There are some good things about Spoke, but I'll go into more detail as to why I only gave it 2 tacos.

The thing that makes this all the more awful, is that this is one of those deals on AppSumo which you get super excited about. I grabbed a couple of codes, jumped in, and oh boy, was I disappointed.

First of all, let's talk about the actual deal itself. Even with the lifetime offering, this deal isn't all that spectacular versus Spoke's more mature competitors like Descript and Grain (yes, even with the lifetime nature of the deal factored in). Shortly before I purchased, I also reached out to the team to query their 'business as usual' pricing, presuming that there was some killer feature or reasoning I was overlooking to justify their normal monthly pricing. I was encouraged to give Spoke a try for myself, and I did. Which brings me to....... The UI.

On the whole, the UI is quite light and crisp, but is it intuitive? Hell no. Instinctively, I went to drag and drop items around the screen. Check. Looks good so far... Wait, I want to remove something from my Spoke summary... I'll just go and drag that to the bin... Oh wait... No bin... How do I delete this? *Minutes of frustration later*... aaannnd look. In the grand old scheme of things, no big deal, UX can be improved upon iteratively, and there were just small things I noticed, but that really does reinforce my feelings on how poor this deal is. Some deals I come across on AppSumo, I'm like - wow! Why are these people not charging more? This app is incredible and the deal is epic! Unfortunately, not so much with Spoke. Polish the UI, build out the feature set first, but at this stage... It's not quite worth the early investment.

On the upside, one good thing that Spoke does offer however, is professional transcription, and the ability to convert your lifetime deal credits into professional transcription time. So +1 for folks looking for human transcription!

Lazarre pitched this as a sort of 'Canva', to Adobe's Photoshop. Which I actually don't think is a bad approach at all. As I understand it, this is to reduce complexity, at the cost of a more limited feature set. And whilst the app is relatively simple to use, there's a fine line between 'simple to use', and 'too simplistic'. You won't find any bells and whistles here, just hit record and allow spoke to transcribe. If you really are looking for something that simple, then maybe this is the tool for you!

Lastly, I removed an additional taco for sending me an email to offer me increased transcription credits for referrals, etc. Instead of this, just make the deal great to begin with, work on making your app fantastic, and you won't need to incentivise me to refer people to you. I'll refer because your price point is good and your product is solid.

That's all for now... I think if you kick out some of those features on the roadmap, polish the UI you're on to a good thing. Just a shame about a poor first impression!

All the best,
J