Why We Built Blogcast.io

There's too much great writing that never gets read. We built Blogcast to change that - by turning the best articles into conversations you can listen to while doing literally anything else.

The problem nobody talks about

The internet produces an absurd amount of great content. Long-form journalism, technical deep-dives, research papers, thoughtful blog posts. Most of it gets bookmarked, maybe skimmed, and forgotten.

We all have the tab problem. Forty-seven open tabs of things we genuinely want to read, slowly accumulating until we declare tab bankruptcy and close them all. The content was good. We just didn't have the time - or the right format.

Meanwhile, podcasts are exploding. People listen while commuting, cooking, working out, walking the dog. Audio fits into the cracks of life that screens don't reach. But most podcasts are loosely structured conversations that take 90 minutes to cover what a 5-minute article says in half the words.

What if the best written content could become the best audio content - automatically, and in minutes instead of hours?

A weekend experiment that worked

The first version of Blogcast was a Python script running on a laptop. Feed it a URL, it extracts the article, sends it to Claude to write a two-person conversation script, synthesizes the voices with ElevenLabs, and stitches it into an MP3. Total runtime: about 3 minutes.

We shared it with friends. The reaction was immediate. People weren't just impressed by the technology - they were actually listening to articles they'd been meaning to read for weeks. The format change unlocked the content.

What surprised us most was the two-host format. Having two AI personalities discuss an article - one explaining, one asking questions - created something that felt more engaging than either reading OR traditional single-narrator audio. The banter, the natural back-and-forth, the moments where one host challenges the other - it all makes the content stick.

From script to platform

We moved fast. Cloudflare Workers for the API, D1 for the database, R2 for audio storage, Queues for background processing. The stack is entirely serverless - no servers to manage, no scaling headaches.

The key features that emerged:

• Paste and go - Drop any URL and get a podcast episode back in minutes. No signup required.
• RSS subscriptions - Subscribe to a blog and get new episodes automatically. This is the killer feature - set it and forget it.
• Personality customization - Pick from journalists, founders, comedians, skeptics, grandmas. The host personality changes how the content is discussed.
• Personal podcast feeds - Every user gets an RSS feed they can add to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. Your subscriptions show up as episodes in your existing workflow.

What we believe

Content creators pour their best thinking into written form. Blogcast gives that writing a second life as audio - reaching people who would never have opened the article but will happily listen to a 7-minute conversation about it.

We're not replacing podcasts. We're not replacing writing. We're building a bridge between them.

And we're just getting started.