Hey there! Back in February, we launched Anchor for iOS as an easy way for people to record mini-podcasts called waves. Our goal was to put fun, powerful, and universally intuitive audio tools in the hands of everyone and anyone to start lowering the barrier to audio creation. The launch was a blast, thanks in part to the amazing support we received from everyone who discovered us on Product Hunt.
Since then, we've been hard at work building new features, and cultivating an amazing Anchor community. We’ve met, talked to, learned from, laughed with, and collaborated with so many creative people from all over the world who’ve found ways to use our app that we never could have imagined. We’re so thankful and humbled by the support we’ve received from them so far.
We’ve also been busy addressing our #1 user request since day one: an Android app. We always knew that if we were going to build an Android app, we had to do it right, or not do it at all. So we designed the app from the ground up, using principles of Material Design and iterating until we found an experience that felt delightful on our own Android devices. We’ve also been testing the app publicly for a few weeks now through Google’s Early Access program, and feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. If you’re an Android user, we hope you’ll take it for a spin and let us know what you think.
Thanks so much for checking out Anchor. If you have any feedback or questions, I’ll be hanging out here all day!
PS - you can learn more about our Android launch here: https://medium.com/anchor/anchor...
@mignano I remember you reached out to me on my website back in May 2015 when Anchor was in its infancy. It feels like a long time ago. At the time, you and Nir were busy beta testing the iOS version of Anchor and making daily changes. It's inspiring to see you are both applying the same approach to the Android version. Most founders would've just copied their iOS version. Congrats
@bentossell Thanks, Ben! You and the rest of the Product Hunt team have been incredibly supportive, and we really appreciate it. And the way PH does community was a huge inspiration for building out the Anchor community.
To answer your questions...
A LOT of waves have been recorded :) Much more than we thought we'd have when we first launched. Since recording voice is a new behavior for many people, we expected a lower percentage of our network to be creators - but we actually found quite the opposite to be true. We've learned that since talking is such a natural behavior for people, and since recording on Anchor is just like talking on the telephone, most people have no problem recording their voice and sharing it with others.
As for challenges…like any startup, there have been many. Curation of high quality content can be difficult at times. Audio is tricky because listening to it is an investment of time, so it always needs to be high quality, but at the same time it’s harder to search and index. So one thing we’re constantly working on is figuring out how to solve this problem and ensure we’re always delivering high quality stuff.
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