Aureal: Continued Development, Marketing and Open-Sourcing

In light of the recents peg of HBD, We've integrated the script created by @good-karma to return the over paid amount back to DHF till HBD stabilizes.

Also I've written an article which helps you take a little dive into our business model:
@blockanarchist1/aureal-the-business-model-walkthrough

Just want to vote for the proposal ?

60 HBD per day x 4 Employees + 60 HBD per day (Marketing Budget) = 300 HBD per day for the next 4 months to make Hive accessible through Aureal for podcasters and listeners

The team will be spending 35 hours a week working on Aureal. This proposal covers the details and costs of:
Development
Marketing
Software infrastructure

These costs also include the server costs, payroll and marketing budget.
Below you can find the details about the project.

What’s Aureal?

Aureal is a decentralised podcast directory on the Hive that connects traditional podcasters and their listeners to Hive.

We’ve seen many dapps which have set an example for the world, that every platform which caters to a community can be tokenized. Yet, even when we think about it, the podcasting ecosystem has been at a low pace when it comes to innovation, yes the audio quality is good, but that’s about the only thing it has going for it.

What are the current pain points ?

Podcasters don’t get paid from platforms like spotify and apple podcasts
They are unable to monetise their content
Podcast hosting is painful.
They spend much of their resources and time to cover costs by finding sponsors and ads
They are shifting to starting a youtube channel even when podcasting is growing
There hasn’t been a lot of innovation in podcasting industry
Podcasters are not aware about the Hive

What does the podcasting industry look like ?

There are more than 1.5 Million podcasts with more than 45 Million episodes currently and the number of profitable podcasts are in 2 digits. There are logistical requirements to running a podcast, which can be costly. The content created requires effort in terms of recording, editing, producing and distribution.

We can make it better

We are trying to make it easier for creators to connect to the Hive.

We have seen many dapps within the Hive Ecosystem where the content of a user has real value and is rewarded as such. We believe podcasters can benefit a lot from this.

Because as we know.

Your Voice is worth something.

How Aureal works?

Your podcasts will be powered by Hive in 3 simple steps:

Enter your RSS feed
Verify with OTP
Viola!

If you have email id in your RSS feed, You are set!

All your episodes are now imported to Aureal and can now be published on the Hive, now the creator’s efforts are valued here.

To make things easier, we have automated this process for any new episodes you publish. They will be published automatically!.
P.S. for older episodes the podcaster can choose to publish on Hive at will with the click of a button.

Aureal 1.0 is currently live and currently available on Web and Google Play store at:
https://app.aureal.one
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.titandlt.auditory

Progress so far

Aureal is currently a podcasting app giving the podcasters access to the perks of Hive.

Redesigned the entire interface
More than 20k podcasts available on the platform(adding more everyday). We plan to have at least 5k episodes directly on Hive by the end of the next update.
Authentication through Hive Signer
Added automatic podcast RSS feed verification
Auto-posting
Intuitive player interface
Aureal is available on Google Playstore and Web
Started working on the chrome extension.

What’s coming up 4 months

Authentication : Enable more auth modes like google, Facebook and Twitter. Currently the app supports Hivesigner only. - 1 week
Bug fixes on Android and Web-app. - Throughout the development life-cycle
Publish Chrome extension for Aureal - 1 week
Availability of Aureal on iOS. - 1 week
Web Application revamp for better UI/UX( light and dark themes are in the plan). - 1 week
Enable Hive communities an Aureal - 1 week
Enable donations( Thanks to Buymeberries) - 3 days
Backend optimization for better API response times. - 2 weeks
Aureal Rewards - (Thanks to Ecency) - 3 weeks
Improve search and recommendation system - 3 weeks
Make the code open source - 3 weeks

Vision (will be part of next Proposal)

Detailed analytics of individual episodes on Aureal - 2 weeks
Create a sponsorship platform for enterprises to enable sponsoring podcast episodes. - 5 weeks
Enable live streaming channels on Aureal - 4 weeks

The Team

@blockanarchist1(The Lead)
@pateldhawal4 (The Lead Developer)
@VrushalShravane (Head of Design)
@chinmaykulkarni (Front End Developer)

Marketing

To generate the initial traction we launched few test campaigns on Twitter and Facebook with a budget of $100 per week:
Number of Impressions: 10000+
Signups on Platform: 60

We do have to optimise this. Hence we have optimised our go-to market strategy.

Considering our market is most probably not aware about Hive and it's capabilities, we’re primarily focused on making sure that they are.

We are targeting specific genres to get diversified content on Aureal.

In order to make this work, we will need community support to get the content curated.

Once done we are simultaneously launching Adwords, Twitter ads, Instagram and Reddit ads to drive adoption.
Once the initial adopters are there on the platform we start with the referral campaign to increase the virality coefficient of Aureal and hence Hive.
We can reduce the costs of marketing if the Hive Community helps us, yet the target value includes the price for ads which includes:

Brand Awareness Campaign (22.5 HBD per day)
Direct Response Campaigns (22.5 HBD per day)

We’ll be going B2B pretty soon:

We’re integrating Aureal sponsorships where enterprises can get 15-25 seconds of space in podcast episode for anything they want to support*.
We charge the enterprises for these content and majority of this goes to the content creators.

Reporting the progress:

You’ll be able to see the progress of Aureal Development and Customer Development in the series of Articles from @blockanarchist1 Hive Account.

##Updates

Aureal is Opensource: You can checkout the repository @ https://github.com/thewall4095/aureal_web_frontend
Google Authentication integrated: This will allow us to optimise the funnel in order to get more people joining the hive community.
You can download the Episodes from Aureal mobile, and you can listen to it offline or on the road. Right @unklebonehead :D
Minor bugs have been fixed, a little work on UX is remaining.
The work on Aureal streams has started which will help us get the Aureal Original [Exclusive content on Aureal]. So we are going to have something better than clubhouse in our Hive Ecosystem.

Wrapping it up:

We've been part of the Hive community since 2018, and we’ve been working on Aureal for over a year, figuring it out bit by bit. We believe in this incredible network of supporters, and for the world wide adoption of hive.

Aureal is trying to make the adoption of Hive easier by making user interface as simple as possible, but currently, we are in dire need of setting an example in front of this unimproved podcasting industry by showcasing the power of Hive.

Making Aureal simple and making it heard!

Because Your Voice is Worth Something.

If you like the platform and have some recommendations and suggestions for us, join us at:

Thank you @Martibis @CrimsonClad for constant support and pushing us further to this point.

Final note:

We’ve been working on Aureal for the last 1 years and we have been through a pretty tipsy turvy ride, so far we have bootstrapped this. we’re trying to make this the best podcasting app, We’re grateful for the community support and we believe that:

Our journey has just started, there is more to come.

Let the ride begin!