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Anchor — Record bite-sized podcasts that anyone can join ⚓
Anchor is an app to broadcast your voice and talk with other people
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@jonatisokon Thanks, Jon - and we really appreciate you helping us beta tester Anchor!
Hey great app but I should say that it may be the best user onboarding ever! Congrats and good luck. It looks like I will use it a lot for listening but not for recording as I prefer recording in my native language. What do you think about different languages to be in the app? Will you encourage that?
@kocdur Thanks for the comment, Baris! We're definitely excited about the ability to tackle localization for non-English users farther down the road. It's a fascinating challenge, because it's not just the text, but also the audio that needs to be localized. Ultimately, our dream is to allow anyone on the planet to talk to anyone else about anything, so bridging the language gap is going to be really important.
One of the subtle features of anchor is that it's asynchronous, so the conversations have the ability to grow over time. Kind of reminds me of Medium. Look forward to talking with you all.
Amazing onboarding. Very smart also to get people to hold their phone as they talk on the phone to get the recording quality up
Hey @mignano & @nirzicherman - I've been following your journey with Anchor for what feels like a year. The beta of Anchor has seen so much hard work. I've seen more iterating based on user feedback than I've ever seen in any other beta. I'm really looking forward to recording our podcast next Thursday for The App Guy. Congratulations on a successful launch
@paul_s_kemp @mignano Thanks Paul! It was great having you as a beta tester, and we really appreciate all the support/feedback. Really excited to be on your show!
@paul_s_kemp @nirzicherman Thanks, Paul! Your supportive words have been truly encouraging throughout the process. Thanks for hanging in there with us - we know it's been a long time. Looking forward to speaking in a few days!
@mignano congrats on the launch, I'm so excited for you guys! I love everything about this product.
@jordanwalker Thanks Jordan! I have to admit, you taking the plunge into starting your own company a little while back was a bit of an inspiration for me. So thanks for that, this feedback, and for being a beta tester!
@mignano :) that's awesome, thx! Well you guys clearly put in the work, this couldn't have been easy! We'll have to catch up when you're able to breathe
@nzieber Thanks, Nick! We'll be working to make the app more usable in other countries and languages soon.
This is an awesome product. You guys need to bring it to Android ASAP. When Meerkat was launched, it was only for iPhone users. Periscope launched later but they brought in an Android app earlier than Meerkat. Android is huge market. By doing this you can actually bring in a lot of people into your system and got to evaluate things quickly.
@invinciblesaad Muhammad - we're working hard to get to Android asap. Please drop your email into this form and we'll let you know when we're on Android: http://anch.co/anchorandroid
Congratulations to the Anchor team. I was lucky enough to start beta testing anchor this past summer, and have grown to love the product, and the community that has been growing inside Anchor. Anchor even has a coveted spot on my homescreen. This is an an excerpt from the first email I sent Mike & Nir with my thoughts on Anchor:
"I don't know what you envision Anchor to be in the future, but after using it a few times, to me it felt like it has the potential to be the a virtual dinner table, college dorm room, coffee shop, and favorite bar- really anywhere that people congregate to have conversations, and hear other people's thoughts on the things that they care about, and are interested in."
I encourage all the new users to jump right in, and record a wave, or respond to someone else's. Hearing the sound of your own voice is strange at first, but be assured it's strange for everyone. I'm excited that many more people will be joining the conversation, and I look forward to hearing from all of you soon!
@kunaltandon Thanks Kunal! I remember that email, well. You've been a fantastic beta tester and have truly helped us shape this product. Even cooler, I feel like we've gotten to know you as a friend almost exclusively from Anchor. I'm really looking forward to watching what conversations and connections unfold between people as Anchor grows and expands.
Thanks again for all your support!
Been playing around with this for a little while now. It's really fun to have actual conversations (asynchronously) with folks you know and don't about topics that interest you. It's early on but it'll be really cool to see where this goes! =)
Ahoy, Product Hunters! Mike from Anchor, here. You can listen to this comment: https://anchor.fm/w/98abdd
My co-founder Nir and I have always been big fans of talk radio and podcasts, but we’ve found it difficult to record and share our own voices. We also think that radio should be multi-directional, instead of a one-way conversation.
So, we built Anchor to solve these problems and enable anyone with a smartphone to easily record and publish 2-minute audio clips, sort of like bite-sized podcasts. Best of all, audio in Anchor is interactive -- so anyone can respond with their actual voice, like a real conversation. This sparks an immediate group discussion that anyone can join. Here’s an example: https://anchor.fm/w/98a765 It’s like starting an interactive radio show right from your phone.
Given that the PH community is into product design, I thought I’d also share our product philosophy with all of you. We call it “audio-first”, and it’s kind of like when the web went mobile-first. We believe audio products should be built more for your ears and your voice, and less for your eyes and your fingers. To that end, Anchor has elements of audio cues, narration, transition music bumpers, the ability to listen with your phone closed/in your pocket, etc. Recording works by holding the phone up to your ear, just like talking on the telephone. And when the product becomes more mature, we hope to even have voice recognition and voice commands, too.
Ask me anything here on PH... or on Anchor with your voice!
--
We're also doing some fun AMAs on Anchor right now. Here's one with @Borthwick, ask him anything about pre-seed investments: https://anchor.fm/w/98b640
@mignano Have been using similar apps like Zcast and Unmute. Live audio calls or podcasts is an interesting alternative to live video streaming apps like Periscope or Blab app. Its less friction to join a audio podcast than video, more like a natural way of how we communicate with others using phone calls. Last year was all about Live Video, this year could be the year of Live Audio :). Good to see more apps in this space, definitely an interesting space.
Just downloaded the app. Love the onboarding flow, great way to explain how the app works. I skipped twitter login by mistake during onboarding and could not slide up the screen. Had to slide down and signup using email. Was that an intentional flow ?
Just did my first wave :) What the best way to reach you for feedback ?
@kwdinc Thanks for the kind words, Kevin! We currently don't support going backwards in onboarding - but we've actually gotten the same feedback from others lately, so we'll probably make a change to support that soon.
The best way to reach us for feedback is to record in Anchor using the #feedback hashtag. We listen to every single wave, so we'll definitely reply to you there :) Thanks again!
@mignano congrats on the launch Mike! Although I've only been using anchor for a few days, I really love the platform and concept. Going to try and be a power anchor user 👍
@kwdinc @mignano Completely agree with Kevin, it could be the year of Live Audio. By the way, I think that this is the future of radio stations because in order to hold an audience they should interact with people more actively. And this kind of technology is the only way to do that.
P.S. Guys, thanks for what you're doing! Keep it up!
Hey everyone - also, I just want to point out some cool conversations that have taken place on Anchor recently.
Glitter / betaworks' @mayafish and @meowgorithm talk about "founder's doubt": https://anchor.fm/w/98aab4
The Infatuation's @houseofstang talks about finding a voice for your product: https://anchor.fm/w/98aab1
WNYC talks about political correctness: https://anchor.fm/w/98a9bb
Feel free to join any of these!
Great idea. And I'm sure @mgsiegler was going to suggest this but integration with Amazon Echo would very interesting to see, I mean hear.
@rstephens @mgsiegler Oh man. Can't wait to get Anchor on Echo. Adding that to our roadmap immediately :)
This is really well done. I love how each cast turns into a conversational stream of replies and like Twitter, I can see people turning to Anchor to share their thoughts and debate about timely topics (e.g. politics, the Grammy's, depression).
Are you planning to add a topic or tagging system to categorize these recordings, @mignano?
@rrhoover Thank you, Ryan! Nir, Kristin, and I really appreciate your kind words.
We love the idea of people using Anchor to have real conversations with others about things currently happening in their lives or throughout the world.
Regarding categorization - we're currently supporting #hashtags, which you can add to the caption of an original wave (we currently don't have captions on replies). We are also manually curating waves into a series of topics. You can see (hear) these by going to the Search/Discover section of the app (magnifying glass icon). However, in the near future, we want to make it easier for people to be able to directly contribute to these topics, so they don't have to wait for one us at Anchor HQ to actually hear it and place it into a topic.
And eventually, we want these topics to be personalized for every user. We want to make sure people are always being presented with great waves that we identify as relevant to their interests based on past listening habits.
Pull