January 2019

Hi there!

Happy Chinese New Year! 过年好！恭喜发财！

This is the 16th full month that I worked on Listen Notes full-time. It's been a pretty solid month.

You can read past issues of this monthly update.

Product updates

1. Launched Listen Explorer. It'll give you some podcast recommendations based on the podcasts you provide. It's of course in the "Labs" category.

2. Embedded playlists. As more and more people are using Listen Later to build podcast playlists, some of them may want to embed such playlists on their own websites. Click the SHARE button to get the code snippet.



3. Upgraded Elasticsearch to 6.5, which was the biggest achievement of January! The old version I used was 5.5. It took me almost an entire week to finish the migration. The effort pays off. The core search engine is much more performant than before. Yay!

4. Improved podcast / episode recommendations. Example.

5. Built several quick & dirty internal tools to help improve the podcast database's quality, e.g., find & fix invalid audios (podcasts may delete audios or change audio urls). This consumed a few days of my time.

6. Built a few internal tools to fight spams. Yes, Listen Notes has reached the scale that there are more and more spammy activities from malicious users... Google has a dedicated web spam team, btw.

7. A few API improvements.

Company updates

I'll focus more on the infrastructure & API side in the first few months of 2019. We are happy to sell the shovel in the podcast gold rush :) An easy-to-use podcast API enables tens of thousands of developers to innovate in the podcast space.

Some numbers

• Database: 622k podcasts; 40 million episodes

• Website: 900k page views & 360k unique visitors

Blog posts

• Listen Explorer: Get similar podcasts

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