We have an explosion of wearables - AirPods Pro - and smart speakers are now everywhere. What would an audio-first experience be like? A business idea generated while in Antler, Singapore, 2020.

1. Opportunity
with Audio

2. Audio consumption is exploding.
That’s being driven by more than just
the smartphone. It’s also hardware,
better creation tools, and found time.

3. Audio is a marketer’s dream.
You are literally in their heads;
they are a captive audience.

4. We have leveraged camera (Instagram) and GPS
(Uber). We now need to start thinking:
“What does audio-first content look like?”

5. Problems

6. Too much content
• Exploding audio content - podcasts
• How to consume and absorb as much knowledge in the
shortest time?
• New found time:
• Gym/Walk (1 hr), Commute (2 hr) -> 3 hr a day
• 10% of our time can be listening to pure audio

7. Discovering Asia Podcasts
• Few Singapore podcasts, same for SEA
• Top podcasts from US & China
• Types of podcasters:
• Podcast Producers: iHeartMedia, NPR, Wondery
(Business War)
• Indie (domain expert): Joe Rogan, Tim Ferris
• Hobbyist

8. Podcasters
• Lack of monetization channel. Now uses in-stream audio
ads.
• Cannot track performance accurately
• Skip since disruptive, or easily ignored/forgotten
• Hobbyist (long-tail) impossible to get sponsorship

9. Ideas

10. Social Audio
• Social sharing of short form audio
• With accompanied transcriptions
• Able to reply with audio

11. Transcript & Share
• Auto transcribe all audio/podcast
• Embeddable in podcasters websites (think SEO)
• Sharable chunks
• Host audio in chunks - able to share without downloading
100 MB!
• Can fav the chunks

12. podmark
• A markup for podcast/audio
• [0:12 #intro]
• [1:23 #ad "Boost your brain" https://powercaffein.com/
tim]
• <podmark start="1:23" duration="1m34s"
tags="ad,topic123" url="...">
• Embeddable in websites, with great UI, support
accompanying picture/video

13. Podcasters Ads
• Allow podcasters to insert banner/interstitial ads within
our app, with their CTA affiliate links
• Provide analytics to usage

14. Space Time
• Audio messages in a certain space time
• Discover by a geographic location eg. Merlion statue

15. The Product:
AudioWeb (Aw)

16. Technology: audiomark
• Auto transcribe all audio/podcast to audiomark format
• Human editors to refine, tag, correct errors, link
• Our website: provide for top podcasters
• Their websites: embeddable
• Index all audio/podcast

17. Mobile App
• Start as podcast app
• Search not just episode titles, but from our fully index
• Share short chunk(s), playable quickly via our website/app
• Reply with audio
• Favorite a chunk (a highlight)
• Has accompanying text/notes, pictures, videos

18. Social Platform
• Hear the news
• Hear what your friends think about a topic, news
• Re-cast, Reply, Repeat

19. • Gossip
• VoiceMail
• Quora
• Audio Tweet
• Short podcast news
• Live talkshow

20. Market Size

21. Podcast Ads Revenue
• Only 2% of digital ads market, but outpacing other forms
• "If I fully monetize the show, I could make $2-4m per
year." -- Tim Ferris

23. Bottom-up Estimation
• Consumers
• 103M Americans are weekly listeners
• If 1% will pay x $5/mth = $60M
• Capture 10% -> $6M
• Ads, affiliate revenue also $6M
• Podcasters
• Global 850k
• 850k x 12 x (1%x$300 +10%x$50+89%x$10) = $172M
• Capture 10% -> $17M
• Digital gifts also $17M
• Total revenue $46m

24. 45% of podcast listeners enjoy more than
$250,000 in annual household income

25. Behaviours

26. Trend: Shorter
New listeners are more likely to give your show a try if it doesn’t eat up a huge
chunk of their day

27. Market Research

28. Blinkist
• Condensed reading platform for non-fiction
• Has both notes (text form) and audio, with audio growing
faster
• 6m users (2018)

29. Audioburst
• Organizing the world's audio
• AI-powered listening experience
• Search engine for audio news, which allows users to
locate audio content within podcasts and other talk radio
programs.
• Index podcast/audio
• Smart playlist with "short bursts"

30. Otter
• $23m funding in 2016-2020
• Launched in early 2018
• Transcribe long-form conversations
• In-house speech recognition
• Diarization (speaker identity)
• Otter 2.0 focus in team collaboration

31. Google Recorder
• 60m downloads
• Launch in late 2019
• Only Pixel phones
• Only English
• Offline transcription

32. YAC
• $1.5m, 2019-2020
• Voicemail for slack
• Backtrack app

33. Noted
• Beautiful
• $12/year for Pro