Note
If you haven’t already listened to episode 10 and 11, please do that. They lay a lot of groundwork that will make this episode that much better.
Transcript
Josh: [00:00:30] Hey, Nate, how are you doing this week?
Nate: [00:00:32] Pretty good. How are you?
Josh: [00:00:36] What’d I say earlier? Not terrible. That’s my new response.
Nate: [00:00:40] hmmm,
Josh: [00:00:41] Just like, could always be worse. Could always be it’s not, not yet. Not the worst off, but.
Nate: [00:00:47] it sounds like a glass half empty kind of position.
Josh: [00:00:50] Yeah, maybe just maybe par for the course these days. Where do we want to start today? So I believe we left off with some of your homework ideas.
Nate: [00:01:00] so we did last week, we did customer success and digital asset management. And we’ve got three more to go.
Josh: [00:01:07] Three more to go. Alright. Let’s recap really quickly on how the process we’re going. So we’re
going, so
you’re describing the market.
Nate: [00:01:17] Yep,
Josh: [00:01:18] into what the niche and position is, and then into distribution.
Nate: [00:01:24] exactly.
Josh: [00:01:25] And these were all rooted from us. May throwing down a challenge to you back in episode nine, I believe
Nate: [00:01:33] Something like that.
Josh: [00:01:34] so.
I believe nine, maybe 10, maybe 10 throwing down that you would come up with these, with this new kind of approach and process to ideation. So it’s looking at markets, looking at the size, looking at the
general, had a. What niche and position, and basically, what do you think you could do in this market that could be interesting to you and to an audience and how you would potentially gain customers from it.
Nate: [00:02:01] Exactly. And the point of this is
to have the foundation to make a decision as to, is this a business idea I want to pursue further and possibly build a company out of or is this something that we need to refine further or discard?
Josh: [00:02:14] Right, right. Okay. Cool,
Nate: [00:02:17] so I got customer service software.
As the market,
so
Josh: [00:02:22] one
Nate: [00:02:23] that’s pretty generic. But if you think of customer service software, what, what things might you think of off the top of your head?
Josh: [00:02:29] Number one is probably like Zen desk is probably the only, maybe I think there’s one of those fresh books, fresh, maybe not fresh books. I think we talked about the different one fresh something, right? There’s like a fresh,
Nate: [00:02:43] press desk.
Josh: [00:02:44] fresh desk. Okay. Yeah. Fresh desk. I’m trying to think of any other ones.
The other one that I know, I don’t know is groove, you know, groove,
Nate: [00:02:55] I do not know grief.
Josh: [00:02:57] that’s it that’s one that is stuck in my head. And probably because they did such a good
job in the like growth in bootstrap type of thing. Like they were one of those early ones doing the, Hey, I’m going to blog about how our journey
is going from like. Zero to a million or whatever. One of those things, they were the one that had really early people that did this, like way, way back. So, yeah, exactly.
Nate: [00:03:23] Cool. So we usually start this off by going over the search terms and the Google search information. So if you had to guess on search traffic for customer service software as a
search term, what would you guess? Monthly searches?
Josh: [00:03:37] 2000.
Nate: [00:03:37] Not quite 1300 in the U S.
Josh: [00:03:40] Okay. All right. Fair.
Nate: [00:03:41] And do you think it’d be difficult in terms of SEO or easy in terms of SEO?
Josh: [00:03:46] I would think this one would be pretty difficult. There’s a lot of competitors in that space. A lot of people think that there’s a lot of angles to go into customer service related software.
Nate: [00:03:57] Yeah, so actually the term customer service software.
itself doesn’t have a whole lot of difficulty. It’s 31 out of a hundred. Which I found, I found surprising as well. I would’ve thought it would be more competitive, like you were saying.
And so if we dive into like the Google search kind of side of it we’re seeing lots of live chat
base, queue management, that type of thing. Like you mentioned, there’s like Zendesk and help scout and HubSpot and all
those.
Josh: [00:04:21] right. That might be a part of the problem is like you just rattled off probably like three or four different niches that have, that are very large, like live chat. It’s just, it could be a massive space now help desk or a knowledge base is like it’s whole and a lot of data, and some of them are bundled.
Some of them have a little of everything and some of them are pure play in one of these segments. So maybe that kind of attributes to the competition, it’s almost like one of these, so generic terms that you end up drilling in to the next search, like, you know, am I looking at ticketing help desk stuff, or am I looking at knowledge base or am I looking at live chat?
Nate: [00:05:01] Yeah. I think probably when I started this, I was kind of looking at like the bigger companies that are kind of the, do it all. Like for instance, then desk does all of those things. I mentioned as opposed to diving into some of the niches. And I think we’ll get into that a little bit later. So the kind of the next part of the segment is the companies that are in this space and a little bit about them just to get an idea of where the market’s at. So you’re ready. So you already guessed Freshdesk is on
my list. Their parent company made 200 million
and they’ve been around since 210, so there’s a whole fresh suite of products. So I’m sure that fresh desk is a small
part of that. They have a pretty big accounting division, I think.
Josh: [00:05:40] if that I think they have a marketing and CRM when I don’t know, they they’re, they’re very big company. I think they’re out of India, I believe. And they. Yeah, they have a lot of different facets of these. And I think over the years,
they’ve, they’ve combined some things they’ve split off some things.
Nate: [00:05:56] Yeah. So they’re really going for the, like the SMB feels like
it’s email, social media, all in a single inbox. And with ticketing then we’ve got one of the big players is Zen desk. I guess how much they’ve made on a yearly
basis.
Josh: [00:06:11] Ooh, I would say they’re probably in the close to a billion a year.
Nate: [00:06:18] Yup. Yup. Really close to a billion. They’ve been around since 2007.
Josh: [00:06:23] Wow. They’re definitely a, a oldie, but goodie around the SAS space for a long time.
Nate: [00:06:28] Yes, totally. They have a lot of, they have a lot
of enterprise grade stuff. like it really feels like This is for enterprise. We will take care of you. Anything that you
need related to customer service they’ve got, yeah, like those verticals, we talked about live chat and knowledge-based key management, all that stuff is all bundled in together.
Josh: [00:06:44] Like, I feel like they’re akin to
like the Salesforce and the CRM, but they’re like kind of that customer service side in that, in that space.
Nate: [00:06:53] Yeah, totally. But I think it was helpful to see what this is. Like, there is a gorilla in
this space. So clearly there is a
market to be had here. This isn’t, you know, some, some small potatoes kind of thing.
Josh: [00:07:06] Yeah, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are also trying to round out and just cover more bases in terms of not even just the direct customer service related things, but
a lot of a good strategy for any of these companies is like, Where do they expand into, so if they have someone came there first for customer service software, but didn’t have a CRM, like where could they go?
What could they offer them? I do believe if I recall there’s a, they own a CRM as well, and it may be at this point, it might be all folded in, but it was back when I used to be looking for a CRM provider like four years ago, I think it was called base. But. It was a very simple cut, not, not too simple, not like pipe drive simple, but like it, it sat kind of in between the market in terms of not as robust as Salesforce, but was a pretty decent CRM.
And I do believe they got purchased by Zen desk. If I,
Nate: [00:08:02] interesting.
Josh: [00:08:03] yeah.
Nate: [00:08:04] yeah.
So one of the interesting things I noted with Zendesk is they have a lot of
enterprise grade stuff, but they were really promoting their chat
feature. Chat seems to be a big deal
on all their marketing material. and so that was kind of interesting.
Maybe they
see some CSUMB positioning there or something like that.
Josh: [00:08:20] I think it’s probably due to the rising competition of what is gone in the marketplace with Intercom and drift or the big chat, first conversational marketing. What do you w whatever you want to
label it. What’s funny enough though, is the live chat is stuff is super old. Like it kind of, it’s like one of these things where, you know, the ones where you would have the little chat bubble that would have a little operator looking like person with a headset and the icon.
I think some of them were called like live chat or some other ones a very long time ago, so
Nate: [00:08:52] yeah, yeah. Nothing new under the sun. Yeah. And the Intercom is actually one of the next ones
on my list. So what, what do you think their revenue is per year?
Josh: [00:09:00] This point, I think they’re like 150 million.
Nate: [00:09:05] You’re bang on you? Must’ve been reading my notes.
Josh: [00:09:08] Ah, I might’ve, it might’ve been that one or just, might’ve been in the
context of me seeing some posts by, there was a person that worked at Intercom for a long time on Twitter. And I think he posted something like the difference
between like where. Where, where they were when he started, which was like maybe like one or 2 million or something like that.
And to end to when he left, which was 150. So I might, might be cheating there with my Twitter, Twitter context.
Nate: [00:09:37] Yeah, so 150 million, and they’ve been around since 2011, they’re all about live chat and onboarding. So they have a bunch of features around that. And they are definitely one of the bigger players in terms of live chat uh, section there. We also have help scout. I think a lot of entrepreneurs are familiar with that one.
They’re at 16 million and they’ve been around since 2011 as well. And so they’re really focused on smaller teams, email and live chat only. And So that, that kind of rounds out the, the companies that are in the
customer service software. So we kind of have the enterprise with Zendesk. We have the SMB with like fresh desk and helps get a little bit, and then we kind of have like a, a vertical with like an Intercom where they’re going just for live chat.
Josh: [00:10:18] Okay. Cool. So where do you, where do you see yourself fitting into this magical market?
Nate: [00:10:25] Right. So Yeah. There’s I had a couple of different positions kind of to look at here. One was like, you could go for a single source, like, for
example, you only do Facebook ticketing or Facebook chat or something like that as your position. So you really narrow in that way and narrow into a vertical.
Another one would be
Josh: [00:10:43] like, a source of where the customer inquiries are coming from.
Nate: [00:10:46] That’s right. So like you have Zendesk where they’re like, you know, customers come from anywhere we can deal with them. Or Intercom is Like you know, they come in from live chat. This would be like, well, they come in from Facebook and here’s a ticketing system for Facebook, or here’s a ticketing system for Google Google maps or something like that.
Josh: [00:11:04] okay.
Nate: [00:11:06] Another one that I had that was kind of, it felt a bit like a feature as opposed to a business position would be to be able to see what your customer is seeing while you’re talking to them.
So I don’t know if you’ve seen, like,
There’s some analytics companies out there that do like heat maps,
Or they do like customer recording.
So something like that, where as you’re helping the customer on live chat or however that.
you’re able to see what they’re seeing.
Josh: [00:11:28] right. Like Hotjar and some, a lot of them are in like the analytic space. May not necessarily be real time, but there’s like recordings and things like that.
Nate: [00:11:37] Yeah, so kind of to remix that idea into customer service, I method. And then another one, which was to make it a lot easier to pull in slash share
screenshots with customers. I know a lot of these tools, they have the ability to chat really well. But they aren’t as well. tailored to like here, press this button over here, you know, point to that spot for them,
Josh: [00:12:00] Oh, that would also be built into like the, that the experience as well.
Nate: [00:12:05] Yeah. So it would be built into the experience. And then, you know, something kind of like how you have the Intercom bubble or whatever that you might have, whatever
this company’s bubble is.
And by that you’re able to
communicate better with the customer because a lot of the customer interaction now is texts, right?
And so if you could share photos better than that might help that customer
Josh: [00:12:27] So this is. The screenshots would be on which side, on the agent side, the person that is helping or the person that is being helped, like the
Nate: [00:12:37] from the agent side to send to the customer
And perhaps you could do it
the other way as well. Like I think a bi-directional you’re building the
tools anyway. Yeah. So that’s kind of some of the positions that I thought of. Is there any in there that, that. I might’ve missed, that you kind of thought that
Josh: [00:12:54] I mean, they’re interesting. Yeah. I guess I would say none of those kind of
jump off the page for me. I think the, the, the feature ones you talked about related to recordings and screenshots and things like that I just think that those are hard to differentiate on. And also if you think of the gambit of types of customer requests that may come in.
They’re all over the board. I mean, there’s, some of them are just like, how do I reset my password? As simple as that. And other ones are just like, Hey, I have a question on how XYZ works. And I think it can be it there aren’t, I guess it depends on the company, but from what I’ve seen, it’s not, I don’t know how many are that are like purely I could solve those with those features.
Now, if there was a, maybe a specific industry that is very. Very honed into doing screenshots and recordings, and that’s pretty much like 90% of it that they could be helped that way. But then I also feel like you’ll quickly jump to doing a share or doing, you know, Hey, do you wanna just hop on a zoom, I’ll show you type of thing.
And there’s a lot of very robust, like a. Recording stuff now, like, Hey, I’ll just quick. I think a big common one now is like, I’ll record you a quick loom and I’ll just send it to you. And I think a lot of customer service people are already using things like that. So saying that is like a flagship feature.
I think is a, is a tough, it’s a tough order unless it’s, like I said, it aligned very strongly with a specific niche.
Nate: [00:14:24] yup. Did you have any thoughts on possible positions that I might not have come up with that you kind of see.
Josh: [00:14:32] Not really. I almost, this is maybe, and maybe it’s just my own bias, but it’s one of those spaces that I think a lot of
people look at pretty quick. It’s, it’s a decent
sized space, but yet there’s also. Hard. It’s hard to be clearly differentiated. It’s it’s been around is one of these older spaces that’s been around for a very long time.
So I do feel like there’s always the, the typical breakouts are already the typical, like niches are already kind of taken care of like the low cost one. The one that is, you know, very good with just live chat or ones that are, are more enterprise focused and sync with your CRM. Like all of these other And I also feel like it’s one that oftentimes people look to as a pain point, like anyone with a SAS, if you, once you are expanding outside of yourself as a, as a single yeah.
Operator, the first thing you’re looking at, even to scale your own time is like, how can I get help all these chat support types of things. So,
Nate: [00:15:35] Yep.
Josh: [00:15:36] I feel like there’s a lot of eyes on that space and it’s. You know, a crowded, a crowded area, even just for people like, Oh, my next idea is because I couldn’t that software out there couldn’t solve my problem.
So we built this internal tool for XYZ and like, I don’t, I feel like a lot of people are already on that iteration step and are probably like, you know, three, four steps ahead. That’s where things like Intercom, I think came from even initially.
Nate: [00:16:03] Yeah, yeah. And I think like you also mentioned earlier too, it’s pretty generic. The
topic that I chose there. And so maybe if you niched in a little more than there might be, you might be more clear as to which way you could go with things.
Josh: [00:16:16] right. Or is there
a specific use case that no, one’s like paying attention to like customer service software specifically for landscapers? I don’t know something that just makes it like where. The normal status quo feature set just is very painful for them.
Nate: [00:16:36] Yup. Yup. Okay. And finally we have distribution.
Josh: [00:16:41] Yep.
Nate: [00:16:42] So any thoughts on what I might’ve picked for that?
Josh: [00:16:44] Probably SEO. In terms of you like to your lower, lower difficulty ranking with the key term you were starting to look at, so yeah,
that’s right. Yep.
Nate: [00:16:54] Exactly. Yup.
Josh: [00:16:56] Cool.
Nate: [00:16:58] Okay.
So up next, we have accounting online.
Josh: [00:17:03] Ooh.
Nate: [00:17:04] So another.
Josh: [00:17:06] Yeah, it sounds like another big one. My initial gut is almost all the same reasoning I put in the last page. So why don’t you tell us why, why don’t we take a little bit of a different tact with this? But how, how do you see. How is this one different than customer service? One for kind of all the same reasons I thought this wasn’t a good idea.
Do you see anything that sticks out? I th I would guess that it’s about like a similar size. It’s also in very old market, a lot of competitors, a lot of different things already hiding in niches, or it’s not that Nisha BL if that’s a word like, like accounting is. Sort of accounting. And yes, you can run at the small business level and up to enterprise type of accounting, but then most of the people are probably stuck somewhere in the middle with the, with a QuickBooks online type of thing.
Nate: [00:17:57] Yeah. And I think you’re right. It’s, it’s very similar to that other one. It’s actually more difficult in terms of like the SEO stuff side of things that I looked at the only kind of. Position that I saw that would be kind of different here is to do like a more aspiration based accounting software, because a lot of the account counting softwares that I found were very, like were a massive calculator put in all your information and it will spit out your numbers. Whereas this could be more
like a almost Like info product D where it’s like, trying to it’s trying to coach you along as opposed to just like. Being truly accounting software, I guess. So maybe that’s not even in the right niche.
Josh: [00:18:34] that seems a little, I don’t know. It seems interesting. Like I could say the niches for things like, you
know, a marketing product where they’re putting.
You know, brand up front versus data or data front versus brand or whatever, but I feel like accounting, like no one really wants to do. Now, if you could make it fun and interesting, maybe you could maybe it’s like gamifying it, but I think a lot of this stuff would be potentially a kind of fad and feel like my initial take is you’d be grasping at straws trying to kind of make it fun.
Nate: [00:19:08] Yeah.
And I think also
the problem would be that it would appeal more to like the the solo
founder kind of person, and a lot less to the enterprise would be like, yeah, take a hike.
Josh: [00:19:19] Yeah. And that’s so low person. They’re like, they’re also happy to just put things maybe in a spreadsheet or they’re also the person that’s just bringing their shoe box of receipts to their to their accountant and saying, this is what I pay you for sort this out.
Nate: [00:19:34] yeah. The other, the other idea would also be to like to niche into a business, like a bit specific business type and then give some sort of insights that other accounting software like generic
accounting software, would it be able to So, that that You know, you probably want to be more specific on the niche rather than just accounting online, because I think that’s,
That already implies that it’s just
generic numbers,
Josh: [00:19:57] right, right. So, yeah, I guess if you found, this is probably that same one, if you found that their behaviors are unique enough in a dish for a specific maybe. I dunno, we could say even like a SAS business, what would a OSAT, what would appear a SAS accounting business look different than another one? And if it’s business accounting, you know, does it all just really boil down to like, you know gap principles and, and, you know having a balance sheet and the basics that everyone kind of it’s tried and true.
So
Nate: [00:20:31] Yeah, totally record your ins and outs and get it on.
Josh: [00:20:34] right, right. Like the, the interesting insights for things like SAS or this things like bare metrics and ChartMogul and all the things that are doing all those SAS metrics layered on top. So
that could be, I don’t know that that. I mean, a lot of that space is already covered, but who knows, maybe there’s niches emerging out of those in more of the metric space related to the numbers, but not as much on the base baseline accounting.
Nate: [00:20:59] Yeah, Yeah. And I think maybe with these two ideas kind of show me a bit too that it’s finding an initial idea and then kind of taking it. So like kind of how I came up with this, as I found Different, one of the companies in this space, like I came across fresh books and I was like, Hey, that’s kinda neat.
So I should see like, okay, what’s
the category that FreshBooks is in.
Okay. They’re in accounting, like online accounting as opposed to desktop accounting. Okay. So that, that goes really big. But then to narrow it down more before maybe doing some of this research might be helpful.
Josh: [00:21:33] Yeah, no, I think. It kind of goes on two sides of the coin. One in the beginning. I said, Hey, let’s just ignore this one
and let’s move on and speed this up and go to go to your next idea. But
I mean, that’s, that’s probably where most people do skip over. So I do think these are worth your time to kind of go through the exercise because you may find something.
I mean, you just need one idea to take off and to find any, you should find, you know, an area where potentially other people aren’t looking. So. Yeah. I mean, I think it could still worth more of a brain exercise, a name, or do you have a level of excitement in this space? On the, on our scale?
Nate: [00:22:11] No, this one here is pretty low. I’d say like a four or five out of 10. Yeah.
Josh: [00:22:18] All right. And what was for customer service software? I don’t think we, we gave a score for that
Nate: [00:22:23] That was a little higher. Probably around like a seven, six or seven, just because I liked the, I liked the idea of
helping customer support people because I’ve spent a lot of my professional time working with customer support people. And I’ve seen the pain that they go through, so.
Josh: [00:22:37] Okay.
Cool. Fair enough. And then, yeah, what did you, did you want to go into distribution with accounting? Did we talk about that yet?
Nate: [00:22:44] No, we didn’t talk about that yet?
So as always, we have, I have SEO in there just because the the search term, there are some search terms that aren’t super difficult. It is definitely harder, but it’s it seems viable
to me, but the other distribution method I had was accountants because a lot of businesses will hire
accountants.
And so if you could help get some of those accountants on your side, I guess to help distribute your software, that could be helpful.
Josh: [00:23:07] Yeah, I think that’s how wave is it? Wave a wave accounting or something like that? I think it’s a Canadian company that did, they had like a free accounting or
free, but I know, I know they were a big
distribution out of. Out of accountants and the other one out of Australia. What’s that one? That’s the big accounting company.
Nate: [00:23:28] Like zero. or Sage.
Josh: [00:23:30] Zero. Yeah. Yeah. They are, they also had a big accountant footprint, which I think, yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. Now how much of them are already kind of tapped out at this point with like a SAS? So That could also be a, I don’t know, a warning sign to go away. They might be like, yeah, don’t I already do this with wave and QuickBooks and all these other ones.
Like, it sounds, it sounds novel to you, but I’ve heard this pitch a thousand times, so.
Nate: [00:23:59] Yeah.
Josh: [00:24:00] Cool. All right. Do you want to move on to your last and final idea or market market idea? Sorry.
Nate: [00:24:08] My last final market I’ve got is online audio editing.
So I think that one’s a
little more, a little smaller. What do you think of when you think of online audio thing?
Josh: [00:24:19] ah, online
audio editing. I, I mean, my first brain of a service drifts towards what we use for this podcast editing is, is descript. So it’s things like that. I think of niches potentially of. I don’t know if anyone does like audio editing in the cloud per se, or if they like like music producers or those things.
I think of like big, big time studios lots of mixer boards and all kinds of wave forms going on in every visual direction. So, yeah. What’s, what’s your, and that’s the search term you started with? So I wouldn’t think that. Query would be very big, I would say like less than 500.
Nate: [00:25:06] really well, actually it has a lot of traffic 6,600 monthly searches in the U S okay.
Yeah. Or
Josh: [00:25:14] So what was the term exactly
Nate: [00:25:16] online audio editing.
Josh: [00:25:18] online audio editing. Okay. And I don’t think you can really mix that up.
Like it’s not like one of these ones we’ve talked about in the past, like customer service. Software is relatively specific, but we talked about customer success as one of the
other terms in the previous episode, which I think can be a broad term.
Like how do customers get success or some
Nate: [00:25:39] Yeah, right? Yeah. It’s like a whole, like it’s a whole course of material.
Josh: [00:25:44] What type of things came up with online? What, what were those, what were the results.
Nate: [00:25:49] so we’ve got a couple like fairly advanced audio editors, like very old ones where they had the wave forms and, you know, you could do some slicing and stuff.
We had a couple of really simple ones that were like, I want to split my MP3 in half. Or I want to take off five seconds off the end of this.
And then all the offline audio editors, Like a Udacity and sound booth and all that kind of thing.
Josh: [00:26:10] I’m surprised they showed up.
Nate: [00:26:12] Yeah. I guess there, Google was just like, yep. We’re tapped out. So here you go. I have something that’s close.
Josh: [00:26:18] Hmm. Sounds like a strong need though. Like if people are looking for that type of thing.
Nate: [00:26:23] Yeah. Yeah. And I thought that, I thought that was
really interesting that
the monthly searches would be so high for something like that. So I, so I looked at a couple of, the companies in this
space. D can you guess at any that might be in there
Josh: [00:26:35] In the online editing other than the script, that’s just kinda where, and the ones you mentioned offline that I know of, like our backup, my backup recording for this podcast episode is audacity. Cause I know it’s an open source but pretty, relatively robust for its, its
Nate: [00:26:54] Yep.
Josh: [00:26:54] its capabilities. So, but that that’s kind of where I’d stop.
Nate: [00:26:58] Yeah. So that’s interesting. I think that’s kind of telling that, like, we don’t recognize any of the names off of there
Josh: [00:27:04] like there’s no brand. There’s no like just, just big brand there.
Nate: [00:27:08] Yeah. So we have like twisted wave. They’ve got
this it’s kind of like a Udacity in the cloud with no install required. I couldn’t really find out too much information on them?
other than they’ve been around since 2007. And there seems to be one person
who works on it full time.
Josh: [00:27:21] Wow. Is there any, any guests on revenue for them?
Nate: [00:27:26] Not that I could find. But I guess you could kind of say, well, one person working full time, you know, it’s got to support him somehow. So.
Josh: [00:27:33] he, he could be making bank and he’s just, hoping no one hears this podcast. And no one starts like diving in after his, his his cheese.
Nate: [00:27:41] This is true, but often when people are making bank, they also want to, you know, grow things and, you know, add more features and stuff. And it didn’t really seem like that.
Josh: [00:27:50] like, It seemed a bit dated, like just,
Nate: [00:27:53] It did seem quite dated and not really didn’t really seem like there’s a lot going on there. One of the other ones I found
was audio tremor, which was just like, it was this slice up your MP3s kind of thing.
And everything on there was free for that one. Like there was no parent site, there was no affiliates or anything like that. It was just a free time. Cool.
Josh: [00:28:12] Interesting. One of the things I D it does make me think about initially is like, why
cloud? Why would it, why would you want it
online? I get the convenience. Like if I just wanted to
trim something and I don’t have a software I’m used to, and I just want to just be like, I have this file sitting on my desktop or sitting on my, you know, a smartphone or whatever.
And I just want to trim stuff out, which does make me think of wonder how many, if there’s stuff in app stores that do this too. I don’t know if you’ve looked at that
Nate: [00:28:40] Yeah,
so I didn’t, I didn’t really look that far, but that would make sense, right? like, on your phone, there’s so much you can do these days. I think this is more like the people that I would be looking for in this would be this kind of jumps into my position already is like some marketer or somebody who spends quite a bit of time online that
just wants to jazz up like a track. like
maybe they want to add, they have a voiceover. Maybe they want
to add some birds, chirping and train going by or something. That
kind of idea. It’s kind of who I think I would kind of hope to target. But again, that’s just
Josh: [00:29:12] like pro like a prosumer type of thing, like it’s not. The normal everyday person, but, Hmm. Interesting. I wonder how much of like, just how
much video has, is now
so popular in terms of like YouTubers and, you know, I don’t know. Does Instagram have a video thing? Just all the, all the videos, Tik TOK.
I think all of these things that people would be a creator for. Like, do they just jump. Does it jump right to like leaving out or combining started doing video, video and audio together? I wonder how much of that is kind of just that’s where people are. They’re not really how many people just need to do audio.
Nate: [00:29:59] Yeah, I think, I think you’re right, Like a lot of people would be just using their video editor to do that. And like maybe you could offer something a
little more advanced than the video editor might offer,
but also simpler than the offline app would offer.
So I think that’s a really tight spot. Like I feel like you’d have a hard time making a go at
that.
Josh: [00:30:19] right, right. And what about yeah, it just. Well, I guess that the obvious one are podcasters. Obviously we kind of even have talked about that in the past when we were talking about different markets and different things like that. So, but if I was again for podcasts, you’re probably, would you be, if you’re looking to do some editing, would you just be looking for audio edits for podcasters or like how to edit podcast episodes?
Is that like where you would go.
Nate: [00:30:46] I think it depends on what you’re doing. Like, I think for a bulk editing, like I do with descript, then it would make more sense to search for podcasts, audio editing. But if I was doing like an intro segment like with like some music and whatever, then,
then I might look for, something like this where it’s like, it’s a little track that I’m going to put into descript, but it’s a little bit more advanced.
It’s got all these different effects and stuff going on with it.
Josh: [00:31:14] Okay. Yeah, I’m not sure. So what’s your level of excitement for for this, this category?
Nate: [00:31:21] I think the engineering problem would be fun. But I’m not overly excited about
the prospect of it actually working out. So I’d give it probably like a four, four or five out of 10.
Josh: [00:31:31] Okay. I am really interested in what all those that’s. The big rub for me is there’s just this massive amount of searches and what are they. are they. just all coming up like,
Hey, there’s nothing here that I’m looking for. Or do you know what I mean? Like that number of searches. And then as you described the results, it just doesn’t seem like there’s like a mismatch with intent versus what, you know, someone is providing.
So.
Nate: [00:32:00] yeah, I did have a hypothesis with that. Is that. I’ve seen a number of references to audio courses using some of
these audio editors, some of these online audio editors.
And so it’s possible that like as part of their course material,
People are going to this. And so
that would explain the elevated search volume,
but yeah,
Josh: [00:32:21] yeah, just, it seems, yeah, it seems very odd. So, I mean, if you want us to investigate further, I’d say like looking at these. Some of these ones that are top ranking. I know you already looked at their pages and gave them a great how dated they might look and
how, how, you know, how many people are working there.
That type of thing. I’d also be interested in their other like backlink profiles. Like what else they’re ranking for how much traffic do some of these tools estimate they actually get? Huh. It’s it’s it’s it just seems strange though. Like, like I said, for the. Understanding who that business user is, is probably the first one is like, okay, so it’s a marketer adding, wanting to add birds chirping.
Like how one, how often does that come up and to a, you know, is it really just more of like, I’m going to already use this video software, I’m going to already use this stuff or whatever thing I am putting out as a marketing. Like how often is it just pure video or sorry, pure, pure audio. So.
Nate: [00:33:22] Yeah, I think that’s pretty rare. I think you’re right.
Josh: [00:33:26] Okay, cool. Yeah. Did you, I assume SEO was your distribution route for that as well.
Nate: [00:33:34] Yes. Low difficulty high volume.
Josh: [00:33:38] Yeah. Yeah. That could be interesting. Okay, cool. So, so we’ve rounded out that’s your fifth one, right? So that’s that kind of wraps up the challenge.
What do you, what do you think your next steps are out of these? Are there any that you feel like pursuing, or do you feel like kind of putting this in your back pocket now and, you know, do you want to go deeper on any of these five?
Or do you want to feel like you keep looking and see if something kinda grabs you at a higher score? I don’t know, believe what our, what is our, your highest score of interest so far? I think you might’ve had us maybe one six or something at a
Nate: [00:34:16] yeah, I think a seven or eight was probably the highest I had. Yeah.
Josh: [00:34:19] Which one was that one.
Nate: [00:34:20] I, to be honest, I don’t remember what I said for all of them.
Josh: [00:34:22] Well, that’s, I mean, that’s clear then you’re not really that excited about any of them. So.
Nate: [00:34:27] Yeah, I think, I think what I’ve learned from this, I think the the process of going through these has been really good. It’s really sped up my ability to judge different ideas and to also
find them.
And so I think it would be best, like to keep, to keep going ahead and find more of these these ideas and to try and evaluate them. And kind of find something that really seems sticky
Josh: [00:34:50] right? No, that seems like a good lesson. Like you said, even at the beginning
of when you talked about how you found your ideas, the first ones took the first two or three, took a few days and
then. Started to get faster. So,
Nate: [00:35:06] yeah.
Josh: [00:35:07] I think that’s, that is the key takeaway and, and, you know, can you use, could you reuse this process and have a look at more and even, you know, maybe you’re filling out a nice little spreadsheet or an air table on these, and you’re looking at them and can kind of re look through them, reprocess them and, and, and see what you can find.
See what you’re interested in, leaning more into.
Nate: [00:35:26] Yeah. Yeah, totally.
Josh: [00:35:29] Cool. So I don’t have any homework for you per se, after this other than find some other stuff and see, what’s interesting. Did you, yeah, other than that, is that, is that pretty much your, your next steps you think?
Nate: [00:35:41] Yeah.
I think I’d like to write, do a bit of a write-up on this in terms of like the, just like an outline that people could reference if they wanted to, to use this themselves. And
kind of like the things that we’ve already talked about, but in print form,
I think that might be helpful for some of our listeners.
And then, yeah, I’m going to just keep grinding away at this. And hopefully I’ll have something to report back.
Josh: [00:36:02] I’d love to see in that article, if you did have it, it’s just like, how did you do it before? Because all I see right now in front of my face and probably
the context you see is. How you do it now, how you’re evaluating these
now, what that looks like, but it’d be interesting to kind of try to remember how you did them before thinking back some of these other ones, like how many did you look at?
How many, how, what, what process did you take? Like what got you excited? What gave you kind of the green light versus right now we’re definitely pumping the brakes on giving you a green light in terms of, you know, actually whipping out your computer and starting to write some code, which I still feel like we’re.
Fair way for fair, long way away. There’s still a lot more to do in between the ideation and and actually writing code, but I know,
Nate: [00:36:46] Yeah, well maybe there’ll be another episode. There you go.
Josh: [00:36:49] yep. Cool. All right.
Nate: [00:36:51] I’ll see you later.
Josh: [00:36:53] All right. Thanks Nate. Talk to you later.