Blogpod — My Journey so Far
Hi everyone.
I’m Samuel, a 21-year-old student from India. I am the creator of Blogcast, a platform for micro-podcasts. In this post, I basically talk about my journey so far. I would love to hear your feedback!
How did I get the idea?
One night, after working for 12 hours, I came across an article on Entrepreneur.com. I thought to myself if I could consume all their articles, I would probably become better at entrepreneurship. This was because I have two failed startups to my name so far.
So I started looking for a way to consume articles quickly. Since I listen to a lot of audiobooks, the idea of audio articles was appealing to me. I did find intuitive solutions like Pocket, Speechify, and podcasts. However, what I was looking for was bite-sized content, convenience, quality, and a pinch of human touch. This was how I came up with the idea for Blogcast, a community that loves the idea of sharing and listening to articles. My vision for Blogcast is for it to become a welcoming community where anyone can share their thoughts and listen to insightful blogcasts. ❤️
Building the MVP in four weeks
Since I have to work during the day, I spent the last four weeks working on the app at night, whilst learning to write a mobile app in React Native.
In the first week, I implemented the very first version of the app. It simply rendered a list of audio clips. Users could click on an article and the player would start playing. The app was quite empty. The data was hardcoded.
In the second week, I developed an internal dashboard and a REST API where I could upload the articles. I integrated the app with the backend and I had my Minimum Demoable Product (MDP). It was quite buggy but was enough to demonstrate the concept. I wanted to validate the idea as soon as possible. I then showed the app to a few of my close friends. They loved the idea!
The third week was an interesting week. I was talking to potential users, onboarding authors, and updating the app at the same time. I fixed the critical bugs. Made the app bearable to use. I onboarded around 10 authors. Got permission to publish around 40+ articles in the true crime, lifestyle, and technology genres.
From what I understood, most people wanted a curated playlist based on their interests. So I started reading a book on recommender systems. (For those of you who are curious, it’s called Practical Recommender Systems by Kim Falk.) To implement it, I wanted to know what genres users liked more, so I added authentication, onboarding screens where users could input their interests, and a few other goodies. This is basically how I spent this week; the fourth week.
What’s next?
At the moment, the articles are converted from text-to-speech using Google’s TTS engine. I will soon try to onboard or hire narrators to help with this. I want to implement a lot of things, and just thinking about them overwhelms me! I hope to see Blogcast grow and help people all around the world share and learn new things.
PS: If you would like to check out the app, you can download it from Play Store. Please feel free to leave your feedback in the comments.
Thank you!
