It takes disruption to be disruptive

Thisten is an audio-to-text platform, where transcripts are created and aggregated from podcasts for people to search, reference and discover — but it didn’t start out that way.

Our team learned the ropes of developing tech by helping to build one of the most impactful on-demand food delivery companies in the world — SkipTheDishes — into a multi-billion dollar company from its early days.

Now we’re taking everything we learned about scaling startups, and are building the world’s largest database of transcripts.

An ever changing world

When Black Swan events occur, there are two outcomes for startups and businesses — adapt quickly, or fail slowly. Without a doubt, psychology and human behaviour often leads people down the path of ignoring sunk costs.

Emotional attachment to what we’ve built, or the IKEA effect as Dan Ariely puts it, makes people irrationally overvalue their contributions. In the case of business, it’s a company’s product or service.

If we disregard the opportunity costs of pursuing what is familiar, what is working and what is comfortable, versus pursuing the unknown, then we are kidding ourselves that what we are doing is rational.

Cutting costs is not enough to survive either. Rather, creating new sources of value for customers and users is what allows new products, revenue streams, and business models to emerge.

Like the early Spice Traders, sometimes we have to set out to sea and into the unknown to find new land. It might sound crass by saying that there is a high probability of a ship sinking before making it to land, but it’s the reality of an unknown situation — it’s pragmatic.

With the preamble aside, this is where we, the Thisten team, found ourselves in early March of 2020 — facing the unknown.

Ignoring sunk costs

When we first started building Thisten, our product was much different — it was a platform where we transcribed speaker sessions at conferences to make them more accessible.

We joined Y Combinator’s Startup School in January, and were getting relatively good growth with the product that we had built. Over the course of two months, we went from $0 to $10,125 in revenue, gained ~4,000 users, and built partnerships in 10 countries

However, many of our customers had started cancelling their conferences in late February, due to looming and speculative concerns around the implications of COVID-19. On March 6th, one of our largest event partners, SXSW, finally cancelled their event.

After conferences started getting cancelled, the writing was on the wall — our revenue stream was no longer viable. We changed course quickly to adapt to market conditions, and redeveloped our product to become better for searching and consuming podcast transcripts.

Our approach

When we decided to change direction, we looked at the tech that we had built and thought through everything accordingly. We listed out our options and spent one day discussing everything as a team. We could:

1) Stay the course

• Continue to partner with conferences and monetize the platform through transcription

2) Evolve our existing Product

• Build our product so that it would be a full-stack solution for conferences to transcribe content, stream video, and capture audio

3) Use our current Product differently

• Apply our current product to a different vertical, such as podcasts, to aggregate transcripts at scale

4) Pursue a new Go-To-Market using our existing Product

• Find new partners, such as Universities, or companies in the Medical and Legal Sectors, who would be interested in transcription and monetize the platform through those customers

5) Hard pivot

• Start fresh and build an entirely new product in a different space

Solution

We decided to go with #3 — Use our current product differently. Our goal was to be “Default Alive,” in the words of Paul Graham. Additionally, we wanted to solve a real problem — podcasts are inaccessible for many people, and audio isn’t easily searchable without transcripts.

Over the course of six days, we redesigned and developed our product. We focused less on making major changes to our existing infrastructure, and more on updating the UI / UX to make Thisten a Consumer platform, as opposed to a SaaS platform.

On March 18th, we officially launched our new platform on Product Hunt. For our launch, we curated and transcribed thousands of episodes from hundreds of podcasts, and added them to the network — from True Crime to Tech, and Comedy to Culture.

Getting & measuring traction

To get traction, we started pursuing some growth hacks, such as engaging with users who’ve asked for podcast transcripts through platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. As well, we began reaching out directly to podcasters to link to Thisten, and to inform their audience that their podcast is accessible through transcripts on Thisten.

Our hypothesis was that if we could drive people to the platform through specific channels, then we’d start to see organic growth with new users.

We set out aggressive growth targets for six weeks to understand if our micro-pivot will work. After six weeks, we’re going to assess whether or not we hit the goals, and are going to measure the overall growth in DAUs and WAUs, engagement time on site, new users vs. returning users, cohort retention and event activity.

Where we’re headed

We’re running experiments every day and taking a scrappy approach to understand how people are using the platform before building anything to make our product deeper. As well, we’ve been talking with users to understand what they want from the platform — what they do and don’t like about it.

Everyday is an assessment of our hypothesis — people both want and need transcripts for podcasts. We’re constantly testing and measuring, testing and measuring, and repeating the process.

Our goal is still to build the world’s largest database of transcripts and to provide accessibility through transcription, and that hasn’t changed. Thisten will be updated daily with new transcripts, as podcast episodes are released.

Takeaways

Whether you launch a new product or company, pursue a new path for growth, or undertake a micro-pivot or hard pivot, it’s never easy. Every launch is a new battle. Pursuing any path is almost like starting over again — it’s what makes startups exciting, ambiguous and unknown, all at the same time.

Startups are hard but, if you love them, you have to swing the bat — over and over, and over…and over again.

Even if our pivot doesn’t work out the way we hope it to, we will own it and be proud that we stepped up to the plate. It feels like magic to play ball.

We hope you come along for the ride ❤