This is How I Almost Built an Illegal Startup

I almost did something real stupid.

Recently I’ve been working on a project I’ve called Storytime.

Storytime is a hot mess of code and design errors that I’ve lovingly strung together in the course of the last few weeks — but it does the thing I want it to do. Which is not, in fact, the thing it was originally designed to do.

What I wanted from Storytime

• I wanted to build something fast. As in, I wanted to see how quickly I could go from idea to Minimum Viable Product. Why? Because the last project I worked on took me the better part of a year, and I never released it. I learned a ton, but the idea was never validated. And I also recently watched levels.io’s recent video which is pretty sweet if you haven’t seen it.
• The original idea was that a person would be able to copy and paste text into a text box and get speech back, utilizing AWS as a speech conversion API. Because that sounds fun to build, and I’d probably use something like that if it was super easy to use and not awful looking. I like listening to things. I’m a huge audiobook/podcast fanatic. I fall asleep to podcasts every night. The point is: the original plan had the ‘scratch your own itch’ vibe going on.
• I wanted to build something in Vim + Tmux. My previous workflow had been Atom, and there’s no better way to learn Vim than to just go for it. Probably. I don’t know, it’s what I did. Turns out Vim is faster and feels better. It also removes a lot of the abstraction from your computer. I was lucky enough to be able to message a guy who works at a local dev shop. He gave me their dotfile. What’s a dotfile? It’s essentially a set of configuration files. It makes Vim a little.. nicer.

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. — Reid Hoffman

So I’m finished with my MVP, right? Right? Well it doesn’t really do anything, certainly not anything interesting. Who would use this? There’s plenty of these on the internet already. Sure they may not look quite as shnazzy, but they get the job of turning text to speech done. So I sat down and started to think.

I still want this to be a simple service. But it needs to be easier. Right now I have to go find the text I want to copy and then copy and paste it and then download the file and then put it in Itunes and then put it on my phone. That sucks. Here is where I almost made the fatal error.

What if I just, you know, used RSS feeds? They’re easily accessible written content that I can turn to speech and listen to. This is a great idea. So I built it. Medium itself has an RSS feeds, which are conveniently obscured, but usable. I had this version up and running in a day or two. Pick a medium publication, pick a story, add it to your queue, and then turn it all into what is essentially a personalized podcast. Boom.

It’s also illegal. Whoops. In the process of just building a product I would want to use it turned out to be kind of bad. People don’t just lose their copyright to their work when it’s piped through an RSS feed. And creating an audio file based on that content is definitely a derivative work. Luckily, I have no users (ha). So we just scrap that idea? Nah. What if we just ask people for their permission? Or pay them for their article downloads? Now we’re getting somewhere. One of the challenges here are now the chicken and the egg problem. The app itself relies on content that it doesn’t generate. Which means I have to personally go around and ask people for their permission to use their feeds.

So this is still the plan. The ultimate goal? You can subscribe to Storytime and it makes a curated ‘podcast’ of articles that automatically gets sent to an app on your phone every day. Because that sounds baller and I’d use that. But first I need to make sure other people want to use it. Oh. And I guess if you want to see what it looks like right now click here to go to Storytime.

P.S Claps and recommends really help me out. If you learned anything, or thought the story was interesting, be a bro/broette, and click those buttons.