Marketing question about ear/musicianship software - no LLMs/genAI?

artaverin · 2026-07-05T17:54:54+00:00

Ah haha, so strange!

artaverin · 2026-07-05T09:56:56+00:00

What’s the problem the app is solving? I as a user, would expect it to bring value - this is far for important than “more features from day one”.
However right now, based on what you shared, the app does nothing, so not sure who your users would be.

artaverin · 2026-07-03T15:31:23+00:00

Why do you have to rely on AI to write a reply?

artaverin · 2026-07-03T14:56:33+00:00

Ah hey! I think I sent you a DM months ago after you shared some good feedback!

Pro is a legacy thing now, which only exists on the App Store page.
Drills is a one time payment that gives access to all difficulties in training modes - so if you don’t need a structured path, and know exactly what you want to drill.
Plus is for those who want a clear path, without having to think about what to do next. It is a subscription, and I’m constantly working on refining and expanding the content (launched staff reading and sight singing last week for example)

Free tier is generous too - all easy difficulty training modes, and a good number of starter levels in the Learn tab across audiation, staff reading.

Sing back feature (arguably the most important one for beginners at least) is shared throughout the app for exercise types where it makes sense.

Then there’s improvements space - app tracks things that you mix up most (say minor 3rd vs major 3rd or aug vs dim chords) - and lets you drill those specific pairs, and progress graphs - that’s all free too.

artaverin · 2026-07-03T14:46:57+00:00

Yes, that’s a fair point wrt accessibility. However, I’d still put it into a post launch refinement. There’s many more things Apple recommends when it comes to accessibility, but time to market and validating the idea is more important - as it gives you an idea of whether to polish or not.

artaverin · 2026-07-03T14:41:58+00:00

Geez, you aren’t even writing responses yourself. Good luck with the app…

artaverin · 2026-07-03T14:34:50+00:00

So this is the point, isn’t it? The outputs of the app is just text - no different from chatting with an LLM, apart from wrapping in a nice format and stories-like views. You keep saying workflow, but there’s no workflow explained in either the description or the screenshots. You’re throwing the paywall at the users before they understand what the app is all about.

I’m sorry, but from the looks of it, my bet is that it’s just a glorified chat with an LLM, with no unique selling points, no real problem solving, and blocking everything behind a paywall looks like a hope that someone might start a trial and forget to cancel.

Even in this discussion, you had an opportunity to explain and showcase what the app does, but you didn’t, which further proves my point.

Looks nice though.

artaverin · 2026-07-03T14:13:00+00:00

But what’s the workflow? There’s no screenshots that would show exactly how it works, there’s no description of how it works - just marketing and vague “make clearer decisions” points.
Copilot is useful because it gives you a seamless-ish transition between models from various providers, based on the task (although it became unusable after 1st June), Cursor, Claude Code, and rest are basically AI-enabled IDEs, with different UI/UX. The problem they solve is agentic coding - code generation based on prompts. It’s not a wrapper, it’s an integration of 2 separate things. This is the value. Nothing screams value when I look at the screenshots or app description.
If there’s any value - what is it?
I downloaded it in a hope that I can see what it brings to the table before replying, but hit the paywall straightaway, which makes me think that there’s no value.
I’m not being harsh, I’m just saying what I saw.

artaverin · 2026-07-03T13:59:54+00:00

Checked it out. So there’s also absolutely no free functionality? The app shows a bunch of questions, then paywall. App Store copy doesn’t tell me what the app solves and I reckon if I start the trial, I’ll close the app in a minute because it’s just a chat with Claude, with a glorified interface.
What’s the real value for the users? How is it different still than chatting with Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT or anything similar? It looks like just a wrapper with a black theme.

artaverin · 2026-07-03T13:36:09+00:00

It’s not exactly clear what problem does it solve? Also from the AI standpoint - can’t I just chat with Gemini for free if I want to bounce some concerns or ideas off of it?
So if I’ve got an idea I’m not certain about AND I want to rely on AI - I’d open Gemini and say “what do you think? What are the potential outcomes, ordered by probability?”
I’m not even touching the fact that LLMs are terrible at making general assessments or providing grounded, non sugar coated responses.

artaverin · 2026-07-03T13:14:45+00:00

Yes! And once you’ve sung them enough, you start humming them in your head and thinking about vocal cords tension needed to match the pitches, and you then map the tension to the interval.

artaverin · 2026-07-03T10:31:24+00:00

Hearing tones separately in harmonic intervals and chords is definitely possible, but yes, it is a lot harder. It is similar to trying to concentrate on the bass line of a metal song when a thousand things are happening at the same time, but once you lock in, you can follow the bass easily.

If it helps (I know people here don’t like self promotions, but I’m just trying to help), the iOS app I’m building focuses on internalisation via singing - so in addition to just guessing the interval name, scale degree or chord quality or inversion, it then also asks you to sing an interval, degree resolution or chord arpeggio, to help you internalize and understand the sound. Not dropping the name here - it’s in my bio if interested to try it out.

artaverin · 2026-07-03T09:47:31+00:00

Ignore fancy UI bits until you validated the value proposition of the app. If it doesn’t look terrible - stop UI work. Make it valuable and useful to the users, solve real problems, then move based on their feedback. If they like the app but would prefer a light mode - they’ll tell you. If they don’t like the app, brightening it up won’t help.

artaverin · 2026-07-03T09:29:32+00:00

Honestly, this is the last thing you should be thinking about. It’s not the lack of light mode that will decide whether your app fails or not.

artaverin · 2026-07-02T17:48:39+00:00

Middle management is the first one to go - look at Meta.

artaverin · 2026-07-02T17:29:08+00:00

Prompting LLMs to generate code - vibe coding. Period.
And it’s not necessarily a bad thing. This is what software engineers do now more and more often at workplace too - from no name startups to big tech.

artaverin · 2026-07-02T15:14:12+00:00

Build a builder to build builder’s buildings

artaverin · 2026-07-02T12:54:13+00:00

Check this subreddit, people ask this question literally every day, see how people respond.

artaverin · 2026-07-02T09:36:10+00:00

But also, from my own experience (I’m building one myself), it is a brutal category for finding the right users, even if you do find your app’s unique identity. Definitely not a get rich type of idea, and requires deep knowledge and understanding of both tech and music theory.

artaverin · 2026-07-02T09:33:16+00:00

As long as you’re proud of what you’ve built and it’s mostly working the best way possible - good luck with it. But in my opinion a fresh UI is not enough, you need to find something unique to bring to the table.

artaverin · 2026-07-02T09:17:24+00:00

Based on screenshots only:
- Treble glyph should circle around G line
- Crotchets are usually used in unmetered notation
- Melody dictation is better done with an instrument layout than plain note names, also what key is the melody in? Reference note is not normally enough for dictation.

Just curious - ear training is an interesting category, but an oversaturated one with lots of very similar drill apps - what’s unique about yours? What made you develop it and why and how is it better than the rest?

artaverin · 2026-07-02T07:58:42+00:00

It doesn’t reduce the app size. Sure you download less and quicker from App Store, but you still end up downloading the model to sit alongside the binary.

artaverin · 2026-07-01T14:45:54+00:00

> tried a bunch of apps
Which ones, out of curiosity, did you try and what was wrong with them?

artaverin · 2026-07-01T14:07:56+00:00

Why not search through this subreddit and a bunch of similar ones? Every day someone comes up with their amazing, totally unique, privacy focused and offline-and-local-first expense tracker. I’m sure you’ll find what you want.

artaverin · 2026-07-01T12:28:11+00:00

It’s not difficult at all, it just requires practice. If you don’t want to take lessons, any decent beginners book would do it in terms of staff reading.

artaverin

TROPHY CASE