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Listnr Inc

Listnr does recoding by using its text-to-speech converter. All you have to do is put your text onto Listnr’s speech synthesis engine, convert it, and you have your podcast recording within seconds.

Before publishing your podcast, you want to make edits based on the pauses, tones, style, speed, and other factors.

Listnr allows you to edit all of these in a few clicks. They have the following features.

Voice Styles: You can choose the type of style you want to give the voice, whether it’s cheerful, empathetic, narration or others.

Pauses: You can set default pauses between punctuation for the entire text, and you can choose to input pauses for some text regions individually.

Pronunciations: You can choose to pronounce a word exactly how you want to and save it in a language setting.

Speed: You can choose how fast the text is voiced over, from 20-200% of default voice speed.

Tone: You can edit the tone depending on the context for each word. You can change the emphasis, the speed, the pitch, or the volume, in a matter of clicks in listnr.

Listnr automatically hosts the podcast for you; all you have to do is record and publish.

You can embed your audio anywhere using the audio player widgets, making it easy to embed the audio in your websites. Social sharing is also available in Listnr.

You can also export your audio files and distribute them manually elsewhere.

Once you publish your podcasts on Spotify and Apple Music, you will automatically get the revenue based on the views you get.

The target market for Listnr are:

• Podcasters

• Bloggers

• Youtubers

• Startups

There are over:

• 31 million active bloggers in the world

• 850 thousand podcasts

• 37 million Youtube Channels.

Listnr has a vast market to cover in terms of the total addressable market. The numbers are also increasing constantly year on year. In 2020, there were 700 thousand podcasts, compared to 850 thousand in 2021, a significant 21% increase.

The text-to-speech market is also expected to reach 7.06 Billion by 2028.

As the need for a social media presence grows, there will be an exponential increase in the number of people getting into the podcast and blogging space without the technical capability or feasibility to record and edit their voices.

Thus, Listnr has plenty to look forward to in their market.

Listnr was founded by Ananay Batra, a computer science graduate of York University. Before Listnr, he had done multiple software development internships. His risk appetite is as entrepreneurial as it can get; before Listnr, he had 0 experience in SaaS, nor did his team. He managed to make Listnr with just 20 interns.

Matthias Schedel is the CTO of Listnr Inc. He’s had the experience of being a founder before Listnr and has also been a CTO of a health tech company prior to Listnr. He packs a broad industry and market experience under his belt.

Ananay and Matthias cover all bases necessary for a superstar team; they have the experience, risk, innovation, and strategy required to take Listnr as high as possible.

They have 3 different pricing plans.

• The Solo producer plan, charging 90$ a year.

• The Startup plan, charging 200$ a year

• The agency plan, charging 500$ a year.

They recently provided a limited number of lifetime subscriptions for just 69$ through platforms like Dealify, which got sold out.

By the end of 2021, they made 400k+ USD revenue with 10k users. They launched in September 2020.

Listnr aims to reach 50k users in 2022. Assuming they could get at least 30k new customers, with an average revenue per customer at 100$ per year (between Solo and Startup Plan), their revenue would rise to 4 million USD.

A 4 million USD revenue would be a 10x growth in 1 year. This is considering they only reach 30k users. 30k is a conservative estimate considering their speed of growth in just 1 year since their launch.

Unit Economics (UE) is the ratio of Customer Life Time Value (LTV) to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

To calculate the LTV, I’m assuming that one customer would use the service for 5 years, with an average customer value of 100$ per year. So we get an average LTV of 500$.

Now, calculating CAC becomes difficult without accurate data. Especially considering Listnr looks like a well-oiled product-led growth startup. Therefore, as a product-led growth business, their CAC would not be too high.

A great UE would be a ratio of 3 and above, with Listnr’s UE for sure being above 3.

There are several competitors in the audio industry, specifically the text-to-speech area.

Speechelo is a text-to-speech platform with up to 30 voices and 23 languages. However, their editing ability is limited to only choosing 4 types of tones. They lack to Listnr in flexibility and features.

Talkia is Listnr’s closes competitor who provides very similar services. The difference is, Talkia is more focused on increasing sales and reach for their customers, whereas Listnr gives more importance to the podcast space.

Anchor.fm is a free tool made by Spotify for podcast hosting, distribution, and monetization. It’s not a text-to-speech platform like Listnr; their only similarity is the market they serve for. Their userbase would be different.

However, Listnr is also releasing a platform, ‘Listnr.fm’, which provides similar services to Anchor. They may soon become direct competitors.

The above 3 are just some of Listnr’s significant competitors; more are there in the market. The text-to-speech market is quite competitive; however, the more competitive the industry is, the more lucrative it is.

The number of podcasts, YouTubers, bloggers, and startups increases exponentially every year. More and more non-stereotypical people are venturing into those areas too. The best example can be seen with the growth of no-code development tools.

The no-code industry is expected to grow with a Revenue CAGR of 24.2%, indicating the number of non-tech people entering the tech space.

Why is it important?

Listnr, while not a no-code development tool, they are the no-code for audio production. There are a growing number of non-technical people entering areas that were limited only to the technical; this market would need Listnr’s products now more than ever.

Listnr is a complete tech software-as-a-service startup. They do not require substantial capital expenditures, with their most significant expenses probably coming from server costs. Therefore, their model allows them to add a lot of customers without increasing costs proportionally.

Their business model is also profitable, with a wholly paid model and a highly growing userbase. Listnr’s position in revenue and profits also seem to be highly positive. They went from 0 → 10k+ users in 1 year; they also went from 0 → 400k USD revenue in just a year.

Their founder also mentioned a goal of reaching 50k users in 2022, which indicates their ability to onboard that many users if needed.

All factors indicate that Listnr will turn out to be a high-growth, highly scaleable company.

The software of Listnr may be slightly tricky to recreate, but not impossible. Listnr’s version 1 was made with 20 interns. However, saying that, Listnr started in a competitive market and grew quicker than anyone’s expectations.

Their growth is a consequence of their platform's excellent User Interface and simplicity, compared to their competitors. Their speed of production and growth plans are not something anyone can recreate easily.

In addition, they have a strong community of users, a genius result of their lifetime subscription deals.

So can someone recreate them?

The Listnr product? Perhaps so. However, to emulate their successes would not be nearly as easy.

Looking at the podcast space, Anchor.fm is the best example of a success. They reached over half a million users that record and publish podcasts through them.

Listnr is also making the platform Listnr.fm, which serves the same purpose as Anchor.fm. Not only are they growing in the text-to-speech space, but Listnr has also decided to venture into the actual voice recording and editing area too.

Anchor.fm’s success is a good indicator for Listnr, it shows a huge market to play for and a lot of revenue to be made.

Listnr’s most considerable risk entering the real podcast space is Anchor.fm. Anchor provides its services entirely for free, so Listnr will have to sustainably find a method to compete, as Anchor’s backing is Spotify, so running at a loss is not a problem for them. Listnr at their current stage definitely can’t afford the same.

In the text-to-speech market, Listnr’s only risk, in my opinion, is that their software is dependent on other cloud providers. The situation is the same for all the other companies too, so it won’t be fair to count it as a genuine risk.

Listn'r’s growth is phenomenal. It is mind-blowing for a startup in a somewhat niche market to make the numbers they did in the last year.

Their story is also something I greatly admire, Ananay without any SaaS or entrepreneurial experience, launched a successful startup that had begun with just interns.

Having also seen their roadmap, I’m very bullish on their growth and would invest in Listnr.