This isn\u2019t a text-to-speech situation either. Each Umano story is narrated by one of many paid voice artists, and with their newest feature, Umano for Writers<\/a>, writers can contribute narrations of their own pieces too.<\/p>\n I talked to Mendiola about the early days of Umano and what it took to become a go-to\u00a0app.<\/p>\n (This is the second piece in\u00a0our new Startup Stories series<\/a>. Check out our first installment<\/a> where we talked to Minbox founder Alexander Mimran about his viral product teaser.)<\/p>\n The company has actually been around since 2012 and was founed by<\/a> Mendiola, Anton Lopyrev\u00a0and Prabhdeep Gill. Since they met in school, the team of engineers always knew they wanted to create a startup together, so after working at some big companies like Google<\/a> and Bloomberg<\/a>, they took to bootstrapping and decided on what their venture was going to be.<\/p>\n \u201cEventually, we landed on Umano to solve a need for ourselves and a need that we thought our friends were having \u2026 Everybody talks about how they wish they were more informed \u2026 but just simply didn\u2019t have enough time.<\/p>\n \u201cIn everybody\u2019s day, there are these blocks of time where you can\u2019t really interact with your phone whether you\u2019re commuting, you\u2019re at the gym, or you\u2019re walking around from point A to point B, and people …\u00a0just fill it with music. So we thought, \u2018Okay, if this content was actually accessible in those time periods and users had a choice between hundreds of songs that they\u2019ve listened to for the hundredth time or \u2026 articles about things that they\u2019re interested in, would they use it?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The Umano app and web service was their solution to a problem that they saw in the scope of Internet content and from there, it\u00a0grew pretty organically and without much of a pivot. But, as with any startup, there’s been a lot of learning along the way.<\/p>\n As a team of three engineers with no audio or journalism experience, they started doing what they know how to do best \u2014 building the product. Since then, Mendiola told me,\u00a0<\/span>\u201cThe idea that we had and our visions of what the product should be have sort of remained the same:<\/p>\n ‘Let\u2019s make content more accessible using audio.’\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Even with the Lean Startup<\/a> model being the go-to for tech startups at the time (which continues today), the Umano team kind of deviated\u00a0from the idea of spending minimal time on the product. Instead of waiting to perfect the product until after it went through testing, Mendiola said\u00a0that their\u00a0first step was a \u201chybrid approach\u201dof what they learned from the Lean Startup model and what they knew about their product.<\/p>\n \u201cWe knew that despite what people would say, we wanted to still build a product that was usable and was polished in some sort of sense.\u201d So they started in their wheelhouse, building and launching a \u201ckickass product.\u201d For them, that was the easy part. The hard part was getting the app into the smartphones of people who would use it.<\/p>\n One of their early strategies was to hit the Caltrain station early\u00a0<\/span>in the morning and go from car to car handing out flyers and pitching the app to commuters. They also emailed various publications and blogs, some with contacts they had and others with just cold emailing. Mendiola said, \u201cOne out of 20 would stick.\u201d<\/p>\n The neat thing, and kind of difficult thing for Umano from a PR<\/a> point of view is that it\u2019s not a podcast or radio and it\u2019s not exclusively news. Explaining this person by person was no doubt a clever grassroots approach, but Umano was still left looking for \u201cthe initial spike.\u201d<\/p>\n Being featured on the front page of the App Store<\/a> and Google Play<\/a> is kind of like having your business\u00a0featured in a window display on the Internet and that was just the spike that Umano needed. Apple and Google really liked what Umano was doing, so in late\u00a02012\/early\u00a02013\u00a0after the app was featured, they were finally getting the attention they were seeking.<\/p>\n \u201cI wouldn\u2019t say it made it easy, but it definitely played in our favor that we were in the press and getting featured a lot \u2026 and it made it easier to eventually raise our first round of funding<\/a>\u201d said\u00a0Mendiola.<\/p>\n As more and more people used the app and it was featured several more times, the Umano team got stats to prove\u00a0that they were on the right track with their initial train PR. Mendiola said that there\u2019s a clear rise in use during the morning and evening commutes. Also, much like with articles you read word by word, people seem to gravitate toward lifestyle stories and list-formatted articles, even on audio. But their histograms also brought up another interesting trend that they didn\u2019t expect.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a large number of users in Asia \u2026 What they\u2019re doing is \u2026 playing the audio, reading along with it\u00a0<\/span>and helping them with their English.\u201d<\/p>\n Umano\u00a0continues to be one of the top apps\u00a0in Korea. It\u2019s so popular that on a trip to meet with investors in Asia, Mendiola was totally blown away by the amount of attention he got for Umano. \u201cThey all knew about it. They all loved it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n So I asked the obvious question: Have you done further investigation into that space to see if you could expand there? It had been a temptation for sure. \u201cIt\u2019s a debate that goes on often just for fun,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s just one of those things where \u2026 you have to be very disciplined about [pushing it] \u2026 It was just too far from our core business that it didn\u2019t totally make sense.\u201d So for now, they\u2019ve stayed focused on the problem they set out to solve instead of bringing a new one into the mix.<\/p>\n With this new venture, the Umano team was tapping into two industries they didn\u2019t know much about, audio and publishing, and they\u2019ve learned a lot about both of them. <\/span><\/p>\n When they first really delved into the world of audio and podcasts, Mendiola said, <\/span>\u201cIt was like this other world that was starting to grow and that we didn\u2019t know really existed \u2026 so that was the real eye opener there for us to see that there\u2019s actually a really large market for it.\u201d In fact, there were already large media companies tapping into the space.<\/p>\n Umano has gained some media partners of their own: Forbes<\/a>, MIT Technology Review<\/a>, Entrepreneur<\/a>, and VentureBeat<\/a>, but pitching to media companies didn\u2019t go as simply\u00a0as they\u2019d planned. Regardless of their front-page app status, the team came to the realization that \u201cpublishers only give a shit about two things and that\u2019s eyeballs and money. As a startup, you don\u2019t really have either.\u201d<\/p>\n Mendiola added, \u201cWhen we first started [pitching to media companies] we thought there\u2019s a clear value add to [their] content.\u201d Their pitch was something like, \u201cWe\u2019re not competing with your readers, we\u2019re just enabling your content to be in other places where you won\u2019t exist. Let\u2019s partner.\u201d<\/p>\n But it didn\u2019t go over that easily, as they found out that even in this time of sharing, sharing and more sharing, publishers are extremely protective of their content. So, Mendiola says that with publishing companies, they learned \u201cit\u2019s a long game.\u201d<\/p>\n And the hurdles don\u2019t stop there. While it\u2019s not a concern that pops up super often, sometimes writers have beef with the platform when the find out their articles were read without their knowing. Mendiola and his team don\u2019t take these concerns lightly and they handle them on a case by case basis. \u201c[We] actually reach out to them \u2026 and really work with them to communicate what we\u2019re trying to do \u2026 I think honestly the initial inclination is to think, \u2018These guys are just copying off my content and they don\u2019t really give a shit about me, but \u2026 I think in general when we explain our overarching vision and that we\u2019re here to help the publishing industry, most people are pretty receptive to it.\u201d Especially with the new addition of the Umano for Writers platform (more on that below).<\/p>\n From the time a text article is published on the web to the time it\u2019s published in its audio format on Umano, it goes through several steps that all start with the software.<\/p>\n \u201cWe pull in articles from feeds that we have in our system and once we have all those articles, we built some tech that\u2019s able to identify which articles would be interesting to our users \u2026 Once that\u2019s categorized and curated\u2026then we have real people [on the editorial team] actually look at the content. Once that\u2019s in the system, it gets shipped off to the narration community and they receive it when they log in \u2026 They record it and upload it back to our system.\u201d<\/p>\n Not every narrator on Umano is a professional voice actor. In fact, anyone can \u201caudition<\/a>\u201d from the site by reading a test article and submitting it. Mendiola said, some people do it for the money, and some people do it just out of a passion for the medium and further expanding the limits of content.<\/p>\n But just to be clear, everyone does get paid. The narration community gets paid per upload and with the Umano for Writers platform, writers get paid per thousand listens.<\/p>\n Mendiola said that Umano is asking many of the same questions as other startups in their phase: \u201c[We\u2019re] figuring out how to get to product-market fit<\/a>. How to continue to grow the user base and thinking through what your customer acquisition strategy is and how it scales up<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n When I first read about Umano, I thought of it like a marriage of podcasts and radio, but it seems I was in the minority. Mendiola said that most people don\u2019t really compare Umano to podcasts, but that may be because \u2014 despite the viral fame of Serial<\/a> \u2014 podcasts are still not a widely-used vehicle for information.<\/p>\n \u201cIn theory [podcasts] sound like this amazing platform \u2026 everybody can broadcast themselves and it\u2019s kind of like the new form of radio \u2026 It\u2019s really interesting that not a lot of people really know about [them] \u2026 I don\u2019t know what people in the audio space or what Umano has to do to fix that to let people know that this content exists.\u201d<\/p>\n Umano is still attracting users, but Mendiola said they saw no spike from the rise of the \u201cpodcast golden age<\/a>.” Instead, he said some of their big competition is Audible<\/a> (which distributes content from New York Times<\/i>, The Wall Street Journal<\/i> and the like, in addition to books), SoundCloud<\/a>, Spotify<\/a>, the Apple Podcast App<\/a> and even Pandora<\/a>. Mendiola said, \u201c[w]e consider all audio platforms competition,\u201d and that\u2019s because they\u2019re all vying for a very specific space.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cEvery person only has a small amount of time to listen to stuff, so …\u00a0it\u2019s very competitive to get into that space. Since [people] only have that small amount of time, they can be very picky about what they listen to.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n One of the most exciting parts of starting a startup is taking risks on new ideas, but chances are they won’t all pan out. While Umano has not pivoted from their initial mission, they’ve taken some risks and not all of them worked\u00a0out. Let’s start with the miss.<\/p>\n While this idea didn\u2019t take off, it\u2019s one that Mendiola still stands firmly behind. Through an automated process, Umano could create 30-minute podcasts of similar articles back to back, using narrated content they already had, and they could automatically push the content to iTunes.<\/p>\n They thought they could fill the gap where big publishers didn\u2019t have any audio content on iTunes, and they essentially did. When you searched a publication like Forbes\u00a0in iTunes for example, you could potentially see an article from Umano pop up. \u201cBut what we realized is \u2026 most people don\u2019t actually search for specific podcasts. They just either hear about it or they look at what Apple\u2019s featuring.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Umano released their Writers platform<\/a> on December 10, and it got a great response on Product Hunt<\/a>. \u201cWe want to partner with writers to deliver that content as well as monetize that content and give you complete control.\u201d\u00a0Not only are writers able to read and upload their own content to the platform, Umano provides an in-browser recording studio so the writers don\u2019t need to have a bunch of professional equipment.<\/p>\n You just import your article, then the software breaks your article into chunks so you can record in stages. When you’re done, it combines all of your stages into one audio file and publishes it to your channel on Umano. It\u2019s a new way to expand your reader base and reach new Mendiola and his team are still working on making improvements to the recording software, \u201cFor us, to take it to the next level, we\u2019re figuring out a way to get the sound quality up for our readers whether that\u2019s educating them or building some tech that [fixes]\u00a0some of those things like white noise …\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n I tried out the current recording software for myself, using only the mic in a pair of headphones, and it worked great. In fact, when you\u2019re finished reading this, you can hear my narration of last week\u2019s Startup Story<\/a> right here<\/a>.<\/p>\n This was one of those oh-so-simple ideas that had a big impact on how people hear about Umano.\u00a0Umano updated the Twitter sharing feature on an article page to automatically include the Twitter handle of the author in the tweet. Sometimes this led to instant RTs and praise from the authors and other times, skepticism<\/a>. But either way, people discovered Umano who didn\u2019t know about it before and even the skeptics usually come around to the Umano mission of making content more accessible by way of audio.<\/p>\n Mendiola said, <\/span>\u201cIt\u2019s crazy how the really small things can make such a huge impact \u2026 in the long run.\u201d<\/p>\n While Umano continues to find where in the market they fit in in a world of streaming services and podcast apps, it’s definitely inspiring to see the success of an app that the team believed in, even without being pros in the space they were about to enter. In fact, when they first quit their steady jobs and sat down at their whiteboard looking for their big idea, they didn’t have anything praticular in mind\u00a0\u2014 they just wanted to start a starteup.<\/p>\n Mendiola said,\u00a0\u201cIt was this \u2018We can do it too\u2019 mentality.\u201d It’s a mentality that continues to serve them well. You can download the app, or use the web platform to curate playlists and suggest new articles on the Umano<\/a> website.<\/p>\n Do you get your media through audio?\u00a0We\u2019d love to\u00a0know your thoughts about Umano in the comments.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"Umano-incar-screenshot\"](\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/19222103\/Umano-incar-screenshot.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nFinding the Big Idea<\/h2>\n
Starting the Startup<\/h2>\n
\n
The Spike<\/h2>\n
A New Industry<\/h2>\n
![\"Umano-top](\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/19222103\/Umano-top-stories.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe Process<\/h2>\n
The Elusive\u00a0Product-Market Fit<\/h2>\n
\n
Two Hits and a Miss<\/h2>\n
The Miss: Automated Podcasts<\/h3>\n
Hit: Umano for Writers<\/h3>\n
eyes<\/del> ears.<\/p>\n![\"Umano-recording](\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/19222103\/Umano-recording-screeshot.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nHit: Auto-Attributing Authors<\/h3>\n