christianpbrink

Hi HN! We are Christian and Ryan (rtw2101) of Audm (https://www.audm.com/ and https://appstore.com/audm/audm). Audm is an iPhone app that lets you listen to the best longform (3000 words or longer) magazine articles from titles including The Atlantic, Wired (plus Backchannel), Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Foreign Policy, Outside, The New York Review of Books, and a bunch of others.

We were big podcast fans, but we knew that most of the world’s best storytellers write for top-tier magazines. We also love audiobooks (when they’re read by really gifted narrators), so we knew that stories written for print often work well in audio. So we built Audm.

We release most stories in the app at the same moment they hit the magazines’ websites. Right now we produce 5-8 articles (3-5 hours of audio) per week, and that number is growing fast as we onboard more publications. Our subscribers seem to have an insatiable appetite.

Something that we didn’t fully appreciate when we started (although our users did) is just how skilled a narrator has to be if they’re going to sound good reading articles that are dense with information and nuanced ideas (which often means very complex sentence structure). We’ve become extremely opinionated about narrators.

We’d love your feedback!

Thanks all, Ryan and Christian