other people have said it already, but you are charging too little for your
service. You should increase the price by at least 10 times. People use price
as a proxy for value, and things that are priced too low are perceived as low
quality. Increasing the price may even increase sales!

~~~
stunt
Increase the price but give a free tier to users to taste it first.

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alphagrep12345
Google's TTS charges much higher than 0.5$. And you're providing lifetime
hosting too. How does it work? I'm afraid that I'd start using it and at some
point, you'd go bust.

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dupouy
Congrats on shipping! It would be great to listen to a sample with a single
click right on the home page. Also pricing could probably be higher -- sell a
Mercedes, not a Chevrolet...

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obaid
Interesting product. I have tried [http://voicepods.com](http://voicepods.com)
previously and its a neat experience.

Well done!

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pedroborges
Impressive product with very natural voices.

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matthewhartmans
This is such a great idea!! Awesome work!!

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aylmao
This is better than I expected. Actually pretty cool, and would like to see it
more places.

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allwynpfr
Okay, this is awesome!

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sergiomattei
Great product! ️

