Monthly Update For May 2018
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.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe2208947-c9e0-4a35-b697-7c527fab5aea_496x319.png)
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.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3eae980d-b361-4574-ac4a-0603d1fe1ebd_744x564.png)
2. Random podcasts. You can get random podcasts by language & categories. It's like Stumble Upon, but for podcasts :)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F05108ab2-3967-4ed3-9fef-8bc4f6670817_1580x1000.png)
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:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F10d89f0b-dfa2-4c45-a09d-dea26ee9c557_1422x1114.png)
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.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb5aa7a34-1fee-40f9-a70a-624db492ebc2_1592x1428.png)
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.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2ec4bf89-403a-46f0-be17-acc1edab7502_1302x1538.png)
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 :)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8c377aa3-0e05-4992-8898-3cbc6aba5d1e_1312x930.png)
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
Blog posts
I wrote two blog posts in May:
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
How A Thrice Weekly Podcast About Nintendo Continues To Grow And Thrive