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Podcasts are gaining popularity worldwide. As per Statista, while in 2006, only 22 % of the adult population in the USA was aware of podcasting, now in 2020, 75% of the adult population of USA knows about podcasting. Back home, in India also podcasts are slowly gaining grounds. According to a PWC report, by the end of 2018, there were 40 million podcast listeners in India, which is 58% more than the previous year. The increasing number of podcast listeners undoubtedly inspires many to create their own podcasts. However, there are many who finds the process of creating podcasts, like recording and editing audio etc quite cumbersome. To address this challenge, Listnr was founded.
Listnr - Company Highlights
- Startup Name-Listnr
- Headquarter-Gurgaon, Haryana
- Founder-Ananay Batra
- Sector-Web/SaaS
- Founded-2020
- Parent Organization-Listnr Co.
- Website-www.listnr.tech
About Listnr
Listnr is an amazing platform that lets you convert your blog posts or any other text to voice overs or podcasts. So now, you can start a podcast without the headache of buying recording equipment or the hassle of recording or editing any audio. The platform facilitates easy one click conversion, where you simply have to select the content (you want to converted to audio) from any website or just write the text in the dashboard, and Listnr converts it to the audio format which you can download and distribute to platforms such as Spotify, Apple podcasts and Google.
Through Listnr you can start a podcast in 30+ most spoken languages of the world including English ( US, UK, India, Australia dialects), Hindi, Russian, Mandarin, German, Spanish etc in different regional dialects. Also, users can easily embed the audio files created through Listnr into one's blog post or website with code snippets.
Listnr uses state of the art Speech Synthesis + the company's in-house Deep Learning Engine to make the voice sound very human like and get a sentiment analysis of the written content.
Our target Demographic is of people from 18 to 54 year old. 56% of Podcast Listeners are between the age of 18 to 34, where an average Podcast Listener consumes about 6hrs and 37 minutes of Podcast shows every week. Starting March 2020, there has been a noticeable diversion in the way people consume media. There has been a scattered shift from the most popular social media sources to Podcast hosting platforms and blogs. There has been a 30 - 40% increase in podcast consumption in the last 2 weeks - says Listnr founder Ananay Batra
Listnr - Founder
Ananay Batra is the founder and CEO of Listnr.
Listnr Founder & CEO
Ananay Batra - Founder, Listnr
Ananay is a computer science graduate from York University, Toronto. Besides Listnr, Ananay also founded Que News, a subscription based News summarization platform.
The Idea Behind Starting Listnr
The idea of starting Listnr came to Ananay while working at Quenews. Quenews was almost like 'Spotify for News', where the team would summarize news from various credible sources, and offer it to the users as audio news. The company used a Speech Synthesis Engine to convert the news to audio format. Ananay realized that such text to speech conversion technology can be very helpful for someone who wants to start a Podcast, or one who wants to convert his blog posts to voice overs, which made him start Listnr.
While listening to the Joe Rogan Podcast, I thought - it would be so cool if people could start a Podcast without recording anything and it was as easy as writing a Tweet. The idea seemed pretty cool but in order to Validate the idea, I made a basic landing page with an email capture and started distributing it around various Social Media channels. 2 days later, I had 100+ people sign up and 20+ emails asking when I would release the product. I went around asking people about Listnr in my Inner Circle and Network, after a positive response, I went ahead with the development. says Ananay Batra explining the idea behind starting Listnr.
Listnr - Business Model & Revenue Model
Listnr operates on a SaaS business model. While Listnr is free for upto 10 conversions per month, the company will soon roll out attractive monthly and annual subscription plans .
Listnr - Challenges
Starting a startup all alone is undoubtedly challenging.
As Ananay quotes, "As a solo-founder, there is no one around to support you. You basically have to keep pushing yourself to do stuff. No one would care, if I don’t work on Listnr, people only start caring when you’re a success"
Besides, started in 2020 itself, the startup also got hit by the Covid crisis. The startup is currently finding it really tough to get development help and other resources given the Job uncertainty due to Covid.
Listnr - Growth
Listnr has been built to solve a real time issue, as it simplifies the process of creating voice overs and podcasts like never before. Given the popularity that podcasts are gaining, a platform like Listnr can surely be termed as the 'need of the hour'. As for now, Listnr has been able to attract new customers through various platforms especially through IndieHackers and Reddit, and there are 100+ clients in the waiting list.
