Monthly Update For March 2018
Hi there!
March is the 6th full month that I worked on Listen Notes full-time. So it's already been half a year since I turned Listen Notes into my full-time job!
Overall, Listen Notes did very well in March. Website traffic kept growing. In terms of page views, 235k in March vs 180k in Feb. And I've added a few new features that I myself wanted to use. And all ad spots on the website were sold out all the way until early June $$$!
You can read past issues of this monthly update.
Product updates
1. Podcaster Interviews. ~100 podcasters tell their own stories on Listen Notes! As a podcast listener, you may be curious how a podcast is made. And as a new podcaster, you may want to learn some best practice of building and growing a podcast. Let's read those interviews!
2. Listen Alerts. It's like Google Alerts, but for podcasts :) You can subscribe to up to three keywords, and get email notification whenever there are new podcasts mentioning those keywords. It's a great tool to keep track of your reputation (or your company's reputation) in the podcast world~
3. Enhanced typeahead search. You can get podcasts / categories directly from these typeahead results.
4. Be able to filter search results by country. Example: startup podcasts in UK
5. A lot of infrastructure improvements, making the website faster. Along the way, I also set up a staging fleet of instances for testing infrastructure changes. I feel pretty good now. Thanks to my previous war-room-experience in Nextdoor's early days, I'm fortunate enough to know a thing or two about building "good-enough" infrastructure that can support at least millions of users, with extremely limited resources (i.e., time, money, labor force).
6. Use email to log in. No password is needed. The user will get a login url via email, which is like Medium's email login method.
Company updates
Listen Notes has been in the latest batch (Tribe 11) of Boost VC for a month and a half so far. It's really good to have people hold my little company accountable. The whole accelerator experience deserves a new blog post in the future :)
And I just hired a consultant to help me with some content stuffs (primarily podcaster interviews). Thanks Stephen! I still can't afford hiring full-time employees -- I don't take salary myself, for now. But I may need some consulting help from time to time. I'm going to redesign the entire website in a month or so. Do you know some good web UI designers / consulting firms? I need some design help then.
Some numbers
Database: 470k podcasts; 28.8 million episodes.
Website traffic in March:
Page views: 237k
Unique visitors: 67k
Podcaster Interviews
Longtime Podcast Advocate Yann ilunga Talks Personal Projects And Podcasting Success
Two twenty somethings interviewing their couchsurfing guests
The climber & nutritionist who makes The TrainingBeta Podcast, a rock climbing podcast
Full-time personal finance and business freelance writer who makes Personal Profitability podcast
Two feminist nerds with a lot to say about TV (The 100, Riverdale , Lost)
Blog posts
I wrote two blog post in March: