Jeto, the app we didn’t shipJeto, the app we didn’t ship

Jeto started with a folder called Read Later and 2,847 articles nobody was going to read. Karthik, Sasi and Stebin, a product designer who joined us for it, set out to close the gap between saving things and getting round to them: links that organised themselves, collections shared with just the right people, and Smart Audio Stacks that turned a reading list into something to listen to on the way home.

We built a lot of it, on the web and as a native iOS app, and the people who tried it took to it. What we couldn’t make work was the arithmetic. Natural-sounding generated audio cost about A$0.006 a second, so a single ten-minute stack cost A$3.60 to make, and the sums only got worse with every new listener. People pay little for read-later tools, and a cheaper, robotic voice would have undone the reason to use Jeto at all. We were paying for it ourselves and didn’t want to raise money just to cover the gap, so we stopped.

What it taught us still shapes how we choose what to build: work out the costs before the features, keep the scope to what the team can carry, and let the clever parts work quietly at the edge of attention rather than in the way.

Karthik wrote up the whole story, from the stack to the spreadsheet, on his blog: Why pivot from Jeto.