Faire évoluer Listnr vers 20 000 utilisateurs et 600 000 dollars de chiffre d'affaires

Scaling Listnr to 20,000 users and $600k+ in revenue

Its been almost a year since I posted - How we scaled Listnr to $150k in revenue - https://www.listnr.tech/blog/how-we-scaled-listnr-from-0-to-6000-users-and-150k-in-revenue-in-1-year

Exactly 12 months later we’ve achieved a MUCH bigger milestone, we’ve scaled to:

1. 20,000 users
2. $600k in revenue (TTM)
3. 5 million play/month on the Listnr network
4. 4000+ paying users
5. Got nominated for Product Hunt's Golden Kitty awards
6. Got over 2000 upvotes on Product Hunt.

Although things haven’t been super easy and as glamorous as they look - we’ve faced a lot of hiccups along the way, everything from personal health to technical issues to having competitors copy us.

The backstory:

We launched Listnr back in September 2020, when it was only me on the team and 2 other interns.

We launched Listnr as a text-to-podcast tool although we later realized nobody wanted to create a podcast using text-to-speech tech since it was a bit too robotic and didn’t have a lot of personality.

But listnr.tech had another use case with was right in front of us - AI Voiceovers, people were using listnr.tech not to create podcasts but to create voiceovers for their youtube videos.

We found a new use case.

The first thing we did after realizing this changed our positioning.

We changed the copy on our website and started optimizing for keywords with “ai voiceovers” intent.

This was going to be our new positioning.

Although I felt like my vision was incomplete (I still wanted to make podcasting easier - I think podcasting is yet to be democratized, having a podcast is going to be as common as having a youtube channel).

This was when we decided to use existing tech from Listnr.tech and create another tool just focused on making podcasting easier, the new tool would be called Listnr.fm

One platform to help you record, edit, host, distribute and monetize your podcast

Our thesis was already validated from the listnr.tech launch so we jumped right into building Listnr.fm

Building our own recording and editing studio was a lot harder than it looks since all audio and video is recorded locally - simultaneously uploading all media from localStorage to our servers with no loss was a tough nut to crack but thanks to our CTO and the rest of the tech team - we were able to pull it off.

We finally launched listnr.fm in March 2022, and the early response was great!

Listnr.fm was the tool that a lot of users were looking for, having everything you need to create a podcast in one place was an easy sell.

We saw people move to listnr.fm from free solutions like anchor.fm and other popular solutions like libsyn, buzzsprout, and riverside.fm.

This is when we knew that we were onto something

The next big thing we did was to switch to a freemium model for listnr.fm

This helped us acquire users without a lot of friction.

The goal here was not to make the most amount of money per user, but to optimize for the number of podcasts hosted on listnr.fm

Our goal for the next 12 months is to have 100,000 podcasters use Listnr.fm

One of the most important lessons I learned in the last 12 months is the importance of self-awareness and the ability to think critically

To ensure the best outcome for your business you need to think critically and think deeply about possible outcomes, things that could go wrong, and things that could go right.

The only way you can do that well is to be truthful (to yourself) and the only way you can be truthful to yourself and remove all biases is by being self-aware.

There's not a lot of literature online about founder psychology, so if you want to see more content on this, HMU or comment below 😊

That's it for today.

Cheers,
Anan
CEO, Listnr Inc