Monthly update for July 2018
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:
Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or hello@listennotes.com :)