Fanfare February 23🎉

Basil Philipp 🎉

This is a slightly redacted version of the update I shared with the team and our investor. I removed our cash-at-hand numbers and anonymized some customers since I didn't ask for permission to name them.

After a flurry of feature releases and the new signup record in January, February felt muted in comparison. Objectively, we still had some successes to celebrate, like the official launch of the Active Transcripts for our first large concierge clients and its significant revenue. We also continued to grow the number of DIY customers.

Sometimes even toast feels sad for no reason

KPIs 📈

Users talked to: 3 existing (+2), 3 other (-1)

MRR: $65 (+$15)

Extra hours revenue (non-recurring): $0 (-$6)

Manual revenue (non-recurring)

clips: $25 (-$15)
transcripts: $2051 (+$1998)

MAU: Total 23 (+5)

Subscribed 11 (+1)
Trialing 12 (+4)

Months to 0: 13 (by March. 2024) // Includes some buffer

Highlights 🚀

Transcribed 32 of a customers past podcast episodes and published them. They are responsible for the spike in the manual transcript revenue.
We bought ads in one of the leading podcast newsletters³. We got three signups, translating to a conversion rate of 4.4%. The cost for the ads was $180 because I bought them on short notice. If we buy a month in advance, it's as low as $29.
Hired three more freelancers to work on transcripts. There's a significant variance in how fast they work, which we believe is primarily due to unclear standards regarding the transcription quality we expect from them. However, we're confident we can generate at least $15 of marginal income per hour transcribed.
We released a find/replace feature to reduce the editing ratio further.
Updated the landing page with better graphics and added more explicit examples.
Started working with Alessandro Tschabold, our Innosuisse Coach. He thinks we're in a good position and have something worth selling. Getting more users should be my focus, in his opinion.
Signed another concierge client. She 86 episodes already, and she wants us to create a clip from each. She also wants a custom domain.
Spoke to Nathan Gathwright⁵ about his side project Steno.fm⁴. He's very well-connected and knowledgeable in the podcast community and was nice enough to talk to me. He told me that only 0.6% of podcasts are currently publishing transcripts. He believes this low percentage is also due to many hosters not supporting the proper tags yet to post them in the RSS feed (RSS being an open standard leads to many features taking a long time to be adopted).
Steno.fm can load transcripts from Descript pages, and we'll work on allowing him to also load transcripts from Fanfare. This should help our common goal to further the adoption of transcripts for podcasts and I hope it's the start of us collaborating more with the open podcast ecosystem.
Our burn was USD 32k since we started the company, around USD 8k less per month than I had projected. It was due to lower spending on marketing and servers than projected and some one-off revenue — like helping out Genistat with some consulting projects. I haven't analyzed the numbers in detail yet, so I'm not ready to adjust our runway projection.

Lowlights 😕

Sending out fully automated clips didn't generate any attributable signups. The engineering work is not lost, as we can turn the automatic styling of clips into a feature for users. But automated outreach is not the silver bullet we hoped for.
Some users never log in after signing up, and we assume the registration e-mail sometimes gets lost. We now added Google single sign-on.
Now that we run multiple campaigns simultaneously, we realize we can't attribute a signup to a campaign. For example, we don't know if a user signed up via a Google or newsletter ad. We now implemented a way to track this.

Team 🤗

Chris had his last day at Fanfare after he told us last year that he wanted to focus on his Master's thesis. We will miss him.
I struggled with a slow recovery from getting sick by the end of January, which I now assume to have been COVID. We also pushed 30+ episodes through our Concierge transcription process, which required much setup work. This slowdown, the feeling that there's a new AI miracle released daily, and the fact that our runway is not infinite felt unsettling and led to many discussions. Most of them were productive; some got overly hypothetical. In the end, we reaffirmed that we're in an okay position, but much work remains. And that AI is a wave we're well positioned to surf. It also taught me the need to hand off more of "how" we do the engineering work so that I can focus more on "what" we do next.

Customer stories 📣

Volts now includes our PDFs and a link to the Active Transcript².
Seldon Crisis released an episode with Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the greatest living sci-fi authors. Our concierge service provided the transcript¹. He wrote this about Fanfare:

Fanfare, through the services of creating beautiful and highly functional active transcripts, as well as individual animated clips with audio, allows me to focus promotions on key parts of episodes. I can search, copy and paste segments of text content for use in promotions or just as a reference for deeper analysis of ideas expressed during a show, without having to re-listen to the entire podcast while taking detailed notes. In addition, the availability of high quality transcripts provides a rich way for people with limited or complete deafness, or those with cognitive disabilities, to easily follow the ideas expressed by guests and by myself during episodes. This ensures that the podcast is as inclusive as possible and I am not limiting its content to those with full hearing or cognitive capabilities.

Outlook for next month 🔭

Continue the cold-email outreach. We have some ideas to make it more targeted and cheaper for us to run. I hope that by adding clips and by making the messages personal we're adding value.
Experiment with sponsoring podcasts. Science Fiction Remnant⁶ is a highly ranked sci-fi and indie podcast, and they reached out through Joel. They decided they didn't want the concierge approach right now, but they are open to us sponsoring them. I'm considering offering them a free website with lightly edited transcripts on top: I hope it will help them and us.
Continue with ads in podcast newsletters.
Implement a referral system.
Increase prices (and offer a yearly option).
Better tracking of signup conversion and user behavior in the app. Together with user feedback, this should help us to understand which features to focus on.
Improve transcript editing to reduce the editing ratio for DIY and concierge clients.
Increase marginal income from concierge clients by streamlining the process.
Experiment using Whisper API for speech-to-text and ChatGPT for highlight extraction and summarization.
Stretch goal: A prototype of enriched transcripts.
I will be on vacation for the last two weeks of March, which means the monthly update will be a week late.

Thank you!

Basil

CEO Fanfare🎉

Image by Foad Roshan on Unsplash.