How We Built A Voice Journaling App With 400+ Monthly Downloads And No Ad Spend
My name’s Rory of Sound Off, and I’m a 28-year-old telly writer from the UK. I’ve spent the last ten years writing on magic and entertainment television worldwide. If you’ve ever watched Magic For Humans on Netflix or played Neil Patrick Harris’ BoxONE game – I helped write both of those!
During the pandemic, I launched a voice journaling app called Sound Off. It’s like keeping a written journal - instead of writing things down, we voice what’s on our minds instead. It’s more free-flowing and closer to the way our minds like to think.
I should know!
I started voice journaling during the first lockdown and haven’t stopped since.
What’s your backstory, and how did you come up with the idea?
I always have a few projects on the go. Right before the pandemic began, I decided to leave my first app-related business, which sold hybrid watches. I wanted my next project to be app-based and with no physical counterpart. I had the money from my exit. I just needed something new to dive into.
Then boom, lockdown. I ended up locked down in Devon, in the UK. It’s an extensive coastal area with few occupants. That time of year is nicknamed “buggy greys” because the only people who visit Devon there have grey hair or buggies (strollers if you’re American).
I felt an overwhelming urge to journal and realized for the first time that all these people who bang on about journaling weren’t just writing down what they did that day. There were mental health benefits, too. I had nothing to do daily, but I still needed to get things out of my mind. The problem was that I needed a journal or a good pen and the shops nearby were all closed. Instinctively, I reached for my voice memos app.
Voice journaling is lovely. It’s freeing and easy to do. You’re less judgemental of the words leaving your lips as you can’t see them on the page. Plus, audio captures emotional elements like tone of voice and pauses in thought much better.
I wasn’t alone. I soon delved into the research shared online and found many people not only audio journaling but also looking for a good app. You see – there wasn’t one. People on forums shared that they used voice memos but longed for a better alternative. I could build that, I thought to myself.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
It all started with an MVP, which was a google drive link. My friend Paavan helped with the project initially. We’d send friends and family members a link to a dealy Google drive file. They’d listen to a piece of guided audio content and then use whatever app they already had on their phone to the audio journal.
My rule is that if your product idea is new, nothing else should be.
We did this to determine the guided content and establish the features the app itself needed. This process was incredibly reassuring. I was shocked that some of the younger volunteers, two teenage girls, had been voice journaling and making recordings averaging seventeen minutes long each day. Seventeen minutes! Until then, I’d been sounding off for months and averaged 3-5 minutes.
We hired someone to help design the app for us, which could have been improved. Try as we may, they couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea. We wanted Sound Off to be like the Nike run app or Spotify. It needed to be a tool people actively engaged in. But all the designers we spoke to, and even the one we hired, kept trying to push us towards a pretty, curvy wellness-looking app. No thanks.
Luckily, Paavan found a talented human called Katarina Batina, who had a few weeks available between her two fancy jobs. She helped us set some good design rules, set the tone, and gave us the confidence to finish designing the app ourselves. And now, I do almost all of the design work for the app in Figma, relying heavily on inspiration from a platform called Mobbin.
My significant rule is that if your product idea is new, nothing else about it should be. So I follow the design standards we’re all used to in good apps.
Describe the process of launching the business.
Honestly, we just launched it. We fumbled around with some blog posts on Medium that did work to build up a small mailing list. Then we toyed with Facebook ads. I sat on my bedroom floor and made my best impression of an influencer recording a selfie video about how you must try voice journaling. They did alright, but we found they weren’t needed to get enough users to try the app for now.
The app was quite well positioned in a niche category. We became the number one app for “voice journal” and "audio journal” in the UK within a week, and we’ve remained there pretty much since. The app gets 400+ downloads a month with no ad spend.
That’s enough for me to tinker with the app and see what works. I’m in no rush to grow the business. It’s profitable, and as a solopreneur, I am lucky to have the freedom to take my time to get it right before wading into marketing.
The biggest lesson I learned is that if you have an app idea, there are free tools that will tell you if people are already searching for it in the app store and how easy it would be for you to rank. We added the word “passcode” to our keywords and shot up the search results. See if there’s a demand for your app idea before you start building.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
When I realized people were already searching for voice journaling apps like this, I focused on App Store Optimisation. That’s been the core focus – minor but incredibly targeted tweaks per build submission.
One of the things that worked well was adding a screenshot that featured lots of images of people to represent the number of users we had. It acted as social proof. Another thing I did was swap out a beautiful sunset image for one of a woman looking directly at the camera. This stops people from scrolling through the App Store to download the app.
In terms of retention, adding more content has helped, plus increasing the ways that users can listen to it. Initially, we were strict about making users listen to guided content in a specific order. Now, listeners can explore the full library and jump around content.
How are you doing today, and what does the future look like?
Life is good. I’m a digital nomad (I hate the term, but there’s no other). I’m traveling the world and maintaining a few of my projects. I have a paid newsletter about writing TV magic that keeps me grounded weekly. Then every month or so, I’ll make a sprint on Sound Off or one of my other projects.
I’m keen for Sound Off to diversify into paid features and paid content this year. There are excellent possibilities for voice journaling-specific features. Imagine if the app automatically tracks your mood and shows you themes you talk about a lot.
It would also be nice to get off the hamster wheel I’m on trying to keep adding new content to the app. It’s at the point now where it’s difficult to add content that everyone will love because it’s already filled with the big hits everyone wants. What excites me is working on hyper-specific content for new moms, students taking exams, etc. They’ll need to wait until when I have a few more thousand people on the app!
For now, paid features.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
Starting a business that you can leave on its own for a while is advantageous. Life happens, and sometimes you’ll want to shift focus elsewhere for weeks or months. I had to do that with Sound Off. It's not something I've done before with my previous work – though it's difficult to tell if I'd never done it before because I didn't need to or couldn't.
I accidentally started a business that I can leave running for three months. It'll just continue to generate monthly recurring revenue. I'm incredibly thankful, delighted, and somewhat surprised by it all. Now that I've got it, I can't imagine anything else.
So I think my answer is that the advantageous thing to do, which I now know, is to only start businesses that you can treat like a spinning plate – focus on it intensely to get it up and going, then leave it for a while and come back to speed it up a bit.
I think what sets great founders aside is not their ability to start, run, or maintain a business – it's their ability to know when to start one and when to leave one on the post-it note.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
Ah, the fun question. I use RevenueCat, which I cannot recommend enough for Apple App Store payments. Then I use Figma, which I cannot recommend enough for design stuff. Then Sprig for user feedback which I do not recommend at all – it was free when I paid a developer to add it to the app, and now Sprig is tens of thousands of dollars. It's just not meant for solo-founders, but I wish they'd said so originally.
Flamelink looks after all of our audio content. Bit boring, but it does the job. Then there's Logic for all the audio editing for the app's content and Photoshop (can't ditch it, sadly) for the app's images, which are almost all from Unsplash.
We initially used Unsplash images as placeholders for what we thought would become custom graphics. People complimented the images so much that we kept them in.
So, all in all – it's RevenueCat, Figma, Flamelink, Photoshop, and Logic. Pretty simple.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
I recommend Pieter Levels' Make Book. It's all about bootstrapping as a solopreneur. It is incredibly encouraging and helps you break free of this start-up VC culty nonsense. It’s taught me to make small bets and test your ideas.
Besides that, I'll recommend Quiet by Susan Caiin, Essentialism by Greg McKeown, The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen, and Yes Man by Danny Wallace. How To Get Rich by Felix Dennis is also annoyingly good, as much as I hate its title. Give Convenience Store Woman a read afterward.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Work hard. Make friends.
It's all you can do.
When starting a business, I suggest becoming an expert at spotting good business ideas. Be selective. I think what sets great business people aside is not their ability to start, run, or maintain a business – it's their ability to know when to start one and when to leave one on the post-it note.
Place lots of small bets. Focus on ideas that are a low effort to start in their most minimal form. I just funded a card game of mine on Kickstarter. I decided to do it because I knew it would take less than a month of my time and $500. I'm not saying it's the next Cards Against Humanity… but if it is, that was a tremendously small bet.
Where can we go to learn more?
I'm not on socials, so the best place to stalk me is through this link.
If you like party games, take a look at mine.
If you like magic, take a look at by Substack.
Oh, and download Sound Off please, and thank you.
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