Treefort Blog

Anti-Fragile Software Systems with Bill Withers

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT

I recently enjoyed a lecture about creating anti-fragile systems for your business. The presenter shared a number of ideas about owning the platforms you use as a way to make sure your business isn’t caught off guard by rising prices or corporate takeovers that could leave you stuck without a critical part of your business. In principle, all well and good.

But…

Is the answer to building an anti-fragile software system, or an anti-fragile business in general, really to not rely on anyone? Build it yourself. Become your own island.

What happens when the boat breaks and no one on the mainland wants to send you the precious parts you desperately need?

It isn’t anti-fragile for a mid-sized manufacturing company to build and manage its own software. In fact, it’s more expensive, more hassle, and more overhead. When the person who built it leaves the company, or no one knows the code because it was cobbled together with a bot, you’re left with a serious problem.

If this doesn’t sink your business, you’re going to be reaching out to actual software companies to get you back in business. Because that is what they built their company to do.

So, what’s at the core of creating an anti-fragile tech stack?

It’s the same thing that has been at the center of good business from the very beginning: trusted relationships.

It turns out that Bill Withers was right. We do all need somebody to lean on.

OK, before you run out and get lathered up with patchouli oil and tie-dye shirts, hear me out.

There is nothing more fragile than running a business that gets into the business of doing all the things that other businesses do better, distracting you from the business that you do best.

Are you a small manufacturing company? Why become a small software company too?

Are you great at producing digital content that sells? Why not find a company that puts the same effort into great software as you do into your media?

There are lots of companies out there. Find one that will work hard for you. Find a great product with a great team who will get up at 2 a.m. to fix the software so that when you’re up at 2 a.m. fixing something else, you don’t have to worry about that too.

If your app platform isn’t doing this for you, switch to Treefort.

We work hard on your software so you can work hard on creating great content.

Developing your own app

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT

If you’re thinking of developing your own app… exciting!! Probably. Honestly, there’s never been a better time to do it. Modern development tools and infrastructure have made it easier than ever to bring your idea to life. But it’s not necessarily a cakewalk, and it can easily end in tears if you’re not careful. In this post, I’ll talk about some of the positive things about developing your own app, some of the downsides, and some of the aspects that are a mixed bag.

The Good

Probably the best thing about building your own app is that, if you do it right, you are the king of your own castle. You’re not held back by limited templates or missing platform features. You can create an app that checks all of the boxes and delivers exactly the experience you’re looking for. When your requirements change or you need to pivot your business, you can change your app to meet your new goals.

It has also never been easier to build an app. Products like Expo make it possible to build and distribute a cross-platform app with much less effort than was required in days of yore. Infrastructure providers like Cloudflare enable you to add cloud components to your app with relative ease. We use these tools at Treefort, and we appreciate them very much.

The Bad

The biggest downside of building your own app is the time and expense. For something extremely simple, 1-2 months may be a realistic time-to-launch. For a complex, feature-rich app, it can often take 9 months or more. The cost of this work can range anywhere from $20k for a basic app to $500k+ for something more innovative or advanced. And all this is just your initial investment: a “finished” app is really a moving target as platforms like iOS and Android progress. Expect to continue spending significant effort to keep your app up-to-date, working smoothly, and available in the app stores.

If your app depends on any cloud components — for payments, user accounts, media streaming, etc. — then another consideration is downtime. Downtime occurs when your cloud components aren’t functioning properly and your app stops working as intended. At Treefort we’ve had downtime caused by everything from bad code to a careless backhoe driver to an owl flying into a power line. Downtime is unavoidable and costly, so the name of the game is minimizing it. This is done by building robust systems, carefully testing changes, keeping up to date with infrastructure and platform developments, maintaining reliable alerts, and ultimately being willing to get up at 2 a.m. to troubleshoot and fix urgent problems.

The Ugly

After reading that last section, you might be thinking, “He doesn’t know about AI! AI solves all of that!” We actually use AI quite heavily in our app development here at Treefort. It’s a great tool and it can definitely reduce time and cost when used appropriately. However, despite what the people trying to sell you AI say, it is not a silver bullet. If you’re not careful, then AI can actually add to the total time and expense of a project (while at the same time making it feel like the opposite is occurring). This has happened at Treefort, and we’ve seen it happen elsewhere. If you still think AI will solve all your problems, just know that the maker of the world’s best frontier coding model is willing to shell out over $300k/yr for a human app developer. AI is certainly changing the world of software development, but for all its wonders, it goes squarely in the “mixed bag” section for me.

The last topic I’ll touch on is freedom (or “anti-fragility” if you prefer). Building your own app will give you more freedom in some areas. You’ll get to decide exactly how your app looks and functions, and you can’t be de-platformed (at least not at the code level). This often comes at a cost though: you’ll have less freedom in other areas. If you’re fixing bugs, then you aren’t producing new content. If you’re managing cloud infrastructure, then you aren’t hunting down the next customer. Unless you are actually running a tech company, your self-developed app is quite likely to become an expensive distraction pulling you away from your core mission. That’s not freedom (or anti-fragility).

Where Treefort comes in

This is a business blog, so of course I’ve got to steer this post back around to the topic of Treefort. At Treefort we make apps (you probably guessed this). Actually, technically, we’ve already made the apps. We offer a drag-and-drop app editor that allows you to customize our apps and relaunch them as your own. The development work is already done for you, and we handle all future maintenance and updates. Sound expensive? It’s not. Our base plan starts at just $800/mo—a fraction of the cost of a single developer.

So what’s the rub? Our apps are specifically designed for media streaming. If you’re looking to publish and monetize any kind of media—videos, audiobooks, ebooks, music, podcasts—then we’ve absolutely got you covered. If this doesn’t fit your needs, maybe the flexibility of custom development makes sense for your business!

Streaming with confidence

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT

There we are, my daughters and I in the kitchen, after our post-dinner clean-up. As any good father would do, I pulled up a Red Bull video of some insanely steep backcountry snowboard descent of an obscure Alaskan peak for us all to be inspired by. Because I’m 44 and interested in health and athletics, the ad that comes up is about a little blue chewy tablet that will solve all my… ahem… problems. “Dad, what’s ED?” Okay—it didn’t happen exactly like this, but you get the picture and can probably relate to the slight anxiety I have about the random ads that my family and I will be forced to endure.

Of the various downsides to using big-tech third-party streaming services—be that for music, podcasts, or video—at the top of the list for many of our clients is the aggressive and often inappropriate ad campaigns that they are forced to subject their audience to. As a creator, you have little to no control over what these ads display or support, unless it’s an ad read that you’ve inserted into your own content. As it is, your audience is force-fed some ED ad before they get to watch your “how to draw a bunny” video. It’s hardly family-friendly. I guess it’s the price you have to pay to use their services.

Granted, many platforms have tried to create ways to control ads, either through a paid subscription (which suspiciously still allows for ads) or by allowing users to block inappropriate ads or content. But, this puts the burden on your audience and they may choose it’s not worth it. Call me old-fashioned, but as a father, I’m opposed on principle to people trying to peddle their wares to my kids, be it products or ideas. Given that families spend $90–$100 per month on subscription plans for digital entertainment services, I guess I’m not the only one willing to shell out to avoid ads.

So, what options do you have as a creator? Essentially, you either live with it or you offer something different. As it turns out, offering something different doesn’t have to cost you big, and you end up with complete control over what you stream, what you charge, the amount of revenue you keep, and the type of experience that you curate for your loyal fan base.

With Treefort, you own the platform, so your content is as trustworthy as you make it. No forced ads and no worries that the “How to draw a bunny” video will send one of your precious users down a rabbit hole.

Is this blog post AI generated?

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Recently Zack and I put our heads together to try and crack the SEO nut. If you search for relevant terms like “White-label OTT app” or “How do I launch an OTT platform” or “Create an audiobook app” (see what I did there… SEO!) then Treefort doesn’t show up until the 10th page in Google, if at all. In fact if you’re reading this article — congratulations! You’ve found the needle in the haystack.

While we were discussing what could be behind Google’s apparent apathy for Treefort, Zack pointed out that this blog was a bit of a graveyard: 0 posts in the last 5 months and only 3 in the last year. A veritable desert of keywords and search terms. Updating the blog felt like an obvious way to boost our ranking.

I’ll be honest - at this point we considered generating posts with AI. Why put in hours of work to hand write blog posts when 5 minutes of prompting could generate a fruit salad of hyper-optimized keywords large enough to feed the search monster for months? Everyone is doing it these days. This fellow published 12,000 posts in one day!

So we fired up ChatGPT 5-and-one-half and asked it for a couple sample posts. The results were what you’d expect: bland, soul-crushing prose about content creation and monetization strategies. The content didn’t surprise us. We’re all familiar with AI slop at this point. But even so, after reading the posts we immediately began discussing ways to hide our sin. What if we disabled email notifications for AI generated posts? Would there be a way to feed these posts to the search crawler without them being visible to people? How could we put some daylight between this garbage and the Treefort brand?

Here’s what we realized: the whole point of SEO is to help real people find your brand. It is only working if a real person clicks your link. And when they click the link, whatever they’re looking at is their first impression of you. What do we want to say with that first impression? Do we really want to communicate that we think you’re a chump who’ll eat the slop? That you’re not worth even the hour of our time it takes to write a blog post?

Rhetorical questions. We do not want to communicate that. It’s not that hard to write blog posts by hand, and we think a hand-written post gives a better and more accurate impression of Treefort. We are a very human company. We don’t have an AI sales bot writing emails. Zack may even write you a note with a ballpoint pen, stamp, and everything. We don’t put an AI chatbot in front of customer support. You can get a real person on the line when you need help, and it’s probably going to be one of the developers who wrote the software.

So here you go: a blog post written by a real live human. If you didn’t enjoy it, at least you have the satisfaction of knowing that I put more effort into writing it than you did reading it.

How to kick the algorithm blues

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

What’s wrong? Has the algorithm got you down?

You work hard to create beautiful and thoughtful content. You launch it into the digital world… and it gets viewed by the same 300 people. Amid the sea of screaming and shouting, you’re just a faint whisper. Is anyone out there?

I did a brief search on an ever-trustworthy clanker, which informed me that there are nearly 1 million audiobooks on Audible, 6 million books on Kindle, and 30 billion videos on YouTube. Somewhere in the range of 93% of YouTube videos have under 1,000 views, 90% of books sell fewer than 2,000 copies, and 66% sell fewer than 1,000. Take my quick AI search with a grain of salt, but the numbers really are staggering. On YouTube, your video is literally 1 of 30 billion! So, how does someone come across your content in that vast sea? Let’s be honest — unless you’re screaming, you’re not going to be heard on the big platforms.

Perhaps the most frustrating part is that after all the work you put into creating and marketing your content, you still know next to nothing about the people who watched, read, or listened to it. You can’t email them a thank-you or give them a heads-up when your next ebook or podcast comes out. At the end of the day, you were only renting the audience anyway.

At Treefort, we’ve come up with a surefire method to beat those algorithm blues. Here are 5 simple steps to get you on the road to recovery:

Launch your own branded streaming app and give your loyal audience an experience tailored to them. Once you have your own platform, you can start treating the larger platforms (and their pesky algorithms) as top-of-funnel marketing activities.
Charge directly for your content. Move from thinking, “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table” to realizing the value of what you create. With Treefort, you can easily set up a subscription plan, wire up individual purchases, embed a giving link, or generate ad revenue through your own ad reads.
Create an email sign-in. As you start directing your audience to your own branded platform, require an email to sign in. Not only will you have user data in our analytics dashboard, but you’ll also have a built-in (and downloadable) newsletter list to keep your loyal fans informed about upcoming releases.
Connect our integrations like Recombee. Treefort has a recommendations integration with Recombee. Instead of your audience being recommended one of the other 6 million ebooks on a big platform, you can make sure that the items they see next are yours.
Enjoy your newfound control and start making your platform work for you — not the other way around.

In all seriousness, we’d love to serve you and the work you do. Reach out and let’s see if we’d be a good match.

Why you need an app (and how you can get one)

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Let’s face it, in the year of our Lord 2026 apps are not the hot new thing they once were. Apple’s famous “There’s An App For That” campaign is 17 years old. For perspective, go back another 17 years and you’re looking at the collapse of the Soviet Union. But despite their age, apps are more essential today than they ever have been. A whopping 65% of the planet is on a smartphone. This is a decent-sized addressable market - one you don’t want to miss out on.

There’s also nothing that brings gravitas to your digital presence quite like an app. An app screams (in a non-hysterical, refined sort of way) “That’s right, we know what we’re doing.” Every organization has a website and a SnapTok, but only the few who truly have it together have an app.

Apps are more difficult to launch, but they offer a level of polish, performance, and functionality that websites haven’t yet been able to match. The average user may not be able to articulate this distinction, but deep down they can feel it. “Whoa, they have an app”, your users think to themselves before they download your app and start generating 3-5x more value. Obviously, you need an app.

Ok ok, so how do I get one?

So you’ve decided you need an app? Excellent! You’ve got three basic options to procure one: build it, vibe it, or rent it.

Build it

You can develop your very own bespoke app by either paying a development agency or hiring your own developers. The latter option will virtually force you to become a technology company. If you’re reading this article, this probably isn’t the right path for you. The former option is great if you have deep pockets, very particular needs, and are comfortable navigating the turbid waters of outsourced development. In other words, only consider this if you are a large, established organization. If you’re just starting out, are on a budget, or need to get to market quickly - don’t do this.

Vibe it

You can just have the clanker bang out an app for you! This process is known as “vibe coding”. You ask the AI (short for “Artificial Intelligence” in case you haven’t heard of it) to build an app for you and voilà, you have an app. As the founder of a SaaS company I shouldn’t be saying this, but vibe coding can actually be a great option under certain circumstances. Today’s AI models are pretty darn good at code. If you meet the following criteria then vibe coding may be an good option for you (dare I say the best option):

You want a truly unique app chalk full features - and you want it on tight budget.
You do not plan to deal with sensitive information like user accounts and subscription payments.
You are willing to invest a significant amount of your time (or your intern’s time) prompting for the right solution, fighting through app review, addressing outages at 2am, rinsing, and repeating.
You are willing to put up with an elevated dose of inscrutable bugs and quirks.

If those terms sound acceptable then go for it - AI is dirt cheap (relatively speaking) and 100% worth a shot. If that doesn’t sound like your cup of tea then steer clear of vibe coding for now.

Rent it

Your last option is to find an already-built app that does what you want and pay a “rental” fee to re-launch it as your own app. This is known as “white-labelling” an app. It’s a great option if you want a high-quality solution at an affordable price point with minimal effort. You’ll get much higher quality than a vibe-coded app with much less effort, and you’ll get it much faster and cheaper than a custom-built app. So what’s the catch? Flexibility - you’re getting something that has already been built and the features may or may not meet your exact needs.

Isn’t this convenient

“Renting is clearly the right choice for me”, you find yourself thinking. If you’re a creator or publisher of any kind of digital content - well isn’t this convenient! Treefort happens to be the premier vendor of quality, white-label media apps that can stream anything - videos, audiobooks, albums, ebooks, blogs, podcasts, etc. We let you brand the entire experience as your own, customize the app to your liking, choose your monetization strategy, and skip over all the tricky technical steps straight to “your app is live!” If that sounds great we’d love to chat!

P.S. A Note About The Web: We talk big about apps at Treefort, but we really do love the web. We think it’s fantastic that anyone in the world can publish a website without asking for permission from a multinational conglomerate or the Chinese Communist Party. That’s why we offer every Treefort customer a high-quality PWA (progressive web app) along with their iOS and Android apps. However, it is an unfortunate reality that native apps are currently more capable than web apps, especially for things like offline media access and background playback (absolutely essential features for any media service). We do hope that over time this feature gap will shrink and the web will become a more central piece of the media streaming puzzle!

How to create content and not go broke

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

All content costs money to create - even if you’re just paying tokens for AI to clank out your next blog post 😉. From infrastructure costs and editing software, to microphones and those little circle-lights, to the actual time you put into the creation, the costs add up. How do you charge for it?

Treefort was built to help you get your content to your audience with the tools you need to monetize. Here is an overview of how monetizing can work on Treefort and how our users take advantage of these integrations.

Subscriptions

Subscriptions are by far the most common way to monetize with Treefort. Dependable, recurring revenue is great for business growth and you don’t need 100k subscribers to make it work financially. Our Stripe integration makes it super easy to set up monthly or yearly subscriptions. Apart from Stripe, our team will help you get set up with Apple and Android too. The essential element of a successful subscription service (nice alliteration!) is new and engaging content. The businesses that manage this well thrive. Our built-in analytics will help you understand what your audience is or isn’t engaging with so that you can give them more of the hits and less of the duds.

Freemium

The “Freemium” model is a variation of a subscription service where you offer both free and paid content. Free content is a great way to attract your audience to your platform and introduce them to your paid offerings.

Individual Purchases

For some content, your audience will expect to purchase it once and have access to it forever. Treefort gives you the option to set up individual purchases - we call these “offerings”. An individual purchase is connected to a user’s account so, as long as the account is active, the content will be available.

Donations

A handful of our customers offer all of their content for free. Ok, it’s not free, they paid to create it, but it’s technically free to their audience. Most of these organizations have 501©(3) status and they use donations to fund the content production and distribution. With Treefort you can link to your site’s giving page or embed the giving page directly in your app.

Mix and Match

Treefort is intentionally flexible. If you’re uncertain about how to charge, why not mix and match? Offer your podcast and articles for free, charge a subscription fee for a series of video courses, and sell your ebooks as individual purchases.

Whichever model you choose, we’ll keep making great software so you can stick to making great content. It’s like a match made in …Moscow, ID.

Articles

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 12:00:00 GMT

I’ll keep this short - we’re all about to head home for eggnog with our families. But we haven’t forgotten about you, our dear customer. In fact, we have a Christmas gift for you!

Pop open the “Add content” button in your dashboard and you’ll find a new option: “Article”. You can now add rich text articles to your apps, replete with images, links, and your very best writing.

You’ll also notice a new “Blog” section in your sidebar. Click over there to group multiple articles together into, you guessed it, a blog.

We plan to continue expanding on these features, so feel free to send us your requests and ideas - although maybe after the holidays ;)

Have a Merry Christmas!

Analytics dashboard

Fri, 19 Sep 2025 12:00:00 GMT

We’re excited to announce the launch of a brand new Treefort analytics dashboard replete with helpful charts, graphs, and stats. This feature is designed to help you better understand your audience and ultimately make more informed decisions about how to serve them.

The dashboard includes a mix of metrics that were already available (but were quite difficult to gather) as well as brand new, never-before-seen stats. A few examples:

Subscribers: Take a look at this chart for historical subscription and cancellation numbers. See how you’re trending without tallying up numbers across Stripe, App Store Connect, and the Play Console.
Shares: See which content is being shared the most by your users.
Searches: See what users are searching for in your app - and if they’re finding it. Search misses can be particularly interesting. Sometimes these will just be severe misspellings, but often they will highlight content that you don’t have but that your audience would like from you.
Engagement: See at a glance your most engaging content. Click the little expando button above each mini table to open the data in the full filterable/sortable analytics table that you’re already familiar with.

Audio playback timer

Wed, 21 May 2025 12:00:00 GMT

Surprise! It’s been so long since our last post that I bet you thought we forgot we had a blog. But just like springtime in the North, we’re back when you least expect it! We’ve been doing a lot of quiet behind-the-scenes work since our last blog post, but today we’ve got an exciting new feature to announce: the oft-requested audio playback timer!

14 minutes left until audio pauses automatically!

The latest version of our app now has an audio timer option in the player, both in the native mobile app and on the web. When you tap the timer icon, you can select your desired timer duration from a number of presets or you can enter a custom number of minutes. “But Matt!” I hear you cry. “I want to fall asleep to my current audiobook chapter, and I don’t know how much time is left in the chapter!” Fear not, my friend, for we have given thought even to this exotic use case. The “End of chapter” timer option is built specially for you! Instead of pausing after a set number of minutes, this timer will pause playback when the player reaches the end of the currently-playing chapter. (And what’s more, it also works for podcast episodes and album tracks!) Simply set the timer to “End of chapter” and then relax in the peace of mind that accompanies the knowledge that by falling asleep you won’t miss more than the entire remainder of your current chapter. (The rest of that chapter probably won’t be on the final exam anyway.)

Pause playback at the end of the chapter…or podcast episode…or video…or album track!

Other creative uses for the playback timer include:

Timed reading: want the kids to listen to 15 minutes of the Bible or some other content? Playback timer’s got you covered.
Chores timer: when my kids were young, we’d have a brief cleanup time each day and play a song to signal it was time to tidy up. Using playback timer, you can signal the kids to do a cleanup routine as long as the music (or audiobook) is playing!
Pomodoro timer: Set a custom playback timer for your 25-minute Pomodoro interval, get to work listening to your favorite audio content, and then take a break when the audio stops.

We hope you enjoy this new feature! As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts. And if you’re looking to distribute your content on a streaming platform that provides you with your own custom apps and has a nifty built-in audio playback timer, reach out and book a demo today!

Music streaming

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 12:00:00 GMT

Our effort to be the best way to publish all of your digital media continues: we now support streaming music! Whether you just want to add a few albums to your app or you’re aiming to launch your own music service, we’ve got you covered.

Publishing an album for your audience to enjoy is as easy as dragging a list of mp3s into your Treefort dashboard. Take a look:

Publishing an album in 60 seconds

Some fun features we snuck into this launch:

When a user is listening to music we replace the audio player’s speed control with a loop button (assuming they would rather listen to that latest hit on repeat than at 3x speed). When the user switches back to an audiobook or podcast, we swap the controls back.
We increased the quality of our audio streams from 64kbps to 128kbps for music. A lower bitrate is fine for the spoken word but the higher bitrate makes a big difference for music.
Users can search for albums or individual songs in your catalog using the in-app universal search.
We built a new backend to track artists that will also improve the way we handle authors, publishers, podcast hosts, etc. For now you’ll notice a fancy new autocomplete when entering these folks into your Treefort dashboard. Keep an eye out for future updates in this area.
While working on music we discovered a performance limitation with our audio player. We addressed the problem and the player can now handle albums or audiobooks in excess of 100 hours and 1,000 tracks! We’re pretty confident it could even handle a Pink Floyd album.

That’s all folks! If you’re looking for a way to publish or monetize your digital content - whether you’ve got music, videos, audiobooks, ebooks, or podcasts - we would love to chat. If you’re already on Treefort - happy streaming!

Build revenue with offerings

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 12:00:00 GMT

At Treefort one of our goals is to help you build revenue with your digital content. You can’t keep producing videos, publishing books, and hosting podcasts as great as all that for free. We get it. So our platform includes a slew of features to help you monetize your content: subscription plans, coupon codes, free trials, group memberships, you name it. At the heart of these features is our “offerings” system.

In a nutshell offerings allow you to decide who gets what in your Treefort apps. The two key components of every offering are:

What is being offered: either content or features in your app
Who it’s being offered to: based on subscription plan or region

You can use offerings to answer questions like “When a user signs up for my $10/mo plan via their iPhone in Canada, what should they get access to?”

This system allows you to accomplish some pretty neat things with Treefort:

Paid content: This is the core use-case for offerings. You can setup a subscribers-only offering to lock content behind a paywall. Only paying subscribers will get access to the content. Freeloaders can browse what’s available, but will be asked to subscribe before they can access anything in your offering.
Subscription tiers: You can create subscription tiers by setting up multiple offerings. For example, you might create a “Basic” offering for your $5/mo subs that includes a sampling of your content and a “Premium” offering for your $15/mo subs that includes the kitchen sink. Users can sign up for a plan or switch between plans right in your app.
Family plans: Many of our customers create a “Family” offering that unlocks the family profiles feature and then sell that at a higher price point. This is a great upsell opportunity if you have a lot of family-friendly content.
Regional licensing: You can limit access to an offering based on region. This is helpful as many content licenses are geographically limited. For example, maybe you can get a sweet deal on the entire Harry Potter franchise if you just limit your streaming rights to the Territory of Christmas Island. You can make that happen with offerings.

We recently made some significant improvements to the offerings system (the regional licensing feature in particular) and we have even bigger plans for offerings in the future, so keep an eye out for updates.

That’s all folks. Happy streaming!

P.S. I’d be remiss if I didn’t throw in a sales pitch: if you’re not already on Treefort, schedule a demo and hop on board. You won’t regret it.

eBook highlights and notes

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 12:00:00 GMT

That’s right, we now support highlighting and note taking in eBooks! To try it out just open a book that you’ve added to your app and select some text. You’ll see a handy new popup with five color choices for highlighting and an option to add your own notes. Tap the icon in the bottom left of the reader to browse all of your highlights for the book.

This feature is supported on every platform - iOS, Android, and the web. Each user’s highlights and notes will automatically sync across all of their devices. As an aside, syncing user data is a more difficult problem than it might seem and we put in quite a lot of work to make this happen. We’re very pleased with the results and plan to build more on this foundation in the future (custom playlists, anyone?).

We started slowly rolling this feature out about three weeks ago. It is now fully available to everyone. We really think readers will enjoy it - they’ve already marked over 18,000 highlights!

That’s all for now. Just keep uploading excellent content and we’ll take care of the rest! And as always, if you don’t have an app yet and are interested please ask us anything or book a demo.

Next episode autoplay

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 12:00:00 GMT

One of our primary goals at Treefort is to help you engage and retain subscribers. We’re constantly making updates and improvements to the platform towards that end. This is why we’ve added a feature that makes it much easier for your subscribers to play the next episode in a video series.

Previously when a subscriber finished a video they would be left staring at the video’s thumbnail, possibly in an existential crisis of what to watch next. Our personalized recommendations can help, but if the video is in a series we know what the subscriber probably wants to watch: the next episode.

To solve this problem we’ve updated the app to automatically suggest the next episode in a series. When a subscriber finishes an episode a screen pops up asking them if they’d like to watch the next one. If they don’t respond within a few seconds we go ahead and start the episode automatically. This is a similar experience to many other streaming platforms out there, except without all the algorithmic shenanigans and censorship.

We’re planning to add autoplay to other parts of the app, but if you have particular requests or suggestions don’t hesitate to let us know!

What we’re about

Thu, 27 Jun 2024 12:00:00 GMT

Hi there, I’m Elliot the CEO of Treefort. Today I’d like to take a brief intermission from our product updates to explain what we’re really up to here at Treefort. Not as in “hey, we’re actually Feds” but as in “what’s the reason that we do what we do”.

At a practical level we are a technology company building a media streaming platform. We can help you launch your own branded streaming apps without the development headache. We spend most of our time wrangling code and keeping the servers running so that you don’t have to. But all of this technology is ultimately a means to an end. Our true mission is this: to help you own your audience and build sustainable revenue.

The concept of a “media streaming platform” is far from original. There are a million services out there that will help you stream your digital content: YouTube, Spotify, Amazon, Apple, X-formerly-Twitter, you name it. You can even use these tools to build revenue with ads, royalties, subscription fees, and more.

But here’s the problem. If you’re connecting with your audience through a channel that you don’t own then they’re not really your audience. You’re borrowing an audience from someone else. This becomes painfully obvious in areas like communication, monetization, and censorship. Spotify won’t let you build an email list from your listeners. YouTube can de-monetize your videos at their whim. Twitter (I mean X) is an increasingly lonely exception to the rule of platforms censoring on behalf of governments. No fun.

That’s where Treefort comes in. We help you retain ownership of your most valuable asset - your audience - and we help you build reliable subscription revenue on that foundation. This is why you get the email address of every audience member that signs up. This is why we make it easy for your subscribers to pay you directly. This is why your Treefort app is a fully customized experience designed to meet your specific needs. With Treefort you rent your technology but you own your audience. Way more fun.

If this sounds compelling, we’d love to have you along for the journey. You can learn more from our website or sign up for an in-person demo today.

Web content

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 12:00:00 GMT

We’re thrilled to share that you can now embed web content right in your Treefort apps! This complements our existing support for videos, audiobooks, ebooks, and podcasts, allowing you to publish just about anything. It’s an important step towards our goal of helping you create a single home for all of your digital content. Here are a few ways you can use this new feature:

Livestreaming: Easily incorporate any livestream player into your app to engage your audience in real time.
Social: Integrate a group chat or forum to add a social element to your app. Pair this with our Single-Sign On support for a smooth user experience.
Magazines: Embed online flipbooks or magazines for content that doesn’t quite fit the traditional ebook format.
Blogs: Everyone loves blogs. Include yours in your app.

If you’re already a Treefort user, check out our help documentation to start embedding web content today. If you’re new to Treefort and find this feature interesting, we’d love to have a chat or give you a demo.

Happy streaming!

Family profiles

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 12:00:00 GMT

We’re excited to announce our latest feature: family profiles.

Similar to the “Who’s watching?” experience from many popular streaming services, this feature allows up to 5 family members to share a single subscription to your service while each maintaining their own personalized experience. Gone are the days of losing your spouse’s place in an audiobook or sifting through junior’s ebooks to find your latest read - each profile has its own progress tracking, library, and recommendations.

Head on over to the app settings page in your admin dashboard to enable this feature today. You can limit the number of profiles allowed per account, upload profile images for your subscribers to choose from, and even limit access to profiles based on subscription tier. And of course we’ll upsell users right in your app if they need to pay to access the feature. Take a look at the help guide to learn more.

Let us know if you have any questions, and happy streaming!

Recommendations

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 12:00:00 GMT

We hope you’ve been enjoying your summer - and your state-of-the-art streaming applications from Treefort 😉. Read on for the latest updates to our product.

Recommendations

We’re excited about this one. If you have a large catalog of content it can be tricky for users to find the next thing to watch, read, or listen to. To solve this we’ve integrated with a slick service called Recombee. You can sign up for a Recombee account and plug it into Treefort to show automated recommendations right in your app! This includes the ability to:

Show personalized content recommendations based on an audience member’s individual taste.
Show similar content recommendations based on a particular video, video series, audiobook, ebook, or podcast.
Show trending or popular content recommendations based on what your audience has been enjoying as a whole.

You can even use Recombee to generate recommendations for use outside of your apps - say on your website. Read the integration guide to get started.

Honorable mentions

Link management — You’ll see a new “App Links” card when you open a piece of content or a collection in your admin dashboard. The goal of this card is to help you keep your app organized and avoid broken links. The card lists all of the places in your app that link to the item. We’ll prevent you from accidentally archiving the item before removing these links from your app.

Media formats — We’ve added support for uploading flac audio files and mvl video files.

Stability — We spent a good part of June shoring up loose ends in the platform to keep your apps fast and stable regardless of the size of your audience, the size of your catalog, or if you decide to switch podcast hosting providers. That last one was complicated - but we’re happy to think of these details so you don’t have to.

That’s all folks! As always, book a demo if you want a tour of the product, have questions, or just want to chat.

Subscription tiers

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 12:00:00 GMT

We’ve got some pretty exciting developments to share with you this month — read on to learn more!

Subscription tiers

Our most requested feature is finally here: subscription tiers! Up until now you could only offer one subscription plan in your Treefort apps. Now you can create multiple plans with different prices and benefits. You can choose which content is available under each plan, and your subscribers can upgrade their plan when they want to access more content.

New checkout page

To complement subscription tiers we’ve redesigned our checkout page from the ground up. The page includes a switch to view monthly or annual pricing (if you offer that), a full list of benefits for each plan (customizable by you), and a beautiful new layout.

Honorable mentions

We’re always fixing bugs and making minor improvements behind the scenes. Here are some of the changes from this month:

Revenue in Google Analytics — We’ve updated our integration with Google Analytics to include your subscription revenue. This helps you analyze revenue and conversions across all platforms.
App header icons — You can now customize the icons in your app’s header to match your branding. You can update the search, menu, back, and close icons.
Quicktime file support — We’ve added support for Quicktime .mov files when uploading video content.

Interested in Treefort?

We’d love to chat. Sign up here and we’ll give you a tour of the product and answer any questions you have.

eBooks

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 12:00:00 GMT

This past month was a productive one for us. Maybe the cold weather kept us indoors and programming more than usual. We pushed out quite a few bug fixes and minor improvements, but we also finished a major feature that has been in the works for some time: eBooks!

eBooks

Now, in addition to videos, podcasts, and audiobooks, you can publish eBooks in your app. You’ll find a new “eBook” option under the “Add Content” menu - click that to get started. A few highlights:

You can bulk upload up to 10 ePub files at once and we’ll automatically extract the artwork, table of contents, and other metadata for a streamlined admin experience.
Your apps have been updated with a responsive eBook reader that works at any screen size, on every platform, and in both light and dark mode.
Your users can pick up where they left off across all their devices and download eBooks for offline reading on iOS and Android.
Our Google Analytics integration tracks the number of times each book has been opened and logs when a reader reaches key progress milestones (10%, 25%, and so on).

We’ll continue working on this feature and have more updates in the pipe!

Honorable mentions

We’re pretty excited about eBooks, but there were a few other features launched in February that deserve a mention:

Podcast episode page: We’ve added a new page in the app for individual podcast episodes. The page shows the episode’s artwork (if your podcast feed includes that) as well as the episode’s full show notes.
Payment plan switching: Users can now easily switch payment plans right in the app. Previously it was a bit of a hassle to do something like switch from a monthly plan to an annual plan.
Updating videos: You can now update a video’s media file even after it has been published. The original metadata, settings, and analytics are all retained.
Uploading from Dropbox: We’ve integrated with Dropbox to allow you to import videos and eBooks directly from your Dropbox account. Files are transferred in the cloud which makes this a great option if you don’t have the best local network connection.

Stay in touch

We’ll be back next month with more - sign up below so you don’t miss out. And as always, if you’re new here and want to know more about Treefort please schedule a demo.