Show HN: Kidcast.fm – personalised audio stories for kids (not AI generated)

Hi everyone, long time lurker/reader here wanting to share a startup I co-founded.

First off, the sales pitch: We are the world's first online audio platform that plays stories with your child as the star! Every Kidcast story uses your child's name to bring them into the adventure as the main character! Our stories are specifically designed to bring the imagination to life and entertain kids from 2-6 years without screens or distractions.

Now that is out of the way, let's go into a bit more detail about the product and about us.

The idea came from my co-founder, Adam, who would read bedtime stories to his children with them as the main characters (Adam is a childrens book author - which helps). He quickly found that his own kids loved the stories where they featured more than standard childrens tales - little kids are mini narcissists or just fascinated by the idea of being the star of the story.

This is what lead him to looking into how a product with personalised audio might work and scale - and that's where we were introduced by a mutual friend. I immediately saw the value in the concept after testing with my own children and got to work figuring out how to scale the process of personalising stories that contain sound effect, music and narration with thousands of names.

We did look at AI and machine generated content but decided to go down the 'human made' path for the reasons of performance - to be fair, AI voice modelling has come a long way since then, but we still have more flexibility and control of performance the old fashioned way (for now). Ultimately, we wanted to create content for kids that had some substance and it felt appropriate to not use AI or machine generated voices to get a more genuine product.

Our stories are approx 5 mins in length, professionally produced with SFX and music, and we have a catalogue of just over 1,000 names to choose from at the moment. You get 1 free story and we're selling the rest as an addon for now - but this may change in future as we add more content.

Personally, I found the stories to work really well in the car; as soon as my kids hear their names, they quieten down and listen.

Anyway, We're just getting started, and this is one of the first public forums I've shared this on. Would love to hear peoples thoughts and feedback and hopefully your own children love the stories.

Thanks!