Monthly Update For November 2017
Hi there!
Hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! November is the second full month that I worked on Listen Notes full-time.
You can read past issues of this monthly update.
Product updates
1. Added audio player. This makes it easy to listen directly on Listen Notes.
2. Added share sheet for individual episode. This also enables you to embed an episode in your website.
3. Added Twitter player card. If you share an episode from Listen Notes to Twitter, your followers can listen right in Twitter.
4. Created three individual Twitter accounts & Facebook pages with curated podcasts.
5. I spent more than half of my engineering time improving the infrastructure, which is extremely critical to this search engine project but is less tangible to end users :( The bottom line is, the podcast database of Listen Notes is more comprehensive and more accurate than before.
6. Started to work on public APIs. I've got a bunch of requests for providing a search API, primarily from developers of podcast player apps. I think it makes sense. If Listen Notes makes it easy for developers to access podcast data, then it'll enable them to focus on innovating products without spending time on tedious database building process. I plan to launch the search API by the end of December. If you are a developer, you can sign up here to be notified when the API is launched.
7. Sunsetting transcription feature. I experimented with transcription over the past month. I've got only one podcaster to submit transcription for one of their episodes. After some user interviews, I found that transcription is not very useful for most of listeners. So, I just removed it, saving some UI real estate on the screen.
Company updates
As you may know, I incorporated Listen Notes, Inc. last month. I just issued stocks to myself and filed 83(b) -- well, it sounds ridiculous for a one-person company, but it's how things work in the startup world. There are always some boring & mundane items to check off.
I also applied to three startup incubators / accelerators this month. Results so far? One rejected. One invited me to interview in early December. One invited me to 2nd round interview recently. Not bad for a one-person term that had no track record and just got started. I'll report back in next month's newsletter.
Similar to last month, I've talked to quite a few people on product / roadmap of Listen Notes and I got a lot of good feedback.
Some numbers
Database: 41k podcasts; 24 million episodes
Just want to remind us: Google indexed "only" 25 million web pages in early 1998. 24 million is a number that can justify the existence of a search engine :)
Searches per day: ~1200 (average over 1 month); ~1500 (average over last week)
Google got ~10k searches per day in the end of 1998.
Website:
Page views: 120k
Unique visitors: 34k
Human beings are producing tons of podcasts now. There are 80+% new episodes year over year in the past 2 years:
Hopefully Listen Notes can help surface those niche podcasts and make podcast market bigger :)
Blog posts
I wrote one blog post in November: