Faye Keegan, Dipsea - Pioneering a New Genre of Audio App

Our guest today is Faye Keegan, co-founder and CTO of Dipsea. Part technology company and part story studio, Dipsea is the first audio platform for women's sexual wellness. Prior to founding Dipsea, Faye spent time at Neighborly as a software engineer and Bridgewater as an investment associate. With a background in economics and investment analysis, Faye isn’t your typical startup CTO.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

(4:16) The growing popularity of audio as a medium; Headspace; Calm.

(11:21) Building a content library for a SaaS app; content analytics; Elevate.

(17:00) The challenges of building a sexual wellness app for the app stores; HBO’s Game of Thrones; the Showtime app.

(22:59) Dipea’s tech stack; Firebase; RevenueCat.

(34:29) Scaling a SaaS app team; hiring for different strengths and a shared product vision.

(36:55) How Dipsea is expanding into new uses cases: self-improvement and sleep.

(38:28) User engagement; getting feedback from users on what to build next.

(40:00) What’s the future of Dipsea?

Follow Us:

David Barnard: https://twitter.com/drbarnard

Jacob Eiting: https://twitter.com/jeiting

Faye Keegan: https://twitter.com/itisthefaye

Download Dipsea:

Quotes:

“Subscription … is an exploding space. People are getting so much more used to consuming premium media on their phones and paying for it.” - Faye

“There can be an advantage, tactically, to raising [money] before you’re in market because maybe you don’t get that product-market fit right away. Sometimes what’s inside the box, if the box is closed, is a little more enticing to investors.” - Jacob

“The number-one rule I have for tech stack is if you’re building it from scratch, you probably haven’t googled it… There are so many great tools out there.” - Faye

“I’m a huge fan of … Firebase and RevenueCat. I don’t have stickers on my computer, but those would be the two.” - Faye

“The majority of consumer subscription apps — you’re not building new technology. You’re building a great product and a great experience. You should spend your engineering time on things that matter.” - Faye

“Generally, it’s about leveraging really great tools that offload your engineering time into the stuff where you have an edge as a company.” - Faye

“There’s going to be one thing your company does that’s different from every other company — and that’s the thing that you should put all your energy into. And then everything else, just solve for as quickly as possible [in a way that] doesn’t compromise the ability to achieve the one thing.” - Jacob

“The learning curve once something is in market is totally different — it’s like a totally different universe — than the learning curve of you and your friends talking about it.” - Faye

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