Long past its expiry date

I’m not sure if there is a statute of limitation on writing a postmortem; if there is one, I am definitely past it.

Reedeo as an idea existed for years before my brother an I decided to build an application around it. That being said, the ‘idea’ evolved over time until what was left was what we hoped to be a minimum viable product.

MVP Scope

We whittled our grandiose concept into a basic app, that would let users take their read-it-later list on Pocket and have it read out to them using text-to-speech voice synthesis; at the time Instapaper and Pocket where all the rage (this is before most browsers added the ‘read it later’ feature into the browser).

It seems obvious to the point of not needing to belabor it … clearly, the scope of the product wasn’t ‘viable’; although I doubt any tinkering around the edges would have made any difference. If anything, our scope served its purpose well, it quickly validated the lack demand for such a stand-alone solution.

Building the App

There were some tricky aspects to building the app, the most complex (and costly) was that back then, you needed a text-to-speech library that could be installed with the app to convert the text into speech; today this could likely be done with a simple call to a local embedded on the device OS.

Overall, the UI was dead simple - the user would provide their login credentials for Pocket, which would be stored on the device, and the app would call the Pocket API to get their list of articles. The Pocket API was fantastic in that you could even call for ‘text only’ versions of each article, greatly reducing the work required to render the speech, also making it easy to store these articles locally for offline listening. It amazing that after all these years, the Pocket API is still supported & available.

Product Market Fit

This is probably the biggest lesson I learned from launching Reedeo; namely, that you need a cost-effective way to reach your market; obvious right? Over the years I’d dabbled in selling things using Google and Facebook; but when you have a niche product solution for a problem people don’t know they have, finding a way to reach your target users can be quite challenging. I’ve heard it said that if you build a great product that solves a need, people will find it; but in spite of being a voracious consumer of tech news, I’m continually amazed by new products and features I find, that have been around for years, but I’ve never come across.

To this day, I think there is a market for this product feature, not only are there still two apps (that I’m aware of) that are delivering this, and even new concepts being floated, Pocket finally implemented this feature … albeit with one fatal flaw that renders it mostly unusable on iOS.

The real challenge I was never able to solve was how to reach a niche of a niche that does not know you have a solution to a problem they think is not solvable? There is no target demographic or a search term you buy to reach these users. Of course, this was before Nir Eyal wrote a fantastic post explaining how to hack your ‘reading’ by having your Pocket list read to you (in essence, the problem that the Reedeo app was trying to help you solve).

Two key takeaways from product market fit

• You need to have a well-defined channel thru which to reach your audience. Proposing posts to bloggers about a problem they don’t understand won’t get you very far; you need better plan to reach your target user. One insight worth considering when looking for your next big idea; is to evaluate whether you have access to any underpriced channels or markets with barriers - a market product fit.


• No matter how much you want a feature to be a product, sometimes features just belong in an existing product. This is part of what motivated me to start a blog called Enhancement Request - to provide a platform to request feature enhancements. So while a feature doesn’t make a company, it might make a great blog post - let me know if you’d an interested in writing an enhancement request post for the feature you’d like to see in a product you love.

In Conclusions

It took 2 years of noodling on concepts to land on an MVP, 1 year of spec’ing and coding, and 3 months in the app store to kill off Reedeo. It was a great experience, and I’m thankful to my brother for partnering with me to make it a reality. I continue to use Voice Dream to listen to my Pocket list, and it has allowed me to use my ‘downtime’ more effectively; nevertheless, I would gladly move my listening to the Pocket app if they ever enabled continuous play with text-to-speech … maybe I’ll write a post about it.

Epilogue

I still maintain the old website reedeo.com for posterity’s sake. When we shut down the company I repurposed our video for a competitor (www.lisgo.org) that was mostly working on the same problem; alas, I’m not sure it helped them any more than it helped Reedeo.