u/Ray_Dev_SG

I’ve been building a transcription app for a while, and most of my current users are from Asia.

Recently I’ve been trying to localize it for users in North America and Europe. I already did one round of localization, but the results weren’t great, and I’m starting to think the problem isn’t just translation — I may be emphasizing the wrong features.

So So I’d really love to hear from people who regularly use transcription / meeting / audio apps. What features matter most to you, in order?

Right now the app has quite a lot:

1. Live translation / interpretation
2. Audio file → text
3. Video file → text
4. YouTube link → transcript
5. AI summaries
6. AI-generated mind maps
7. Chapters / outlines
8. Ask AI questions about a recording
9. Deeper AI analysis of recordings
10. Automatic action items / to-dos
11. Transcript translation
12. Text-to-speech

It also includes some audio tools:

1. Trim audio
2. Convert formats
3. Split / merge audio
4. Change playback speed
5. Voice changer
6. Add background music
7. Extract vocals / instrumental tracks

And this is actually where I’m stuck. There are so many features now that I’m not sure which one should be the main selling point.

If you use apps like this, I’d really appreciate your opinion:

1. What are the top 3 features you care about most?
2. Which features above feel unnecessary or distracting?
3. When you see a transcription app for the first time, what would make you actually download or pay for it?

I’m especially interested in feedback from users in the US, Canada, Europe, or anyone familiar with localization for these markets.

I’m not looking for compliments — I genuinely want to understand how people outside my current market think about this kind of product.

Any feedlback would help a lot. Thank you!

I’ve been building a transcription app for a while, and most of my current users are from Asia.

Recently I’ve been trying to localize it for users in North America and Europe. I already did one round of localization, but the results weren’t great, and I’m starting to think the problem isn’t just translation — I may be emphasizing the wrong features.

So So I’d really love to hear from people who regularly use transcription / meeting / audio apps. What features matter most to you, in order?

Right now the app has quite a lot:

1. Live translation / interpretation
2. Audio file → text
3. Video file → text
4. YouTube link → transcript
5. AI summaries
6. AI-generated mind maps
7. Chapters / outlines
8. Ask AI questions about a recording
9. Deeper AI analysis of recordings
10. Automatic action items / to-dos
11. Transcript translation
12. Text-to-speech

It also includes some audio tools:

1. Trim audio
2. Convert formats
3. Split / merge audio
4. Change playback speed
5. Voice changer
6. Add background music
7. Extract vocals / instrumental tracks

And this is actually where I’m stuck. There are so many features now that I’m not sure which one should be the main selling point.

If you use apps like this, I’d really appreciate your opinion:

1. What are the top 3 features you care about most?

2. Which features above feel unnecessary or distracting?

3. When you see a transcription app for the first time, what would make you actually download or pay for it?

I’m especially interested in feedback from users in the US, Canada, Europe, or anyone familiar with localization for these markets.

I’m not looking for compliments — I genuinely want to understand how people outside my current market think about this kind of product.

Any feedlback would help a lot. Thank you!

I’ve had four Apple Developer accounts terminated recently, and I’m starting to notice a very similar pattern between them.

Here’s what happened:

Account A

Purchased more than 2 years ago.

Had around 7 apps published and had been operating normally for a long time.

Recently, I published a new app.

I then transferred that app to Account B, which was a newly purchased account.

A few days later, I transferred the app back from Account B to Account A.

Shortly afterward, Account A was terminated.

Account B is still active, but currently has no apps on it.

Account C

Purchased recently, around the same time as Account B.

I submitted one new app.

The app stayed waiting for review for several days without any progress.

Then the developer account was terminated directly.

Account D

This account had also been used for more than a year.

It had around 5 apps published.

There were no app transfers involving this account.

I only submitted a new app recently.

Account D was terminated about one day apart from Account A.

And the today, another account was terminated - this one was registered by myself, not purchased.

For this account:

I submitted one app.

It stayed in Waiting for Review for about 7 days.

Then it changed to In Review.

It remained In Review for around 6 days with no result.

Yesterday, I withdrew the submission and submitted it again.

Today, Apple terminated the account and cited fraudulent activity.

The strange part is that I’ve started noticing one very consistent pattern across these recent cases:

Whenever one of my apps changes to In Review and stays there for an unusually long time — even more than half a day — instead of getting approved or rejected normally, the developer account eventually gets terminated.

Obviously this is only based on my own recent cases, so I’m not saying this is an official rule. But for the accounts I’ve dealt with recently, the correlation has been extremely consistent.

Has anyone else noticed something similar lately?

It feels like Apple has become significantly more aggressive with developer account reviews and terminations recently, especially when a new app is submitted.

I’m particularly interested in whether anyone has recently experienced:

Apps staying in In Review for several days before the developer account is terminated.

Older developer accounts with multiple existing apps suddenly being terminated after submitting a new app.

Accounts being flagged for “fraudulent activity” even when the submitted app itself never received a normal App Review rejection.

A noticeable increase in account-level reviews or enforcement compared with previous years.

Has something changed recently in Apple’s develper account risk-control or review process?

The beginning of the month has come. Once again, it is migration season.

The quotas of the old savanna have run dry. A balding adult developer is the first to raise his head and test the air. From across the Pacific rolls a low thunder — the distant applause of a new model launch.

And so the migration begins. They abandon the CLAUDE.md they have tended for half a month and merge, in silence, into the herd. They leave the Claude grasslands for the fabled plains of Codex, where — they say — the grass grows richer and the benchmarks sit two points higher. The column stretches across several time zones.

Soon the herd reaches the Mara River. The water is murky. Beneath the surface, the crocodiles wait. One of them breaks through and speaks: "Are you sure you want to cancel your subscription? We've saved a 50% discount, just for you." The young turn back here. The adults only let out a low growl, throw themselves into the current, drag themselves up the far bank, and — on pure instinct — enter that string of credit card numbers.

Midstream, they pass another herd moving the opposite way: the population migrating back from Codex. Neither herd looks at the other. Each crosses alone. No one asks the other why.

Our cameras find an older male. This is his eleventh crossing. He stopped reading the benchmark reviews long ago. He simply walks, head down, in the middle of the herd, an unfinished agent task still strapped to his back. He knows the grass will be no greener on the far side. And he knows that next month, he will walk this same road home.

Such is the law of silicon-based nature.

A quick note up front: Everything in this post is from my own hands-on experience going through the OpenAI Ads Manager beta — every step, every screenshot, every observation is real. My original write-up was scattered (I was taking notes as I went), so I used AI to help me organize the structure and make it readable. The substance is mine; the formatting got help. Full screenshots included below for anyone who wants to verify. If AI-assisted editing is a dealbreaker, no hard feelings — skip away.

TL;DR:

• Got into the OpenAI Ads Manager beta (15-day wait after applying)
• Full walkthrough below: dashboard → campaign setup → context hints → ad creative → submit
• Real performance data coming in a few days

Applied for the OpenAI Ads Manager beta about two weeks ago and got approved a few days back — roughly 15 days from submitting the application to receiving the access email. Just finished setting up my first campaign.

Since the self-serve beta opened on May 5th there haven't been a ton of hands-on walkthroughs out there, so I figured I'd document the whole process — from the invite email through hitting submit — and come back in a few days with actual performance numbers.

Posting this now while it's fresh. Data update will go in the edits.

The invite email

Came through as a standard transactional email — clean, minimal, just a login button. Nothing fancy.

Dashboard — first impression

Once you're in, the UI is minimal — almost surprisingly so. Left sidebar has just four sections: Campaigns, Tools, Billing, Settings. No reports tab, no audience manager, no asset library. Compared to the sprawl of Google Ads or Meta Ads Manager, this feels stripped down.

The main view defaults to a Campaigns tab with sub-tabs for Campaigns / Ad groups / Ads — so the classic three-level hierarchy is there, just collapsed into one screen instead of separate pages. A green banner at the top confirms "Account verified — you're approved to launch ads in ChatGPT."

A few things worth flagging from the sidebar before diving into campaign creation:

• Tools only has Change History and Conversions right now
• Billing has the full set (Overview / Activity / Documents / Settings) — payment infrastructure is clearly more built out than the campaign tooling
• Settings has an API Keys section. So programmatic campaign management is on the table from day one, which is more than I can say for some platforms that have been around for a decade

Creating a campaign — Objective

First decision: campaign objective. Three options in the dropdown — Reach, Clicks, and Conversions — but Conversions is currently labeled "Coming soon." So right now you're choosing between optimizing for impressions (CPM) or clicks (CPC). The CPC option only launched with this beta — during the earlier managed pilot, CPM was the only buying model.

Worth noting: even though Conversions as an objective isn't live, you can still set up conversion tracking to measure results. The algorithm just won't optimize toward those events yet.

Country targeting

Location targeting at the campaign level is hard-capped to four countries: United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. That's it. The "Enter another location" field exists but the dropdown won't accept anything else.

Matches what OpenAI said publicly: ads only serve to Free and Go tier ChatGPT users in those four markets right now. If you're hoping to run ChatGPT ads in the UK, EU, or anywhere in APAC outside ANZ, you're waiting.

Budget

Standard setup — pick Campaign budget (total spend cap) or Daily budget (a daily ceiling). Same model as Google Ads and Meta. No minimum spend floor that I could find — which is a real change from the early pilot days when entry was reportedly $50K+.

Conversion tracking & the web-only problem

Before you can set up conversion events, you have to create a data source. The form asks for a name, then a Type: Web / iOS / Android.

Only Web is selectable. iOS and Android are both marked "Coming soon."

This is the single biggest limitation for anyone planning to run ChatGPT ads for an app. You can drive traffic to a web landing page and track it, but there's no native app-install or in-app event tracking yet. If your business is app-first, this beta isn't ready for you — though the fact that the form already has iOS/Android slots suggests it's on the roadmap.

The Web data source itself gives you a standard pixel: a <script> tag with a unique pixel ID that you drop into your site's <head>. Once installed, you can define conversion events — currently the only base event type is page_viewed, with a configurable conversion window (default 30 days). There's also a separate Conversions module under the Tools sidebar with a "Manage conversion keys" option — so the pixel/server-side infrastructure exists, it's just gated to Web for now.

Ad group — where it stops looking like Google Ads

The Ad group page is where ChatGPT Ads starts to diverge from everything else. Four fields:

1. Ad group name — standard
2. Maximum CPC bid — range is $0.01 to $100.00. The default placeholder is $3.00, which is a tell: OpenAI seems to think that's roughly the right ballpark for early auctions. For context, average Google Search CPC sits around $1-$2 and Meta around $0.50-$1.50 in most verticals. ChatGPT Ads is launching with a higher floor signal than either
3. Website URL — default destination for ads in this group. Standard ad-group-level setting
4. Context hints — and this is the part that's actually new

OpenAI's own description of context hints:

>"Describe the conversations, topics, or keywords where your products or services may be relevant; these hints guide matching but aren't exact-match targeting rules."

Read that twice. A few things stand out:

• It's called hints, not keywords or targets. Soft guidance, not hard filters
• "Guide matching" — the LLM uses these to understand what conversations your ad belongs in, not to do string-matching against user input
• "Aren't exact-match targeting rules" — they're explicitly telling you not to think in Google Ads terms

So this isn't keyword bidding. It isn't audience targeting either. It's something closer to: "here's a description of the context where my ad makes sense — figure out the rest, model."

The input UI itself is bare. Just a multi-line text box. No tagging, no chips, no autocomplete, no suggested hints, no keyword volume tool, no competitor research. You're writing into a blank text box and trusting the model. That's either liberating or terrifying depending on where you sit.

My read on how to write them (happy to be wrong):

• Too narrow probably under-delivers — the model can semantically expand from transcribing meetings to a lot of related conversations, so being too literal limits reach
• Too broad probably tanks relevance — productivity is so vague the model has nothing to anchor on
• Sweet spot is probably scenario + intent, e.g. taking notes during long meetings rather than just notes

No one knows the best practice yet. This beta launched two weeks ago. There's no data on what works.

Ad creative

Five fields:

• Ad name — internal label
• Website URL — inherits the ad group default but can override
• Headline — 50 character limit
• Description — 100 character limit
• Ad images — PNG/JPG, square recommended, minimum 256×256px

Character limits are tight. For comparison, Google Search Ads gives you 3× 30-char headlines plus 2× 90-char descriptions — roughly 270 characters total. ChatGPT Ads gives you 150 characters total. You have to land the value prop in one sentence.

The preview shown in the panel looks like a small card with a "Sponsored" label, brand name, headline (truncated at ~35 chars in the preview), description (also truncated), and a small thumbnail image. The ad unit is clearly designed to slot below a ChatGPT response, not to dominate the screen.

A few observations on the creative spec:

• Image displays small in the preview — fine detail in the image is wasted
• Headline gets truncated well before 50 chars in the actual preview — front-load the most important information
• No CTA button selection that I could find (no "Learn More" / "Download" / "Sign Up" picker)
• No A/B testing primitives at the ad level yet — if you want to test creatives, you build multiple ads under one ad group

Review and submit

The final step is a Review page that summarizes everything: campaign name, objective, locations, budget, conversion event, schedule, ad group settings, context hints, and the ad itself. Hit submit and the campaign goes into review.

No timeline given on how long ad review takes. I'll update once mine clears.

Surprises, friction, and what's missing

A few takeaways after going through the whole flow:

🟢 Surprises (in a good way)

• API Keys section exists in Settings — programmatic management from day one
• No minimum spend floor — the rumored $50K pilot entry is gone
• The three-level Campaign / Ad group / Ad hierarchy is exactly Google Ads — zero conceptual onboarding for anyone with Google experience
• Conversion tracking infrastructure (pixel + events + conversion keys) is mature for a 2-week-old self-serve beta

🟡 Friction

• Default CPC suggestion of $3.00 is high relative to other channels — feels like an anchoring move
• Context hints input is a blank text box with no guidance, no suggestions, no volume estimator — you're flying blind
• Character limits on headlines/descriptions are aggressive
• Preview truncates headlines around 35 chars even though the field accepts 50

🔴 Missing (for now)

• Conversions as an objective — Coming soon
• iOS / Android data sources — Coming soon
• Countries outside US / CA / AU / NZ
• CTA button selection
• A/B testing tooling
• Audience exclusion / frequency cap (didn't find these — happy to be corrected if I missed them)

What I'm doing next

The campaign is configured and ready. I'll come back with actual performance data once it's been live for a few days — impressions, clicks, real CPC, CTR, which context hints actually pulled volume, and how the ads end up looking inside ChatGPT.

For anyone else in the beta — would love to compare notes, especially on context hints. Did your first batch get approved on the first try? Any patterns on what gets flagged?

https://preview.redd.it/uy8gnpvf7g2h1.png?width=1899&format=png&auto=webp&s=b9c8b343b6ff51c0a5a8c9d0624ac4fe9bce89f3

Will edit this post with the data update soon.

Hi everyone! 👋

I’m preparing / launching my product on Product Hunt and would love to connect with other makers here.

If you’re also launching soon, feel free to share your Product Hunt link in the comments. I’m happy to check out your product, leave genuine feedback, and support it if it’s relevant to me.

https://preview.redd.it/567apjnbe71h1.png?width=673&format=png&auto=webp&s=0b6f5e6c2f29aa7b9220e78abb07907d4f84509e