#2: Continue working without users, motivation, failed advertising
I continue to explore what the best channels are to promote Headroom within the podcaster community. Some attempts have failed, and one advertising platform turned out to be a bit of a scam. Last week, I also tried to find a more straightforward niche for my product to focus on. There are many areas in podcasting: pre-production, production, and post-production.
Currently, Headroom is extremely helpful after a podcaster has already composed the episode and has the final audio ready.
This is the main area of Headroom right now: preparing the episode for publishing. It helps add show notes, chapters, fill in audio meta tags, and export everything in a ready-to-publish format. After the episode is published, Headroom’s job is done.
My Goal
My goal for the next steps is to expand Headroom and make it more valuable for podcasters after publishing their episodes. I want to evolve Headroom into a true marketing toolkit for podcasters.
Marketing
Not a great week for marketing—user and download numbers stayed roughly the same. I tried working with one advertising company, and it completely failed.
PodNews and Their Lie
I decided to try PodNews’s classified ads. Their promise sounded great: a daily newsletter with ~32,000 subscribers in the podcasting community. Sounds perfect, right?
But on the day of the ad—no email in my inbox. I received one the day before and one the day after. As a result, zero users opened my website. So their “daily newsletter” wasn’t so daily after all. The cost? $90 for that ad.
Lesson learned: Always subscribe to a newsletter first and verify that they deliver as promised—especially if it’s supposed to be daily.
To make it worse, I wrote to them asking why my ad wasn’t delivered, and they haven’t replied. Suspicious and disappointing.
What’s Next
My plan for the coming weeks is to focus directly on podcasters—write to them personally and ask for feedback. As always, there’s a chance that I’ve only solved my own pain, and other podcasters have different workflows or needs.
I know it might seem late to validate the idea, but better late than never.
Development
Last week, I spent a lot of time on development and introduced a completely new feature to Headroom: social post creation and generation with the Assistant.
Headroom Updates
A new version 1.2.0 is coming to the App Store.
With the new social post creation and generation feature, you can:
Prepare your promotional posts for all major social networks
Write them yourself or edit with help from Headroom Assistant
Generate posts directly from your transcription
Headroom Assistant generates posts tailored to each platform (character limits, tone, etc.)
Generate posts for all platforms in one click
Easily copy and publish your posts
Be ready to promote your episode in advance.
This update also includes small performance improvements and bug fixes.
Subscribe, stay in touch, and try Headroom!