At 555, I wake up, make breakfast for my son, drop him off at the school bus. For some reason I pull up my phone.
And I look at my personal email and I see that Apple sent me an email. And I have this sinking feeling.
The ground is shattering under me. I remember I come back home from the garage and tell my wife I need to take a walk.
Hello and welcome to episode 52 of the Metacast Behind the scenes podcast. I'm your host, Yolanda Bestylif.
And I'm Arnavdeca. I'm Jenny.
Today we have Jenny joining us on the show because we have a very important topic we want to discuss.
So we are about to launch Metacast in open beta.
And this was a 180 turnaround in our approach to the launch that happened in the last three days.
So we wanted to have this recording to document how we did all that, but also to announce these exciting news.
To the 15 people that listen to our podcast.
It's more than 15 now, but they are not like hundreds of people.
Now we're just kidding.
I guess let's talk about launch stages just in general.
So in the company like Amazon or Google that follows a proper launch process that has lots of resources and wants to do things properly.
Usually you have a first stage, which is something like an alpha or a private beta where you have a half-working product that does some things, but it doesn't do most of the functionality that you intend to put in there.
It lacks polish, maybe it lacks some security features as well.
And you give it to a very small set of committed loyal customers, trusted customers, so friends and family.
Usually it's a very small group of people that get access to it under a non-disclosure agreement.
Also known as an NDA.
At this phase, you're basically trying to add or build the things that are differentiating in your app or service versus the rest.
And you don't care about anything else at this point.
You want to see that stuff that you're building actually has validation like people actually want to use it or not.
Right. Yeah. And in the enterprise space, you would get some of your customers who have been asking for this feature or this product for a long time.
They are committed to help you because they want what you are building.
So yeah, it's going to be a building together with your customers in a way.
And these are customers that are really ready to put up with a lot of bugs and issues and brokenness.
And typically you can break things while you're in private beta, also known as closed beta, because that's just the expectation.
It's half-working software that might... I think when we did chat bot launch, I think we considered wiping out customers' data even, but I think we managed to not do it.
But overall, it wasn't a table.
At the end of the private beta, it's possible that you just wipe out all of the data that customers put in.
So it's kind of a risky proposition for most customers, except for the most loyal ones, the most committed ones.
Then the next stage would be like, you got some validation.
Now you want to get more validation from a broader set of users.
And you do what would be called preview, the Amazon, Google also calls it preview.
It used to be called Open Beta.
You know, it's companies, I think it's both of them.
But beta kind of signals that the product is half-baked or under-baked.
So they change that position, but in fact, a preview is a beta that anybody can access.
So the difference between closed and open is that closed one.
The creators are selecting who gets in versus the open one.
Anybody can choose to go in and try the software.
There's no gating criteria, but it's still a beta.
And is there still an NDA in the second in the Open Beta one?
No, because you basically publicly say that it's for anyone to use.
And I have not seen it before, but in our case, it will be the case.
There may be a cap on how many users you allow into the Open Beta.
And in our case, it's less of a choice more of a constraint by Apple App Store.
And I don't know if actually if Google Play Store also has the same thing, but Apple only allows up to 5,000 people to be in the Open Beta.
So basically, as soon as we launch the Open Beta, it'll be gone within like minutes.
That's what you're saying.
I think so, yeah.
Like a Taylor Swift concert.
The Metacast beta is going to take down the internet.
Yes. Like there was a very geeky to Victoria from Anacortis in Washington.
You have to wake up at like six to get a spot for those 15 tickets that get released.
But more or my tennis court bookings.
I have to wake up at 630 AM and wait on a phone call for.
Anyway, let's not digress to far away.
So anyway, so we have been in closed beta since August.
As of today, we have 42 allow-listed users on the app.
Fewer users use it, but we have 42.
Which I think is a good number to transition this from closed to open.
Because it's the answer to life, universe, and everything.
Jenny, do you remember that one?
That came up in episode 42, which was the last one I was on.
Yes, so we are hitching on that number.
So when we did the closed beta back in August, what we felt is the differentiating feature, the secret sauce in our app, and nothing else.
So even ourselves, when we were using it, we had to use other podcast apps for most of the functionality.
And we would listen to like a couple of our apps, just as a kind of like experimenting.
Then I think Jenny joined shortly after, and then we added all the playlists and ability to search and discover podcasts and favorite them and all that.
So and actually, Jenny, you could not use it for the longest time.
I felt kind of bad because I joined this company, and I wasn't using the app because where I live, I don't have unlimited data on my mobile plan.
And our app didn't have downloads yet.
So that was one of the first things that I wanted to build because I was like, this is the thing that's blocking me from using the app.
But now we have it.
Yeah, it actually reminds me that we forgot one of these stages.
It's dog footing.
When you have a version of software that is for internal use only, and the term dog footing comes from 1976, I think, adds.
It's like a dog food ad where they feed their canned dog food to dog.
And I think the question is, will the dog eat the dog food or something like that?
I forgot exactly premise there, but the idea is like, if your own dog will not eat your dog food at yourself, that nobody else is going to.
And that was very big at Amazon, pretty much for every product.
Yeah, actually, I would say even bigger at Google, because everybody uses Gmail and Google Docs and all that.
We have been dog footing for a long time, except Jenny.
But I think since about December, we have been using it pretty consistently.
I don't use any other podcast apps right now, except for notifications.
I like to get notified when specific episodes drop, and we don't have that yet.
We won't have it even at launch, maybe.
But aside from that, I don't use any other app right now.
So we've been pretty happy with it.
There's a few other people who have been using it consistently, too.
So, yeah.
So actually, before we go into more explanation of the decision, and what triggered that, I think it's time to stop calling, transcripts the secret sauce.
We'll say exactly why we decided to open up more.
But what can our app do?
Our app.
Take a stab at your elevator page.
So you can do everything else that you can do in any other podcast app.
But additionally, it's not just audio.
We extract the metadata from the things that people are saying, the words that process is called transcribing.
And using that transcript, what we enable is powerful features.
Like you can almost break that audio, the long form audio into small, small segments.
You can share bookmark highlights, specific things that are being said.
So that's kind of our, what we thought was our secret sauce.
Until now.
So basically, we have an audio player that also has a transcript
displayed at the same time. And as you listen to audio, you also see the transcript.
And the transcript is synchronized with audio.
So it kind of moves, it shows you where exactly you're listening.
You can read or you can just like scroll and scheme double tap and listen from somewhere else.
If you want to skip the ads, for example, you can just read them or skip them all together or skip a certain section of the podcast that you're not interested in.
Then you can bookmark any part of that episode, like you would do.
And Kindle app would be a great comparison here.
Kindle or InstaPaper, where you can select a certain segment of text and that will be highlighted, which you can copy, share, or we have a feature where you can look at all of your bookmarks in the same place.
So you can see all the things that you've bookmarked.
If you want to go back to the book that somebody mentioned or some insight, you can always just go back and see that in play it again, which you can't do in any other app.
So other than that, you said that our app can do things that other apps can do.
Actually, our app can do more things.
They are not all complete, but it can do more things.
So, Genie, you want to tell us about the thing that our app can do that other apps can do as well that you have built.
Yeah, you can download an episode if you're not on a data plan that's unlimited.
Not only can you download, we also have these automatic playlists created in the app so that everything that you've ever downloaded, you can see it in one place.
You can choose to listen from there or delete all of it in one go.
That's sort of like nice things, yeah.
Yeah, actually, if I can give a concrete example of how the transcripts in my life have been kind of fun and helpful, I listened to this podcast where they ended up talking for a part of it with one of the guys from Queer Eye.
And my family happened to be like really into Queer Eye at the time.
And so I wanted to play just that part of the podcast for my wife and my daughter.
And so I just went into it and searched for the guy's name and it jumped straight to that point in the transcript instead of me having to like scroll through the audio and find it right at the right place.
It was just searched for the text, tap on it, and away we go.
So once you have it, you realize how handy it is.
Yeah, I use it quite a lot with like sports podcasts too because they usually tend to talk about a lot of different topics that happen in the week or so.
And I'm maybe interested in one or two.
Some podcasts tell you in the description when this segment is but most don't.
And then very easy way is to like search inside the podcast in our app to search for.
I'm interested in the Djokovic match.
So I'll search for Djokovic and like jump right to that segment.
Yeah, I often use the two bookmark mentions of books or other podcasts or some names that I want to check out later.
And also I listen to a lot of business podcasts and if somebody says some insight or like a framework or a question that they asked them.
So actually, good example.
I was listening to Alex Harmoji's show the game yesterday and he was explaining how he thinks about business in terms of constraints.
He basically finds the bottleneck and then he just keeps pounding that bottleneck until he removes it and then the business starts to grow and he looks for the next bottleneck.
That's just a very powerful framework.
Right? And I'm like, I don't want to forget about it because it's one and a half hour episode.
So I just put the bookmark there.
I don't bookmark the whole section because it's too much.
There's almost like a bookmark in the book rate.
And I know that it starts on page 55 or something and then that's how I use this as well.
But then we had a discussion in Slack.
I think it was something about niche stuff.
And it was another Alex Harmoji's podcast.
I didn't bookmark that part, but I went there and I used search to just search for word niche.
And then I found that specific segment that I took a screenshot and shared with you folks.
It just makes these kind of things very easy because those episodes wanted to hours long.
It's pretty much impossible to find anything unless you have a search functionality and the transcript that you can read.
Talking about the usability side just before I forget, we did do a demo of this in Vancouver two weeks back now or maybe it was last week I forgot.
But that was like exciting because a lot of people were interested in it came to talk to me afterwards.
It was in person not recorded so we can't share.
There's a good amount of validation that this stuff is really useful.
And we know that podcast players are generally popular.
There's a lot of them and people use them and pay for them.
So there's the intrinsic as well as the direct validation for what we're building.
Yeah, we were very secretive.
We're like, oh, it's a secret sauce.
People have to sign an NDA to use it.
Yeah, they are.
So why all of a sudden we talk about it some open day?
I guess at this point in end of January before like three days ago, whatever happened, which we'll get to, where we were is, we know this is useful.
We're using it already.
We want to launch this app.
But to launch it, we need to add like, I don't know, 500 more things.
It's more like 50 things.
500 sounds exaggerated, but actually about 50.
So that's actually a very big number by itself.
50 things will probably take us at least a few months if not more than that significantly.
And the reason for wanting to do it that way was, we were a bit worried about the reviews.
Unlike web apps or SaaS products that you're selling to maybe B2B customers, you can release a half bake thing, see what the reception is, and keep it proving on iteratively.
Whereas an app, if you launch it, and you basically get a whole bunch of one-star reviews because things are broken, you can pretty much bet on the fact that somebody else is not going to like immediately pick that up.
Because people do look at reviews immediately.
That's one of the first things you look at.
I know about the two of you.
I mean, you can tell me, but for me, I think it was also a bit of a matter of pride in the way.
I want to launch something that's really polished.
I'm a big fan of Steve Jobs and all, and I like perfect products.
I like beautiful products.
I have a knife for little crappy things that may even be non-functional, but annoying.
I think I've always applied that lens to the products I work on.
So it was always hard to release half-baked stuff when it was at Amazon and Google.
I would always try to push the boundary on, like, make it more perfect.
I try to let go of that mindset with Metacast, but I don't think I did until a few days ago.
Jenny, did you feel like that, too?
I think with our background at AWS, I think that there was a very high bar for launching something.
It might not look that way from the outside, but the number of things, like, the level of security things, integrations with other AWS things, I felt like the last product we worked on, AWS user notifications, the basic functionality was done probably six months
before we launched, because we had so much more extra stuff we had to do.
And the reason that we do that is because of customer obsession and because of the reputation of the brand.
So as a new company, I do want us to be a strong brand that customers love.
So I think that that's part of it.
It's just hard to know how many bugs, how many paper cuts are users willing to put up with before they set it aside or give it a one-star review.
You hope that they understand our story that we're three people wanting to make something perfect.
We're not there yet, and we're not just gonna, like, leave something shitty forever.
We want to fix it more than you want us to fix it, but there's only so much time and stick with us.
And that's where when we started being like, hey, let's just do open beta because for one thing, they can't give us bad reviews yet.
And also people who are signing up for it are hopefully along for the ride.
They understand where we are in terms of the maturity of the product and all of that.
And it gives them that opportunity to talk with us directly and influence the direction of things, which I think is pretty cool, like to have a partnership with customers.
Yeah, build with them.
I think till last week we were in the mindset that we need to add these 50 things, polish it up, add all these things that we think for launch.
To be clear, of those 50 things, because I don't want us to sound like we have 50 features, it was more like maybe three or four, maybe five features, and everything else was just small paper cuts.
Like a bug here, like a weird behavior there, like that bug cast is not important.
It's just a bunch of these smaller things that edge cases.
Yeah, but we wanted to fix all that because we wanted to launch in the app store directly.
But that changed in the last three days, why?
We would like to say that, oh, we thought of this ourselves, but I can reconstruct this story for you.
So 555 on Friday wake up. 555 AM. 555 AM, yeah.
My breakfast for my son dropped him off at the school bus, come back home at 6.40 or so.
For some reason, I pull up my phone, and I look at my personal email, and I see that Apple sent me an email that I need to accept in the new terms of service for podcast connect, which is the interface for podcasters to publish their podcast.
I usually don't even look at my Gmail for weeks.
But for some reason, I start reading it, and it says that Apple ads transcripts in the near future.
And I have this sinking feeling.
The ground is shattering under me.
It's a bit of a panic mode.
And I've read about all of those stories where Google or Apple Amazon reads us something, and it just kills the business overnight for people who have something that is the same as theirs, but cost money, whereas Google makes it free, and they just get all of the market.
So yeah, I had this very bad feeling.
I remember I come back home from the garage and tell my wife, I need to take a walk.
Which day was this?
Friday. We are recording this Wednesday, January 31st.
This was Friday, the previous week.
So five days ago.
So on just the Wednesday before, when I did the demo, afterwards, one of the people came to me and said, I love this thing, but this is something that Apple or Google can build it in a month.
And I said, yeah, they're not going to.
They don't put any focus on this.
And then two days after, we heard, OK, I'm fully adding transcripts to the podcast app.
So. Right. So yeah, I go for a walk.
And I walk for about 10 kilometers or 6 kilometers.
I walk for a very long time.
And I just develop it.
Develop it.
And at the same time, I'm sending some thoughts to Slack, more like a stream of consciousness kind of thing.
And I'm starting to realize that we are not really competing with Apple.
Well, first of all, it's not a zero sum game.
Multiple apps are already on the market.
Yes, Apple and Spotify are the leaders.
They have the majority market share.
But they also they cater to everyone.
Whereas for us, and similar to other apps like Overcast, for example, we can cater to a very small group of customers, very small niche.
More like podcasts is official in others.
Those people who are really passionate about podcasts, people who are subscribed to a lot, who want to write workflow, who want to really get the most out of their podcasts, and who are ready to pay for this.
So that's our market.
And that market is probably just a few percent of the total population.
So we can build a tool for them.
Let's say if you grab 1% or 2% off the entire market of podcast listeners, that's going to make us wildly profitable and happy.
To be honest, with all the scrutiny that comes, I don't even want to own 50% of the market.
Of the other states, smaller, maybe 25 is a bit fine, but not like a dominant player, where you start to get called to Congress and all that stuff, Senate, wherever they go.
I don't want to think about it.
And also, what it may be realizes, I mean, they said it explicitly.
They are doing this for accessibility.
And Spotify, when they add the transcripts, they also said it to the same way, the same thing.
They said it, they're doing for accessibility.
They are not really thinking about how do they make management of information better for you.
So it's more like it's just a nice addition.
It's like showing artwork, but you can also see the transcript.
Whereas we can really double down on that specific thing, on what you can extract from transcripts, for the specific user, make it into a tool, which will make no sense for majority of listeners, because they just plug it in, they listen to radio.
They don't need any of that.
And that's fine.
Yeah, I need to realize that we are focusing on the niche of the advanced podcast listeners.
And we should just double down on that.
And the fact that Apple has transcripts that's not necessarily irrelevant, it might be good, because it might be the tight lifts all boats, because Apple has set some standards.
Like, if you have your own transcripts, you can provide them in specific format.
So there are some formats like SRT and VTT.
And there is a field in the RSS spec that supports this.
And some podcasts already do that.
So potentially more people will start adding transcripts to their podcasts, which means we don't have to generate those.
So we have less cost.
And also those transcripts will potentially be more accurate, because they may be more like human curated, or they can use this script, which has proprietary technology for transcription, which is better than what we are using.
And if more podcasts do that, we get to benefit from it as well.
And we basically compete on the grounds of the quality of tools that we provide, as opposed to the fact of the availability of the transcript itself.
Yeah, I hope it makes sense.
So yeah, two hours of walking in my panic mode, turned into more like, this is a great opportunity.
And you sent me an email.
And I think this is the first time ever you have sent me an email in Outlook and all there's that important tag.
I didn't.
I think it's Gmail just marked it that way.
OK. Or maybe you added the exclamation marks in the red emoji to the subject line or something, but you sent me an email that was like I catching.
And just like you, I woke up.
I think about 6.30 AM that day, that's the first thing I read.
I went through a very similar journey, but all in my bed, maybe through about 30 minutes, I was reading through it.
I also felt that, oh, shit.
So Apple Podcast is a free product, and now they're adding it.
So I mean, why would somebody pay for what we're building, right?
But then I think as I read more and more about it, it dawned on me that they're, like you said, they're trying to show it almost like a separate artifact, the transcript, right?
And not to say that they can't do the things that we're trying to do in the future, but right now, at least it feels like they're not trying to.
And they're going to launch in spring, which is still a few months away.
The most positive thing that I got out of all this was that there's already quite a lot of podcasts.
Some of them are paid that are doing pretty well.
They have playlists and features and all that that we have, and we like to think that we're actually putting a good UX workflow angle to all that.
But additionally, Apple doing this at large scale means that this is a useful thing.
I think that was like one of the biggest validations for what we're trying to do that I got indirectly through Apple trying to do this.
And then we also talked about it, but I was thinking, OK, so this is Apple doing it, but what about Android?
Is Google going to do it immediately?
I've been thinking the same thing as that this is great for iOS users, but I'm an Android owner, and this doesn't impact me at all.
I have previously used Spotify for podcasts, and it drives me bonkers.
If my daughter listens to Taylor Swift on her Alexa, and then I open my Spotify, instead of the podcast, I was just listening to the recently played or continue playing as Taylor Swift.
So I personally really do not like mixing my music app with my podcast app.
And also, Apple, it's huge scale, of course.
Can you contact them and say, hey, I'd really love this feature?
If what Apple provides is good for you, then that's a great app for you.
But I like to think of us as more accessible, not in the sense of accessibility, but in the sense of what other app can you contact the developers and say, hey, I've always wanted this thing.
And maybe they'll build it.
Well, even today morning, we got an email from a beta customer saying, hey, I wish it worked this way.
And we're like, yes, this makes sense.
We're thinking about it.
Yeah. And I think, like you said, we are not happy.
Ilya and I used to use Apple podcasts.
We actually stopped using it, use other podcasts already.
So we don't like the UX.
We have met a lot of people over the last few months who don't like the UX.
So there is definitely that side to it.
So at this point on Friday, we had our first startup crisis moment, right?
Like existential crisis.
All hands on deck.
Let's meet up.
Let's figure out what do we want to do.
Yeah, I'm like, should I have stated Google?
Right.
So yeah, let's talk about that.
And what happened next will surprise you.
Yeah. So we had a chat about this.
And I think we started to converge on the idea that we need to launch ASAP to beat Apple, of course, but I'm just kidding.
Well, same I kidding.
I mean, there is, I think some ego thing, at least for me to put a stake in the ground, but it's maybe not even secondary.
It's too short of you whatever it is.
I just had this realization that we've been hiding what we're doing and like calling a secret sauce.
Now that it's out there, that Apple has set what they're doing, I think it's fine.
We can just talk about it.
I think eventually other apps will also have that.
So I didn't feel like we need to hide it anymore.
Because we also have this idea of like, what if Apple sees it in still this idea and all that.
I mean, they did see it when we submitted that.
When they tested it, you never know.
We have been doing it since August after all, so yeah.
This is probably like the plight of a startup, though, is that will the big company find out and steal the idea?
But the idea is to not just be an idea.
We are more than that.
I think ultimately we're just creating the app that we want.
And then if other people want it too, which I assume they will, unless the three of us are like incredibly unique within the podcast listening community, we're not trying to beat Apple.
Everyone can pick the flavor of podcasting app that they want.
And we're just going to keep making things, right?
We're going to keep adding to it.
So Apple can do its thing.
Yeah. The thing that changed our mindset is we need to launch this ASAP.
But at the same time, we cannot launch in the app store right away because there are still a lot of things missing.
There are bugs.
And basically, you will probably get at least a good number of one star reviews, probably a few four star five star also, but a good number of one star.
I think that's what made us realize that we need to go for an open beta immediately.
I think I also was swayed by our interview of Christian Selleck, who didn't open beta with thousands of users for the Apollo app.
So that interview is available on the Builders going to build a podcast episode one, our other podcast.
He didn't sway me at that very moment, but when we had this existential crisis discussion, I also reflected back on what Christian said in the podcast.
Actually, if you remember, right after we recorded with Christian, we did have a discussion on Slack.
And I think maybe when we met too, that we should do an open beta.
And we thought, OK, yeah, let's do an open beta, but it'll be somewhere before our launch.
I think the timelines just got squeezed into, we do the open beta right now, even with all the bugs and everything.
Yeah, so very important is when's the January 31st?
This episode comes out on February 7th.
I would hope we will have launched, or at least almost launched, the open beta by the time.
So yeah, it is accelerating very rapidly.
What also helped me, I had a friend of mine, Rassoul, who is also one of our close beta users, visit here in Florida, and we met for dinner, and I told him about this.
And he's like, you should have launched like two months ago.
Don't worry about those bugs.
You have a great app.
Why do you care about this?
You're overly perfectionist, and he is very direct.
So he just picks his mind up.
And I had this very uncomfortable feeling, like, I know he is right, but I have so much resistance.
I want to object.
But I know he is right, so I keep my mouth shut.
Listening to him just drained me so much, but then after I digested everything, it helped me come to terms that the mindset has to change.
In a way, I am thankful for this crisis.
I don't know if it will make us better or worse, we don't know, right?
We can predict the future.
But I feel like it got us out of our comfort zones, and we are going to do things differently, and that in itself is a huge reward.
Right.
I think in hindsight, we should have been planning to do a extended open beta anyway, with lots of bugs, while building a community of people who like the app and getting feedback from them.
We were just trying to keep it very closed and secretive, I think.
Open beta also allows us to probably get closer to our users a little bit, because I think we can add things to the app that direct people to our subreddit, which we'll talk about in a minute, which you may not necessarily want to do in the same way in the public app,
because it caters to kind of a bigger audience.
We can do more in your face, hey, if you want to leave feedback, click here, kind of user experience.
For now, while we are in open beta.
So we have created a subreddit, it's Metacast app, and we'll link to the subreddit from this episode.
What we will be doing is for every app release, we will specify what are the new features, maybe add some screenshots, the no limitations, add the known bugs, and also we want to encourage users to create feature requests and bug reports in the subreddit,
or just having discussions about podcasting apps.
Well, stuff that is going to be relevant for us is a feature request, I guess.
So yeah, that's going to be very good.
And one thing that the Rassoul said that I really liked, he's like, you need to, three or one redirect your bad reviews from upstored to the subreddit.
And while you are in open beta, there is no upstored.
So there is nowhere to leave a bad review.
And if somebody comes to the subreddit and writes a huge rant, well, that's great.
I mean, that's the whole purpose of a beta, right?
Exactly.
Yeah, that gives us the input that we can use to improve the app.
Whereas if they do this on the upstored, it's much more difficult to rectify.
I really like it.
So where should people listening to this join the subreddit?
Yeah, just go to subreddit and search for Metacast app as a single word.
Or go to the show notes for this episode and click link.
Right.
I think this shipping it immediately into open beta also forced us to basically re-evaluate all the priorities we had for all those 50 things that we talked about.
Yeah. Basically what we did is let's stop all feature work.
We had one PR that was in the almost done state.
It's a stuff for removing the account.
And if you've got fixes that can't be did.
But everything else we just pulled the plug on for now, we just want to do a couple of security things.
So the security best practices because we want to make sure that we don't get hacked and all that.
And the other thing that's very important is we want to be able to enforce app upgrades in case maybe we discover that there's some abuse going on.
And we don't want the users to use the feature anymore in the old version of the app.
So yeah, we were going to integrate with the package that basically doesn't allow you to use the app if we say that you have to upgrade.
So that just gives some extra protection for us because when it comes to transcripts, and just overall infrastructure, there is money involved that we have to pay and we want to protect ourselves.
Because ultimately, even though it's a beta from the feature perspective, this is an open beta.
And that is a huge difference between closed and open is that you don't necessarily can trust everybody who's going to get this app now.
So they can get the app, decompilate, look at what's actually happening, the network requests, and try to reverse engineer things and do malicious things.
So yeah, those are the only things I think we're focusing on at this point.
As soon as that's done, we're going to declare open beta.
Right. One of the bigger blockers for us to launch in the app store was also the need to integrate with payment.
So we can offer subscriptions.
Because again, running this app is not free.
Right now, we pay almost nothing, but at scale, not only significant, like medium scale, that will already cost us probably hundreds of dollars to run per month.
We need to be charging for this, or we will have ads for free users.
But integrating with all of that would take another few weeks, and we just didn't want to wait for that.
So for the open beta, actually, the entirety of the app will be free, at least for now.
Which means people may do abusive stuff, which we don't want necessarily with them to do.
We want to protect from that.
One part of beta is Apple.
I think Google also doesn't actually let users for the beta anyway.
So there's no point in doing all that work right now.
And I think at the scale, at max, we can have like 5,000 users.
But at 5,000 users, if we get to that, I know we'll get to it within minutes.
But even if it takes a few months, I think we'll get some good data about what our costs are and all that.
A more realistic data than we have right now with 15 to 40 users right now.
Which you can count the number of dollars it costs us on a single hand right now.
But that's probably not realistic.
That would be great.
We will add a tip jar.
I'm going to borrow from Christian Celix Playbook.
And whenever we post an update for what's new in this version and all that, or some bug fixes, we will just have this.
If you like this, consider tipping us.
Supporting our work, yeah.
We need to figure out the wording for this.
But yeah, we'll just use buy me a coffee.
They take whatever 10% cut or something.
It will also help us validate the buildings to pay for the app.
Hopefully.
Save somebody every now and then drops us 5, 10 bucks.
It'll be nice.
So this concludes this topic.
Can you want to add anything?
One of my favorite things working at AWS and just building in general is hearing from customers.
A lot of times it's a bug that's kind of a mystery.
You're like, what's going on here?
Because it's almost always an edge case.
If it were obvious, then your integration tests or unit tests or something would have caught it.
So I'm just incredibly excited to hearing from customers or users in this case.
And I'm just really hopeful that our subreddit community is strong and kind.
Not trolls.
You're hoping for too much from Reddit.
Can this be the most strange for Reddit?
Let's see.
I know.
This is my first real experience with Reddit.
So yeah, there is some trepidation as well.
I think what we can hope for from the subreddit is actually an engaged and honest community, which is what you typically tend to get in Reddit.
You brought up a very important point about customer versus user.
The way it works, let's say, for Facebook.
So users don't pay anything to Facebook.
I mean, most of them.
They are the product and then customers are advertisers.
It's almost like Facebook has these users that are like cattle that have been sold to supermarkets that sell the meat or the butcher's.
I mean, I'm exaggerating, but that's essentially what it is, right?
So users are the mercy of the company in a way.
For us, we have aligned incentives.
Our users are our customers.
Users will be paying to use the premium features of the app.
We are not going to resell the data anywhere.
We are not even going to collect more data than we need to collect.
And we always want to keep it that way.
I feel like from that perspective, listening to our customers will be really gold because they are paying.
They don't make decisions.
But ultimately, they will help us build a better app.
Plus, I think we have been hearing maybe every week or so one or two people will get back to us with their wish list or tell us that why something is not working for them.
Last few weeks, at least consistently, Ilya, we've been getting feedback from customers.
But I think getting to this open beta means this thing that we have been using ourselves consistently for a while, we're going to be able to battle-tested with a much bigger number of people to see if it also works for them or not, while getting great data points about
prioritization of those 50 things that are remaining, which ones are the really important ones to get to next.
So, I think you're a very good example, right?
When we first were building the player interface, we had a sleep timer on it because every other app has a sleep timer.
But then we needed that space for something else, so we dropped the sleep timer because we're like, who use the sleep timers?
Why would we listen to a podcast while going to sleep, right?
So, the three of us didn't have any concern with that.
Actually, the two of us, I think, Jenny, hasn't joined yet.
And then we said this on the podcast as well.
I said it in the user update email.
And then somebody writes, actually, no, I do follow sleep with podcasts because I listen to whatever white noise or something.
It's not even a podcast, it's just in the format of a podcast.
And then our good user, David Kudus, if you are listening, he gave us a lot of feedback as well.
And yeah, today he sent an email that he actually likes to follow sleep with podcasts.
He needs a timer.
So that kind of thing, which we sort of arrogantly thought was not needed by anyone, is actually important, at least to some users.
And that's what user validation helps to do.
Okay. So, let's wrap this up with a last segment that we always have in our podcast, which is, what are we reading and listening to right now?
Let's start with Jenny.
I have been listening to an audio book called Broken Code, which is kind of behind the scenes at Facebook.
So it connects with what Ilya said about selling a product versus selling user data.
Very well researched, excellent, interesting book.
I said earlier that my family watches the We Are I show.
One of the people on it is a person named Jonathan Van Ness.
And they have a couple of podcasts.
There's one called Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness.
And they just have a lot of different topics.
So some of them I'm not so interested in like something about how do you put on makeup or something.
But if I look at the title, about half the time I'm into it, I'm also reading a book for young people called The Wanderer.
And I'm reading that at night with my daughter.
It's by Sharon Griech, who is a newberry award winning author.
And it's about some young kids and their families sailing a ship across the sea.
And we live by the ocean.
So it's fun.
What's the skewer I show?
What platform is it on?
How do you spell it?
It is on Netflix.
It's like the word queer and then the word I. It's five people.
One does a home makeover.
One does hair makeover, food, culture and fashion.
They each have a different thing.
And it's kind of like a makeover, but it's emotional and it's really good.
It's since season eight.
And it's a reboot from a show I think from the 90s called Queer Eye for the Straight Guy from Bravo.
I guess I also recommend that for a TV show.
Yeah, that's why I asked like that sounded interesting.
We let it to the show notes.
Yeah, or if you listen to some meta cast, you can just take a bookmark and share it.
That segment specifically.
All right, Ilya, let's go with yours.
So I have not listened to many podcasts recently.
I've been listening to Alex Harmoji's podcast called The Game.
And I think what he does, he was on either other people's shows or it was some kind of like consultations that he did with people.
They almost like rapid fire, 15, 20, 30 minutes dialogues where people ask him questions and he responds to them.
It's mostly around service businesses because that's his background.
But he's just so systematic about the frameworks and how he thinks.
I love listening to him.
I discovered him maybe less than a year ago and I just can't consume enough of what he says.
He's very similar to Navale Ravi Kant, but probably much younger.
And also Navale is more conceptual.
He's like mentioned many times that he likes Navale.
He took Navale's concepts and he talks about them very tactically.
Like if you need to have a salesperson, yeah, the yeah, the yeah, the and even though we don't need this, but I still pick up some conceptual cues that might be helpful for us, especially for marketing.
He's really good.
So it's called The Game by Alex Harmoji.
I read The Elements of Style by William Strunk.
It's a classic on writing.
In 18 or 1920s when it was published for the first time, 100 years ago, he stood the test of time.
It made my writing more assertive, lovely book, 64 pages, amazing book.
Wow, it's only 64 pages.
Yes. Because he teaches you brevity and he walks the talk.
I'll also be listening to Learning Spanish with Paul Noble, I'm about four hours in, because I'm learning Spanish.
Thanks to, thanks to, to our Navale.
Yes. You're welcome.
I'm complimenting this book with Duolingo, the Duolingo teaches you more of the vocabulary, and this book teaches you more of the fluency and confidence when speaking.
So I just walk around in my neighborhood, listen to it in my headphones and talk out loud, because it's Florida at 9 or 10 pm.
There is nobody out there.
So I can just easily use the communities my playground.
So and the very last thing that just came to mind when Jenny said, you know, mention the kids book, I really got into the comic series called Bone by Jeff Smith.
I don't know if you read it, it's about this creature that looks like a human, but it's kind of white looking made out of bone or something.
I don't know the origin of it, but it's eight or nine comic books.
It's like fantasy.
So those bone creatures mix with humans and they help them and they're dragons, they're lock hosts.
So it's a lot of adventure there.
What really grabbed my attention for the first time is when I saw the cover in the library.
Neil Gamer himself, who wrote Sandman, so he said that Jeff Smith can hold the joke to keep you turning the pages or something like that.
I'm like, wow.
So if Neil Gamer says this, I have to check it out.
And I've been reading with my younger one, he doesn't understand it because he's too young for this, but I like compress.
I know the meaning and I just tell him this story, but you look at pictures together.
And it's one of those old comic books that are nothing like dog man comics.
They are drawn really, really nicely, probably by hand on paper back in the day, because it's from the 90s.
So yeah, I can't recommend this enough even for adults.
If you like comic books, that's an amazing comic series.
I'll piggyback quickly on the Paul Noble book.
So that learning Spanish and there is a second thing called next steps in Spanish.
Awesome books.
I was telling you earlier, but I'll say on the podcast too.
I think you'll say possum books.
Awesome books.
That's the name of a publishing company.
Talking about possums, dual, lingo, gives you, I feel like the vocabulary.
I don't know.
I'm probably about 2500 words.
And those words stick to you, right?
Like you immediately remember once you have practiced it enough with dual lingo, what they mean in what context to use all that.
What it doesn't give you is the ability to have a conversation enough, fluent way with a person who speaks Spanish.
And I think this is where this book shines is it's all about conversations and the confidence that you get out of it.
So Paul Noble is actually a language professor somewhere in the UK I'm forgetting.
He has these two books for Spanish.
There's a book on French and Italian and Japanese and all that.
So if you're learning any language and you want to very quickly become conversational in it, I'd say pick up those books and dual lingo.
And coming back to the stuff that I'm reading, since both of you talked about stuff that you've been reading with your kids, I'll start with that.
So we have the other podcast, right?
Builders gonna build for the episode three of that, which when is that coming out?
The 14th of February.
I think.
Right. So the episode of Builders gonna build podcast that's going to come up on 14th of February, the third episode is with one of my all time favorite science fiction authors called Dennis Taylor.
Dennis E Taylor.
And he has an amazing series called Bobby verse as well as a few like short, this thing.
If you want to listen to the full thing, go listen to our Builders gonna build podcast.
But because we were interviewing him on Monday, which was the 29th of January, I felt like I want to prep again.
I listened to a few podcasts with him and I heard a few things in the Bobby verse books that I had not considered before.
So I started listening to it again.
But this time with my daughter, some of the sci-fi is a bit, I think, too much for her to grasp right now.
But I am having a pretty cool bonding moment over that to trying to explain what a guppy interface is and what are these cryogenics and all that.
So in fact, you've replicated it into her.
So yes.
So that's the thing that I'm listening to or reading.
It's a book.
The second book is a book called Eleanor and Park.
It's a beautiful kind of 1980s story about two kids in high school struggling in the own ways, but bonding over it.
Beautiful story.
I've read it.
I don't know, maybe like 10, 15 years ago, but I had completely forgotten about it.
I was going through audible, saw it and I wanted to pick it up again.
And then podcasts wise, not much recently because Australian Open was going on till last weekend.
I was out of sleep.
The only thing I was listening to was that any spot cast I've kind of wrapped that up.
It was a beautiful, awesome Australian Open.
Really other than Jokovic wanted after like a decade, even though I'm a big Jokovic fan that was fantastic to see.
Cool. So it's a good segue.
Unlike Australian Open, we are going to be doing a global Open Beta.
So imagine when you can't be enjoying.
There are no winners.
We all need together.
It's not a zero sum game.
Yeah, you can help us build the app.
Well, first of all, you can download the app, go to metacast.app and depending on whether we ship or not, by the time this episode comes out, there might be either a link to download it on Apple or Google or there will be a field where you can put your email.
And the moment the app comes out, we will send you an email that it's ready for you to try.
And yeah, join our subreddit at reddit.com slash r slash metacast.app.
The link is in the show notes.
Yeah. And if you want to say hi, just send us an email at hello at metacast.com.
I've been holding that in.
We'll focus.
All right.