Back in 2018/2019, during the early years of Listen Notes, I focused on how to build products fast and get the right product off the ground. It was our “building phase”—similar to opening a new coffee shop, where you focus on interior design, sourcing coffee beans, designing the menu, etc.

Now in 2025, Listen Notes has a mature product lineup. Our main focus has shifted to stability (aiming for ~100% uptime) and sustainability (ensuring Listen Notes remains a key player in podcasting even 10 or 20 years from now), much like running a coffee shop that consistently serves great coffee day in and day out.

Overview

So What Is Listen Notes?

Listen Notes, Inc. is a company I started in October 2017. Initially, it was a single-page web app to search podcast episodes by keyword. This is how listennotes.com looked like in 2017:

As you can see, the 2017 version of ListenNotes.com was quite basic. I hope this inspires you to launch your own web projects. Remember, launching is just the beginning—most of the work comes afterward.

Now in 2025, Listen Notes is one database with three user interfaces (UIs):

• One Database: The best podcast database with high-quality metadata and (ideally) close to zero AI-generated fake podcasts.

• Three UIs to query the database:

  • A website for discovering podcasts: ListenNotes.com

  • A Podcast API for developers to integrate podcast discovery into their apps: PodcastAPI.com

  • A “bring your own UI” option where you get raw data from us and use your preferred UIs (e.g., Excel, Google Sheets, SQLite, etc.) to explore the data.

We also offer a few small-ish products. For example, we have a Cloudflare-based open-source CMS called microfeed and a fast podcast transcription/summarization tool called Listen411 (or Transcript.New).

At this point, Listen Notes has more than one person to work on it (with a single-digit team size, and some even part-time). The exact number fluctuates based on our current technical and non-technical tasks. I believe we’ll see more companies like this—lean, efficient teams where not everyone needs to be full-time. I’ve been inspired by how Gumroad is run.

I’d like to openly share how we run Listen Notes. However, as a private company, I can only disclose what I feel comfortable with. Like other companies (e.g., 37signals), we strive for a certain level of transparency but choose not to share revenue or highly detailed stats.

While some startups embrace radical transparency (kudos to them!), most companies—including ours—prefer to keep some things private. We appreciate your understanding.

You might find this article interesting: The Golden Era of Being an Open Startup Is Gone. There’s a darker side to human nature—when you try to be transparent, some people criticize you for not being transparent enough. It’s like donating to someone, only to be told it wasn’t enough. Let’s see how this goes. Fingers crossed.

This will be a long post, but here’s a quick summary of the Listen Notes tech and non-tech stack in 2025. (Apologies if some cool, new tools you love are missing!)

Engineering

• OS: Ubuntu Linux

• Cloud Hosting: Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Cloudflare R2 + Pages

• Web Backend: Python, astral-sh/uv, Django, uwsgi, Nginx, supervisord

• Web Frontend: ReactJs, Tailwind, Webpack, Volta

• Async Workers: Celery, bash scripts, Docker

• DevOps: Ansible, Slack

• Datastore: Postgres, Elasticsearch, Redis, ClickHouse

• Dev Tools: Parallels, Vagrant, Packer, PyCharm

• Monitoring & Alerting: BetterStack

• Performance & Security: Cloudflare CDN / Firewalls / Turnstile

• Payments: Stripe, PayPal

• AI-Assisted Coding: ChatGPT

• Design: Figma

Non-Engineering

• Documents: Notion, Microsoft Office 365

• Legal: Clerky, Stripe Atlas

• Contractors / Freelancers: UpWork, 99designs, Facebook Groups

• Payrolls & Benefits: Gusto, Lively, Schwab, E*TRADE

• Domain Names: Cloudflare Registrar

• Helpdesk: HelpScout

• Emails: Superhuman, Google Workspace, Cloudflare Email Routing

• Small Website Building: microfeed.org with Cloudflare R2 & Pages

• Banking & Credit Cards: Mercury, Amex, Chase

• Bookkeeping: Quickbooks Online

• Office / Company address: WeWork

How We Build Listen Notes Software

The main products of Listen Notes are not particularly “technical”, because we don’t do deep AI research like OpenAI or build defense tech like Anduril or cure cancer. We just build superficial CRUD apps—like many web products today. As mentioned earlier, our main web app consists of one database and three UIs. Our code lives in a monorepo containing Django/Python for the backend, ReactJs for the web frontend, and various bash scripts/Ansible YAML files for DevOps. We use multiple data stores, including Postgres, Elasticsearch, Redis, and ClickHouse.

Other small-ish projects (like microfeed and Listen411) have separate repos, but this article primarily focuses on our main Listen Notes business—the monorepo.

One Database

If I remember correctly, the most profitable AWS products are all database-related. While we run on AWS, we don’t pay for those managed database products—we run open-source datastore software on AWS EC2 instances for cost efficiency. Sustainability is key: we want to provide excellent service without running out of money.

Personally I enjoy shopping for new EC2 instance types—comparing specs, pricing, and benchmarking—especially after AWS re:Invent each year. It's a bit like how others love shopping for handbags, watches, or cars. I don’t know if it's a healthy (and admittedly expensive) hobby!

The Single Source of Truth: Postgres

We use Postgres as our primary data store, which has grown to over 1.2 TB. In the doomsday scenario, even if the code base or servers were gone, with our Postgres dump, the business could be restored. That’s how critical it is.

When Listen Notes started, we used Postgres 9.6; now we’re on Postgres 17.0 (as of writing this post in early 2025). I remember each major upgrade vividly, almost like flipping through a family album.

Our Python code—running on async worker servers (from compute-optimized EC2 instances like c5 to c6i to c7g)—ingests and processes podcast metadata, which then flows into Postgres. Most data related to the website (e.g., user info) & API are also stored in Postgres.

Our Postgres cluster typically has 3 (sometimes 4 or 5) instances: one primary (for writes and some reads) and several read-only replicas with short query timeouts (e.g., 30 seconds). These servers run on storage-optimized EC2 instances (e.g., i3 → i3en → im4gn & is4gen). We avoid AWS RDS for cost and control reasons (e.g., lack of root access).

Over time, we’ve accumulated many custom bash scripts for routine DBA tasks, some scheduled, others ad-hoc.

Search Engine: Elasticsearch

The heart of Listen Notes is our podcast search engine. We index all public podcasts and episodes in the world—now totaling over ~200 million documents. (For comparison, in 1998 Google indexed ~25 million web pages, which was a lot then.)

Our Elasticsearch cluster runs on storage-optimized EC2 instances. Whenever a podcast or episode is added, updated, or deleted, we sync the corresponding document from Postgres to Elasticsearch. We run periodic jobs to keep the two copies of data almost perfectly in sync.

Search queries—whether triggered on the website, via the Podcast API, or from internal scripts—are routed from our Python code to the Elasticsearch cluster.

Analytics: ClickHouse

We store analytics data (like API / listen / search logs) in our own ClickHouse installation. Added to our tech stack around 2020, ClickHouse has proven to be robust and fast for data warehousing. Kudos to the ClickHouse team!

Fast & Ephemeral Datastore: Redis

We rely on Redis as a cache for rate limiting, feature switches, and other performance-critical functions. Our Redis instances, hosted on memory-optimized EC2 instances, are among the longest-running servers in production, sometimes for 2–3 years before an instance upgrade—remember I enjoy shopping for new EC2 instance types? :)

What Is “One Database”?

Technically, our “one database” is the logical “Podcast Database.” In practice, various data types are spread across Postgres, Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, and Redis. Even data like API / listen / search logs contribute indirectly (e.g., to our Listen Score). In any CRUD app, the data layer is critical—and it’s especially true for our business.

Three UIs

In today’s world, UIs aren’t necessarily graphical—APIs and even voice interfaces (e.g., Amazon Echo) count. For Listen Notes, our three UIs are:

UI #1: The Website (listennotes.com)

Our website is a typical Django app with Views, Models, Celery tasks, and more. When I first wrote Listen Notes (late 2016), I used Django 1.9 and Python 2.7; today, we run Django 5.1 and Python 3.13.

We organize our Django code into “apps” (e.g., playlists, episodes, datasets) with standard files like views.py, models.py, and admin.py. As some files grew large, we broke them into multiple view files (e.g., views_xxx.py, views_yyy.py, views_zzz.py, etc.)

We used to use virtualenv and pip, but since early 2025 we’ve switched to uv. We found that uv is extremely useful for managing multiple Python projects across various versions—even when some dependency libraries don't yet support Python 3.13.

Most webpages on ListenNotes.com are partly server-side rendered (Django templates) and partly client-side (a React single-page app compiled via Webpack with Volta to pin NodeJs versions). Although some criticize JS bundles and prefer vanilla JavaScript, we haven’t found major issues with our current approach. We simply cannot commit to a multi-week migration project based solely on a random blog post on the Internet—what works as best practices for others may not suit our needs.

For async tasks triggered by user events (e.g., sending transactional emails), we offload to Celery async workers.

In production, Django is served via uwsgi (managed by supervisord) behind an nginx load balancer. We group uwsgi processes to prevent one slow page type (e.g., search) from affecting other page types (e.g., feed).

UI #2: The Podcast API (PodcastAPI.com)

I wrote about building our Podcast API a few years ago. While the core remains the same, we’ve added more API endpoints, data attributes, SDKs for multiple languages, and even a self-hosted code playground.

We launched the API in December 2017, and it’s now integrated into thousands of apps and websites.

Initially, we used RapidAPI (then Mashape) to manage and monetize the API. However, after experiencing multiple RapidAPI outages, we spent a month building our own API gateway. This not only improved our reliability but also saved us from paying RapidAPI's 20% commission fee. While paying 20% might be acceptable for a side project, it's simply too high for a serious API business.

Our API gateway is now part of our monolithic Django app, handling rate limits, authentication, authorization, caching, and the actual request processing.

To let users try the API without writing code, we built our own multi-language code playground using Docker for an isolated environment.

UI #3: “Bring Your Own UI”

We allow customers to export raw podcast metadata and explore it in their favorite tools (Excel, Google Sheets, etc.).

As a small business that serves many other small businesses, we favor an on-demand pricing model. Small customers might spend $10–$20 multiple times a year to access just the data they need, while larger customers can purchase the entire podcast database delivered as a SQLite file.

We have extensive Python scripts to handle batch data exports and automatically deduplicate records from previous orders.

Design

When we first started Listen Notes, we used Sketch for all our design assets.

In mid-2018, while working with a designer on our website redesign, we were introduced to Figma. Since then, it has become our go-to tool for all design assets.

How Do We Make Money?

I know some idealistic developers believe everything on the Internet should be free or that the only moral way to earn is via a 9-to-5 job or donations. Listen Notes is a for-profit company—like a coffee shop, we have operating costs, and the people behind Listen Notes need to earn a living. If money wasn’t a concern (e.g., maybe become a trust fund kid in my next life?:), Listen Notes might be 100% free.

We monetization via the aforementioned three UIs:

UI #1 (Website): Free for 99.9% of users (with ads), with some premium features behind a paywall (no ads). Instead of forcing long-term subscriptions, we offer one-time “2-day passes” (think Disneyland tickets) by default, which many customers repurchase over several years.

UI #2 (API): Operates on a freemium model. There’s a free plan for side projects, a self-service PRO plan (with fair pricing—if you use zero requests, you pay nothing), and an Enterprise plan involving a sales process.

UI #3 (Data Exports): Self-service options let users buy a small piece of data on demand, while enterprise customers follow a full sales process.

We use PandaDoc for contract management and both Stripe and PayPal for payment collection. Using two payment processors offers peace of mind in case one fails or bans us.

We appreciate Stripe’s highly friendly and competent customer support, along with its excellent developer experience. However, when it comes to handling dispute charges, PayPal significantly outperforms Stripe.

Any business that accepts credit card payments will inevitably face customer disputes—malicious claims are simply unavoidable. Fortunately, Listen Notes experiences only one or two disputes per year. When processed via PayPal, our win rate is nearly 100%, compared to about 15% when handled through Stripe. To be clear, this isn’t Stripe’s fault; it’s the credit card networks (Visa, MasterCard, American Express) that ultimately decide the outcome, with Stripe merely acting as the intermediary.

To minimize disputes, we follow several best practices: offering a great product, providing excellent customer service, and ensuring that customers clearly understand the terms before payment. For our self-service tools, we display a prominent modal that outlines the terms and requires customers to click the “I Agree” button before proceeding. While this might deter some users, it effectively reduces the risk of future disputes—a trade-off we are willing to make.

Additionally, our self-service tools automatically send PDF invoices to customers. These invoices are created by taking a screenshot of the HTML version of the invoice using headless Chrome and Puppeteer.

Internal Tools

Running a database business means continuously maintaining and cleaning the data.

Our internal tools help us:

• Manually review newly added podcasts to ensure they don’t violate our content policies.

• Auto-detect AI-generated fake podcasts and streamline the review process.

• Handle user account operations (merging duplicate accounts, blocking bad actors, etc.).

• Toggle feature switches to ensure confidence when launching new features.

• Enhance customer support by instantly retrieving all essential details about a specific user or podcast—it’s like having a co-pilot.

• …

These internal tools are built into our monolithic Django app and include a web portal as well as ChatOps (command-line tools within Slack) for quick operations.

AI / Machine Learning

We maintain several small repos for AI/ML projects, primarily for features like “PEOPLE ALSO LIKE THESE PODCASTS.” But recently, we’ve had to use AI to fight AI —

With tools like NotebookLM making it easier than ever to mass-produce fake podcasts, spammers have begun inserting casino links into AI-generated podcasts and distributing them across platforms. Listen Notes was the first to crack down on this issue. We developed multiple models to detect AI-generated fake podcasts and even open-sourced a simple one: notebooklm-detector.

A few months ago, we reached out to Notebook LM’s lead PM to ask if they had tools for detecting Notebook LM-generated audio. She initially said yes but struggled for weeks to follow up before eventually leaving Google with several colleagues. It’s unclear how serious Google is about this project.

Regardless, fighting AI-generated fake podcasts remains an ongoing effort. We invested in a maxed-out Mac Mini with an M4 chip to train models and refine our detection and review process. We’ve also uploaded some generated fake podcasts to Kaggle, hoping the community can collaborate to combat AI-generated spam effectively.

How We Do Dev and DevOps

Dev Environment

We host our repos on both Bitbucket and GitHub for vendor redundancy. All production servers run on Ubuntu Linux. As for our devbox, we run Ubuntu inside Parallels + Vagrant on macOS.

I personally code in PyCharm. I tried VS Code a few times in the past few years but always returned to PyCharm (I'm sorry; I promise I'll give VC Code another try in a few months to see if the chemistry is there. :) I also used GitHub Copilot for a year (2024) but eventually canceled the subscription. Nowadays, I often rely on ChatGPT for writing small bash scripts, React components, or Python functions—it’s like having an intern to do self-contained coding tasks for $20/month.

Cloud Hosting

In 2017, we used three $10/month DigitalOcean droplets. In early 2018, we switched to AWS (thanks to WeWork’s $5,000 AWS credits). Since then, we’ve become a loyal AWS customer. While cheaper alternatives exist, the cost of downtime or poor support is far higher in human and customer trust terms. AWS remains our choice, even though it’s our second biggest expense after human costs.

For EC2 instances, we always purchase reserved instances and pre-pay where possible. It’s a significant expense but well worth it.

We provision servers using Ansible. This lets us spin up an EC2 instance and have it fully configured automatically.

Data Backup

Our primary data (in Postgres) is our single source of truth, replicated across multiple servers in realtime. We also run daily backups like this (encapsulated in a cron job):

• Run pg_dump on one of our read-only Postgres servers.

• Encrypt the dump with GPG.

• Upload to AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Cloudflare R2 - I hope these three public companies don’t lose our data all at once :)

Code Deployment

We deploy our Django and React code directly from MacBook Pro using an Ansible-orchestrated script. Our process is simple and effective—compile assets (JS/CSS), upload to Cloudflare R2 (served via Cloudflare CDN), and check out latest Django code on production servers via Ansible. A load balancer (nginx) ensures zero downtime by temporarily removing some uwsgi processes during deployments.

Monitoring and Alerting

In the past, we used Datadog, PagerDuty, and Atlassian Statuspage, costing ~$3,500 annually.

As a small business owner, I frequently evaluate whether there are more affordable and better alternatives to the tools we use. Recently (early 2025), I found BetterStack. And we’ve already moved our entire monitoring & alerting stack to BetterStack—a bundled solution that cut our monitoring costs by 90% and offers responsive, friendly support.

Fighting Bad Guys/Bots

All requests to ListenNotes.com & Podcast API pass through Cloudflare, which provides CDN, firewall, and DDoS protection. We’ve set up custom firewall rules for different web pages and API endpoints. Our internal tools also integrate with Cloudflare’s API, allowing us to block or challenge malicious IP addresses with a click. To protect some compute-intensive pages on our website, we used to use Google reCAPTCHA, but since early 2025 we’ve switched to Cloudflare Turnstile—it's free and works well.

Major Upgrades

We periodically upgrade key software components—such as Ubuntu, Postgres, Elasticsearch, and Django—to apply bug fixes, introduce new features, enhance security, and boost performance. Additionally, we update our EC2 instance types to optimize the price/performance ratio. Each upgrade is meticulously planned and rehearsed, which has prevented outages over the past eight years. These tasks remain too critical to fully trust to AI for now.

What Tools We Use to Run Listen Notes, Inc.

This section covers the non-technical aspects of running the company—the parts I wish someone had shared at length when I started Listen Notes in 2017.

Customer Support

Great customer support is the best form of marketing. I personally reply to most customer support emails, typically within an hour (and almost always within 12 hours).

Two key tools help us do great customer support:

• Documentation & Help Articles: We use HelpScout for our helpdesk (listennotes.help). We used to use Intercom until I switched to HelpScout: more affordable and better!

• Email Client: I use Superhuman. Over the years, I’ve accumulated a lot of email snippets that lets me reply to most customer support messages within seconds—right inside Superhuman using shortcuts.

We treat our customers the way we wish to be treated by any software or hardware vendor's support team. As customers, we all want prompt responses and we want to deal with honest, friendly, and competent human beings.

Marketing

We have multiple marketing channels. But the two most effective channels so far are:

• Providing great customer service that leads to positive word-of-mouth.

• Buy Google Ads. We’ve experimented with Facebook and Twitter ads, but Google Ads has proven most effective for us.

Banking and Business Credit Cards

We hold several checking accounts with major U.S. banks and Mercury that allows no-fee international wires. Why do we maintain checking accounts at multiple banks? Simply in case one experiences technical issues, goes bankrupt, or de-banks us—vendor redundancy gives us peace of mind.

We also park our cash in Vanguard (VUSXX yielding 4+% as of early 2025). Caveat: Opening a Vanguard business account required multiple phone calls—a true test of patience.

For business credit cards, we favor:

• Amex Business Gold: 4x points for advertising and software/hardware (except AWS).

• Amex Blue Business Plus: 2x points for all expenses under $50k/year.

• Chase Ink Business Preferred: 3x points for travel expenses.

• Amex Amazon Business Prime: 5x cashback on Amazon expenses, including AWS.

These cards help us maximize rewards by allowing points transfers to airline and hotel loyalty programs (e.g., Chase to Hyatt), significantly reducing our conference travel expenses.

Legal

We incorporated Listen Notes, Inc. through Stripe Atlas in 2017. Stripe’s customer support has always been friendly, competent, and incredibly helpful.

For quick legal paperwork, we use Clerky, which offers on-demand pricing.

For more complex legal matters, such as sales contracts, we work with a local law firm.

Company Documents and Project Management

We’ve used Notion since early 2018 for wikis and project planning. While it might not be perfect for every feature, it consolidates many useful tools in one place. We maintain runbooks for DevOps, DBA tasks, financial tables, and monthly kanban boards. Although cool kids use Linear nowadays, Notion works well for our small team.

We also pay for Microsoft Office 365 to ensure compatibility with enterprise customers who rely on Word, Excel, and Teams.

Payrolls and Benefits

Since 2017, Gusto has reliably handled our payroll without excessive upselling. We also use it to send job offers, which significantly streamlines the process. Additionally, Gusto manages our payroll-related taxes, including withholding taxes and W-2 forms. It's a very reliable service—we love it.

We use Lively (integrated with Schwab) for HSA and E*TRADE for 401k. It took me quite a while to figure out how to do these things—a lot of Googling, Reddit-ing, and many phone calls with other humans in the pre-ChatGPT era—but I’m glad it’s finally done. This might be the fun (or not-so-fun) part of being a small business owner!

Contractors / Freelancers

I personally believe that in the future, it will be normal for people to work multiple part-time jobs and have multiple income streams. Pay cycles will likely become more frequent than the traditional bi-weekly paycheck—ideally in real time, where you get paid immediately after completing a task.

At Listen Notes, we frequently work with contractors and freelancers. A common example is hiring a CPA for tax prep—there’s no need for a full-time, in-house CPA at a tiny company. For design work or experimental projects, we often turn to platforms like Upwork or 99designs. I also enjoy hiring multiple people for the same task and comparing their results. While this approach can be more expensive, I value redundancy and having options.

Occasionally, we also find freelancers through Facebook Groups, generate contracts using Clerky, and process payments via Gusto.

Domain Names and Corporate Emails

We register dozens of domains through Cloudflare, GoDaddy, and Namecheap (since some TLDs are only available on certain registrars).

Our corporate emails (e.g., hello@listennotes.com) are managed through Google Workspace, while some wildcard/project-specific addresses are handled via Cloudflare Email Routing (e.g., hello@listen411.com).

BTW - we have several domain names for sale. Email hello@listennotes.com if you are interested:

• breaker.fm

• listen.host

• listenhost.com

• inka.fm

Misc. Small Websites

Aside from our core products, we run several small websites using our own opensource project microfeed -

• Listen Notes Changelogs: changelog.listennotes.com

• Our mascot llamacorn: llamacorn.listennotes.com

• Listen Notes brand assets: brand-assets.listennotes.com

Microfeed is a lightweight CMS built on the Cloudflare stack and originally designed for podcast hosting. Using microfeed allows us to host these “micro” sites on Cloudflare at virtually no cost. We plan to create more fun “micro” sites with microfeed in the future!

Office

Before COVID, we had a small office at WeWork. During the pandemic, we shifted to working from home. Now, we've returned to a dedicated private office at WeWork, which also serves as our business address. While knowledge workers can technically work from home, having a separate workspace often boosts productivity—at least it does for me.

Bookkeeping

We do bookkeeping on our own using Quickbooks Online. While there was indeed a learning curve for us in early 2018, we have steadily improved over the past few years.

Many VC-funded tax startups aim to generate recurring revenue by offering bookkeeping services (kind of like SaaS?), which in turn helps justify their valuations. However, as a small business owner, you might not need these services. If your financial operations are straightforward, handling bookkeeping internally can deepen your understanding of your business finances and enhance your financial acumen. After all, if you can flip binary tree, there's no reason you can't grasp some basic financial principles :)

Conclusion

Thanks for reading this long blog post. I truly wish I’d had a resource like this when I started Listen Notes in 2017. I hope sharing our practical tools and practices can help others running a small software business.

You don't have to chase every new tool or tech trend. Many of the tools we rely on have been around for over a decade—some even longer. In fact, podcast as a media format is 20+ years old!

Our focus remains on stability and sustainability. We’ve been around for 8 years. Look forward to next 8 years~

This blog post was initially published at https://www.listennotes.com/blog/tech-non-tech-stacks-to-run-listen-notes-2025-113/

You are receiving this update because you opted in to receive news and information about our products and company directly from Listen Notes, Inc. via listennotes.fm.

It's been a while since the last update. For more timely updates, please visit changelog.listennotes.com.

What’s new?

1) Fighting Notebook LM-generated fake podcasts

In recent weeks, Notebook LM has taken the podcasting world by storm. Simply upload a few documents, and it generates a conversational podcast for deep dives. Unfortunately, scammers and blackhat SEOs have quickly jumped on this, leading to a surge in fake podcasts generated by Notebook LM. You can view a growing list of these fake podcasts here.

At Listen Notes, we’re committed to minimizing AI-generated content so that listeners can enjoy authentic, human-produced podcasts. However, Notebook LM has made it easier to mass-produce low-quality, fake content, posing a real threat to the podcasting community.

I've been in contact with the Notebook LM team for over a week now, with a simple request: provide us with a way to detect Notebook LM-generated audio, like a watermark or any existing detection tool. Unfortunately, despite numerous back-and-forth emails, we’ve yet to receive a clear answer.

Last Friday, we built a tool of our own. It’s working well for now, and we’ve already deleted hundreds of fake podcasts over the weekend.

2) Google One Tap Login on ListenNotes.com

3) PDF receipts from ListenNotes.com

This is more of a niche feature, but we've had frequent requests for PDF receipts from our users in Europe—so we built it!

4) Standalone subdomain for feeds

Listen Notes offers a few hosted RSS feeds, such as Alerts and Listen Later. These feeds are now served through the subdomain feeds.listennotes.com, instead of the previous www.listennotes.com. The advantage of using a dedicated subdomain for feeds is that it allows us to easily implement separate firewall rules for feeds (mainly accessed by bots) and web content (accessed by human users), providing better control and security for both.

5) Improvements for Listen411.com

A few improvements on Listen411.com (super fast transcription tool):

• Supports email login method. Previously only Google login was supported.

• Supports 3D Secure Authentication for saved cards.

6) Improvements on Listen Notes infrastructure

• Upgraded to Django 5 (from 4) and Nodejs 22 (from 16)

• Finally replaced all Listen Notes AWS EC2 instances from Intel CPUs to Graviton-based CPUs. More cost effective.

7) Misc

• Farewell, RunKit! We've removed the last RunKit embed from our API pages. Going forward, we’re using our own custom-built playground for running Node.js code.

• Fixed bug of searching English possessive 's

• Listen Notes Chrome Extension: Now Upgraded to Manifest V3

Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or wenbin@listennotes.com :)

You are receiving this update because you opted in to receive news and information about our products and company directly from Listen Notes, Inc. via listennotes.fm.

What’s new?

1) Listen411 - new UI design

We just polished the homepage of Listen411.com a bit -

Try listen411.com

2) changelog.listennotes.com

We launched a dedicated site to chronicle the ongoing (big & small) updates from Listen Notes, Inc. This new site is hosted at no cost, thanks to microfeed.org (opensource cms built by us) and Cloudflare -

changelog.listennotes.com

Currently, there are several micro-sites of Listen Notes, Inc. powered by microfeed.org for FREE & serverless:

• Brand Assets: brand-assets.listennotes.com

• Mascot site: llamacorn.listennotes.com

• Changelog: changelog.listennotes.com

• and microfeed.org itself

3) Migrated ~10TB data to Cloudflare R2

For the past 7+ years, we've been storing tons of data—over 10 TB—in AWS S3. This month, we undertook a major project to migrate those ~10 TB of data from S3 to Cloudflare R2, aiming for more cost-effective storage solutions.

To ensure a smooth transition, we have also updated our Django codebase to support multiple Storages (including S3, R2, and potentially others in the future).

4) Removed Google Podcasts urls

As of April 2, 2024, Google Podcasts has been discontinued by Alphabet Inc. Thus, we have removed all Google Podcasts URLs from ListenNotes.com and PodcastAPI.com accordingly.

5) Misc

• Enhanced the infra of the Code Playground on PodcastAPI.com's Docs page. The previous system, built with Docker on a shared server, experienced instability issues such as unexplained hangs. We have now migrated to a dedicated server, which should provide a more stable environment and improved Docker performance.

• Transitioned away from Stripe's invoice-based billing for our recurring charges. This change is to reduce our transaction fees by 0.5% for each transaction - big cost savings!

Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or wenbin@listennotes.com :)

It's been some time since our last update! I've been thinking of creating a dedicated "changelogs" page for these updates, as writing a newsletter can be quite time-consuming :) Anyways, let's do one more issue.

What’s new?

1) Listen411 - A really fast podcast transcription & summarization tool, with on-demand pricing

We quietly launched Listen411.com in early January.

It's a dead simple web tool for audio transcription and summarization, distinguished by two key features:

• It’s super fast. Listen411 transcribes an hour-long audio in less than 60 seconds.

• It’s on-demand pricing. With Listen411, you pay only for transcribing one audio file. No subscription is needed.

Currently, we're in the process of redesigning the UI to give it a more polished look :)

Try listen411.com

2) Find Podcasts with Guest Interviews and Sponsors Easily

We've enhanced our podcast metadata with the addition of two new data fields on listennotes.com (using AI):

• has_guest_interviews: Indicates the presence of guest interviews in the podcast.

• has_sponsors: Reveals whether the podcast has sponsors.

These updates are integrated across various parts in the Listen Notes ecosystem:

First, on individual podcast pages, this information is now displayed.

Second, on our podcast search engine website, two new filters are added (Premium Membership required).

Third, these filters are also available for use in the batch dataset export tool:

Fourth, our Podcast API (PodcastAPI.com) now includes these filters in the GET /search endpoint, with corresponding new data fields in the API response.

Finally, users can suggest modifications to these data fields under the EDIT tab on any podcast page.

3) Misc

• Upgraded and replaced the majority of our servers with more powerful & cost effective Graviton-based EC2 instances. Sorry, Intel!

• Upgraded Elasticsearch to version 8.12, and Postgres to version 16 (from 13).

• Rotated SSH keys across all servers as part of our ongoing commitment to security.

• In response to AWS's decision to start charging for public IPV4 addresses from February 1, 2024, we've removed public IPv4 for over 50% of our servers.

Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or wenbin@listennotes.com :)

I've now completed my 69th month, marking five years and nine months of full-time dedication to Listen Notes, Inc.

What’s new?

1) Listen Notes ChatGPT plugin - discover podcasts using ChatGPT

Install the plugin in the Plugin Store on chat.openai.com:

Essentially it’s a NLP UI to use PodcastAPI.com:

Learn more:

• How to Use the Listen Notes ChatGPT Plugin to Discover Podcasts and Episodes with AI

• [Blog post] How to build a ChatGPT plugin: A case study using PodcastAPI.com and serverless Cloudflare Pages for AI-powered podcast discovery

  • Source code at GitHub

2) microfeed api

microfeed is a free & opensource cms, similar to WordPress. You can use microfeed to freely host podcasts, videos, photo albums, and blogs under your own custom domain name!

The latest v0.1.2 release of microfeed now features a CRUD API, enabling the creation and modification of items such as programmatic podcast audio uploads and episode creation.

Find the OpenAPI specification at: https://www.microfeed.org/json/openapi.

This enriched CRUD API broadens microfeed's potential, supporting automatic generation and publication of diverse content including text-based blog posts, AI-generated photo albums, podcasts, and videos.

3) inca.fm

Introducing inca.fm, ai tour guide for every place.

Simply select a location and converse with inca.fm as you would a human tour guide.

Give it a try, no sign-up necessary: https://www.inca.fm

Pro tip: Pair inca.fm with your AirPods (which is actually a AR device!), to enrich your experiences. Whenever an intriguing location catches your eye, engage with inca.fm. It's like having an interactive audio tour guide in a boundless museum - Earth itself. You can ask questions and play audio messages.

This is the 3rd pivot of inca.fm :) In the previous life, inca.fm was a short audio app (2020) and a web-version Clubhouse (2021). To pivot or not to pivot? :)

• YouTube was initially a dating site.

• Instagram was initially a location-based check-in app.

4) Custom PRO plan

Added a custom API PRO plan for entrepreneurs from developing countries or pre-revenue bootstrapped startups.

5) Misc

• Resolved Twitter login issues. Our API token was unexpectedly revoked by Twitter, impacting login functionality on listennotes.com. Rest assured, we've found a workaround.

• Expanded the disk size of our read-only DB server, a task seemingly simple yet requiring 2 engineering hours for completion.

• Successfully upgraded all servers to Ubuntu 22.04, a task simply stated but demanding 5 engineering days to fully execute.

Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or wenbin@listennotes.com :)

This is the 67th full month (5 years and 7 months) that I worked on Listen Notes full-time.

What’s new?

1) microfeed

Our free podcast hosting solution microfeed is getting better and more popular:

Some exciting changes will be merged into the code base in the coming weeks.

2) Run code right on the API Docs page

Developers can easily try out PodcastAPI.com in different server-side languages right on our API Docs page:

What’s better, you can tweak and run the code without leaving your browser.

Previously we use RunKit.com to allow running nodejs code on our API Docs page. But RunKit doesn’t support other non-nodejs languages and it seems that this project has not been well-maintained - quite a few npm packages are not up-to-date, including our podcast-api.

Anyways, we had to develop our own RunKit alternative to support more server-side languages. And we did it.

3) Domain name of a podcast publisher

We added an important data point to the podcast database: the domain name of a podcast publisher.

Domain name is a great join key in the data world.

First, you can find the domain name of a podcast publisher on the listennotes.com podcast page (Example):

Second, you can use our API to fetch podcasts by a domain name -

GET /podcasts/domains/{domain_name}

Third, if you are a podcaster, you can update the domain name on your podcast page’s EDIT tab (Example).

Fourth, if you are using Listen Notes chrome extension, you can easily see a list of podcasts published by a specific website -

4) “subscribe on substack”

If a podcast is hosted on Substack, we’ll display “subscribe on substack” on the listennotes.com podcast page (Example):

5) Fair billing for API Pro Plan

The Podcast API PRO plan's pricing structure consists of two parts: a base fee US$180 and an overage fee (if any).

Previously (Dec. 2017 ~ Jan. 18, 2023), the base fee US$180 was mandatory even when 0 requests are used in a billing cycle (30 days).

From now on (Jan. 18, 2023 ~ now), the PRO plan subscribers will pay $0 if no any requests are used in a billing cycle (30 days). In other words, the base fee US$180 should be paid only when at least 1 requests are used in a billing cycle (30 days).

We try our best to be fair to both our customers and us:

• Fair billing for API pro plan

• Daily pricing (and auto cancellation) for Premium Membership

And we hope other software vendors would follow suit.

6) Some experimental GPT projects

Of course, we’ve been experimenting with GPT for various product enhancements, but nothing is ready to launch yet.

Generally speaking, we launched only ~30% of what we’ve built. In other words, we abandoned ~70% of what we built.

7) Misc

• More ops tools to support the rapid growth of our Podcast API business.

• A lot of improvements related to “effective customer service communication”, including adding a payment modal to confirm terms for various paid products, sending extra emails to explain terms…

• Add podcast-api to langchain

Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or wenbin@listennotes.com :)

This is the 63rd full month (5 years and 3 months) that I worked on Listen Notes full-time.

What’s new?

1) microfeed

We just launched a new open-source project “microfeed” 3 days ago. It’s a lightweight CMS self-hosted on Cloudflare, for podcasts, blogs, photos, videos, documents, and curated urls.

It was a successful launch. Our GitHub repo microfeed/microfeed got over 1,400 stars within 3 days!

It’s (almost) free to use microfeed, in terms of money - you still need to pay for a custom domain name. But it’s unlikely that you’ll exceed Cloudflare’s generous free usage quotas.

It’s not free to use microfeed, in terms of your time. You’ll need to deploy the code to Cloudflare on your own. You spend time. And your time is valuable. This also requires some technical skills. You need to be patient enough to read the instructions first - nowadays, people don’t like reading texts; everything needs to be TikTok-able... If you are already familiar with Cloudflare, probably it’ll take 10 to 20 minutes for you to read the instructions & finish the initial setup.

2) you.com integration

you.com is a viable Google alternative. Now you can see podcast search results on you.com. Example:

3) demo.podcastapi.com

A podcast api demo hosted on Cloudflare Workers:

https://github.com/ListenNotes/demo.podcastapi.com

4) Added “Unique podcasts” filter for episode search

Sometimes, you want to know what podcasts publish any episodes with certain keywords, but you don’t care what episodes. In this case, you don’t want to see multiple episodes from the same podcast.

Here you go: “unique podcasts” filter! Example:

The “unique podcasts” filter also works in our Datasets product:

https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-datasets/keyword/

5) Upgraded to Python 3.11

The Listen Notes backend is running Python code. We just upgraded our Python runtime from 3.10 to 3.11. And we saw ~10% overall performance improvement instantly!

We could’ve made the upgrade earlier, but it was blocked by some 3rd party packages that had not supported 3.11.

The last blocking dependency was clickhouse-driver. So I created a GitHub issue in the repo. A few days later, the developer finally made clickhouse-driver Python 3.11-ready. Happy!

6) Misc

• Migrated help.listennotes.com to listennotes.help and switched from Intercom to Help Scout, which instantly cuts our monthly cost of hosting a knowledge base website by 50%!

• Migrated our internal chat ops tool from Hubot to an in-house webhook solution. It’s great to remove one more 3rd party dependency :)

• Launched a llamacorn website: llamacorn.listennotes.com, inspired by GitHub’s octodex.github.com

Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or wenbin@listennotes.com :)

And Happy New Year to you!

This is the 59th full month (4 years and 11 months) that I worked on Listen Notes full-time.

I’ll go to Dallas for Podcast Movement 2022 next week (Aug 23~26). If you happen to be there, happy to chat :) It’s crazy to think that this is my first time attending Podcast Movement, after ~5 years of building Listen Notes!

What’s new?

1) Launched Listen Notes Affiliate Program

This has been one of the most frequently requested things from our users (especially from podcasters): https://www.listennotes.com/affiliate/

2) Improved Listen Score

Added a few new signals to calculate Listen Score. We can’t disclose what are those new signals, because we don’t want people to game the system.

It’s always work-in-progress for improving Listen Score.

3) Working on a new & not-so-secret project…

It’s a big project. And some news outlets / blogs already reported (or mis-reported) our new project :) Stay tuned!

4) Misc improvements

• Migrated our redis instance to a faster server.

• Switched to a new speech-to-text API for our auto-transcription service.

5) New blog post: A practical way to upgrade Postgres major versions with near-zero downtime

At Listen Notes, we performed Postgres major version upgrades twice since 2017, the year Listen Notes was founded. During these upgrades, we experienced zero downtime for “read” operations, and less than 1 minute downtime for “write” operations.

Read it now

Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or wenbin@listennotes.com :)

This is the 58th full month (4 years and 10 months) that I worked on Listen Notes full-time - I can’t believe that it’s almost 5 years!

What’s new?

1) A few improvements on PodcastAPI.com

First, added one API endpoint to fetch audience demographics of a podcast: GET /podcasts/{id}/audience - Not all podcasts have audience data, but as time goes, we’ll have bigger coverage.

Second, added "rejected" status for podcast submission: POST /podcasts/submit / - so hosting services can notify their podcaster users if podcasts are rejected by Listen Notes.

Third, upgraded our PodcastAPI.com’s OpenAPI spec to 3.1.0, so we are able to add webhooks to the spec.

Fourth, improved Podcast API tutorials - almost rewrote everything.

By this point, our Podcast API has been used by tons of apps / websites - I’m pretty sure we are the most widely used PodcastAPI.com in production. It’s like we are becoming the infrastructure of the podcast industry. Feel a lot of responsibility!

2) Allow fuzzy match for podcast alerts

We’ve got a tool to monitor podcast mentions: https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-alerts/

Previously, we always automatically added double quotes to a search term to monitor latest podcast mentions. So search queries were always exact matched.

Now, you can do fuzzy search without adding double quotes, which is useful to monitor (sub)domain name mentions.

3) Embed search results to your website

For some search queries (especially a person’s name), you can embed a list of search results to your website now:

4) Improvements on Listen Later playlist

First, added total audio length to an episode playlist - I spent so much time listening to podcasts!!!!

Second, added rss feed to show latest episodes of all podcasts in a podcast playlist (Example):

Recently, we’ve seen an interesting use case of our Listen Later playlists -

Automatic podcast curation newsletter!

The basic idea is to use a Listen Later playlist’s rss + Mailchimp/ConvertKit’s RSS-driven email campaigns.

Mailchimp / ConvertKit will check Listen Later playlist’s rss periodically (e.g., daily, weekly…) and automatically send an email campaign with newly added podcasts or episodes. It’s like using a headless CMS.

5) Fixed a bug of searching ‘s in a podcast name

For example, searching nature's archive failed previously. Now it works.

Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or wenbin@listennotes.com :)

This is the 57th full month (4 years and 9 months) that I worked on Listen Notes full-time.

What’s new?

1) “Audience of this podcast”

We aggregate listen stats on Listen Notes, and we launched Listen Real-time a few years ago based on such stats.

Recently, we make the aggregated audience geo data public for individual podcasts. You can find such stats on a podcast page’s “Audience of this podcast” card - See example:

Two caveats:

1. Currently, only a small portion of podcasts have such “Audience of this podcast” card, because a big portion of podcasts don’t get any listens on Listen Notes (or on all the other platforms in general).

2. The podcast ecosystem is fragmented. People use different clients to listen to podcasts. Therefore, please consider listen stats on Listen Notes as a small sample size of the entire podcast industry.

2) “Report inappropriate content”

Productize the “report inappropriate content” flow:

https://www.listennotes.com/report-content/

3) Upgraded Elasticsearch from 7.15 to 8.20

Typically we do big upgrades for infrastructure software (e.g., Elasticsearch, Postgres, Ubuntu, Django…) once every 18 months ~ 24 months or so.

We upgraded Elasticsearch from 7.6 to 7.15 last November. We shouldn’t have updated to a new version now (~7 months). However, this time is different -

• ansible-elasticsearch won’t support newer version of Elasticsearch (i.e., 8.0+) any more. This means that we have to rewrite our Ansible provision scripts next time when we’ll upgrade to a newer version of Elasticsearch. Based on our experience, we’d better rewrite the provision scripts sooner rather than later, otherwise, it may become a disaster if there’s an outage, AND we have to rewrite the provision scripts, AND re-provision our Elasticsearch cluster at the same time.

• New features of 8.0+ look appealing! We (as a service provider) want to be like good chefs, who always use the best ingredients to cook & serve our customers :)

So, we rewrote our Ansible provision scripts for Elasticsearch, and re-provisioned our Elasticsearch cluster (upgraded from 7.15 to 8.20).

4) “Enterprise-ready”

Enterprise sales is… tedious. We had to do a bunch of “Enterprise-ready” things. And every month, there will be 10+ new edge cases that can’t be solved by software & automation. But it’s a good problem to have.

5) New blog post: “Instead of Monthly Billing, a Daily Alternative for SaaS“

https://www.listennotes.com/blog/instead-of-monthly-billing-a-daily-alternative-48/

Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or wenbin@listennotes.com :)

This is the 56th full month (4 years and 8 months) that I worked on Listen Notes full-time.

What’s new?

1) More work on new data fields & UI changes

In April, we added three new data fields-

1. update_frequency: On average, how frequently a podcast releases a new episode?

2. audio_length: The average audio length of episodes in a podcast.

3. amazon_music_url: A podcast’s Amazon Music url.

In May, we added new search filters (update_frequency & audio_length) to web search (w/ Premium Membership) and Listen Datasets -

As we are adding more and more search filters, we have to make the filters UI compact. Therefore, it’s 2-column on desktop now :)

2) “Contact Sales”

We standardized the “Contact Sales” form for our enterprise products, which enables us to add more automation to our sales process in the future.

• https://www.listennotes.com/api/enterprise-sales/

• https://www.listennotes.com/premium/enterprise-sales/

• https://www.listennotes.com/datasets/solutions/

3) Find podcast pages by Spotify url

Use website (w/ Premium Membership):

Use API:

POST /podcasts with the spotify_ids parameter

4) MISC

• Faster server-side page rendering, e.g., more caching, more database query optimization…

• Website/API will continue to work if Redis is down. Most improvements on system reliability are preventive.

• Updated Python & Javascript dependencies for ListenAPIDemo.

@PODFEST EXPO

Listen Notes, Inc. is a sponsor of Podfest Expo this year, and I went to Orlando, FL last week for the conference. I learned a lot!

Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or wenbin@listennotes.com :)

This is the 55th full month (4 YEARS and 7 month) that I worked on Listen Notes full-time.

What’s new?

1) Added new data fields

We have been adding new data fields to podcasts metadata in our database, especially those that are not in the rss feed.

Recently, we added three new data fields -

1. update_frequency: On average, how frequently a podcast releases a new episode?

2. audio_length: The average audio length of episodes in a podcast.

3. amazon_music_url: A podcast’s Amazon Music url.

To add a new data field, we always need to update several products at the same time, which is quite tedious -

For example — On the website:

And the API:

2) Misc improvements

• Improved SVG icons rendering performance.

• Some backend work for providing more detailed logs for API users. TODO: UI work on the API dashboard.

#StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦

Support the Ukraine people: https://ukraine.ua/news/stand-with-ukraine/

This is the 54th full month (4 YEARS and 6 month) that I worked on Listen Notes full-time.

What’s new?

1) One-click payment

Some paid products on listennotes.com have an on-demand pricing. Previously, customers had to re-enter their credit card numbers whenever they made a purchase. Some customers had to do so several times on the same day!

Now repeating customers are able to reuse previously saved payment methods without re-entering their credit card numbers. One-click, and done!

2) New marketing page for the podcast database subscription product

https://www.listennotes.com/datasets/solutions/

3) Tor browser

ListenNotes.com didn’t work well on Tor Browser before March 2022! It was because of multiple issues, e.g., css & javascript compatibility, firewall settings, our other in-house security measures…

Now, it’s fixed.

4) Some behind-the-scenes improvements

• Did a bunch of db optimizations, which gives us a lot of headroom to grow! This graph shows the CPU usage on our master db server - it’s not hard to tell when did we make those changes :)

• Refactored payment-related code. We’ve got several paid products. Over the past few years, we end up with messy & duplicate code for doing payment. In March, we spent an entire week refactoring & cleaning up most of the payment code. This enables us to move fast in the future to add new paid products / payment methods. Slow down first, then move faster in the future :)

#StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦

Support the Ukraine people: https://ukraine.ua/news/stand-with-ukraine/

This is the 53rd full month (4 YEARS and 5 month) that I worked on Listen Notes full-time.

What’s new?

1) New search modal

Previously, we used a dropdown sheet under the search bar to show typeahead results. We recently built and launched a new search modal to replace the dropdown sheet:

• Now you can set a few commonly used search filters before seeing the search result page, i.e., episodes or podcasts, sort order, and only match titles. Previously, you had to search episodes first, then use search filters only on the search result page.

• We’ve got bigger space to show typeahead results, which makes it easy for future extensions (e.g., history searches, saved searches…).

• A side effect of using a modal is better web accessibility.

2) Better support for search queries with double quotes

When you search on Listen Notes, you can use double quotes for exact match. But we had very limited support for using double quotes. Specifically, these queries were not working previously:

• Multiple pairs of double quotes, e.g., “elon musk” “tesla stock” didn’t do exact match for both “elon musk” and “tesla stock”.

• The entire phrase not inside double quotes, e.g., “elon musk” tesla stock didn’t do exact match for “elon musk”.

Now we support the above cases.

3) Embedded search bar to search episodes of multiple podcasts

People can embed a Listen Notes search bar on their own websites: https://www.listennotes.com/custom/

Previously, the embedded search bar can search episodes of up to 1 podcast.

Now, we support multiple podcasts - Example.

4) A lot of behind-the-scenes improvements

• Vertically & horizontally scaled up our servers. Specifically, we added more beefy database & elasticsearch EC2 instances. We are paying more $$$ to AWS!

• Added feature switches to be able to one-click disable some critical 3rd party APIs. We can’t 100% trust 3rd party APIs. We want to be able to instantly pause using certain 3rd party APIs when they have outage.

• Increased visibility to our infra, e.g., built more monitoring dashboards & alerts on critical metrics. And in the past month, we already discovered & fixed a few bugs that had existed for 2+ years, thanks to the increased visibility of how our system works.

• Refactored the script that fetches new episodes for all podcasts. This is the oldest piece of code that I wrote for Listen Notes :) It has grew to an unmanageable state - ~2,000 lines of messy python code in a single file. It’s time to refactor the code for further improvements.

• Be able to dynamically do rate limit on certain API endpoints. This reduces the chance that we get DDoS-ed by some wild API requests.

#StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦

Support the Ukraine people: https://ukraine.ua/news/stand-with-ukraine/

This is the 52nd full month (4 YEARS and 4 month) that I worked on Listen Notes full-time.

What’s new?

1) Improved Elasticsearch query performance A LOT.

This is the end result 🚀:

We use Elasticsearch to build the podcast search engine. It’s important to always look for opportunities to make queries fast.

2) Customers are able to update billing info (e.g., company name, VAT, billing email…) on receipts.

It’s under the BILLING tab (login first):

We’ve got quite a few enterprise customers so far, who always surprise us with unexpected product feature requests :)

3) Automatically insert start time on the SHARE sheet, if the episode is being played.

4) Make it easy to insert start time & end time when creating a clip from a playing episode.

5) Be able to specify start offset for dataset export, when sorting by Listen Score.

https://www.listennotes.com/datasets/category/

“Because it was made with care"

I like a line by Nairobi from Money Heist - “A f*** bill that’s better than the bank’s. They can’t even trace it. A work of art. And you know why? Because it was made with care. I’m a professional.”

Mark Zuckerberg said in Startup School 2013 - “the reason why I think we actually ended up being the ones doing it (Facebook, social network) is because we just cared way more about it than everyone else (e.g., Yahoo, Microsoft, Google)...”

Care is the keyword.

Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or hello@listennotes.com :)

Stay safe!

This is the 51st full month (4 YEARS and 3 month) that I worked on Listen Notes full-time.

What’s new?

1) Be able to download actual video and audio clips (Example):

Learn more: How to create a podcast clip for free?

2) Better UI for right to left languages, e.g.,

• https://www.listennotes.com/ar/

• https://www.listennotes.com/fa/

3) It’s a good time to do some infrastructure upgrades during holidays:

• Upgraded to Python 3.10 (from 3.8)

• Upgraded to Django 4.0 (from 3.2)

• Upgraded most pip packages to the latest versions, except for paypal-checkout-serversdk. I created a GitHub issue.

• Upgraded to Elasticsearch 7.15 (from 7.6)

• Upgraded to Tailwind 3.0 (from 2.2.x)

• Upgraded a bunch of EC2 instances to more powerful instance types (again).

Luckily, no drama, thanks to extensive testings on staging & gradual rollout.

Why we should do infra (both hardware & software) upgrades periodically (e.g., annually)?

• Security patches (obviously…)

• Bug fixes (obviously…)

• New features (e.g., Tailwind 3.0 adds RTL support)

• “'End of life” - if a piece of software is not longer maintained & updated, it’ll decay (aka, software rot).

• Performance improvement (e.g., new EC2 instance types, Python 3.10 is fast…)

• Making it easy for future upgrades (e.g., it’s easier to upgrade from 3.0 to 3.1, than from 2.1 to 3.1)

Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or hello@listennotes.com :)

Stay safe!

What’s new?

1, “Listen on Listen Notes”

When you want to embed a “Listen on Listen Notes” logo to your own website, you can select from 4 different styles under the EMBED tab (Example):

2, Crypto payment to Datasets

Listen Datasets supports crypto payment (e.g., bitcoin, ether…) now, thanks to Bitpay.com.

3, “Top Charts” based on Listen Score

You can sort “Best Podcasts” by Listen Score now (Example):

4, “Related searches“ and spell checking

Login users can see “Related searches” and spell checking suggestions at the bottom of a search result page - will open to logout users soon:

5, API improvements

a) Sort "best podcasts" in different ways

b) Related searches, spellcheck, and trending searches

c) Added paid plan labels to endpoints on the Podcast API Docs:

Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To it. - Joel Spolsky

Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or hello@listennotes.com :)

Stay safe!

What’s new?

1, A standalone login page: listennotes.com/login

It took us FOUR YEARS to build this standalone login page. It was just one of many tasks that sit in our TODO list forever :)

Previously, login/signup happens in a popup modal, which is NOT linkable. We were not able to share a link when replying to customer support emails.

2, Major infrastructure upgrades

We upgraded several critical pieces of infrastructure software, including:

• Ubuntu 18.04 → 20.04

• Django 3.04 → 3.27

• Postgres 11 → 13

A lot of prep work. Rehearsed the whole upgrade process on staging 4 times within 5 days. Each took 4 hours, end to end.

On a quiet Friday night, we did it on production. We had to disable database writes for ~45 seconds, while doing pg_upgrade. Other than that, things went well.

Also, did some database performance tuning, e.g., tweaked configs & added a bunch of indexes.

3, “People also like…”

For some popular podcasts, we added a “people also like…” card, under the COMMUNITY tab of the podcast page (Example):

4, Sponsored Daring Fireball

This was the second time we sponsored Daring Fireball. Basically it was to promote this blog post: Why Podcasts Are My New Wikipedia —the  Perfect Informal Learning Resource

If you are curious, this was the ad on Daring Fireball :)

Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or hello@listennotes.com :)

Stay safe!

Product updates

1, Dark mode - or “not-so-dark” mode. It took us 4 years (2017~2021) to add a dark mode. Well, Google also launched dark mode in 2021, so it took Google 23 years (1998~2021) to launch a dark mode :) Progress!

2, A lot of improvements on Listen Datasets, e.g., be able to avoid exporting duplicate podcasts in past orders, be able to batch export podcasts/episodes from a Listen Later playlist, more automation for the enterprise database product, be able to sort podcasts when exporting by category… These improvements require very little UI changes + tons of complex backend business logics.

3, Upgraded web servers to more beefy EC2 instances, again! It’s like running a restaurant - we always use the best ingredients to serve our customers. Better infrastructure -> faster website -> better user experience. Website speed is UX.

4, Fixed some data inconsistency issues and web UI bugs.

5, Accelerated the data pipeline of calculating Listen Score. Now we can update Listen Score of all podcasts every 2 weeks, rather than 1 month+.

6, Added more internal tools to fight fake podcasts. What are fake podcasts? Here’s an example: http://feed.podcastmachine.com/podcasts/26350/mp3.rss

The audio is generated by computer. The main purpose of such fake podcasts is to do black hat SEO (i.e., link building).

We are seeing more and more fake podcasts. So we need to build better tools & processes to deal with them.

Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or hello@listennotes.com :)

Stay safe!

Product updates

Over the past 3 months, we’ve done one and only one thing: Rewrote the entire web ui of listennotes.com. That’s it :)

Specifically, we migrated from Bootstrap & jQuery to Tailwind & alpine, and upgraded ReactJs & Webpack to the latest versions. Of course, we also fixed some bugs, paid some technical debt, and made the code base a bit more maintainable.

At this moment, ListenNotes.com has evolved into a complex web app, which has many public pages and way more internal pages that are invisible to users.

I think Listen Notes has entered the mature stage. Most of future improvements will be invisible to most users (e.g., niche features for paid users, improving data quality & infra…) or only be useful to a small portion of users (e.g., adding one more search filter…).

I wouldn’t say Listen Notes is “finished”. But I’m afraid that adding new (user-facing) product features may just make the user experience worse - "gild the lily" or "画蛇添足" (draw legs on a snake; overdo things).

Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or hello@listennotes.com :)

Stay safe!