Monthly update for May 2020
Monthly update for May 2020
enhanced inca.fm, Listen Community, Premium Membership
Hi there!
This is the 32nd full month that I worked on Listen Notes full-time. Hope you are doing well and staying safe!
Product updates
Released a new version of inca.fm - a short audio creation tool. Now you can save old audio stories locally. Download from iOS App Store.
Launched Listen Community - “product hunt for podcasts”. Most podcast discovery services (or newsletters) are focused on top-chart podcasts from big publishers, which is kind of boring… We built Listen Community to discover and share niche podcasts, not from big publishers.
Launched threaded comments. Finally, you can reply to other people’s comments on Listen Notes! Example:
Shut down the public transcription service. Previously anyone can order the transcription service to turn an episode audio into texts on our website, then the resulted transcripts would be available to the public. But some podcasters are very angry because of copyright concerns. Now, we decided to shut down the public transcription service - it’s actually a money losing business, as we need to pay 3rd party speech-to-text api & server fees & some human time (for customer support).
Some API changes. Take a look at these interesting apps / services that are using our API.
Launched Premium Membership. It’s basically a paywall for advanced podcast search features, which are used by less than 0.1% of our users and oftentimes abused by virtual assistants from Philippines and Pakistan - they are like Amazon Mechanical Turks, manually scraping data from the Internet. In the past few weeks, a large army of virtual assistants used Listen Notes to search and scrape contents. They created tons of fake accounts and tried many combinations of our search filters. Given that some advanced search filters are only used by such virtual assistants and a tiny portion of our users, it makes sense to just build a paywall.
Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or hello@listennotes.com :)
Stay safe!