Hi there!

May is the 8th full month that I worked on Listen Notes full-time. I have to take time machine to travel back to Dec 31, 2017 to tell myself: Wow, you can survive this long as a small business owner!

Highlights:Again, launched a bunch of things that I personally wanted to use.Wrapped up the website ui redesign (on paper).Lowlights:From raw numbers, website traffic is flat. Again, traffic from Google was soft -- let me know if you know any SEO experts that I can get help from :)Some growth experiments didn't go well, e.g., Listen Academy & Quora answers. Marketing is really really difficult :(The journey of doing startup is a long long process of grinding. It's not like anything you read on TechCrunch or any fairy tale in your imagination. 

You can read past issues of this monthly update.

Product updates

1. Multiple Listen Later playlists per user! It's  like YouTube's "Add To" menu :) Now you can curate podcasts & episodes by topics.

2. Random podcasts. You can get random podcasts by language & categories. It's like Stumble Upon, but for podcasts :)

3. Some improvements on Listen API. Specifically, I added the endpoint to fetch curated lists of best podcasts by category, which was a very popular requested feature from developers. If you are developer, give it a try:

4. Transcribed more podcast episodes. Now, 0.2% of the whole Internet's podcast episodes have transcripts on ListenNotes.com! If an episode has transcript, you'll see a little "transcript" badge.

5. A bunch of infrastructure improvements. Yea, very boring stuffs. But you have to do this behind the scene.

6. Added trending queries to home page. I also added some automation for sharing trending queries to social media.

7. Started to translate new website design into code. This is the sneak peek of the new design. It won't be too different from existing design. It's just a polished version, with consistent design elements. It's also a good opportunity for me to clean up the frontend code a bit. Listen Notes was initially a side project, so you can imagine there are a lot of tech debts :)

Company updates

I'm pretty heads down on product development this month -- same for next couple months.

By the end of August, I'll decide whether to raise more money to eventually build a team or just focus on monetization to make this business sustainable. 

Some numbers

• Database: 507k podcasts; 31 million episodes

• Website:

  • Page views: 227k (6% increase over April's; but less than March's 237k)

  • Unique visitors: 60k

Press Coverage

• This website lets you curate podcast playlists for friends (or yourself) via TNW

Blog posts

I wrote two blog posts in May:

• Why Listen Notes doesn’t allow users to review podcasts?

• Re: You don’t actually need a co-founder
  

Podcaster Interviews

• How An Independent Record Label Gets The Most Out Of Podcasting

• The Chronic Health Condition Expert Helping Others Ease Their Burdens By Sharing Her Passion

• Podcasting For A Cause: Disability Related Web Accessibility

• World-Class Volleyball Stars Talk Volleyball Podcasting

• How A Thrice Weekly Podcast About Nintendo Continues To Grow And Thrive

Read more

Listen Academy

• Unbundling The Podcast: Why Podcast Episodes Have Been Set Free Like Single Songs

• Binge-Listen to Podcasts for Fun And Fast Learning

• How To Listen To Podcasts?

Read more