Internet has made knowledge and information accessible like never before, and this knowledge and information is available in various forms – text, audio and video. However, recent trends are showing that audio and video content is becoming more popular these days. One main factor that gets users more attracted to audio and video content over text content is that the users either lack patience or time to read text, while it is easier to consume audio and video content. So, if you are a website owner especially a blog site owner, you can increase traffic in your site by offering the website visitors the option to listen to your content other than reading it. AudioTilly, a startup based in San Jose (California) is simplifying this for you, by letting you convert your website’s text content into speech format instantly. We interviewed AudioTilly founder Lloyd Jacob to know more about the startup.
AudioTilly Highlights
| Startup Name | AudioTilly |
|---|---|
| Headquarter | San Jose |
| Founders | Lloyd Jacob & Alexander Burakovskiy |
| Sector | WordPress Text to Audio convertor |
| Founded | 2019 |
| Parent Organization | AudioTilly |
| Website | www.audiotilly.com |
About AudioTilly
The Idea Behind Starting AudioTilly
AudioTilly – Founders
Core Beliefs of the AudioTilly Team
AudioTilly – Revenue Model
AudioTilly – Marketing Strategies
AudioTilly – Challenges
AudioTilly – Future Plans
About AudioTilly
AudioTilly was started in 2019, with the vision to create tools and services to make content easily accessible. AudioTilly’s text to audio technology converts website text content to audio instantly, and allows visitors coming to the site to listen to the content, other than reading. So when users of a website don’t have time to sit and read their great content, they can simply visit the site, click play and start listening to the great content instead.
A major USP is that AudioTilly has modified and optimized the text to audio technology to make the content being read sound very much human-like! The platform offers 23 voices highly tuned and pleasing to listen to.
Websites and blogs can monetize this audio content via advertisements provided by AudioTilly or other DSP (Demand side platform) . This is similar to how radio content is supported with advertisements.
Blog owners can also access AudioTilly reports that quickly give insight of important data like top articles listened to, avg time, and more. Again once you subscribe to AudioTilly, the content of the blog site automatically gets added to the AudiBrow app, which gives you free access to AudiBrow’s user base.
Integrating AudioTilly to your website is simple. You can either do it by getting the AudioTilly WordPress Plugin, or you can just Copy & paste AudioTilly’s JS script to blend the player into parts of your site. Till now the company’s product was in testing phase and they are launching the WordPress plugin this month, i.e August 2020.
The Idea Behind Starting AudioTilly
The idea to start AudioTilly came to Lloyd form his own personal experience. Lloyd enjoyed reading his favorite online news and blog sites, but didn’t have time in the day to do this, as much of his time was spent on managing his work and family. But Lloyd realized that he had enough time while driving, commuting or at the gym, and this is the time he could use to listen to the content of his interest, and it would have been great if the blogs and news he read could be listened to as well. Lloyd decided to work on the idea, which led him to start AudioTilly in 2019. To start, Lloyd created a mock in Figma and shared it within his social circle and networking groups, to get the feedback.
“The feedback we received on Figma has been very positive. Many can’t believe this isn’t already in mass usage today” Lloyd quotes
AudioTilly – Founders
Lloyd Jacob and Alexander Burakovskiy are the co-founders of AudioTilly.
AudioTilly CEO Lloyd Jacob is a Y Combinator alumni (W’12). Lloyd has over 16 years of experience in product development and marketing. He is the mentor of SJSU Ideas Lab, and also was mentor for YC Startup School (S’18).
AudioTilly co-founder and CTO Alexander Burakovskiy has 10 years of technical experience, entrepreneur, software architect, product designer, specializing in scalable web services & mentor young developers group.
There are no other team members currently in AudioTilly. The co-founders work remotely and are handling all by themselves.
“My co-founder Alex worked on several small projects with me. He is very skilled and I’ve enjoyed working on past projects with him. So when it came to AudioTilly I proposed to him a co-founder role. He was happy to accept and join me on this journey” Jacob says on how he met his co-founder Alexander Burakovskiy
Core Beliefs of the AudioTilly Team
- Create tools and services to Customer Obsession. AudioTilly focuses on building everything with the customer in mind. The team works with the aim to serve the customers, provide value to them, earn and keep customer trust and delight the customer with quality product and performance.
- Invent and Simplify. Build innovative things. Don’t just copy. Build products to be simple yet powerful.
- High Standards. Build quality products. Fix defects before customers experience them.
- Be Frugal. Accomplish more with less. Throwing money and resources at a project does not equal success.
- Data Driven.Use data to make a judgment on performance and discover opportunities to improve, make content easily accessible.
AudioTilly – Revenue Model
AudioTilly is now launching its WordPress plugin. All users get free conversions monthly of up to 5 articles. From there on, fair prices will be charged for those who require more content converted to audio, . Regardless of the plan, all user’s will get access to the premium text to audio voices.
AudioTilly – Marketing Strategies
AudioTilly’s text to audio converter was in a testing with 39 blogs to gain feedback and improve the product, and the WordPress plugin is launching in August 2020. For getting the first set of users, the startup is planning to reach out to blog owners. They are also planning to leverage content marketing, influencers, and paid marketing options at a later stage.
AudioTilly – Challenges
Making the audio human sounding was a challenge for the co-founders.
“We didn’t want the end users to feel they were listening to a robot or computer reading the text aloud.So we focused heavily on optimizing the audio text to speech quality. Today we have 23 voices highly tuned and pleasing to listen to” quotes Lloyd
AudioTilly – Future Plans
AudioTilly is currently in the launch phase and the team believes that they can break even on cost by 3rd quarter of 2021.
Considering the high demand by users to simplify consumption and aggregation of online news & other written content, AudioTilly’s solution is an excellent blend between news apps and podcast experience. If executed as per plan, the team expects AudioTilly’s valuation in the next 4-5 years would match/beat that of their competitors, SmartNews ($1.2 billion valuation) and FlipBoard ($1 billion valuation)
“Audio content is exploding. Up until the growth trend of podcast, users were limited radio, Sirius, and user’s personal audio content. Now, Pandora, Podcasts, Alexa, etc have opened up new channels in Audio content options. This is leading a change in user behavior. For instance majority of the podcast listeners have carved our listening times at the gym, while driving and while cooking at home. This is time video cannot replace. I expect in the next 5 years to see a 50% growth in this space compared on 2019 stats” says AudioTilly co-founder Lloyd Jacob commenting on the growing popularity of audio content
If you’d like to be part of AudioTilly’s beta users and get free conversions for up to 10 articles for 1 year, email at support@audiotilly.com and mention this article