So our CEO and his incident was no one to update a bunch of dependencies before we launch.
And I can't get the audio to work at all. I first put the app, I restart my phone, and I'd get this audio spinner of gas.
And that's when I kind of like raised a flag and was like, I don't think that this is a product we should push to market right now.
Hello and welcome to episode 53 of Metacast Behind the scenes podcast. I'm your host, Arnaf Deca.
I'm Uliya Bizuos. And I'm Jenny.
On this podcast we talk about Metacast, our startups journey. On our website, metacast.app, you can find links to download the app. It's currently in open beta, as well as our weekly newsletter and links to our other podcasts that we do.
Metacast is a new podcasting app. It's in open beta right now. You can do some pretty cool things that you can't do in any other podcasting app right now, such as it's not just audio.
It lets you read and see the text and use information from inside the text like bookmarks, specific things, or share it with your friends, search through audio, pretty cool things like that.
With the help of a transcript. Yes. And there's still a lot of things to do. That's why it's in open beta. We'd love for you to check it out. So without further ado, further ado.
Usually it's a baby's that I do not others.
Okay, without further ado, so we launched our app on open beta last Friday. So we are recording this on Wednesday, 14th of February, happy Valentine's Day from the past.
But you're probably listening to it on 21st of February or some day after that in the future. So hello, happy Valentine's Day from the past to you.
But yeah, we launched the open beta on Friday, 9th of February, and we've been slowly doing some small scale marketing, and we're going to talk about how the launch went so far, what we're finding out and all of the stuff from there.
Before we go to the content of this episode, can I try something new? So I was listening to Justin Jackson's new podcast this morning.
They just launched a new podcast called podcast marketing trends. It's Justin and his friend Jeremy ends with also podcasting. And it is an interesting thing. They said, if you go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, writers review or rate us, take a screenshot, send us an email, and we will give you a free copy of my book, the pragmatic podcast.
They do something like that as well, but with some PDFs. So yeah, why not? If you want to support us, go ahead and give us rating and also get the free book for doing that.
And we're asking for an honest review and a rating. It doesn't have to be fake five stars. If you don't like it, tell us. Yeah, yeah, I'm asking for honest five star review.
And where can they email us, Ilia? Hello, at metacastapotcast.com. Right. Send that over.
So let's get started with today's topic. So in the last episode, which was 52, we talked about the craziness leading up to how we decided to do the open beta after all, what led to it.
So if you want a bit of backstory and context, go listen to that episode. Today we're going to talk about how we carried out the launch and what we're seeing since then in the last four or five days.
So we basically decided we go into open beta sometime end of January about like eight days before we did, I think eight or 10 days before. Yeah.
And then we set the launch date for February 6th because the episode 52 was coming out on February 7th. We were like, okay, maybe we should tie this together. Let's do it on the Tuesday, February 6th.
And then we broke the app on February 6th. Yeah, I just want to say we were pretty much really accepted the app stopped playing audio on Android.
I think on iOS, it was playing very often, but on Android just was working at all, if I remember correctly, because everything is kind of a bit of a blur.
We had some intermittent audio issues that we were aware of, but we were like, let's just go ahead and launch with this as is get it out there and we'll fast follow fixed these issues.
So our CTO in his infinite wisdom wanted to update a bunch of dependencies before we launched and I'm the only Android user of the three of us.
And I was writing in Slack. Y'all it is not working for me. I don't know about you, but I can't get the audio to work at all. I force quit the app. I restart my phone and I get this audio spinner of death.
And that's when I kind of like raised a flag and was like, I don't think that this is a product we should push to market right now.
So you pulled an end on court. Do you want to quickly describe what an end on court is?
Yeah, in the Japanese manufacturing process, which was met by Toyota, DPS, the other production system.
On the factory line, if a worker sees a defect in any of the parts on assembly, they have this thing. I don't know how exactly it actually looks like in the factory, but it's some kind of like a court that you pull that court and the entire assembly line just stops, just grinds to a halt.
Then they go fix the problem to prevent that from reoccurring the root cause it. And then let's how they produce defect free cars.
And the idea there is by giving the workers control over quality and kind of pride over quality and giving them the tool and also blame free culture, I believe.
So it's like you don't get blamed. Maybe if you should have pulled it that helps them make high quality cars.
For example, like you don't get blamed if you decided to upgrade everything that day before lunch.
No, that is different. If somebody pulls the end on court on somebody else's upgrades, that's the end on court thing.
So by the way, did you say TPS? Is that where TPS reports come from? What is a TPS report?
Wait, you haven't seen Office space? I haven't. You have to watch that like before this weekend. You will get all the pop culture references and TPS reports.
Okay, I'll tell my kids that yeah, instead of having a family quality time, I'm going to be understanding the quality system through the Office space.
Yeah, yeah, it's important for team culture, Ilya.
Yeah, okay. Yeah, I can make this sacrifice. Okay, but going back to this, I was thinking about it.
This kind of a thing, upgrade every possible dependency. We would never do this in a place like AWS because the risk is too high.
There's also a very rigorous release process. So all your tests, especially security related tests and all that penetration testing.
All of that have been carried out with a set of configuration or piece of software and you're not going to change that last minute before the release versus a place like now, especially for open beta with the cost and benefit ratio being that these upgrades will actually possibly enhance some of the security aspects, which it did like we use Firebase and there were a lot of upgrades in Firebase dependencies that we did, which was good.
But occasionally we have seen that upgrading things because we rely on open source software does break stuff to I think it's a fair trade off for especially our scale and size right now and the kind of guardrails, which we already have, which is Jenny listening on audio on Android to make sure that it works before we release it to other users.
It's terrifying that that is the release process.
If we did not have Jenny who is an Android user, we might not have noticed this. Even though you have an Android phone or not, you don't use it regularly. It's just a testing device.
That's after Jenny joined us before that. Remember I bought the phone soon because you would test on iOS and I would test on Android. And then now that Jenny is a full time Android user, I like, OK, I don't have to use this.
Just to note the change that you made was not being picked up in the emulator. Oh, yeah, I was just saying, thankfully I don't have to use Android that piece of junk.
So getting back to it, it's not just us who have technical problems, right? We just had a pretty major hiccup in our recording software. So if the episode does not transition from the last 20 seconds into what we are about to say very naturally like it does with us most of the time. That's why.
Yeah, and similar to our app, this podcast might lose a bit of context.
That's a very inside joke. OK, so long day, Feb 6, we figured out that audio is fairly broken on iOS and completely broken on Android. So what did we do?
I have to say this. So we were only called the three of us trying to figure something out. And then I think I mean, I was just talking and Jenny was intensely looking at her screen, just doing something like ignoring us all together.
Multi-tasking, multi-tasking.
I think Ilya, even I were actually trying to do something in Spanish. We were asking her and she was not responding.
Yeah, we were just so frustrated and tired, we just distracted ourselves with something else. And Jenny is like, I fixed it. We were like, OK, but obviously, as a man do we attributed this success to our category in the background.
Actually, that happened twice that day, where we had some really insane problems. We could not figure out what's going on. And you and I start blabbering about something and then Jenny comes back after like 15 minutes of silence and says, I fixed it.
Well, let's give some context here. I took on a task that refactored and added some things to the audio. And it has been slightly broken ever since.
So I'm very much taking ownership of trying to improve the audio because I'm not going to say that it's my fault. It just turns out that there are a number of ways these different things can go wrong. And we have to tweak a lot of things.
So we're slowly inching our way closer to more stable audio experience and to give a little bit more. So before this major change in how audio works in our app, we basically use the third party plugin to do it all.
But that plugin doesn't allow you to like configure a lot of background audio stuff, which is important for a podcasting app because you want your like car hardware buttons and maybe your Bluetooth headphones, all those like tapping and all that to work.
And so Jenny re engineered refactored the audio system. And yeah, major change minor problems.
But the actual root cause of the thing being broken the day we wanted to launch, it turned out was upgrading one of our audio plugins. And realizing that there was actually some hidden changes we needed to make otherwise it was a breaking change.
So just adding a few lines of code did the trick.
I mean, it's an open source piece of software. It's a great piece of software. It does so many complex things, but it was possibly a breaking change that requires more configuration when you change that new version that was not in the change list.
So we didn't think about it. Reading the code we figured out, okay, or Jenny figured out that we have to do this.
So I'm curious if at Amazon, let's say an engineer broke something the day before launch, the day of launch, how much extra paperwork would have to be done, explain for why it happened, root cause analysis, basically all of those artifacts that you have to create to document what went wrong.
As opposed to actually spending time fixing it.
First of all, to be clear, you wouldn't do this kind of a thing at AWS because the stakes are too high. You have customers, companies relying on AWS. So you wouldn't do this kind of change.
However, there could be operational incidents like you did something else and that broke.
And typically for doing any change in production, there is a very rigorous change management process.
So you do have to write up what you're going to change, what you're going to do. If it breaks, how are you going to roll back and everything must have a rollback procedure.
But even then, sometimes things do happen. And in that way, I really actually like Amazon's correction of error, COE process.
And Google has probably something similar every company does.
They call them also another three letter acronym. They call OMG's.
Oh my God.
Yeah, nobody ever says, oh my God. Actually, maybe they're actually might stand for something else. I don't know.
But they called OMG's an assistant. It's called OMG.
What I like about that process is again, it's blameless.
It's not about who did what, but more about what allowed like either process or software or something allowed this thing to happen in the first place.
Rather than somebody doing something that broke something.
I don't know if the difference between that two kind of makes sense. But let's put it this way.
A few years back, there was a humongous Amazon S3 outage turns out it was because a single engineer ran one command line thing that did something we want to get into the details.
If you want, you can look up S3 outage of 2019 or so. Basically, the whole internet was done.
I think it's public. Yeah, it was a tens of thousands of instances were removed by that single type of in the command.
And then suddenly the internet was down for like a day or so because of this.
But that engineer is still at Amazon or it was when I was there and was doing well.
And it's because the process is not about blames or mistakes. It's about what do we do?
What do we change in the process so that a single person cannot run this kind of a command ever again?
Incorporate is important to have visibility.
And time to get in promoted comes. People should know you. So this person probably has a lot of visibility.
War stories, yes.
What are some other ways we broke that because that was not all.
Yes. Eliya, do you want to talk about this one quickly? Sure.
So again, the infinite wisdom of our CDO wanted to make sure that we protect our back end from unauthorized access, which is a very commandable goal.
To enable AppCheck.
Well, if this is only my infinite wisdom, I would worry.
No, I was just challenging my inner journey here using her words.
Yeah. So AppCheck is this actually, I don't know if it's the package or it's more like a system configuration.
You can almost consider it like a proxy kind of system that protects fire based back end as well as you can use it to protect your third party back ends to from your app or web usage.
Yeah. So we thought we should enable this before we launch. It is reversible, but it is a brick and change.
And it might take 15 minutes to see that it broke another 15 minutes to undo it. So it is a downtime.
And it was reversible for three of the four things we use, but not reversible for one thing, which was probably the most crucial thing for apps is authentication.
So yeah, we turn it on and guess what? It broke.
We were considering actually turning it on later on in production, but because we had a bit of extra time, we decided to turn it on before we launch.
And well, thank God we did.
I think it took us a couple of hours of fiddling and testing to figure it out.
Again, our city of figured out very, very quickly within five or ten minutes, I think.
But it took probably another few hours to get the change into the app, rebuild the app, test it, and all that.
But yeah, we are sure glad we did it before we launched because it would have broken everybody exactly the same way, but we would have more users.
Or it would have been a very expensive upgrade process to do this.
Why would be an expensive process?
Expensive by time, right?
Yeah, expensive as in once you release the app, it's public, it's available.
You wouldn't want to do this kind of a change directly on that app and on that backend.
So the process would most likely be setting up a different backend, turn it on there, make sure the app can talk to it, and then turn it on in your real backend, the production backend.
So it would have taken a lot more time and a lot more effort to do this kind of a change later on.
But setting up this whole development environment and all that that would have taken probably a few days.
Yeah. Okay, after that, I think it was pretty smooth, right?
Yeah, after that was just grinding through some of the things we have did it the site, we also enabled the open beta stage in tram line, which is our CIS Deep Pipeline Software, tramline.app.
I think it's their address.
So anyway, we will link tram lines from the show notes.
Tramline is awesome, also done by our friends, well, our nubs friends, now our friends because we love them.
And we also had an episode with them to talk about their other product.
We wrote a few updates for Reddit, yeah, it was basically just like grinding through a bunch of these updates.
And then on Friday, I think we had the links finally up, but that's what I found interesting.
So we had version 56, which was functional, but it had a viewer bug with a playlist, but we shipped it to open beta anyway.
And Apple approved it within the same day.
We did a few hours, I think, like a couple of hours.
But then version 57, which had the fix for that little bug, it took probably three days.
I think we submitted it on Friday and then on the weekends nobody was working, I don't know, because sometimes we get reviews on weekends as well, but not this time.
And then it was only approved on Monday, I think.
Yeah, there's like some manual review always happening on Apple's idea.
Yeah, did we even have to wait for Google to review anything?
No, Google only does configuration level reviews.
The actual app changes looks like it's automated testing because every time we submitted, we do see Google users that we've now figured out that they're like test users, not humans, bots, signing into the app, doing things.
And just to make sure that the app is functional.
Yeah, so the other thing that we found puzzling is that being in beta on Google Play Store basically means that you just show up in the Play Store and anybody can download the app.
There's a quarter, we said it to 1000 users right now.
So if more than 1000 users use the app, I don't know if it will not show up or if it will not be able to download it.
I don't know how it's going to work, but it was surprising that anybody can just go to the app store and just find it.
But that's how Google Play just looks.
Like you can search for Metacast or you can search for like podcast player and in that it'll show up.
And there is a very small disclaimer saying this is in a beta or something like that, right?
Which is actually we wrote that it was not Google doing anything automatic to show that.
Yeah, so you put the word beta right in the title.
Whereas with Apple actually, it's almost the opposite.
They give you the link that has very clear instructions, but you have to install test flight, which is an app that Apple acquired already about 10 years ago.
And it used to be a third party app that lets people like us distribute private apps in test mode right before they released the app stores.
So yeah, people have to first install test flight, then they click the link and then they are able to install.
And it kind of expires after 90 days.
So it's very tightly controlled.
Whereas with Google, it just feels like free for all.
I don't know which approach I like more.
Google is definitely easier for the user.
Apple feels like it just gives a bit more control to us developers.
And maybe a bit of safety angle too, because Apple's beta software on iOS, you basically cannot install unless you go through the hoops of installing test flight and acknowledging that this is beta software and you're taking on the risk of installing it.
Whereas Google says almost accidentally you can search for something, find something that's in a beta, not even in production and install it without knowing it.
Right.
So Apple also you have to have the link. If you don't have the link or the code for test flight, you can find it, you can discover it.
Yeah, I think different philosophies to running different sorts of app stores, that's all fair game.
Alright, let's talk about the marketing site.
Like what did we do after the soft launch?
Yeah, I think it was Friday afternoon.
I wrote a short post about how crazy this week was and congratulating our thousand logic metacast to open beta with all the links.
It got 6.7000 impressions, which is pretty good. You can measure the clicks in LinkedIn.
Yeah, it sent out a newsletter on Monday.
So yeah, that wasn't Friday, right? The LinkedIn post on Monday sent out a newsletter.
We have just under 400 subscribers, generally about 50% of those open our newsletter.
So give or take 200 people would have seen the email.
Yeah, but then unexpectedly we also got mentioned on a newsletter called PadNews.
And we learned about it because somebody wrote a huge comment under our read post saying that they've downloaded the app and they had a couple of questions and reports to make about the app.
The person mentioned that they learned about us on the newsletter.
So we asked them for a link and then we found the app.
There's a small mention, but apparently you know people read that and they found us this way, which was pretty cool.
Yeah, so far basically I think every day I've been posting something and mentioning metacast in my LinkedIn post.
So that gets a bit of traffic and we still have 300 people who enter their emails in our landing page that we have not reached out to.
I do want to get the audio in a better shape before we start reaching out to those people.
To be fair, I think of those 300, there's probably some that already are on the beta, but there's still a good amount of people.
And then our personal networks and all that will reach...
Yes, yeah. And then I have a rant about this.
I recently came across a screenshot or a short video where people are talking about this tool called Tapleo that helps you automate your social media engagement.
And you can like DM multiple people with a predefined message.
All that kind of stuff. And I was looking at this and I'm like, okay, so this is the emails spam but for social.
I think you mentioned it on LinkedIn itself, but there are LinkedIn browser extensions that will basically increase your engagement by replying to whatever post you're seeing and using AI to generate a comment.
And those comments are usually very easy to tell apart that these are AI generated comments.
Yeah, they would be something like, yeah, generated comments are very easy to tell in the Raspersial tools to detect them.
What other means do you think we could use to detect AI generated comments?
That's exactly the structure that they use. They're purpose what you said and ask a question.
Yeah, it's a hook. It's just so lame because now everybody knows they're AI generated.
I was thinking maybe we should use a tool that would automatically send those people an email, something like, no, that was Tapleo, but for email.
But like, there's something wrong about it. I think the energy of using an automated tool to send 300 emails.
I don't like it. So I'll probably start with maybe like top 50. I'll just say take 50 email addresses and actually manually send in the emails.
And see what the response rate of that will be.
I think it's this scale I can afford to spend an hour and a half to just send everyone an email. I mean, it will be the same copy-pasted text, but I could probably deduce the names from the email addresses and just send it from my account.
We see how that works. There's another thing that is not a rant. We were looking at this software called Fondo for taxes.
I think I entered my email there to get a discount or something. And I got an email supposedly from their CEO. So it's named by the CEO's name.
And that email looks like it's personal email and it ends with something like, let me know if blah, blah, blah, right?
And I just ask him a question in response to that email. Well, it's been about a week. I haven't heard it back yet.
And that's what I don't like about this kind of personalized emails that make you believe they are personal but they're not personal.
That's why I have this hesitation of using an automation tool for just a couple of hundred of emails.
For our scale, yeah. Personal purchase is probably for our scale. Yeah.
Obviously, if you have like 5,000 or more, like you can't possibly do this with a couple of hundred, you can.
But at that point, like, would you want to make that email feel like a personal email? That's another choice to make.
That's another thing. Right. You can make it impersonal because it is impersonal. But if you try to fake it being personal, that's what I don't like.
Yeah. Okay. So it's been like a handful of days since we launched it. Let's talk about a few numbers.
I'm going to check out prep more numbers for this recording. So just yesterday, often when I started working on a dashboard, I mean, we had a dashboard.
I guess maybe let's talk about the stack there because we use Firebase and we use Google Analytics for events.
Actually, both of these have very nice integration with BigQuery. We have a feed of all analytics events in the BigQuery.
They all anonymize and all. And then in BigQuery, we can make reports on that data.
And then we try to use local studio, the free version of it for visualization of that data.
When I do something simple, it works. Something simple means like a simple chart or a simple table.
But I was trying to do something more sophisticated. And I didn't like that basically made me conform. The way I like to do reports, I like to have a view that has a bunch of data in there.
And then I can just like slice and dice it in different ways. It's almost like I get a lot of data into the same table.
I use something like PivotTable functionality to get different insights from it.
Local does not work that way, unfortunately. So I would have to write multiple almost like purpose-built queries to get the data that I needed.
And I discovered that in Google Sheets, you can actually connect a BigQuery source. And then in Google Sheets, you can use PivotTables.
And then with PivotTables, you can do charts from them. And I started doing what I really enjoyed doing in both Amazon and Google.
I set up a bunch of Sheets that have different representations of that data in PivotTables. And they have one sort of huge dashboard sheet that just pulls the data from all of those other sheets.
So I can have all of the numbers in the same view in a very nice spreadsheet format that can be easily formatted and moved around. And you can build charts from it.
So yeah, I started working on that, but I haven't finished.
But what we are seeing now, after launching the data, we had about 20 users on average or so using the app. And coming back to the thing that you said before our nav, every time we submit to Google, Google Play Store, we have these fake users signing up to the app, creating some activity in app.
So it's some kind of testing. If you look at Firebase reporting, it would show you we have something like 170 users or something. It's a very big number compared to what we actually have.
I think more like 250 or so. That's what it shows.
Whereas what I think we should be measuring is more like active listeners. So people who started playing an episode, but can also play an episode.
So I guess it's going to be an error built in there. So yeah, I looked at a number of episodes, people play and also people who play at least one episode. So an active user is defined as a person who played at least one episode during the day.
And also we look at a completion of episodes, which indicates that people actually stick around and use that.
So I haven't built anything more sophisticated yet. But yeah, what we saw is about 20 users, about 40 episodes that they start, about like 25, 30 that they finish, which is much more than we used to have before we launched the open beta.
I'm looking forward to actually building out the dashboard in full. And by the time this episode comes out, I think we should include a couple of graphs into the newsletter so that I can share those numbers.
And maybe the next episode we could actually go over a little bit more because there's a lot of metrics like what are we trying to measure? Why are those things important to us and all that?
I think that would be an interesting part.
Yeah, also another meta point here is when we first set up the integration, the BigQuery, I built a few dashboards, which sort of made sense at the time during the close beta time.
But they were also hypothetical because we barely had any usage. And now that we have actual usage, I'm starting to rethink what kind of metrics you want to look at, what kind of shape the reports should be in.
Whereas if you do it theoretically, it's almost guaranteed that you will have to redo what you've done.
I think it's a good insight for the future that it's best to think about what events you want, instrument them, and then actually have the data and then use the data to shape it into the format you want.
As opposed to trying to predict everything in advance.
The other, I think the Reddit people joining the subreddit and engaging that has also been pleasantly surprising.
It's nothing astronomical, which we never expected anyway. But it's been pretty cool, right, to see about 30 people also so far have joined.
There's some chatter in the Reddit posts and all that.
Yeah, we have 32 users last time I checked, but they said it was an 11,000 percent growth from the three members we had.
Maybe that's how we should start our LinkedIn post like we grew our community 11,000 percent.
Yeah, one more quick step I was just looking at analytics is looks like the Android versus iOS playt is almost even at 50, 50 now.
Although some of that is probably contributed by the Google automatic testers, which don't seem to happen on iOS.
That's cool because we had very few one or two only Android users still now.
So what is some feedback that you learned so far?
One thing is feedback also has been coming in from many different channels.
We've got emails, we've got Reddit, you have received telegram, I received WhatsApp feedback over emails.
So they're like coming from all sorts of angles, which is cool. It's great to see all that.
Yes, people sending us DMs, people who know us.
Yeah, that's going to both blessing in the course. It's great to have all those.
It's just difficult to share them with the team because you can't just send them a link.
In terms of actual feedback, I think somebody mentioned to you that the phone was heating up and then another person also said,
and we had never heard or experienced this ourselves. So that was brand new.
Yeah, today it was heating up as well for me, but I was listening to the podcast while also being in LinkedIn.
So I actually don't know which app caused the overheating, but when I looked at the screen and put it down, it became cool again.
Yeah, this will be interesting things for us to also diagnose because none of us have a background in app development.
This is the first time we're doing something like this. So I'm super excited to tackle these kind of things.
The other thing I kind of felt is even on Monday, we were a bit hesitant.
Like, should we send out this to the newsletter or not because there were still intermittent issues with the audio, right?
But I think looking at some of the analytics data, at least feels like there is a good number of people actually starting or that had used it already by that day,
had played episodes, completed episodes and all that. So we decided to ultimately just send the newsletter anyway.
So now that we've launched, I really like how Amazon was putting this.
Launch is just day one. Launch is just the beginning, even though you might have put months or even years into building the thing,
it only starts when you actually launch. And that's how I feel now, because yeah, all of the effort that we've put in is all great, but now is the moment.
Not necessarily moment of truth, now is the moment when it all starts in terms of like, it meets the reality.
Is what we built what people actually want. One more realization I had after launching.
So we have been working on this from about what March, I think March, that was the first commit for the app March last year.
End of March or so. Do you remember, Ilya?
I remember that in March, we had a demo that we used for the white combinator.
Right, or maybe it was February then February and when we started probably it's almost a year. But throughout this thing, very early on, it was completely bare bones, right?
Like you couldn't browse different podcasts, you couldn't find anything. It was basically what we had put in there.
The interface itself was quite janky. There was a lot of gimmicky hard-coded stuff just for the demo, I think.
But over time, until now, I had never thought about how does it feel in the user's hands.
And two things change. One is the marketing, the Metacast.app website, the image that you put in there.
I am H.O. in my humble opinion, it looks great. But also like two or three people have told us that they really like the look and feel and how the information flows and all that.
And that kind of finally made me realize that this is actually a real app. Now it's not a personal experiment or hobby thing anymore.
Yeah, I've personally become hypersensitive to little bugs now even more.
Because previously we'd be like, whatever we haven't launched yet, we can leave with that.
But now every time something happens and a bunch of things happen now because it's fairly unstable right now.
I always have this at the back of my mind. Would this be a trigger for somebody to say, okay, I'm done with this.
And then I'm going to move to something else. Just because people have different tolerances for bugs and all.
Of course it would be, right? We are kind of personally invested in it, but most people are not.
So yeah, basically for us right now, these stability issues are the number one priority because audio fails every now and then.
Then the app loses state every now and then which can be really annoying actually today was searching something.
And it lost state basically it went from me typing something in search back to home screen.
So I lost all of that progress of typing. It was very annoying.
These little things they happen every now and then. And this is just core functionality. They have to be fixed before we go on to like build cooler stuff.
Right. And I think some of these things are very hard to debug because they are intermittent. We can't really see them on our devices or in emulator.
So that's also the next setup things we're doing is to add more diagnostics features to the app.
Yes, one of the things that we'll be doing actually, I don't have you already built it or not.
It's kind of semi built about 60%.
Yeah, basically we'll have a feature to enable logging.
The user can choose to enable logging and then send us those logs. Obviously we're not forcing this onto everyone.
So it's only if you want to help us troubleshoot something you can opt into this.
That's something that we are learning with the mobile device. It's a computer in somebody else's hand that the app runs on.
Especially in Android, there are so many different devices and it's just almost impossible to get hold of the logs.
So we need to have some tools in place.
And Jenny has fixed a lot of like the current problems already in a PR so that should go out very soon.
So yeah, let's hear from Jenny because Jenny, you've been quite quiet today.
We are going to our favorite section of this podcast.
Maybe we should just have a podcast, book recommendations.
That's not what it's going to listen to that.
So yeah, Jenny, what are you up to now in terms of content consumption?
I am listening to the Elon Musk book on audio book from the library.
It's about 20 hours or so.
I'm listening to it at 1.7 speed.
And I have three weeks to finish it.
So I've told my company the two guys I work with that I'm actually not using the medicast app very much right now because I got a crank through this book.
So I'm listening to that and then my daughter has a little bit of an entrepreneurial streak and she wanted to start a banana bread business.
So last night we watched an episode of Shark Tank.
I've never seen it before, but it gives her a little bit and me.
All of us, my family, a little bit of insight into company building, funding, different things that investors are looking for.
I don't know, it's kind of interesting.
Yeah, it's a very different perspective than I think even what you'll normally find in investment circles.
I mean, literally it's called Shark Tank because of a reason, right?
In terms of podcasts, so Vision Pro launched I think about a week ago now as of this recording.
So there's been a bunch of podcasts.
The HardForg podcast has had it.
Brand McAle's tech meme has covered it.
So I've been going through all that trying to figure out so far it sounds intriguing.
If I had like $3,500 plus tax to like spare on a version one, probably half not working device, I would.
But yeah, it sounds so far pretty interesting.
You see the Zuckerberg video where he talks about Quest vs Vision Pro.
Not yet. I just saw a mention of it this morning. I have not seen it yet.
Yeah, I saw it enough time in my feed that I decided to watch it today.
It's about three minutes. It's actually quite interesting.
I mean, obviously he says that Quest is better than Vision Pro.
But he said a quote. Sounded like he made it up, but apparently somebody else said this before.
The best way to predict future is to invent it.
I love that. That's why we are on a quest to build Metacast.
Our vision is very pro.
Oh my god, yeah. That's an Apple Lava code.
And then the other thing I've been reading is an audiobook called The Midnight Library.
It's incredible. I don't usually read this sort of stuff.
It's more of, I think, philosophy and things like that.
If you have a bit of, like, science fiction plus philosophy nerdism in you, I think you would really enjoy this book.
It's about the state between life and death.
And it's portrayed as if there is a place, a midnight library where you go to, and basically every book in there is a decision in your life that you would have taken differently.
And how your life would have turned out differently.
It's amazing.
Nice. Who is over?
Matt Hague, I think. I'll look it up.
Is it modern?
Yeah. It's like contemporary.
Maybe 15, 20 years back, that's about it.
Yeah. Matt Hague, yes.
It's incredible book. And it's got really good reviews too.
Cool. Yeah. So I've not been reading much recently.
I'm still trying to finish the Children of Dune book, which is the third book in the series.
I had to, like, look into the plot because it's so interesting, but I don't have enough time to read it.
Yeah, apparently one of the people that returned into the sandworm at the end.
So I'm actually looking forward to reading this because that takes this science fiction slash fantasy to the next level.
Also, I had one podcast discovery this week.
There's a podcast called Acquired. It's very popular. I heard about it, but I never listened to it.
But their host David Rosenthal was on Justin Jackson's Build Your Sass podcast.
That's how I got to know about it.
So I listened to their interview. Then I listened to the interview with Jensen Huang, who is the founder of NVIDIA on Acquired Podcast.
And I really liked the way these guys, they have done three episodes on NVIDIA where they break down NVIDIA, they do all of the research.
So they said they've done about 500 hours of research on NVIDIA.
And then they got to interview the founder himself. So their questions were very prepared.
In a way that they don't need to be around the bush. They know so much about the company that they can go really deep.
I really enjoyed that. And I really enjoyed hearing Jensen Huang talk.
I didn't know who he was until recently. He's very wise man. I really liked listening to him.
Acquired is actually one of my favorite podcasts. Their episodes are incredibly in depth. They're very long usually.
My favorites are the Costco one was amazing. Like I didn't know about how Costco came to be and how much of an influence.
All of these like Kmart, Walmart, Costco, how much they've had across the industry.
And the other one I really liked was the Nintendo story. They go all the way back like 100 years and start from the beginning.
In fact, that's the episode I used to demo our app at the last Vancouver launch event in like end of January.
That's nice. Yeah, they also speak very clear. So the descriptions work pretty well.
Oh, they had an interview with Charlie Munger. That was the very first episode I listened to their podcast.
But they were sitting in the restaurant. It was just a few months before Charlie passed. So he was 99 years old.
And his speech has this kind of crackly kind of sound like old man's speech. And I could barely understand anything that he was saying.
So I actually ended up not finishing the episode. But I was impressed that these guys must be big deal if they talk to Charlie Munger.
I remember this because they mentioned Costco. I think Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, they invested in Costco or John.
And they had a conversation about Costco.
I think Charlie Munger or Warren Buffett has some famous quote about Costco and investing in it. I'm forgetting the exact thing.
It wasn't a Costco episode though. Cool, cool. Yeah. It was a great low energy but she'll kind of episode onwards and upwards.
And upwards to our beta to the top and right. Hecky stick. So yeah, again, I don't have enough energy to tell people to leave us reviews and reach out to you.
But if you're soliciting to this, please do. Yeah, you can find us on metacast.app. And there you can find all the links to our newsletter.
And this podcast, the other podcast we have called builders gonna build. And of course you can send us an email at hello at metacastpodcast.com. See you next week.