Show HN: Blogcast – Generate audio versions of your articles

Well done! This is made by Miguel, Blogcast is one of the most unique awesome product, congratulations! much love from Singapore

This seems pretty cool. I might give it a try at some point, once I have a blog again.

Okay, this is awesome!

It doesn't mention it anywhere on the website, but this is using Google's Text to Speech (https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/). I recognize the voice.

I've used Google's TTS to convert books into audiobooks. Surprisingly listenable.

Nice work! This is an impressive product - the voice sounds human and it’s easy to understand. Allow me to make a few suggestions:

A low effort improvement to the landing page would be to move link to a sample from the bottom to the top. Make it the first thing a visitor sees. Let the product speak for itself.

You shoukd charge more too. $.50 on a for-life value add feels like you’re only capturing a teensy tiny fraction of the value you provide. You’ll probably have to deal with way fewer support requests too if you charged ~$5/article.

Think about it - someone could record the audio themselves which might take ~1 hour all-in? If their hourly rate is $60, your service is still providing ~$45 of value per use if you increase the price to $5. The customers you want won’t care about the increased price and it makes it more likely you can continue to support your users and grow the company far into the future.

Finally, a natural product expansion would be automated distribution to podcast platforms. IMO you should invest in building this out instead of supporting the audio embed. A new distribution channel is a lot more valuable for a blogger than a new feature on their existing channel (think about it: if you were a blogger would you rather embed a video to go along with each post or post an accompanying video to your YouTube channel and link to it/link back to the article from the video?).

Product braindump done. Again, awesome work on the product and good luck growing the business!