🎧 Audiblogs: Changing How We Read 🎧
Why turning blogs into personal podcasts is the best product idea I've encountered in a while.
Okay, friends, I’m going to level with you all: writing is hard.
I write a lot. I write for school, work, and fun. Sometimes you have the creative juice, and sometimes you just… don’t. Lately, I’ve been in a bit of a writing slump, at least when it comes to the “fun” department.
A few hours ago, I sat down and wrote 1,000 words for my job in less than 60 minutes. But now, when it’s time to write for fun, I struggle.
I spoke with a friend this week and told him about how sometimes I just “have it” creatively, and sometimes I don’t. When I don’t, it can be excruciating. He told me that when it’s painful, that’s when it’s most important to write. He also told me I need to read the War of Art, so that’s now on my to-do list.
Anyway, I don’t say all of this so you will feel bad for me. (Please don’t feel bad for me. I’m lucky enough to be whining about how hard it is to do my hobby. I live an incredibly blessed life.) Instead, I say all of this because authenticity is important to me. I try really hard to be my most authentic self. I don’t want to put on a show.
And maybe somebody will find it helpful to know that they’re not the only person struggling.
As I’ve gotten busier and busier with important things (aka things that pay the bills), this newsletter has more and more of a struggle for me. However, I believe that writing is a muscle and that creativity requires work. I have had doors open for me because I took the time to develop my writing muscle, so I’m not willing to let that muscle atrophy now that I am doing what I set out to do.
So, here we are, at 11:51 p.m. on Thursday, February 11, 2021, writing an issue of my newsletter that I am determined to publish in less than 9 hours, at 8:30 a.m. on Friday, February 12, 2021. I hope you’ll find this issue useful and fun. If not, please let me know, and I’ll try to adjust accordingly.
Anyway, that’s enough long-winded author-speak for one essay, so let’s dive into the juicy lettuce of Startup Salad 🥗.
Audiblogs
I recently came across an absolutely game-changing product.
Audiblogs is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to take an article and turn it into a podcast.
Wait, you must be thinking, doesn’t Pocket already do that?
Sure, Pocket allows you to save articles and listen to them in their app. But Audiblogs is much different. It turns the articles you want to read into actual podcasts, read to you by an Audible-esque voice.
It’s so much better than Pocket that comparing the two products is about as crazy as comparing Tom Brady and Eli Manning. Sure, Eli has won a couple of Super Bowl rings, but he also had a .500 career record, and the only major statistic he ever led the league in was interceptions. Was he good? Sure. But to mention him and Tom Brady in the same sentence is blasphemy.
In this situation, Audiblogs is Brady, and Pocket is Manning. Pocket’s been around for a while and is fine at what it does, but Audiblogs, is changing the game.
Why is Audiblogs great?
To explain why Audiblogs is excellent, it makes sense to take a look at the words of its creators, Eric Jung and Kyle Morris:
“We love reading online since it’s one of the most effective ways to discover new perspectives. However, reading is kinda hard and time-consuming 🤷♂️ which lead us to constantly having a huge backlog of things to read.
At some point, we turned Paul Graham’s essays into audio podcasts for fun. We loved listening to them, as did our friends. So we decided to create a tool that allows you to do just that -- listen to any web article.
We use Audiblogs to “read” while we exercise, cook, run errands, etc. We now have 1-2 hours of extra time per day that we can use to read other things!
If you love to read but don’t have enough time, you’ll love Audiblogs!”
Audiblogs was built on the understanding that people love to read but don’t always have the time to sit down and give an article their full attention for 10, 20, 30 minutes. This is sentiment really resonates with me.
In 2020, I interviewed my friend Sid Jha for my podcast, People of Growth. In reading Sid’s work, I was impressed by how knowledgeable he seemed to be about incredibly esoteric topics. As I interviewed him, I tried to figure out how he came to be so “smart.” What he said was surprising and obvious all at once.
Sid reads for an hour every night before bed, no matter what. It’s non-negotiable. He said that he started doing this in high school, and I can assure you that it has paid huge dividends, if only in his ability to come across as brilliant. And it seems to be at least somewhat attributable to his commitment to reading.
With this anecdotal but significant evidence of reading's benefits, I set out to read more in 2021. While I’ve done better in some ways, I’m still far behind where I’d like to be. The biggest reason for that seems to be a lack of time. There are only so many hours in the day. I work two part-time jobs, do law school full-time, and try to be a good dad and husband. My schedule has developed quite the knack for staying full.
I don’t think that my experience is super unique either. People are inherently busy creatures. We fill our days with important things, and new tasks, especially ones that require sitting still and not being “productive,” are often hard to prioritize.
But Audiblogs changes that. It helps you read while you do. Walk, work, clean, play, and read all the while. What Audible did for audiobooks, Audiblogs is doing for blogs and online writing. And it’s beautiful.
The question then becomes: hasn’t Pocket already solved this?
The answer is a resounding no. While on its face, Pocket and Audiblogs may be functionally similar, in reality, they are different in nearly every way.
Pocket gets its name from its main feature: holding things. Pockets are useful because they hold things, Pocket is useful because it holds the interesting ideas, articles, and links you find on the internet. In a sense, Pocket is a virtual “junk drawer.” You can throw all of the stuff that you might need in it, and then at least you’ll know where to look for it later.
But interacting with your collected items appears to be somewhat of an afterthought. The reading experience is good but is little more than Pocket’s version of Safari’s Reader View. The audio component, on the other hand, is terrible. Audio is provided by a robotic and cold text reading program, and the audio player is ugly and unhelpful. It’s the perfect combination of fine and terrible, creating an opportunity for Audiblogs to pick up where Pocket lacks, namely in the audio department.
Audiblogs, unlike Pocket, doesn’t try to be anything that it isn’t. Audiblogs turns online articles into podcasts. That’s about it. Plug the extension in, save an article to your podcast player, and you are off to the races, listening to a voice that feels friendly, like the “This is Audible” voice that we have come to know and love.
Audiblogs has also made it especially easy to listen instead of read by allowing you to listen to articles in the podcast app you already use. No more scrolling through Pocket trying to find an article, only to get stuck dealing with its janky audio player. Instead, just pop open your podcast app, select your personal Audiblogs channel, and get to listening! It’s a seamless process.
How can Audiblogs change the game?
The growing creator economy
The creator economy appears to be growing in a manner that I don’t believe we have ever seen before.
We are seeing incredibly talented people go independent and create careers for themselves as content creators. I’ve enjoyed watching two of my favorites, Mario Gabriele and Packy McCormick, go on this journey. The two have operated somewhat differently in their respective approaches to monetization. Packy opts for a sponsorship model, and Mario opts for a membership model (I’m a proud premium subscriber to Mario’s The Generalist).
But as creators begin developing businesses reliant on their content, it seems that they will have crucial choices to make about which mediums through which to distribute their content. I appreciate creators like Packy who are interested in delivering their content in easily digestible ways for their readers. To do this, Packy records himself reading his newsletters as a podcast. I did this for the first two issues of Startup Salad, and let me tell you, it is not an easy task.
Audiblogs essentially removes the requirement for Packy to spend an hour plus recording himself reading his work because his readers can now quickly turn his writing into a podcast with one button. Audiblogs, perhaps unknowingly, is enabling writers to focus on what they do best: writing.
Blowing up the podcast space
The podcast space has been growing like crazy for the past decade. We’ve seen huge acquisitions in the space and huge contracts for the exclusive rights to successful shows. For a while, podcasts have existed mostly in a niche of their own. A delicate balance seems to exist between podcasts, audiobooks, music, and radio, with radio on the way out and podcasts taking a bigger and bigger piece of the market.
But Audiblogs has a real chance to change that.
The audio space seems to be on the precipice of a new era. As social audio has burst onto the scene, people have begun to replace podcasts with Clubhouse and Capiche FM. Consumers are beginning to see audio as a two-way street, not the one-way, audience-only avenue we’ve become accustomed to. With the tide already beginning to turn on audio as a whole, it seems probable that Audiblogs could have an opportunity to take another chunk out of podcasts’ market share.
Audiblogs allows online writing to compete directly with podcasts, on podcasts’ own turf. Podcast hosts now have to convince their listeners that their podcast is more worth the listeners’ attention than other podcasts and that listening to their podcast is better than listening to an artist’s eloquent, well-planned prose.
If podcasting played a more critical role in my life, I would be worried. So much of podcasting is information communication, but improvised oral information-communication is incredibly inefficient. Written information-communication is highly efficient, as the author can put serious forethought into how to format said information to most effectively communicate it. Then, as podcast listeners get a taste of efficient oral information distribution, their feelings may begin to sour on the rambling, long-winded nature of podcasting.
Or maybe I’m wrong, and people just really love listening to other people talk! Who knows? Definitely not me.
Conclusion
Audiblogs is one of the most exciting products I’ve encountered in recent memory. I really believe it’s a tool that can fundamentally change how we interact with information, the internet, and the world around us. It also has the potential to help millions of auditory learners learn and grow.
It’s a tool that I’m happy to use and will do my best to support. If you’re curious, you can download it here.
Until next time…
Thanks for reading, everyone. As always, my DM’s are open.
Take care and stay safe.