A Behind the Scenes Look at Building Hello Audio with Lindsay Padilla of Hello Audio
Episode 533: Show Notes
Today on the show we have Dr. Lindsay Padilla, Founder of Hello Audio, a SaaS product that lets users easily create private audio feeds their customers can listen to anywhere, anytime! She has been building this SaaS product from the ground up. It has been fascinating to watch from the sidelines and we are excited for you guys to dive in. For the first half of this episode, Lindsay gives us a true, honest, behind-the-scenes look at everything it takes both mentally and logistically to build a software. Everything that she wanted to create from the hole she saw in the market of audio and how course creators can deliver amazing content to their students and how Lindsay could make that happen.
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She talks about breaking down barriers in a male-dominated space, learning things in the tech space, raising money, deciding to bootstrap or not, and everything in between. And then at the end of the episode, we talk about what Hello Audio actually is and how you as a service-based business owner, online course creator, educator, could use this platform to better your customer experience and to add more value. You get a peek into the stuff that Abagail and Emylee have been thinking about doing in their business and ideas for what you can use in your own one to help you grow and create an amazing experience for the people you already have.
How Lindsay Got the Idea to Build A SaaS Product
Hello Audio is a software that takes your premium content and turns it into private audio feeds for your customers, students, or audience to be able to listen and learn on the go. Lindsay got the idea after she had spent years in the education and online course space. The core question she was occupied with during this time was how to get people to finish courses. She realized the reason many people were not completing courses was due to the medium the material was delivered in. She did a course that was delivered in audio and also was part of the Stu McLaren membership community and heard many of the participants asking for the content to be converted into podcast form. At this time there was no SaaS product that handled this and she saw a gap in the market. She highlights the idea that anytime you have a repetitive task on your hands, this is an opportunity to build a SaaS product!
The First Steps of Building Hello Audio
Abagail feels like she spends her life cobbling tools together to streamline processes. She has wanted to build a SaaS product for a long time but is intimidated by how male-dominated the tech world is. So she is really interested to know what gave Lindsay the confidence to pull the trigger on her idea and implement it in the real world. After Lindsay got her idea she pitched it to her husband who then did research on the topic and got convinced that it was a great idea and they should build it. They then raised $30,000 by selling lifetime memberships for the product on Facebook before it was even built! They used this money to start their build and then got into negotiations with other podcasting companies to see if they could combine their skills. One of the women she met in this process wanted to partner with her to build the product. They agreed but then after building a beta version, the woman left and took the code so Lindsay and her husband had to start over! She didn’t let this get her down though, but saw it as the universe testing her to see if she really believed in her idea! Lindsay and her husband needed more money at this point, so they raised another $100,000 using the same strategy as before, by creating excitement around a product they knew solved a problem. One of the lessons Lindsay took away from this is that in contrast to the tech space, she understood branding. Through branding, she was able to raise all the money she needed to build her product.
Where Hello Audio Is Now and Why Lindsay Decided To Raise Capital
Last summer was when Lindsay built her product from scratch and the 250 lifetime users they had garnered were the first official testers for the beta version. In November 2020 they opened to monthly subscribers which felt like a huge step into making the project a reality. They are now seeing 20% growth month over month. They are carving out a niche that doesn’t exist because no podcast hosting company is doing things the way they are. Lindsay and her husband are at a point where they are looking at where audio is going and using their insights to guide their choices. People are falling in love with audio again and are able to commit to it better than video because audio content can be engaged with while on the go. In September and November, they did their first capital raise. They chose to raise capital and not continue to bootstrap because Lindsay could feel something bigger was happening and she needed to fund a team to build the product fast. She did not want to stay in the digital marketing space and she wanted to set an example for other women out there. They are now at $7,000 MRR, which doesn’t sound like much but SaaS uses accrual accounting meaning they are at just under $100,000 ARR currently.
What People with Personal Brands Have That Tech Bros Don’t
Lindsay spoke about how the tech industry doesn’t understand marketing and we wanted to dig a little deeper with her about what she did differently. Laura Roeder was a big inspiration to her and the two started inboxing each other while Lindsay was building Hello Audio. Laura took her company Meet Edgar to $3M in 18 months and it was all through knowing her audience and understanding marketing. This is a skill that Lindsay and Laura understood that all the white bros building tech in Silicon Valley did not. So Lindsay wants to say that any coach, consultant, or creative can totally build and sell a SaaS product because the skill that differentiates them from the tech people is their ability to sell something in a scrappy way! Moreover, it is possible to build apps these days without even writing a line of code. SaaS has great margins and Lindsay also believes that building SaaS can be helpful to women. This is because women are so devoted and emotionally connected to their audience. It can be really helpful to step back and make money from a product rather than one’s skillset!
Diving Deeper Into Hello Audio and Its Value Proposition
In the last part of our conversation, we asked Lindsay to speak a bit more about Hello Audio and its value proposition. Firstly she defines the difference between a private and a public audio feed because people shouldn’t confuse a private audio feed with a podcast. Podcasts are publicly searchable on podcast hosting apps whereas private audio feeds are not. What Hello Audio offers to creators is a unique link to their content that each of their subscribers will receive. This link is more secure than a public URL and it is tied to the email of the subscriber. When the subscriber clicks this link, they are taken to a subscribe page where they can then click another link that opens the private audio file on their favorite hosting platform, making the experience as frictionless as possible. What is so great is that Hello Audio is not trying to change their customers’ behavior. People already listen to audio while doing something else, and what Hello Audio has done is found a way to link that habit to the concept of an online course. The thing that makes Hello Audio special is that their product is built around the idea that we can pay more attention and learn in a different way while listening to audio rather than watching a video. Many of us work on our screens and the last thing we want is to get more screen time while doing an online course after work. Hello Audio is not just for people already in the content creation game either. It can be valuable to people who don’t have a fancy $2,000 course offer. Audio is easy to create and easy to consume. You can gather email addresses more effectively with an audio offering rather than a free book or course because audio has a higher perceived value. There are a lot of use cases for private feeds which is exactly what makes Hello Audio so exciting!
Quote This
Anything you have in a spreadsheet or any sort of weird script or repetitive manual thing that your team is doing probably has a software solution.
Highlights
How Lindsay Got the Idea to Build A SaaS Product. [0:05:04.1]
The First Steps of Building Hello Audio. [0:08:24.2]
Where Hello Audio Is Now and Why Lindsay Decided To Raise Capital. [0:19:00.4]
What People with Personal Brands Have That Tech Bros Don’t. [0:24:32.2]
Diving Deeper Into Hello Audio and Its Value Proposition. [0:37:28.7]
#TalkStrategyToMe [0:52:02.6]
Sign up with Hello Audio.
Drag your MP3s or video course content into the software and it converts these into private audio.
Change the titles, add to the descriptions, or rearrange the ordering.
Enjoy choosing from the different options for how your content is delivered such as through drip or instant feeds.
Add hyperlinks to other resources of your choice.
Add listener emails next.
Hit send!
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Lindsay Padilla
Hello Audio
Website | Instagram | Facebook
Dr. Lindsay Padilla spent years dedicating her life to educating students. She decided to take that knowledge and start her own business helping people create online courses and teach people what they know. But she dropped all of that to start a brand new company, Hello Audio and she has been building this exciting new SaaS product from the ground up since then!
KEY TOPICS
SaaS, Online Courses, Private audio content, Branding, Raising Capital
