How an independent app developer is building his company with NO outside funding

How successful can an independent app developer get?

Joining me today is Winston Chen. He is the founder of Voice Dream which makes an IOS text to speech reader for students and adults with difficulties reading visually.

He did it with no outside funding and he’s actually, get this, charging for his app.

Winston Chen

Winston Chen

Voice Dream Reader

Winston Chen is the founder of Voice Dream, an iOS text-to-speech reader for students and adults with difficulties reading visually.

 

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Full Interview Transcript

Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I am the founder of Mixergy.com which as you know by now, home of the ambitious upstart and speaking of, I’ve got an entrepreneur for you who is kind of like an upstart. A guy who is an independent app developer who started building his own mobile app and now is continuing to build up a company around that. My big question for this interview is how successful can that strategy get an entrepreneur who is doing it on his own and has no outside funding and is actually, get this, charging for his app.

Joining me today is Winston Chen. He is the founder of Voice Dream which makes a currently IOS text to speech reader for students and adults with difficulties reading visually. Actually, you know what, I’m now even excited about the way we explain what that is. He has an app that will read text to you. PDFs, text, things that you save in Pocket or Instapaper, etc. and he and I were talking before the interview started about how excited I am that I can actually listen to some articles that I find online or PDF’s while I run and that’s what the app does. Winston, welcome to Mixergy.

Winston: Thanks for having me.

Andrew: You know, before we get into this, the app, I want to get a sense of what your life was life before. It wasn’t a horrible life before you were an entrepreneur but you were stuck in a specific Microsoft product that you weren’t enthused about. What was the Microsoft product that you felt trapped in?

Winston: Powerpoint.

Andrew: Powerpoint.

Winston: I’m sure a lot of viewers can relate to that. I feel like Powerpoint is my companion. I am either preparing something in Powerpoint, mixing slides in Powerpoint, or giving a presentation in Powerpoint.

Andrew: What was the company and what were you doing there?

Winston: The name of the company is Kalido. It’s a data warehouse where I guess, now days, it would be called a big data company. I was the chief technology officer. I was more on the customer side so I spent a lot of time talking to customers, talking to prospects, presenting in conferences and so on.

Andrew: What is so bad about being trapped in Powerpoint?

Winston: Well, I guess the main thing is it didn’t fulfill a desire to create something. I feel like, as you do moving objects in Powerpoint, you realize that you are just sort of mixing and creating concepts. You are dealing with concepts that are often not grounded in the [out] and that was definitely a big issue. And then, of course, as you put together a presentation, everybody has a point of view and that goes with working in a company, with politics, of course. And I guess the biggest thing was I feel like my creativity wasn’t being fully exercised.

Andrew: Meanwhile, how exciting is it that you’ve got this app that before we even started talking about the interview I just had to tell you about how excited I was about the app. About how I was going to use it for running and what I did playing with it before we got started. It’s got to feel cool, doesn’t it, to actually see someone use a product that you dreamed of, that you created, that you put out there in the world?

Winston: Yes. The most satisfying thing in the world is getting emails from customers. Some of the emails would say “First of all, let me tell you, I love your product. Your product has changed my life”. Just yesterday I saw a tweet from a customer that says “You know, I just want to say, Voice Dream Readers, freaking awesome”. That is all. I spent many years in software. I never had customers that said I love your product. That makes me feel really good.

Andrew: Yes and it’s nice now that as a mobile app creator, you are noticing more and more people who have smart phones, obviously, who get excited about the products on their smart phones. Let’s talk about how you got here. One of the steps along this path was a Ted video that opened your eyes to something. What was the Ted talk that did that for you?

Winston: Well, the Ted talk was given by a well-known graphic designer in New York City. So his idea is that, and it is a really irresistible idea. He says that we spend 20 years in school, then we spend about 40 or 45 years of our lives working and then we retire. And he said, why don’t we take five years out of retirement and spread them throughout our working lives. Why wait to do the thing you that you really want to do until you are mentally and physically past your prime? So he shuts down his firm once every seven years and he goes somewhere and you talk about going to Bali. And they just do, he just do whatever he wants. And mainly to do creative things that normal designer-client relationships wouldn’t commit him to do. So that is a way to rejuvenate his creativity.

Andrew: So I noticed this person who creates inspirational videos here on Mixergy, there’s people who listen to then and they just get inspired, and other people who listen to them and get inspired and just do something about it. Did you end up taking a retirement year?

Winston: Yes, I took a year off. I saw the video several years before we actually did it. It was one of those things were, you know, you only hear an idea. And it says: I want to do it, and do it now. You know, and it sort of sits in the back of your head, almost waiting for the right opportunity to kind of grow out and blossom. And the right opportunity came when I was near my ten year anniversary at Collido, the last company, and I thought it was the right time to do something else. And I wasn’t sure what it was I wanted to do, so that idea started blinking, so I said. “Okay, now is that time to take that year off.”

Andrew: Where did you go?

Winston: We went to a small island near in Norway just north of the Arctic Circle with a population of 180.

Andrew: Wow.

Winston: And we went there before ever setting foot on the island.

Andrew: Why did you pick that place?

Winston: My wife is Norwegian, so in some way it makes sense although she never lived in a remote place like that. One picture sold me on the island. It was a picture from the peak on the island that looks over, you know, countless islands, scattered around the main island with beaches that looks like you’re in the tropics. And I said that a place that looks that beautiful can’t be all bad. Then my wife found that the school there was looking for a teacher, and she’s a teacher by profession, so she said, “I’m in”.

Andrew: Oh, wow, that’s great.

Winston: Quickly, from an idea to execution, it took all about, you know, four months.

Andrew: What was the best thing about being there?

Winston: You know I spent the first couple of months there while the sun was shining most of the time, being in the arctic. I spent those months hiking, fishing. I spent a lot of time with my children. That was really important. I had these days that I would call “Daddy Days”, where I would spend half a day with the one of my two children, and another half a day in the week with the other child. It was great, because I got to know them really well on a one on one level, something that most parents don’t have the opportunity to do and certainly something I did not do when I was working fulltime.

Andrew: How did being away help you come up with the idea for the business that we are here to talk about today?

Winston: See, I knew during the year away that I was going to do some thinking about what I was going to do next. It involved a startup of some kind. But I didn’t have any lead particular. I wasn’t thinking about that: Okay during the year off I’m going to go off and build something because it had been a long time since I wrote any code. So what got me going was when it got dark in the arctic. You know, ten o’ clock in the morning was when the sky was starting getting bright, by the time its three PM its pitch dark. I couldn’t fish anymore, I couldn’t hike anymore, I spent most of the time in the house. I needed to do something with my time. And I thought what better way to keep the mind focused and sane than to do some coding? So I decided to write this app. And it was not, it was not going to be something, I thought it was good for me to experience what it was like to develop a mobile app. And I didn’t intend it to, for the app to turn into a company, or anything as successful as it is, as it is now.

Andrew: I heard it was an experiment, that you had this vision that you were going to create a few different apps?

Winston: Right, I had a few ideas, a bunch of ideas, some of them involving, this app was one idea, I thought about creating a one picture representation of your life. In terms of a compressed timeline, I thought about developing, building a company around [??] Business Intelligence to analyze large amounts of data. So there’s a bunch of different ideas that I played with and researched into, but this idea was easier to execute so I thought I’m just going to do it.

Andrew: I see and one of the reasons you were drawn to this is that you’re father had a related experience, what did your dad do?

Winston: So my father was a researcher at IBM. He’s retired now and teaching at Columbia. He did research in speech technology for several years. In fact he built the Chinese version of [??]. So he kind of got me thinking that synthesized speech which for many years was relegated to hobby to sort of a united member having an Amiga Machine with a robotic synthesized voice something…

Andrew: That came with it that you can actually use the computer right out of the box to read text from what I remember.

Winston: Right, right, right, and that was something that we nerds really liked to play with, but with mobile devices you know with inherently smaller screens I thought speech technology must not be able to play a big role. So I thought okay now what can we do with texts as speech right? So I thought about my life, my previous life, I always had a lot of stuff to read, I used an app called Instapaper that kept track of all the webpages that I wanted to read but don’t have time to read, always had a lot of white papers, and I thought why wouldn’t I just build an app that can read the stuff out loud for you either when I’m taking a walk, or taking a run, or I’m in the gym, or I’m driving.

Andrew: Yeah.

Winston: It’s a productivity tool that was what I had in mind.

Andrew: And because you experienced the problem yourself and had this need yourself you said, “You know what? Let’s create it,” and you did need to do market research because you were just learning to code, and you were experimenting and the vision was to create five different products, am I right?

Winston: Right, because I…The ideas that I wasn’t, you know it wasn’t like I’m committing money, [??] capital. You know, because of the year, which I didn’t have any concrete goals you know I thought I could afford to take some risks. I spent two months doing something and it was fun I learned something that was good enough for me.

Andrew: I want to address something that I know is on our audiences mind, they must be thinking, “This guy Winston comes from a background where his father was a techie who knew how to code, he knew how to code himself, he was CTO. Developing this mobile app and learning to code must have been a snap for him; it’s like turning on the TV for most people.” Was it like that?

Winston: Well I, I developed, I was a developer when I got out of school, and I programmed for a living for a couple of years then I got into corporate IT. So technology has obviously changed dramatically. That was over about 12, 13 years, but the basic programming concepts didn’t change very much, so and also there’s this wonderful thing called Stack Overflow which lets you find every possible conceivable answer to every question that you might have. So the modern tool set is relative to what I was working with are just incredible. So I…So I can’t give you a concrete answer, but you know short answer is if you have a programming background creating an app is not difficult, however I don’t think it’s something that people who haven’t been emerged in the world of coding can just pick up and do.

Andrew: Okay all right, and for people who are listening to this saying, “I’m not a coder but I’d like to get in on this, I’d like to do what Winston’s talking about and build my own app,” we obviously have courses within Mixergy Premium where you’ll see non-developers talk about how they hired developers, how they communicated with them, and how they got there app created even though they’re not technically proficient. So we say go to MixergyPremium.com and check that out. The first version of the, by the way actually let me get to this, you said Stock Overflow was a good tool whenever you have questions you go there and you ask them, what else is there that’s helpful for you, or was helpful for you as you were learning to code?

Winston: Open source, open source libraries, you know GitHub. You know the way programmers these days are sharing their work is incredible. That’s something that back in the old days we never had access to.

Andrew: What was especially helpful, what’s a library that you were able to use that changed the product development for the better without forcing you to create it from scratch.

Winston: For example, to integrate with Instapaper, Instapaper uses a fairly sophisticated authentication technology. It’s just not something that I could learn and build, and it integrates myself. Now at such time, it did happen lo and behold, there is a thing called Instapaper Chip that someone’s written in a library in Objective C. Which is a language that I used to develop my [??] apps, that I did integrate with Instapaper.

Andrew: I see.

Winston: It’s incredible.

Andrew: And you don’t have to do it yourself, it’s out there available for you to put directly into your app. That is one of the original features. You said “Look, people are already using Instapaper to save articles that they want to read later. I will just fish those articles out on their behalf, put it in my app, and use my app to read those articles to them; so they can hear them via voice, as opposed to read them with their eyes.” That’s one of the features. What are some of the other features that you had in the first version, before you added all the things that were looking at today?

Winston: Right. PDF reading.

Andrew: PDF was in the first one too.

Winston: Right. So I wrote my own PDF parser, which turned out to be terrible.

Andrew: Okay. I was going to say, that’s a very hard thing to do. I use lots of apps that rip the text out of a PDF and make them more accessible to me. And very few of them are actually very good.

Winston: Right. And that’s because PDF is a visual format. Adobe developed it to be a visual format so it can faithfully replicate a brochure, document, or piece of paper. If you leave it inside the PDF document, oftentimes there are no spaces. There are only individual characters and their location on the page.

Andrew: Oh. I see.

Winston: So, if you had to parse out text out of a PDF document, you have to guess where the spaces are. If there are two characters further away enough, then you say “ah, there’s a space.”

Andrew: I see. And then choose from document to document, how much space is important.

Winston: Right. Right. And also PDF has been around for so many years. There are so many variations to how the data is represented internally. Even today, right now the avenue is a commercial library from a company called Fox It, which you have to pay for. You’ve got to realize that’s money I need to spend. Even those libraries still don’t catch every variation.

Andrew: Fox It. That’s where you goy the library.

Winston: Right, right.

Andrew: The first version, did it use Fox It, did it use yours, or did it use something else?

Winston: Well. I was training somebody. I wasn’t about to pay somebody licensing fees for a library, so I wrote it myself.

Andrew: Okay.

Winston: And I [??] tried to improve it until I realized this project was just too big for me. About a year later I went with a commercial library.

Andrew: Gotcha. How do they charge for it?

Winston: I believe they charge per year, but they were very nice. Because they realized that there are a couple of things, I’m a small company, one person, and secondly, I’m doing something good for students, for people with visual impairment.

Andrew: So you say talk to them and said, “I see the prices you offer, I’m starting out, can you give me a deal?”

Winston: Right.

Andrew: Okay.

Winston: And similarly with companies that provide the voices, I didn’t do the voices. Again, that’s a project that would be too big for one person. Acapella [SP] was the first vendor that I used. Again, they understood the trials and tribulations the [??] about, or the kind of remedies were talking about pale in compares with desktop applications.

Andrew: So, if I understand you right? Instapaper connectivity was included, but you didn’t create that yourself. PDF parsing, which meant that you could read what was in a PDF, was also included, that you created yourself. And the feature that took text and turned it into voice was also included, and that you got from someone else too. Those are the three big features that were included in the first version.

Winston: The other one is integration with Pocket, what was called Read it Later, which is very similar to Instapaper.

Andrew: Right. Instapaper. Did you create that yourself? Or is that something you found on GitHub also?

Winston: That library app I built myself, because their interface is much simpler.

Andrew: I see. So four basic features, packaged in app, you put it in the app store right away. Did you start selling it, or offering it for free?

Winston: Well I decided, I sold it for $2 a download, and the reason is that the company that I bought the words from Acapella contractually required that it must be sold for at least $2.

Andrew: They don’t want you giving it away for free, they don’t want you undercut, why $2?

Winston: That was just level that they set.

Andrew: That’s where they wanted it okay.

Winston: So I obliged, which is fine I understand but like I said before I wasn’t thinking about making money from it so I just charged the minimum that I could contractually.

Andrew: And did the app store put you in the New Release section and feature you right away?

Winston: Right…So that was back in the days when the what’s new is more prominent so when you release an app you typically get a bump because you’re getting more eyeballs on it. So I did get a bump the first day I think there was a hundred downloads, and then it quickly tapered out.

Andrew: So that’s 200 bucks the first day Apple keeps what, 30% of it? That’s a hundred? Okay.

Winston: Right, then quickly after that it’s like 10, you know, five a day.

Andrew: When you’re getting $140 your first day does it feel, how does it feel?

Winston: Not very much, kind of what I expected, I wasn’t expecting, I guess I was realistic enough that I wasn’t expecting something like this to all of a sudden top the charts. You know a lot of apps are driven by PR, and there was no PR behind this app, no nothing, there’s no launch so at that point I thought okay that was a great learning exercise, it’s time to move on.

Andrew: I see okay. So you weren’t frustrated you just said hey I’m learning?

Winston: Right, right, right. So then what started to change was that people started writing me, customers who had, who had downloaded it. The first email I got was a day after the app was launched was from a teacher…So he said you know, “I downloaded your app and I’m using it for one of my students.” He said, “This student is really brilliant at math.” This man was a math teacher, but he said, “He’s got some sort of reading problem where he can’t read so every time he takes an exam I have to take him to a corner of the room and read the exam out loud for him.”

Andrew: Interesting.

Winston: He said, “Usually I read it for him a couple times and this kids so smart he would get the right answer. He said now with your app the exam is in PDF, I loaded it up on my iPad, and I give it to him. He’s got his headphones on and he can play the exam back and forward, repeat it if he wants to, and then he’ll write down the answer.” And that’s something I never thought of before.

Andrew: You just thought of you, a busy executive who doesn’t have time to read all the articles that are coming to you through InstaPaper or through PDF’s, you didn’t realize there’s some people who don’t read, who need some reading help. So that was the motivation that kept you going, that it was there are people who need this and I will help them it’s not the money that came in that said hey this is going to be a profitable business for you?

Winston: Yeah because my wife, my wife is a teacher as I said so she, you know she, she, you know I talked to her about some of the other idea’s that I’m pursuing and you know one of the ideas was a sort of a social network for kids, for really young kids, and she’s just coo-coo about all this. She’s like, “Why don’t you do something like…Whispering Reader where you’re helping people?”

Andrew: I see.

Winston: And she was absolutely right, and personally I was you know from what became a side project became an obsession. You know as the weather got warmer I should be outside you know doing more stuff outdoors I’m in the house coding all day, and after dinner with the kids, and the kids gone to bed I’d go back to the computer and code more.

Andrew: How do you know what features to add? What was it that told you this is a feature that the customers are going to want and this one can wait until later?

Winston: Most of the new features come from customers.

Andrew: So when you were starting out how did customers communicate to you what they wanted?

Winston: All through email.

Andrew: Just email?

Winston: Yeah, and back in those days I probably get you know two, three emails a day. See one thing I want anybody who’s in software to think about if somebody feels like your product is important enough to them to write an email, even if it’s a blisteringly negative email, that person cares, and that person perhaps knows something that you don’t.

Andrew: Give an example of something that you got via email that you wouldn’t have thought of on your own.

Winston: Boy, I mean there’s so many of them. I started getting emails from blind people around the world who says that you’re product doesn’t work well with Voice Over, and I didn’t even know what Voice Over was. Voice Over is iOS’s built in screen reader basically that allows the blind, or the visually impaired, to use the phone without…

Andrew: So they know what a button’s text says and what a button does by tapping it once and then it starts to read what it says right?

Winston: Right, right, and when I started getting those emails I wasn’t even thinking about that blind people could use this app. I didn’t even know blind people used iPhones, and customers, I guess, you know, we talk about listening to customers all the time and customers really took the initiative to drive the direction of the product.

Andrew: What’s one more example of something that came to you via email from real users that you wouldn’t have thought of on your own?

Winston: Well one customer said that when you’re, “When an upgrade came the app crashed and I could never open it again,” and as I dug deeper, and deeper, it turns out that this customer capped over a thousand books in Voice Trade, and the database architecture that I was using could not support something that large, particularly when you need to change the structure of the database. So I made a change in the product to be able to support very large libraries like that. So and the difference there is that initially I designed the product for reading is basically transitory in a sense that once you digest your content you don’t need it anymore you can get rid of it right? These are, this is how we retrieve you know webpages or webpages, we never read them again.

Andrew: Yeah.

Winston: But when you’re talking about books it’s different.

Andrew: People want to keep books, but not just keep them keep them within the app that they are likely to listen to them in.

Winston: Right.

Andrew: Yeah.

Winston: So customers are using the product in a way that I never expected. Now there’s a lot of this you have to also to apply your own judgment, because if you do everything customers ask you, you know the product will become so bloated like Microsoft Word where you’ll never be able to do what’s important. So deciding what kind of feature requests, what kind of general direction the product needs to go to based on customer feedback you know there is a bit of…

Andrew: Help me understand that. What’s an example of something that because you understand the vision for the product you had to say no to?

Winston: Well I was on an interview this morning actually with a radio station near Russia, and one of the callers said, “There are some formats for books that are prevalent near Russia why don’t you support them? I’d like you to support them.” And I was honest about that and I said, “You know I’ve got so much I can do, I’ve only got so much time.” So a feature like that would be great but you have a recourse, you can convert those formats into a format that’s readable with Voice Trade whereas I can do something that can help a much broader set of customers.

Andrew: I see. So as opposed to helping this small narrow group of customers who are speaking Russian and using this specific format you want to help people who are broader like maybe creating an Android version of the app, which reaches way more people, and if someone doesn’t have the, if someone has the format that’s not supported they can convert it over versus someone who has an Android they can’t somehow support the iOS version to Android.

Winston: Right, so that’s an example of somebody with an idea that has a narrow market appeal. Other, and this is something that, that I see probably you know in every software company, is that the customers are your, you have a relationship with, they’re typically the power users right? They know a lot about your product, and they can tell you things that you wouldn’t have thought of, at the same time they also have much more sophisticated needs than the average user. So if you do everything that the customer tells you then you’re essentially catering to power users.

Andrew: Right.

Winston: And some of those features might never be touched by the average user.

Andrew: So how do you know what’s going to be a power user feature versus an average user feature?

Winston: It’s hard to say. It’s hard to say, I think a lot of that is some of its just gut instinct.

Andrew: In some ways I was thinking is a book something that many people are going to use?

Winston: Well, let me give you an example, so in the app you can, you can put content in folders. A lot of people asked, “So why don’t you support nested folders?”

Andrew: You mean a folder within a folder?

Winston: That’s right.

Andrew: Okay.

Winston: Yeah, so that’s an example of power user feature that the average user probably wouldn’t need, and probably will confuse them more than help them.

Andrew: Okay. Alright, then let’s continue with the narrative, you are on sabbatical building this thing for fun, it’s not doing great business but you’re touching people’s lives and so you say, “I’m going to continue developing it.” At some point you come back from sabbatical…

Winston: Right.

Andrew: …And now you have to decide is this a business that can support me and my family or is this something that just happens to be pushed on the side. What did you, how did you deal with that?

Winston: So when I came back I was, I was really not intending to continue with the product. When I came back it became my NPR Entrepreneuring Residence and Matrix Partners, some of the EC’s in Boston.

Andrew: Okay.

Winston: And I, the idea was to build a start-up. I was involved in a couple of projects with a couple of separate co-founders in the area of data that was my old field. But meanwhile I’m still working on the app. I could not get away from the app it was you know it’s strange I never felt that as a you know as a business that the kind of obligation I felt toward customers. You know even though I was, I was adding new features and I wasn’t charging for any of the new features but when so many customers ask, “Could you please add this thing?” And I feel like that’s a really useful thing for all the people I felt like I would be letting them down if I didn’t do it. So I would say during that period of about six months I was you know I spent about a third of my time on continue to develop Voice Stream, and then the other time I was pursuing other start-up ideas.

Andrew: Okay that makes sense, and then at what point did you say this has got to be my full-time thing?

Winston: That was around, that was around the beginning of last year, around January or February.

Andrew: Of 2013?

Winston: Yeah, and at that point the app started to sell well enough that you know when my wife and I looked at each other and say, “We can live on this,” and the feedback from the user community has been awesome. You know like I said I thought to myself, and as a software guy, you know what can I do? What is, you know what is the, what can I do that can give me more, more reward, personal reward not financial reward, building this app.

Andrew: Helping people. How did you go from having a hundred downloads the first day, which tapered off pretty dramatically the second, third, and so on days, to having enough customers come in every day that you can actually survive on this, and have this be your business? What did you do that grew all those users?

Winston: I think its word of mouth. It’s all word of mouth. I did, I did almost know…I did definitely did not do any marketing. A friend of mine however helped me with some PR.

Andrew: What kind of PR?

Winston: Well he got my personal story on NPR.

Andrew: I see it, your personal story in 2013 soon after, in May 2013 with photos which are stunning I can see why you would go to Norway. This is you taking these photos too?

Winston: Right, but other than that it’s all word of mouth. So I think when you’re starting out a business, when a customer writes you an email, if you respond professionally, kindly, in a way that you care, you are essentially building a champion in the user community who can tell other people about your app.

You know, every person, when you build a product, you know, if you think of all the small things that annoy users, and making sure that you spend the time to make the app easier to use, every new download, you’re building a champion who’s going to tell other people about it. So, if you look at the trajectory of sales, you know, it’s a bump, and then very gradually, this thing was growing.

Andrew: What about this? I see there’s a site by Brian Friedlander who wrote a blog post about you December 2012, about how this app that you created is so helpful for people who have issues reading. Is that something you’re familiar with?

Winston: Yeah, yeah. Brian reached out to me and he started to experiment with it. Then, later on he wrote this blog post.

Andrew: So you didn’t reach out to him, he just found you?

Winston: Right, right. As it was the case a lot of times, and, of course, I was helped by a lot of educators looking for tools to help students with various differences.

Andrew: Same with smallbutkindandmighty.com? They wrote about you. That wasn’t you reaching out, that was them saying, “What can we do to help people who are having trouble reading?”

Winston: Right. Right, right.

Andrew: I see. Maybe one thing we can take away from this is that you were actually helping people who weren’t being helped before, and had a community of bloggers already there to help them out. Right? These smallbutkindamighty.com wasn’t there just for you. Assistive Technology, the blog I referred to was already writing for people who needed this kind of help.

Winston: Right, right. There is definitely a hunger for tools like this, and the reason, I guess it goes into the larger thought, which we can talk about this a little bit. There is no money, in the traditional sense, for this kind of product.

Andrew: What do you mean?

Winston: Because you. . . It’s a small market. The largest companies in this field probably had about 50 people. This is probably the biggest company that there is. They are selling desktop applications for $1000 a seat. So for an app, at $10 a download, there just isn’t enough to sustain a company. That means an individual developer has to spend the time of kind that I did working on the product with uncertain future to serve a niche market.

Andrew: I see. The market is such a niche market that funded venture, venture funded firms have no interest in it, that the bigger companies that could just throw money and throw people at a problem have no interest in being in there, and so, it gives you more strength and fewer competitors.

Winston: Right. If you talk about individual developers, most people, if they didn’t take a year off, would not be able to spend, nearly two years, to build the product until it got to the point where the family could live on it, one family can live on it.

Andrew: All right. I see. What about this, Winston? The app was two bucks, and it’s now $10. Did you lose any sales by increasing the price by five times?

Winston: Roughly, when you double the price of an app like this, you actually gain revenue.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Winston: So that means that you double the price, the number of downloads are reduced by more than half, but it’s still over 50% of the volume previous to the price increase.

Andrew: Okay.

Winston: So the way I thought about it is that there is a happy medium there where, because of the number of downloads you have, in terms of word-of-mouth, can spread to more people. Right? So that means. . . Lower price means the greater word-of-mouth effect, but also because it’s niche market, it’s okay to charge a premium for the app. So thirdly the closest competitor to this app called WeToGo [?] is 20 bucks. In fact, most assisted technology products like this are 20 bucks. So I thought $10 is a fair price and sort of hits the optimal point between word of mouth versus [??].

Andrew: Do you remember when Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper, said that he was toying around with the idea of adding voice to his app.

Winston: Yeah, I read his blog quite a bit when I was creating the app. I mean, he is really an inspiration for individual developers, and in some ways I’m indebted to him because in his blog he talked about how to structure his company, one person company and structure his work load. You know, in a way that he can do all of that as a single individual. It was very, very helpful. Of course, he was far more successful than I was. But, yeah, he’s got a lot of good ideas.

And so when he talked about that, a lot of people asked him to do that and he ended up didn’t do it. Pocket added a text speech to their Android version, but they haven’t done it for the iOS version. So that’s always a threat when another company decides to add text speech features, but at this point the text speech capabilities and voice reader is at a point where it’s just as sophisticated as the most sophisticated version of PC text speech apps. So it would take quite a bit of work to look for another text speech product feature to get to where this product is now.

Andrew: I can imagine. I’m looking at your update schedule. June 20th, 2014, update. May 5th, 2014, update. March 27th, 2014, update. March 21st, March 14th, and January 13th, December 2nd, November 12th. You’re just constantly updating and yet one of these latest reader style apps could add voice, but could they match your voice options? Or will they allow people to just look in here at your site, ePub, Daisy PDF. Daisy books, PDF documents, Dropbox and eDrive, Pocket Instapaper and Evernote docs, BookShare and Guttenberg support, importing USB, importing from other apps. I tried to do that. That worked.

So at this point it’s so far ahead that even if they add voice for one feature there, there just a small portion of what you do.

Winston: Right. If you read Marco Arment said a lot of people are asking to support PDFs, and he found out I wouldn’t do it because it’s hard. From the time when I started doing PDF to the time when I was happy with the PDF reading, even right now I’m not completely happy with it. It probably took at least a year.

Andrew: You know what? I wish someone would do an Instapaper for PDF because PDF is still hard to read on mobile and iPad. I could read a book on my iPad before going to sleep, and then on Bart on the way into work. I can continue where I left off because of WhisperSync. I can’t do that as easily for a PDF, and I would love for Instapaper or Pocket to do that for PDF. But it’s hard.

Winston: It’s hard, right because on the PDF you see an line break. It’s very difficult to know whether it’s a line break because you’re out of space or it’s a new paragraph.

Andrew: Yes.

Winston: Right? Then because of that a lot of reflow which has taken our PDF document worked the text out of it so you can change the font. A lot of the reflow features of the PDF readers don’t work that well.

Andrew: No. The best I was able to find was in GoodReader, an app for both the iPad and iPhone, but the one feature there missing is “save your place” the WhisperSync equivalent.

Winston: Right, right. So saving your place, that’s also an important thing. You mentioned Daisy. Daisy is a format for accessible eBooks, either whether in text or in audio. So libraries for the blind around the world carry most of the content in Daisy. So it’s fairly obscure in terms of our mainstream standards. Not in audio books in Daisy, right? The problem with a lot of mp3 players and audio players is that they’re not designed to read audiobooks because it doesn’t keep its place. Right?

With the music, with a song, it’s okay, you know, it doesn’t remember where you were before when you stopped, but with a book, that’s not OK.

Andrew: No.

Winston: Right. So, yeah, being able to remember where you were in a document is really important. I know iBooks, for example, with a voiceover, you could read iBooks, talk out loud. With a [voiceover] that’s not so good, however. One problem, among many problems, with that approach, is that if you stop, if you ever want to stop and you want to start again, you’re back up to the top of the page.

Andrew: Yes.

Winston: Right?

Andrew: Yeah, these are big challenges when it comes to doing audiobooks, and frankly, even just pdfs. I hate the pdf format. I wish that no one would have used pdf formats, but that’s the format that we use when we sell or buy books online.

Winston: Right. It’s here to stay.

Andrew: It’s here to stay, unfortunately, and it stinks. But, you know, you have to deal with the world as it is around you. You focus on this full time. You say, “I’m not getting a job. I’m not going to continue this work with Matrix.” Then, again, as I understand it, sales start to trail off, and it has something, you think, to do with people going back to school.

What happened there?

Winston: Well, so, February 2013, last year, was when it reached a point where we said, “OK. We can live off of this.”

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Winston: So from that point it kind of grew. Even though the summer’s there is a dip, as a general trend, it happens, in terms of number of downloads, it was growing.

Andrew: So even though it dips in the summer, it’s still, overall, a good business that’s profitable and continues.

Winston: Right, right, and so it’s still growing, and it’s all mostly word of mouth. Today I was continuing to add new features, and also I have a second programmer now working with me and he’s building the Java, or the Android version of the app.

Andrew: I like word-of-mouth, but it’s not enough. I need more. So I’m looking to see, maybe, SimilarWeb recently added app analysis, which tells me where traffic is coming from and going into the App Store. I don’t know what they’re doing there. I have to look into this a little more, but I can see, Google sent you a lot of traffic, where people are searching, I guess, for this online. Direct Traffic Blog.Ted.com is sending downloads.

Winston: Right.

Andrew: They know about you.

Winston: I wrote a piece for Ted.

Andrew: Okay.

Winston: That’s driving some traffic.

Andrew: Okay.

Winston: That’s talking about the story of why I’m encouraging people to take a year off and pursue whatever you. . .

Andrew: You do some decent PR. So that’s you reaching out to them and getting on their site. I looked to see how we found you. It wasn’t that one of the researchers here discovered you, it was that you filled out the form on our site saying, “I’m volunteering to do an interview.” Right?

Winston: That was actually a recent college grad that I met, and she said she’s got some hours to help me.

Andrew: So you said, “Okay. Help me by finding places to talk about my app.”

Winston: Right, right, right.

Andrew: Yeah.

Winston: As I said, PR is the only marketing activity, if you will. . .

Andrew: Winston, when we think about PR, we think about, “Let’s just keep pounding the Today Show with requests until they have us on and we get this big splash, or try to get on a big show.” It’s not that.

It’s what are some blogs out there that should be covering us? What are some places that we could put our own articles? That’s why you reached out to me for Mixergy. That’s how you got on to Ted.

Winston: Right, right. Some of that is reaching out. Some of that is other people who have found me through other blogs or other publications.

Andrew: Yeah, there’s a multiplier effect. There’s no doubt that when someone does an interview on Mixergy, other interviewers on other sites that cater to the tech startup community, say, “Well, maybe we should feature the guy’s company or the product.”

All right. Here’s something else. Bookshare.org is linking to you.

Winston: Right. Bookshare is a U.S. organization that supports people who are blogging to people who have dyslexia. They distribute books to them, nearly for free. They’re a wonderful organization. So Voice Dream Reader integrates with Bookshare so [it uses] authentication that the user can download books from Bookshare and the app will read those books out loud. Bookshare carries just about every book that you can possibly want to read.

Andrew: Oh, really?

Winston: It is really incredible.

Andrew: I had no idea.

Winston: Yes. And this is an exception in the copyright laws for people with reading disabilities.

Andrew: So if you have a ready disability you can have virtually any book out there read to you using the Voice Dream Reader app and an account on Bookshare. So, that’s another thing I’m learning as I keep pushing around here. That every one of these integrations is another potential place where you can get traffic. That is you integrate with Bookshare.org, they have a reason to send their users over to you. In wonder, does Instapaper link over? Let me see …site, colon, Instapaper.com, Voice Dream, let’s see.

Winston: No. I don’t think so but I know the guys at Pocket often send people my way. If a customer says “is there a way for me to hear the content here out loud?”

Andrew: Then they send them over but they don’t have a list of apps that are supported.

Winston: I am officially a partner so my app is on their list but I don’t think they single me out or anything, other than one of the media apps that integrate with them.

Andrew: Okay. You seem to rank high for text to speech voices. What’s UCCW skin?

Winston: I’ve heard of that one before.

Andrew: Let’s see. UCCW skin. Elegant UCCW skin. I have no idea what that is but . . . I see.

Winston: My web site was under attack for a while so maybe . . .

Andrew: I see.

Winston: Yes.

Andrew: But, I looked at the description of the app in the app store. It’s well written. It wasn’t, hey, let’s throw something in there quickly. You emphasized the fact that you were top of list for a while on lots of different countries’ app stores. You clearly list out all the different things that you are compatible with so if someone searches for any one of those words, you are likely to show up. That seems to help, too.

Winston: Right. I did everything. That is one of the things about being a one person company. I am a copy writer. I created the web site. I do graphics, logos, icons. I negotiated contracts with vendors, did partnerships with Bookshare and so on. So as I think back, I guess I can regret those years when I was an executive at another software company but those years actually helped quite a bit and I don’t think I could have done what I did had I started this fresh out of school as a programmer because I wouldn’t have the knowledge to do all these other parts. All these other things that are perhaps not necessary but certainly helpful.

Andrew: The negotiating, for example.

Winston: Right.

Andrew: Okay. Yes. I think a lot of people wouldn’t understand that they could call up and negotiate rates the way that you did, especially in the early days. And yes, you were able to go to {fox hit] and say, “Can you give me a lower price? I am a one man operation here and I am trying to do good in the world” and companies are receptive to that. I don’t want to get past this. Your [SEO], it’s not the best in the world, not the best in the business, but it’s good. I typed in phrases like ‘text to speech voices’ which I can see people typing in and you come up. You have a bunch of that. I can find others. You are on lots of different places like, Ted, we talked about. Quartz. You are on MakeUseof.com. You are on About.com. I imagine About.com is the intern.

Winston: About.com, I don’t know. Maybe there is a list there about the text to speech products.

Andrew: 555 TV. You are on there, too?

Winston: Sorry?

Andrew: 555 TV. Do you know 555?

Winston: No. I don’t. I don’t.

Andrew: It’s a blog network and . . .

Winston: There’s quite a bit of . . . The other day I was just adding a few other media mentions. Things like NPR, NBC News, TED, Informational Week, [Xconomy] and so on. So for a one person operation, I thought to myself, that’s not bad.

Andrew: Yes. You are doing well. And also, tell me if I’m misreading this. I keep wanting validation because I’ve got you here and I want to make sure that what I’m imagining as an outsider is actually true. Most landing pages….maybe not most, a lot of the landing pages for Apps today, have nothing but a screenshot, a headline, and a go to the App Store link, because they want to send you to the App Store as quickly as possible.

You have a lot more text, which I’m wondering if that’s what makes you so much more accessible. That, via the search engine, so much more appealing to them.

Winston: Right. So the second most popular page on the website are the user reviews.

Andrew: Okay.

Winston: So, if you go to my website and on the sort of bottom left, where the….

Andrew: What customers say, what experts say…

Winston: ….if you click that, then it brings you to a page where it compiles almost all the reviews on the Apps Store, on a single page. It’s a little old, I should really update that, that’s the second most popular page on the site.

Andrew: After the home page.

Winston: Right. So, that gives you an idea that people who go to a web site, they are looking for validation. They’re looking for, not just what you say about your product. They are looking for what other people say about your product.

Andrew: Yea.

Winston: And that makes….so you have to be current on “what is it we do.” It’s very important. What does the product do? And here’s what other people say about us.

Andrew: Yea.

Winston: I think those things are essential.

Andrew: I can see that. I can see your page. I mean it’s, again, it’s not the most search engine optimized site out there. For example, your URL structure is not great…

Winston: Right.

Andrew: But, there’s content here which gives Google a reason to send people over and allows Google to find you for different phrases. There’s a blog here which does the same thing and I see a lot of email addresses. So, people can even get your direct email address from your site, which many developers don’t do, and that’s how you get a lot of feedback from people and build good relationships with them.

Winston: Yes, yes.

Andrew: Okay. Well, this has been an interesting story, a great success story. I asked you before the interview started, “Do you feel comfortable giving your revenue?” You shared it with me in private, but you said, “No, I don’t feel comfortable”. You actually, even if I told you, I said, “Look, I’ll ask the question anyway and you can say, No.” and you seemed uncomfortable with that, so I’m not even going to ask you the question. Here’s how I’ll ask you instead. Are you making more money with this App, more profit I should say, with this App than you were at the job that we started this interview talking about?

Winston: Absolutely. [???]

Andrew: And is it more meaningful? It’s got to be, right?

Winston: Even if I was making less, as long as we can live off of it, I would still be doing it. Because the kind of satisfaction that you get waking up in the morning and finding an email that says that “I just want you to know that your product just changed my life.” is immeasurable.

One specific email, um, so, my wife and I were sitting in the car and she was going through my email and she said why don’t you take a look, and she started discovering the email trail of a, between me and a customer, who, by all appearance, extremely difficult. your product, I don’t understand this, why do you it this way. You would say, but the customer, the customer that you don’t have. and then, um, I was patient with him, I could ask him questions, uh, try and be helpful and ultimately, um, got the problem solved. But then he sent this last email, he says, ” You know, I’m like over 60, I’ve got trouble redoing my entire life. Never liked books, and I always felt bad about it. and he says, now after I got your product, I feel like I’m a new person. I’ve never read this much, in one book after another, So my wife was sitting there, about to cry, and the kind of difference that the product is making.

Andrew: I can see it, uh-uh, I am such a skeptic, to be honest with you, Winston, I looked online to see, maybe, maybe, you had a lot of negative feedback. maybe you were just featuring the best stuff on your site, but not any of the, but mostly there were negative comments. no, all the tools that I’ve got, I checked the App any, I checked the me talk about similar web, I checked a lot, they were all showing really positive stuff, really legitimate traffic coming in. It’s so inspiring to see what you’ve done, I want to say that you’ve to close this off here.

First of all, for the audience, I said in first interviews or App entrepreneurs that aren’t developers, but are good at other parts of the business, There’s one that I especially like, that I think anyone should watch, even if you are a developer. It’s the one with a woman called, Jen Gordon, type in her name and you’ll see her product for thinking through the school means within an App and checking those mock-ups with customers and seeing, is this the thing they’re looking for. Seeing how they interact with the mock-ups, and then you’ll understand how she sends those mock-ups to developers to actually coded up and built out, Jen Gordon’s course is one of the first ones we did on the ….. and it’s still one of the best that we have on the internet. I urge you to take a look at it.

And the second thing is this, right there on your site, on the VoiceDream.com is your email address. I would urge anyone out there in the audience who wants to connect with the guest to just start off by saying thank you. Well, the email address is right there on the site, on Voice dream. if you got anything of value out of this, if you were moved, even if you were not thinking of taking actions today, remember, at the start of the interview, we talked about, instant saw a “Ted” video and it took a little while for him that to do something with it, but then, he really had a life altering experience from that App. if there’s anything here, life altering, or just life enhancing, then I urge you to go to “Voicedream.com” and that email address and let Winston know, and I’m going to do it right now

Winston, it’s an honor to have you here on ….. Thank you a lot for sharing your story.

Winston: Well, thank you so much for inviting me.

Andrew: You bet, thank you all for being a part of. Bye guys!

Who should we feature on Mixergy? Let us know who you think would make a great interviewee.

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