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Launch HN: Audm (YC S17) – Longform Magazine Articles in Audio

by christianpbrink on 7/17/17, 5:00 PM with 31 comments

Hi HN! We are Christian and Ryan (rtw2101) of Audm (https://www.audm.com/ and https://appstore.com/audm/audm). Audm is an iPhone app that lets you listen to the best longform (3000 words or longer) magazine articles from titles including The Atlantic, Wired (plus Backchannel), Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Foreign Policy, Outside, The New York Review of Books, and a bunch of others.

We were big podcast fans, but we knew that most of the world’s best storytellers write for top-tier magazines. We also love audiobooks (when they’re read by really gifted narrators), so we knew that stories written for print often work well in audio. So we built Audm.

We release most stories in the app at the same moment they hit the magazines’ websites. Right now we produce 5-8 articles (3-5 hours of audio) per week, and that number is growing fast as we onboard more publications. Our subscribers seem to have an insatiable appetite.

Something that we didn’t fully appreciate when we started (although our users did) is just how skilled a narrator has to be if they’re going to sound good reading articles that are dense with information and nuanced ideas (which often means very complex sentence structure). We’ve become extremely opinionated about narrators.

We’d love your feedback!

Thanks all, Ryan and Christian

  • by carussell on 7/17/17, 7:49 PM

    I see people launch stuff all the time and go with a choice that doubles as the fastest way to get people to forget your product—when someone visits your site and finds that it's locked away in an app store download. (In your case, Apple's, but it's the same for anyone doing Android-only.)

    Can you publish to the Web? You might tell yourself that you need to wait for more resources so you can build the Android app that you've been wanting and then the webapp, but listen to me: you don't. You have something to publish. You don't need an app. Put it on the Web. That's what it's for.

  • by tradesmanhelix on 7/17/17, 7:03 PM

    Excited to check this out. Have been looking for a viable replacement for Umano since they were acquired by Dropbox in 2015, but have not found anything comparable to their service.

    I never pay for apps, but I ended up subscribing to Umano (yearly subscription). Here's why:

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    1. Wide selection of interesting articles, esp. tech and lifestyle ones.

    2. Great narrators. Sounds like you guys are already hard at work on this, so kudos there!

    3. Value. Umano used a freemium model, and I think it worked really well since the extra features (offline downloads, customizable story intros, etc.) added value once you were hooked on the experience.

    I see you guys are taking the "pay for it" approach, and my only concern there would be getting people hooked, esp. since the initial trial period is so short. Umano had time to become an indispensable part of my life (listening while driving, working out, etc., plus it became a super easy way to keep up with current events), and that motivated me to pay for it. Not sure I would have ended up doing so had I been completely locked out without paying first. Also, I liked being able to get a year's worth at a discount. Once again, would not have felt comfortable paying for an entire year up front had I not already been hooked.

    -----------------

    Just my $0.02. All the best!

  • by totally on 7/17/17, 6:56 PM

    Instapaper reads me long-form articles on my commute (iOS).

    I heard about audm on some podcast, I forget where. I checked it out, and decided it wasn't worth $8 a month to have a human read to me, instead of a robot, a small subset of the content I regularly consume.

    Robot-for-free over human-for-pay seems like an apt analogy for our time.

    At any rate, I like trials, and if your service is truly great and had the value-add of curating excellent articles from sources I wouldn't normally find, that might put me over the edge. Then again, I cancelled my Audible subscription too.

    If you're successful, Amazon surely will buy you.

  • by danenania on 7/17/17, 5:39 PM

    I love this. There are many situations where audio is preferable to text -- driving, walking between trains on a commute, or even just lying in bed and giving your eyes a break from screens. This seems like it has the potential to vastly increase the number of quality audio options available.

    Are there any plans to add high quality tech content to the mix? It would be great to occasionally take in a long article from Medium or highscalability or... lots of other sources in audio form. I suppose a challenge there would be how to read out code snippets in a digestible way.

  • by dr_ on 7/17/17, 5:22 PM

    I never really used to listen to podcasts - until I got a car that has Car Play functionality. Now I listen to them all the time. Will Audm be available on Apple Car Play or Android Auto?

  • by jansho on 7/17/17, 7:04 PM

    I love that this is not just audio-narrating articles from some of my favourite magazines. I adore the Kevin Spacey-esque tone! What happens if some of these magazines start releasing their own audio version? I do remember that some Atlantic articles had this. Also, did you have to get permission from the magazines to audio-narrate their articles?

  • by JonAtkinson on 7/17/17, 6:24 PM

    I love the sound of this and have subscribed - an intersection of quality journalism and podcasting is a fantastic concept.

    Do you have any plans to provide an Alexa skill? "Alexa, read me something interesting" is a service I would pay handsomely for.

  • by krishna2 on 7/18/17, 3:40 AM

    Congrats on the launch. Have you considered doing this for Kindle Singles?

    There are certain topics that I am interested in but the time I want to invest is between NewYorker articles (15-20 pages) and a full-fledged market-dynamics dictated 250-450 page book. And Kindle Singles (and such sized books) fill that niche nicely. And needless to add here, am a huge audible / audio fan - so would love to see the two get merged.

    Thanks & Good luck!

  • by johncoogan on 7/18/17, 1:40 AM

    I've said it before and I'll say it again, Robertson Dean is the greatest audiobook narrator of all time. http://www.audiofilemagazine.com/narrators/robertson-dean/

  • by elmar on 7/17/17, 9:51 PM

    Interresting project, So what's the long term view, to develop an AI agent that is as good as the best human narrators?

  • by gustaf on 7/17/17, 9:06 PM

    Congrats on the Launch Christian and Ryan! :)

  • by virgil_disgr4ce on 7/17/17, 5:29 PM

    This is cool—I've definitely been wanting this. I've tried many times to use iOS's accessibility features to read me an article on Pocket and... well.... you know. That didn't exactly stick ;)

    I'm curious—how many narrators do you employ so far? This is such an interesting business.