Monthly update for November 2018

November 2018

Hi there!

This is the 14th full month that I worked on Listen Notes full-time. Website traffic this month is all-time high, again!

You can read past issues of this monthly update.

Product updates

1. Internationalization. The website UI is available in 12 languages now.

2. Better recommendations. I spin up a server to train data 24/7. It's just some commodity ML tricks. Nothing fancy here.

3. Kick off a mobile app project. It's a ridiculously simple & opinionated podcast app. It's an experiment, which may or may not work - but worth trying. Hopefully I can launch it by the end of this year.

4. Some spam fighting. It's like what Google's web spam team does.

5. API firefighting. I use Mashape/RapidApi as API gateway for Listen API. They did a major upgrade and caused some outage, which in turn made Listen API down. This is like when AWS has major outage, then you can't use Netflix. Learned some lessons here. Will write a postmortem blog post if I have time.

Company updates

Put off monetization plan in a month or two. Working on an experimental app in December.

Still having fun so far.

Some numbers

• Database: 588k podcasts; 37.6 million episodes

• Website: 502k page views & 190k unique visitors

Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or hello@listennotes.com :)