Changing course.

On competition, cattle & pets, and setting myself up for success on a new project

Handling competition

A lot has happened to my perception of my Speakerine project in the past 10 days.

Some time ago, I discovered some mobile applications that I could consider to be competition.

One of them is Omnivore.
It's open source. So it's free. And it honestly looks good!

It is competition because it's a read-later app that offers text-to-speech capabilities. It's got great feature ideas, too! For example, you can create emails linked to your account to receive newsletters directly in the app.

When I discovered this app, my inner voice went all “That's it, you should quit” on me.
Somebody's already there and they're doing a great job, just leave it.

But then I figured that's not how I should think about it.

Omnivore is not competition.
What I want to build with Speakerine has a very strong focus on audio, not on reading.
It is not “for serious readers"; it is for people who don't have time to read.
It's about curating your daily reading list of articles and getting a playlist to listen to out of it.

Of course, I did not jump instantly from the first feeling to the second.
I was surprised, though, that this became my conclusion. Competition has always made me anxious, and it's hard for me to ignore it.
But here, what it really did is help me strengthen my “product vision” (let's call it that) for Speakerine.

Good for me :)

About cattle & pets

Some of you already know I'm part of the Small Bets community (hey, small betters! 👋). I should write later about the benefits of belonging to such a community.

One thing that's been repeated several times in Small Bet’s chat is:

Treat your projects like cattle, not pets

When you get too attached to a project and treat it like a pet, you might fail to see when it's time to stop it. Cattle, on the other hand, is dispensable.

Well, what Omnivore helped me realise as well is that Speakerine might be too big of a cow for me right now. Here's why:

Technically speaking, I know where to go and what I want to build.

Since Omnivore is open source, I've explored their code, and I can see they have actually solved everything I have in mind:

• Extracting an article’s main content

• Turning that content into audio thanks to text-to-speech models. They even use a secondary voice for block quotes; I love the idea!

• Handling RSS feeds

• And so on, and so forth

Reading their code, I can see how many challenges they’ve faced and overcome while building their apps and the API services to support them.

You know how we sometimes say that knowing your future will ruin your present?
That's the effect Omnivore’s code has had on me: instead of a relatively straightforward road to an MVP/prototype, all I can see now is a winding path full of bumps and brambles.

It let me see the unknown unknowns I was happy to ignore at the moment and made my task look more daunting than it had to be.

I thought about it for some time and saw two main paths in front of me:

• Continue on my current path of building Speakerine as I intended, knowing I will probably face many roadblocks.

• Use Ominvore’s code. After all, it's open source! I could ditch a good part of it and rebuild the front end to match the user experience I'm aiming for.

The thing is, in both cases, it does not really look like a “small bet” anymore.

So I'm starting to think I’m treating this project like a pet, meaning I care too much about moving it forward and finishing it, even when it gets too complicated considering my current situation: two young kids, a 9-5 job, and little bandwidth.

I might need something else.

Setting myself up for success

Let's get back to some fundamentals:

• I haven’t done any serious coding in ~3/4 years

• I haven't built & shipped a full project on my own for 10+ years

• I'm a perfectionist who tends to overthink (could you tell? 🫣)

• I am not, at the moment, particularly good at time management, organising myself for productivity, (…)

I want to build in public to get back to doing all of the above and to have fun.
Ultimately, I'd like to earn money from that, but it will take time. That's fine.

So, my definition of success right now would be:

• I found a simple idea

• I built & shipped it in a matter of days/weeks

• I publicly documented the process

I don't even care if it's earning money in the end.
I'll just kill it if it's a money pit. That's the idea of small bets.

Speakerine is too big for me right now to have this velocity, and I know I would care if it did not earn any money.

That's why I decided to pause the project and get myself back into shape by working on something much simpler.

Introducing: real-emails.com

This is the simple idea: an API to check for disposable/temp email addresses.
I already bought the domain for it: real-emails.com.

There are tons of services offering disposable/temporary email addresses to help people provide fake email addresses they'll never ever check again.

Honestly, I can see why people use them, and I do happen to use Yopmail from time to time…
But when you’re building a SaaS or trying to acquire emails legitimately, you want to make sure you're not being given crap addresses.

Some basic services use only one or a few domain names for their email generators. You could simply list those ones in a blocklist, and you'd be done with them.

However, more serious services like Yopmail.com can enrol new domains every day!

This is where a service becomes useful: you don't have to worry about keeping up-to-date with all those new domains.

So I will build that service, release it, and make it available for a tiny yearly subscription fee or a lifetime deal.

I'm giving myself a week to build it and will try to send updates every other day.

Let's see what happens!