TapeTales

Launching TapeTales meant creating both the product and the market from scratch. The obstacles were significant:

• No existing content: Greece had no audiobook catalog to license.
• Limited partnerships: We secured one publisher, but most large publishers had already signed exclusivity deals with a competitor.
• Reluctant stakeholders: Even after we created a narrator network, publishers were unwilling to invest capital in audiobook production.
• Unfamiliar customers: Greek consumers had little awareness of audiobooks, requiring us to educate the market while introducing a new product experience.

This combination meant that TapeTales had to succeed not by outcompeting others, but by proving the viability of the audiobook format itself.

With limited content and stakeholder support, our strategy was to differentiate through product quality and user experience.

• Focused MVP: Instead of trying to solve everything, we launched with the single publisher who partnered with us and built a lean catalog to validate demand.
• UX-first approach: We designed a seamless subscription app with intuitive onboarding, simple playback, and clear pricing. For a market new to audiobooks, reducing friction was essential.
• Premium brand identity: We crafted a modern, trustworthy brand that signaled professionalism and reliability, helping both publishers and consumers take the format seriously.
• Scalable production model: We developed a narrator network and studio pipeline to prepare for future growth, even if publishers were slow to invest initially.
• Education through design: We designed the app experience to both showcase the value of audiobooks and teach users how to engage with them, effectively merging UX with market education.

As part of building TapeTales, I developed Greece's first audiobook subscription revenue share model. With no local benchmarks, I researched international best practices, adapted them to the realities of the Greek publishing market, and created a transparent system that balanced publisher incentives with long-term platform growth. This work positioned me as the country's leading expert on revenue share business models in digital publishing, a skillset I later brought into Bookvoice to scale its subscription offerings.

Although our catalog remained constrained due to exclusivity barriers, TapeTales achieved key milestones:

• Validated that a subscription model for audiobooks could work in Greece.
• Delivered the first UX benchmark for audiobook apps in the local market.
• Built trust with early adopters through a frictionless and premium product experience.
• Positioned ourselves as credible pioneers, despite structural limitations on growth.

In 2023, TapeTales was acquired by Bookvoice. My co-founder and I joined as Head of Product and Head of Engineering, where we leveraged the lessons from TapeTales to scale Bookvoice's infrastructure, expand content offerings, and transform the overall customer experience.

TapeTales was a formative experience in product leadership under constraint. It taught me how to:

• Prioritize ruthlessly: focus on what delivers value (seamless UX) when resources and content are limited.
• Balance supply and demand dynamics: design a product that works with minimal content while preparing for scale.
• Drive adoption in a new category: create onboarding and flows that educate users as much as they engage them.
• Bridge product and strategy: use product quality as a lever to convince skeptical stakeholders and build market trust.