SoundOff

SoundOff is now live in the App Store! It’s been 5 years in the making. In 2018 @jasonnovack and I were winding down our failed attempt at building a SaaS AI startup and were thinking of new things to build. We started talking about an app that asked everyone the same question and ppl answered it with voice. We didn’t get very far, I think we just recorded a few answers ourselves. A couple of months ago @jasonnovack texts me one day - “Want to try Answerz again?” (Answerz was our code name). I said yes, let’s do it. With the help of a couple of old colleagues, we initially got 20 ppl to record answers in the voice recording app and email them to us. We uploaded on Dropbox and listened to them there. We could immediately tell how cool it was to hear all these different perspectives. We then set out to build a simple webpage to help us more easily collect answers That webpage turned into a simple webapp. Which eventually gave way to an iOS app written is SwiftUI. After testing it in TestFlight with about 200 ppl, we’ve now released it into the App Store. I couldn’t be more excited about our future. We are getting great feedback and the engagement rates are really high. But it’s more than that. A month ago my mom asked me if she could send it to her friend Barbara. I said “Sure why not”. I had very little confidence Barbara would get it installed on TestFlight, let alone create an account and start using it. Fast forward a month, Barbara is by far my favorite user. The fact that we built something that my 73 year old mom’s friend uses every day just blows me away. So that excites me about its future more than anything. Come join our small and growing community. I think you'll find that the authenticity you hear is a refreshing experience compared to all of the social and traditional media we consume daily.

Congrats on your launch! This is an impressive model for social media redesign. I appreciate the combination of simplicity, authenticity, and meaningful interactions that the unique audio based design encourages. How are you approaching the balance between adding more features, and keeping the app design relatively simple (while powerful) for users?

I love the idea of submitting short audio recordings instead of typing out answers. It feels more personal and engaging.