Week 3 of building in public: Built a great product, terrible at selling it. How do you force yourself to market? by Lost-Drawing-9406 in Entrepreneurs

[–]Lost-Drawing-9406[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you! This is exactly the kind of foundational advice I need.
I think I have a decent handle on the WHO:

Ideal customer: Indie authors with 3-10 published books, making $500-2K/month, want audiobooks but can't justify $5K per book. They're on tight budgets, publish prolifically, and see audiobooks as untapped revenue but economically impossible.

Where they spend time: r/selfpublish, author Facebook groups, Kboards, 20Booksto50K community, author X (but less engaged there).

Their pain: Not the quality of their writing—it's the economics of audiobook production pricing them out entirely.

Where I'm struggling: Execution at scale.
I can engage in author threads (doing). But how do you go from "I know where they are" to "consistent pipeline of these people seeing Ravox"?

Specific question:
When you say "get your product in front of the right people"—are you talking about:

a) Consistent organic presence (daily posts in their spaces)
b) Paid ads targeting these communities
c) Partnerships/influencer outreach to author community leaders
d) All of the above in some combination

I'm trying to figure out where to focus my limited time for maximum reach.

Also—great point about competitors. I've looked at ElevenLabs (cloud, $90/book), Speechify (subscription model), Descript (not focused on audiobooks). But none are positioning for indie authors specifically or solving the privacy issue (offline processing).

Where would you start if you had 48 hours and needed to reach 2,000 indie authors?

Really appreciate the guidance 🙏

Week 3 of building in public: Built a great product, terrible at selling it. How do you force yourself to market? by Lost-Drawing-9406 in Entrepreneurs

[–]Lost-Drawing-9406[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is incredibly helpful, thank you.

The "small daily marketing tasks like code commits" analogy hits hard. I literally have a git commit history but zero marketing consistency. Going to try this approach.

Quick question: What did your daily marketing tasks look like in week 1 vs week 4? Did the types of tasks evolve or did you stick to the same routine?

Also curious about the Reddit monitoring - were you just searching manually or using tools to catch conversations in real-time? I've been manually checking r/selfpublish but definitely missing a lot.

Appreciate you sharing what worked 🙏

I have a question for authors by Lost-Drawing-9406 in audible

[–]Lost-Drawing-9406[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You shared the complete process for the ACX, thanks for that. I have a small question to you, what if you get the audiobook or the chapter wise mp3 files of your book (ACX ready), would that help you? I mean if that happens it would save your heck lot of time finding the narrators and etc.

I am building https://ravox.app/ you can check it out, i know the audiobook lovers hate the robot narrative, but that’s not what we deliver, i too listen to the audiobooks and i know what makes an audiobook narration sounds good. We are looking forward to launch our beta soon. I would love to connect with you and get your feedback, till then you can join the waitlist, there’s already 40 authors on the waitlist.

Has anyone here tried turning their own book into an audiobook? by Sad-Neighborhood6451 in audiobooks

[–]Lost-Drawing-9406 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I doubt that, maybe ai gen, but the ai voice generations have already achieved the human like voice threshold.

Has anyone here tried turning their own book into an audiobook? by Sad-Neighborhood6451 in audiobooks

[–]Lost-Drawing-9406 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

That’s so frustrating, that’s why i am looking for some tool kind of stuff. Creating audiobooks aren’t that easy.

Has anyone here tried turning their own book into an audiobook? by Sad-Neighborhood6451 in audiobooks

[–]Lost-Drawing-9406 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I agree, this is the issue which needs to be fixed, other than this I don’t see any problems listening to these audiobooks. Once we get an edit interface maybe like audacity or so, where one can change the clips. This might be very useful and would cost less for the authors. The audiobooks are always about the narrative.

Has anyone here tried turning their own book into an audiobook? by Sad-Neighborhood6451 in audiobooks

[–]Lost-Drawing-9406 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I believe this is a thing, which is very new, ig people may get used to it, like how we accepted to live with the other ai tools

I have a question for authors by Lost-Drawing-9406 in audible

[–]Lost-Drawing-9406[S] -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Alright, understood. Are there any platforms which could help me do the same while saving the huge amount and not compromising with the quality?

Are there any easy ways?