July 2018

Hi there!

July is the 10th full month that I worked on Listen Notes full-time.

Highlights:

• Launched some important features to improve the quality of the podcast database.

• Did some SEO audit. Traffics from Google are recovering.

Lowlights:

• Nothing :) I feel pretty good for July.

You can read past issues of this monthly update.

Product updates

1. User identity. Each user can have a handle, like the one on Twitter or Instagram. For example, mine is @wenbin. This opens the door to implement some social features in the future.

2. Edit a podcast / episode page. This allows people to help improve the quality of the podcast database, by adding social accounts for podcasts, editing tags, updating the RSS feed, and updating geolocation & language. More to come.

3. Short url for sharing. When clicking on any Share button on Listen Notes, you'll get a short url to share, e.g., https://lnns.co/5tfqaowKXbY

4. Podcasters can claim podcast pages on Listen Notes, which is like business owners can claim business pages on Yelp. A claimed podcast can indicate if it's looking for sponsors, co-hosts, guests, or cross promotion with other podcast, which open the door for building a marketplace in the future. Example of a claimed page.

5. Finished SEO audit with a SEO consultant. I've got some work to do on the SEO front.

6. Some miscellaneous improvements on the crawling infrastructure, which allows to fetch latest podcasts & episodes more timely. Building and maintaining a robust crawling infrastructure itself is not an easy job.

Company updates

I've been heads down on product development. The general goal is to build a solid foundation to help me decide whether to raise more money or to focus on monetization in the end of August.

Some numbers

• Database: 532k podcasts; 33.3 million episodes

• Website:

  • Page views: 212k

  • Unique visitors: 50k

Blog posts

I wrote a new blog post to explain why I'm building a podcast search engine website, instead of building a podcast player app:

• Why a standalone podcast search engine website?

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