Hi there!

Happy new year! January is the 4th full month that I worked on Listen Notes full-time.

You can read past issues of this monthly update.

Product updates

1. Improved Listen Later. Now you can change the name & description of your playlist. TODO: custom artwork image. Turns out people loveListen Later. I'll continue improving it in the coming weeks.

2. Launched Listen Clips. This tool allows you to create & share a clip of any podcast episode.

3. Launched Listen Club. It's a place to curate lists of awesome podcasts from online resources, e.g., articles & forum posts.

4. Added new search filter: specific fields. You can search just title, author, and / or description of podcasts / episodes.

5. Built the internal tool & email infrastructure. This is mostly invisible to end users. It's just some useful tools for me to do operations and to build some emails that'll be sent to users. But it's necessary to invest time & energy to improve the human operator's productivity (hey, it's me~), which will pay dividends in the long run.

6. I'm selling the podcast database now. On the last day of 2017, I actually made one sale. If I could make money early, why do I need VC money? 

Company updates

Nothing major, except that I spent a lot of time this month learning how to file corp tax for 2017. 

I turned down several meeting / coffee requests this month, so I've got plenty of time to write code and add new features to ListenNotes.com. I feel good about it :)

Oh, as I promised in the last newsletter, I wrote a blog post to share my (failed) experience interviewing with Y Combinator.

Some numbers

• Database: 437k podcasts; 26.4 million episodes

• Website:

  • Page views: 143k

  • Unique visitors: 42k

Blog posts

I wrote one blog post in November:

• The boring technology behind Listen Notes

• My Y Combinator interview experience (W18)