Monthly Update For April 2018

Apr 30, 2018

Hi there!

April is the 7th full month that I worked on Listen Notes full-time.

Highlights:Launched a bunch of things that I personally wanted to use for quite a while :)Boost VC demo day. I presented Listen Notes confidently and got a lot of great feedback.Started to work with some contractors. It's a painful learning process how to do quality control. I'm glad that I can step out of my comfort zone to do this now, rather than later. If I want to grow Listen Notes, I can't do it alone. Lowlights:Website traffic is soft. Traffic from Google was down a lot in the past couple weeks. Well, I don't have much control for this part. I get to focus on things that I have more control of.Four-hour long website outage and 10-hour production data loss. This is all bad. I'm glad that it happened now rather than later. I've took some necessary measures to prevent this from happening again -- well, no one can really prevent this, but at least, to lower the chance of happening again.You can read past issues of this monthly update.

Product updates

1. Added Listen Forum, an online forum for podcasters & listeners to hang out. If you are reading this email, please join the forum :)

2. Added Listen Academy, featuring a bunch of in-depth podcast-related articles. Most people in the world haven't listened to podcasts yet. We need to have some resources to educate the market.

3. Added a hot standby database instance and implemented a better production db backup strategy. There was an big db outage this month, which prompted me to do these infrastructure improvement.

4. You can curate podcasts in Listen Later list now. This is one of the most requested features.

5. You can upload a custom Listen Later image now, which basically makes your Listen Later playlist like a real podcast :)

6. Added more information to the podcast page (i.e., number of episodes & when this podcast was created).

7. You can filter search results by total number of episodes. Many PR/marketing people requested this search filter, and they consider "total number of episodes" is a good signal to find appropriate podcasts to be a guest or put their CEOs as guests.

8. Added episode recommendation section on home page, for those trending search queries.

Company updates

I spent a lot of money and time working with contractors this month. I'm still learning how to work with contractors. Hopefully I can get better soon.

I presented at Boost VC demo day a couple weeks ago. It went well. I had chance to talk to a bunch of investors there.

I'll focus on product development in next couple months, which means I have to aggressively say no to a lot of things (e.g., social events, fund raising, coffee with investors/founders/random people, ...) There are primarily two things that I want to spend my energy & time:

More powerful Listen Later playlist, especially the support for creating multiple lists.
A new website redesign. I've been working with a designer friend on the website redesign for three weeks so far. Hopefully we can settle down the design by the end of May and I can start implementing the new design in June.

Some numbers

Database: 488k podcasts; 30 million episodes
Website:
- Page views: 212k (it's 10% down from last month's all-time-high 237k)
- Unique visitors: 55k

Blog posts

I wrote two blog posts in April:

Podcaster Interviews

Read more

Listen Academy