Products I Can’t Live Without #4: Play.ht

Recently, I’ve written about Fullstory, Calendly, and Figma as 3 of my favorite products and 3 products I would be very sad to live without.

Today, I wanted to write about a product I love because of its incredible effort-to-value ratio: Play.ht.

Before we dive in, check out those past posts, especially if you aren’t using these 3 products yet!

A quick reminder: The bar is very high for products in this series. The products I’m featuring aren’t only indispensable; they’re so valuable that I’d be a significantly less effective Product Manager + Leader without them.

I would be very very disappointed (and very angry) if they did not exist.

A Little History on Play.ht

Play.ht was founded by Mahmoud Felfel and Syed Ahmed in August 2016. Initially, they launched a Chrome extension that allowed you to listen to any Medium story.

This launch was featured on ProductHunt the week of 10/1/16 and got a TON of upvotes (1,614!)

As a result of the success of this first launch, Mahmoud and Syed quickly launched a suite of additional services, including:

• An embedded audio player for any blog (automatically generates audio from your text)
• An instant podcast feed for all of your articles
• Automatic audio versions of newsletters

Almost a year after they first launched their Chrome extension, the team launched what I believe is their killer feature for people like me: Play for Medium writers.

This awesome Chrome extension and related tools allow Medium writers like me to instantly add audio to their posts with just 1 click.

The experience is seamless and is truly enjoyable and fun to use!

But this post isn’t a history lesson on Play.ht, so let’s get into the specifics on how Play.ht makes a huge difference in the lives of people like me (and hopefully you too!)

How Play.ht Makes a Huge Difference

1. Ease of Use

It’s incredibly easy to add audio to your Medium posts with Play.ht. Below is a screenshot of the Medium toolbar after adding the Play.ht Chrome extension.

As you can see, I’ve already published this article with the Play.ht audio component, so when I edit, all I need to do is click “Save, publish, and update audio” and my audio is updated as well.

Play.ht also provides you ~30 voices to choose from. I prefer the default “Matthew” and have used that voice for all of my posts so far.

2. Effortless Amplification of Content

In addition to ease-of-use, leverage is a killer feature for Play.ht.

I’ve written over 100 posts on Medium and it simply isn’t possible for a one-man-show like me to individually record audio clips of all of those posts (and any future posts) myself.

Play.ht lets you add audio with 1 click and very quickly offers another way for people to interact with your content.

Above, you can see some of my initial stats with Play.ht. Initially, I only added audio to 3 posts. The spike is after I added audio to about 50 posts; 75 listens/day is pretty damn good!

What’s great about listens is that listeners also spend much more time on your Medium post than the average reader, which means you have the potential to make more money since Medium pays authors based on member read time.

More on Medium pays writers here

3. Accessibility

Not everyone likes to read Medium articles. Especially ones that are over 1k words. Play.ht allows you to reach auditory learners as well.

As the Play.ht team considers their future feature roadmap, I’d suggest an automatic video generator to reach visual learners as well.

Expanding my content’s accessibility to different types of learners is one of the key reasons I launched a YouTube channel recently!

4. Podcasts

Play.ht just keeps on delivering!

While I haven’t created a podcast of my own yet through Play.ht, how cool is it that you can 1-click syndicate your content from Medium into a podcast?!

While you likely will want to tweak and edit the podcast before sharing it with the world, Play.ht gives you a strong head start and makes expanding to this new medium a little less daunting!

I’ll report back again once I explore this feature more.

5. Analytics

As you saw above, Play.ht also helps you easily quantify the impact of adding audio to your articles.

Here’s a sample below of their weekly analytics digest. “Time spent listening to articles” is my favorite metric because it directly correlates with how Medium pays its writers like me!

While only 2.38% of users are engaging with my audio on the page, these are power-listeners who spend an average of 3 minutes on my post (this is well above the average for readers!)

“Listened to full audio” is another great statistic to track and also greatly eclipses the % of readers who read the full articles I write. The decrease week-over-week below is simply because I added audio to many, many more posts. I’ll keep tracking this one over time too.

6. Email Capture

On top of all of these features, Play.ht also offers email capture on the audio widget.

While it’s too early for me to report back on results here, I think this is a great idea to help Medium writers like me continue to build our audiences.

Thanks for reading! If you’re enjoying this post, I think you would enjoy my new book Disrupting Yourself.

I’m offering a very limited time Medium discount here: Disrupting Yourself Special Offer (if you prefer paperback: Disrupting Yourself Paperback)

And if you’re looking to learn more about Product Management or how to become a better Product Manager, I would pick up a copy of my book: Building Digital Products (New 2nd Edition!)

How Play.ht Has Helped So Far

Since using Play.ht, I’ve seen the read time of my articles increase dramatically on Medium.

As a result, I made 2.5x as much money (!) from my Medium writing in March 2020 compared to February 2020.

While Play.ht may not be responsible for all of those gains, it certainly was the biggest contributor.

What are you waiting for? Check Play.ht out!

Play.ht is free to try for your first 3 posts on Medium, so what are you waiting for?

Check it out and see if you get the same results I did. I’m excited to see what the Play.ht team does next and I hope it helps you too!

What’s a Product You Can’t Live Without as a PM?

Let me know in the comments or on Twitter at @amitch5903!

More from Alex Mitchell on Medium

Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, meaning that at no additional cost to you, I earn a commission if you click them and purchase a product.

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