His secret? Listening to his users

‣ Company: Voice Dream LLC
‣ Founder: Winston Chen
‣ Mission: To create a text-to-speech reader for users of all kinds
‣ App launched: 2012
‣ Team size: 1
‣ Most-used emoji: 👍

In the nine years since its launch, Voice Dream Reader has become one of the biggest apps in the accessibility field, a go-to tool for reading text aloud from web pages, PDFs and other documents. But its developer, Winston Chen, didn’t design it for that purpose.

“I didn’t have a group of users in mind when I wrote Voice Dream Reader,” he says. “It took a meandering path.”

That path started in 2011, when Chen quit his job at a Boston tech company and moved with his wife and kids to Rødøya, Norway, a city with a population of 200. This “mid-career retirement” was a chance to reconnect as a family. But sometime in the Nordic winter, Chen felt the itch to work on a project – one that would come to redefine his career.

We caught up with Chen about being an “accidental entrepreneur,” how early users shaped the app’s success and how he found inspiration in remote Scandinavia.

So you’re in semi-retirement in this tiny town and you decide to teach yourself app development?
Well, the main reason was that it was getting dark and really cold and I needed something to occupy my mind!

How did you get the idea for Voice Dream Reader?
I always had a lot to read for work and I thought, “Here’s this wonderful mobile device but it’s got a small screen. Maybe the text-to-speech engine can render the text to you so you can listen when you’re driving or at the gym.” It took me about two months to write this very basic app.

What was the initial reaction?
People started to email. A math teacher said he had a student in his class with a learning difficulty who would take exams with Voice Dream Reader using headphones. And a French guy wrote me to say, “Your app is really useful to me because I’m blind but could you label some of these buttons?” I didn’t even think of that. I started putting in features for people who are visually impaired. Most of the big features those first two years were driven by users.

How did that change your approach to your work?
It was really mind-blowing for me, coming from B2B business software, to think, “Hey, I wrote a piece of software and it’s helping this kid.” It totally changed my perspective. I just shut down the other stuff I was doing and this became what I piled my time into. It really helped make a difference in people’s lives. I know that’s a cliché. But I felt it viscerally.

What advice would you give to others (even if they’re not in Norway)?
It wasn’t hard to get into app development, even for someone like me who had been out of software development for many years and had more of an engineering background. I tell people, “Don’t think there’s any mystery to it; if you’ve done software at all before, writing an app is not that hard.”

Voice Dream Reader

Text to Speech

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Voice Dream LLC is a part of the App Store Small Business Program. If you are a developer and would like to learn more about the program, follow the link below.