Hi everyone 👋 New to the community!
by•
Hi everyone 👋 New to the community!
I’m a solo indie developer building ArticleCast — a simple Chrome tool that turns any web article into natural-sounding audio, turning your unread reading list into private podcast feeds.
Supports solo narration / two-host dialogue, editable scripts and segmented playback, perfect for learning on the go.
The build is fully done, currently in internal testing & going through store review process. Slow and tedious as a solo dev, but I’m pushing for an official launch soon.
Glad to be here, stay tuned!✨
Listening is easier than reading.
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Hey there! I am new here too.
The product sounds nice and useful for people who need help with their creative endeavours.
All the best for the upcoming launch.
@manisha_giri1Â Manisha, welcome to you too. Since you are also new, one thing that took me embarrassingly long to work out about this place.
The upvote is the cheap signal and almost nobody reads it. The comments are where everything actually happens. Makers answer, other builders argue, and the useful information about a product tends to live three replies deep rather than in the description.
Which means the highest return thing you can do early is not upvoting widely. It is picking one launch a day in an area you genuinely know something about, reading the whole thread, and saying the thing nobody has said yet. Even a good question counts.
That is also how you find the people worth knowing here, which turns out to be the real point of the site.
@rabnoor_s Yes. That's something I have come to realise as well in the last week. There can be a lot of empty upvotes (like Likes) with no actual movement that matters very specifically to you and what you are working on.
Glad to be able to connect with people who actually give you real feedback and shine light on blind spots, especially during the early stages. Very humbling, very encouraging.
welcome. the two-host dialogue mode is the interesting bit, most article-to-audio tools just do flat single-voice TTS. is that script auto-generated from the article, or are you writing the back-and-forth structure yourself?
Welcome. The thing I would think hardest about is not the tech, it is whether the backlog actually gets consumed once it changes format.
Read-it-later products have a long history of turning into graveyards. People save with real intent, and the saving is the satisfying part. Converting the pile to audio removes the friction of sitting down to read, which genuinely helps, but it does not remove the reason the pile exists, which is that most of those articles were saved optimistically.
So the number I would watch from day one is not saves, and not conversions to audio. It is minutes actually listened per article converted. If that holds up you have something properly different. If it does not, you have built a nicer graveyard, and it is much cheaper to learn that now than after three more features.
Separate and practical: do not couple your PH date to Chrome Web Store review clearing. That timeline is not yours and it slips without warning. Get approved and quietly live first, then choose your launch day when nothing external can move it.