SoundOff is now live in the App Store! It’s been 4 years in the making…

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/soundoff-daily-conversation/id1661147373

amateur zythologist // professional building soundoffdaily.twitter & publicartifacts.twitter // ex consensys, web3 media exec, web2 founder, rocket scientist

Working on SoundOff https://apps.apple.com/app/soundoff-daily-conversation/id1661147373  and Druck https://apple.co/3GXl1Ya

In 2019 @novack 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

Finally a couple of months ago @novack 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 ex CNN producers, 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 with authentication, a real database (DynamoDB) and push notifications.

After testing it in TestFlight with about 200 ppl, we’ve now released it into the App Store. We’ve got a waitlist in place to make sure everything scales properly as we grow. But 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. She answers all the time with gems like this https://soundoff.io/answer/1bpzzz8leiq1its

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. Ok long thread over. Come join us!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/soundoff-daily-conversation/id1661147373

We didn’t get very far, I think we just recorded a few answers ourselves. Fast forward a year and I’m at CNN leading the podcast team. Again @novack and I talk about doing this (he’s leading Web3 there) but it never goes anywhere (figured we’d get Anderson Cooper to ask the questions)