WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:16.000 We are talking normally at 1x right now. You want to go back to like let's say 1x again, but you accidentally tap that button so it becomes a little bit faster at 1.5x and then it goes like even faster at 1.5x and 2x and 3x and then then it slowly goes back to 0.5x. 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:51.000 We are going to do a quick few updates about the things we have added to the app in the last few weeks since the last episode came out. Then we are going to talk a little bit about a conversation we had with somebody who runs VC-backed startup and pros and cons of that side. Basically the nitty-gritty details are what we learned. 00:00:51.000 --> 00:00:59.000 We have wanted to talk about this topic for a while. We have funded it forever I think, but this conversation really triggered some reaction in us. 00:00:59.000 --> 00:01:18.000 On and off we have talked about bootstrapping vs. VC-backed basically raising funds on and off in this podcast multiple times, but this is the first time we had a very hard to heart chat with another person who is running a startup which is on the completely other spectrum from us. 00:01:18.000 --> 00:01:25.000 It did trigger a lot of reflections learnings in us so we thought it will be good to share some of that. 00:01:25.000 --> 00:01:30.000 Yes, stay tuned for this. Let's roll ahead with the app updates first. 00:01:30.000 --> 00:01:39.000 First of all, for people who listen to us for the first time, the meta-cast is a podcast app and we are running this podcast talking about how we are building the app. 00:01:39.000 --> 00:01:49.000 We have shipped a few really cool features recently. What was the feature that puts me to sleep? Like the most boring feature that you built recently? What is that? 00:01:49.000 --> 00:01:59.000 I'm going to yarn out. Can I talk about the backstory of how this came about? No, you can't. I'm going to because you're yawning. 00:01:59.000 --> 00:02:10.000 I'm going to stick that as a yes and go ahead. So we have heard a few customers tell us that they need a sleep timer in the app already. We didn't have one until very recently. 00:02:10.000 --> 00:02:22.000 But one of the things in our app is that there's a lot of variety of people listening to a variety of podcasts. By the way, we are going to bring in your listening history and all that very soon. 00:02:22.000 --> 00:02:33.000 So stay tuned for that in the next couple of cycles being big, you see. But as we started looking at who's listening to what podcasts or what podcasts are people listening to with our app? 00:02:33.000 --> 00:02:50.000 One of the things I found out a few months back was this podcast called Get Sleepy. There were a few other sleep podcasts and kind of sleep sounds people were listening to, but those were not my style. Whereas this one I found out and I found like some really good episodes of it. I really got into it. 00:02:50.000 --> 00:02:58.000 And I started using that more and more. What does this podcast? I don't think most people are familiar with the most boring podcast in the world. 00:02:58.000 --> 00:03:08.000 It's called Get Sleepy. So the goal is to tell you a story in a way that makes you fall asleep. It's a beautifully done. 00:03:08.000 --> 00:03:14.000 Oh, wait, it's actually not a white noise podcast. No, no, it's actually a storytelling podcast. 00:03:14.000 --> 00:03:19.000 Oh, no, wow. It was also a white noise podcast. That's why I was like talking to you about it. 00:03:19.000 --> 00:03:36.000 Right. No, it's fiction. So for example, right, one of the things I heard recently was having a tea in a tea shop in 1920s London. So they take you back to 1920s London, explain how everything is and who's drinking coffee or tea. Why are they drinking? 00:03:36.000 --> 00:03:45.000 What kind of tea they're drinking? But they slowly get it more and more like calm the way they speak goes slower and slower. And I love it. 00:03:45.000 --> 00:03:59.000 I feel like I listen to about 15 minutes of it before I fall asleep. So it achieves its goal. We launched another feature a few months back, which makes it hard to listen to these kind of podcasts. So let me explain what that is. 00:03:59.000 --> 00:04:10.000 We have playlist and you can keep playing from a podcast in our app. So when you play an episode, it automatically picks up what's the next episode in your playlist and starts that. 00:04:10.000 --> 00:04:21.000 Or if you're playing it from a podcast, then it'll automatically pick up the next episode from that podcast and play that. So what happens with the sleep podcast is you start playing it. 00:04:21.000 --> 00:04:30.000 And then you fall asleep and then at the end of the episode, maybe 45 minutes, 60 minutes in it rolls into another new episode. 00:04:30.000 --> 00:04:40.000 If it's from your playlist, maybe it's a completely different podcast, maybe it's a politics or sports or something. And most podcasts start with some music and all that and that woke me up. 00:04:40.000 --> 00:04:56.000 So the whole purpose of like falling asleep with the get sleepy podcast was getting lost. I told you guys immediately the next day and I figured out a few workarounds, but we immediately thought, okay, let's prioritize the sleep timer and other people had already asked for this feature too. 00:04:56.000 --> 00:05:05.000 So that was one of the things we launched last few weeks. Yeah, I want to mention another use case that people brought up. It's the white noise podcast. 00:05:05.000 --> 00:05:15.000 When we had our second child, we did use a white noise app. I think we even paid for the premium subscription. So we actually played pink noise. It has like 20 different colors of noises. 00:05:15.000 --> 00:05:21.000 Yeah, the pink noise is a bit less harsh than white noise. So there are different algorithms that generate those. It's pretty cool. 00:05:21.000 --> 00:05:34.000 And especially if you have like loud neighbors and stuff like that. So pink noise or white noise helps you make the environment more stable. Even the three is a loud sound. It doesn't startle you. It sort of gets absorbed by that cushion of the sound. 00:05:34.000 --> 00:05:47.000 So apparently somebody figured out that they could put a bunch of white noise files on the podcast host and then people listen to those. Basically, it's a white noise sound, but it's produced through the medium of podcasting. 00:05:47.000 --> 00:05:57.000 I remember you an article something like I forgot the number, but it was something like 20% of podcast listens on Spotify or white noise or something like that. And it was like, what? 00:05:57.000 --> 00:06:03.000 I forgot the number, but I remember that the number was non-trivial. It was a significant number that warranted an article about it. 00:06:03.000 --> 00:06:12.000 So that's a very similar use case to yours, especially if maybe you just want to play it for an hour and then turn it off after a while. So you don't drink the battery or for other reasons. 00:06:12.000 --> 00:06:22.000 Or you don't want to be woken up again by an ad if you don't have a Spotify premium subscription or something. Yeah. So yeah, that's the first of the three, four things we added. 00:06:22.000 --> 00:06:29.000 The second one, do you want to talk about this one? Let's go fast. Yeah, the speed control. We have one more sophisticated speed control in our. 00:06:29.000 --> 00:06:39.000 So some people like to listen to their podcast on very high speeds because they want to save time and they want to be more effective. And I never understood that. 00:06:39.000 --> 00:06:51.000 While some people like to listen to them at very slow speed so they can get each and every word or trying to aprender, you know, 00:06:51.000 --> 00:07:01.000 you have a new language. Yes, like the sleep timer was sort of an afterthought in the app, but not the sleep timer, the speed control. 00:07:01.000 --> 00:07:15.000 Because I personally never use speed control. I love listening to people as they speak with all of those new answers of speech, right. However, books, I do speed up because books is narrative and they usually extremely slow. 00:07:15.000 --> 00:07:29.000 But you like speaking things up a little bit. So we slapped on a very simple speed control that had I think four or five different fixed options like one X 1.5 X 1.75 X2X. I think 2x was the maximum. 00:07:29.000 --> 00:07:38.000 And you could tap that control. It would cycle through those options. So if you want to go from 1.75 to 1 X, you have to go like one 75 and go to two. 00:07:38.000 --> 00:07:58.000 Then it goes to 0.5 and then it goes to one. So it would go from like we're talking normally at 1 X right now. You want to go back to like, let's say 1 X again, but you accidentally tap that button. So it becomes a little bit faster at 1.5 X and then it goes like even faster at 1.5 X and 2 X and 3 X and then then it slowly goes back to 0.5 X. 00:07:58.000 --> 00:08:13.000 And so this is a perfect video to explain scubaism. You know what scubaism is? No. The scubaism is the concept of making the UI elements look like things in real life. 00:08:13.000 --> 00:08:24.000 Like you have whatever the discat for saving the file or like scissors for cutting, you know, all the stuff. But doing it in audio form audio format. Yeah, adjusting to the medium audio scuba morphism. 00:08:24.000 --> 00:08:40.000 Anyway, so that was the way it was very inconvenient as you can imagine. And then somebody reached out to us and they're like, I want to listen to podcasts at 3 X. I think it was 3 X that they asked for. Yeah, 3 X or 4 X. I think they said maybe 4 X. Yeah. And we asked them why. 00:08:40.000 --> 00:09:00.000 And if I'm not mistaken, it was that person who gave us a bunch of reasons, but not all of these reasons were actually their reasons. They also gave us a bit of research that they possess for whatever is right. What we realized is that, when first of all, some people just train themselves to consume information as efficiently as possible. It's fair. I don't judge. 00:09:00.000 --> 00:09:14.000 But then there are also people who are vision impaired or even blind people, right. And they overcompensate because they can't read. So they listen, but listening at normal speed is too slow. So for them, 4 X is just fine. 00:09:14.000 --> 00:09:27.000 Because their vision impaired, their other senses like listening is much more enhanced than other folks, right. Right. Right. Yeah. But this is like an abnormal ability due to the lack of other ability, right. 00:09:27.000 --> 00:09:39.000 To listen at 4 X and still comprehend what's being said, right. It's like a compensatory superpower that they develop. Right. And then another end of the spectrum, you have people who maybe you think a little bit slower. 00:09:39.000 --> 00:09:49.000 I think newer diversion, I think is the right term for this right now. Right. So it's just people who need a little bit more time to comprehend and they slow things down. And that's totally fair. Right. People need that. 00:09:49.000 --> 00:10:04.000 And personally, like I'm getting to the lower intermediate level in Spanish. So I'm starting to listen to simple Spanish story podcasts and things like that. But at the one X speed, it's just too much. I can hear. 00:10:04.000 --> 00:10:17.000 I can maybe understand all those words, but I can't process the thought or the meaning in real time as I'm listening. So for me, those podcasts at like 0.7 or 0.8X is just perfect. 00:10:17.000 --> 00:10:26.000 Yeah. And I think when I posted about this thing on LinkedIn, actually that post got like 50,000 impressions. I think it's really took off by our standards. 00:10:26.000 --> 00:10:34.000 So there were lots of comments on the post. We'll link that post in the show notes too. So did it go like 4 X further than your typical post? 00:10:34.000 --> 00:10:38.000 It was about 8X. 8X faster. Yeah. 00:10:38.000 --> 00:10:53.000 Yeah. There were a bunch of comments. And actually a few people said that they slow things down for language learning too, which was great validation. And I personally never understood why you need to slow things down except for listening to market reason. 00:10:53.000 --> 00:11:07.000 Basically, it's still the podcast. I feel like they speed him up. Probably have a filter that speeds here. I don't know. It's humanly impossible to speak at that speed. But anyway, learning language is a totally valid use case. But anyway, so we have this new speed control that has a very nice slider. 00:11:07.000 --> 00:11:13.000 And some predefined options. It's really nice. It became a first class citizen in the app. 00:11:13.000 --> 00:11:18.000 It needs more, but that'll come later for now. I think it's in a pretty good state. 00:11:18.000 --> 00:11:25.000 Right. We need to do a little bit more to let the user set the default speed. They want to listen at so they don't have to change it every time. 00:11:25.000 --> 00:11:37.000 Default speed plus the way I am using podcasts. And I think we've heard it from other users also is some podcasts. You find them either too slow or too fast. 00:11:37.000 --> 00:11:44.000 So you just want all episodes from that podcast to be played at a specific speed, which is a valid use case. Yeah. 00:11:44.000 --> 00:11:56.000 Yeah, make sense. We heard a really cool input from one of the people on LinkedIn post who said that wouldn't it be nice if the speed adjusted based on who is speaking. 00:11:56.000 --> 00:12:02.000 So like if you have Mark and recent talking to somebody else who talks very slowly, either option will not work. 00:12:02.000 --> 00:12:10.000 We probably have to go it like one X maybe 1.25 X or switch back and forth. It would be really nice if it actually was able to adjust. 00:12:10.000 --> 00:12:23.000 Yeah, even nicer would be if you set it to like say 1.1 and the app determines that this speaker is faster and that other speaker is slower and figures out how to play both at 1.1 ish. 00:12:23.000 --> 00:12:31.000 That's the point right. So like I think it's no longer a speed per se right. It's not linear anymore. It's like it will adjust. We'll get to that at some point. 00:12:31.000 --> 00:12:46.000 Yeah, all right. Feature number three is in our playlist section. So we have this playlist called this later in the app and the use case for that is that as new episodes come out, you don't always have time to listen to all of those. 00:12:46.000 --> 00:12:57.000 And you just put them to the backlog. People in tech will understand what this means. Guess what? The backlog just keeps growing and growing and growing and nobody grooms it and it just grows out of proportion. 00:12:57.000 --> 00:13:06.000 So I think I had like 150 or something episodes in my listen later, you had almost 200. I probably have 300 at this point. 00:13:06.000 --> 00:13:20.000 So it was a huge list of episodes right. And it was really painful to find things you want to listen to because let's say if you found a really cool last episode a month ago and then another one like yesterday, there are a bunch of other episodes in between. 00:13:20.000 --> 00:13:28.000 So if you want to just listen to something from Lex, for example, it was kind of clunky to find like what are these episodes actually from that specific podcast. 00:13:28.000 --> 00:13:37.000 So Jenny coded up this really cool feature. We call it a podcast grid view. I mean doesn't really have a name in the app, but internally we call it the grid view. 00:13:37.000 --> 00:13:48.000 So you tap on that grid icon in the playlist and it creates almost like a pivot table. So I showed you all of your podcast covers that you have episodes from along with the count of the episodes. 00:13:48.000 --> 00:13:57.000 If you in the mood to listen to Lex, you just go to that view, you tap Lex and then you see all of the likes episodes that you saved for later and then it becomes a much easier task to pick what you want to listen to. 00:13:57.000 --> 00:14:06.000 That's a really cool feature that really helped me personally to find some of the older episodes that saved like a year ago. And I'm like, wow, I want to listen to that. 00:14:06.000 --> 00:14:14.000 There was a Quentin Tarantino episode. I think it was in the Rogan podcast. I haven't listened to it yet, but I even forgot to edit it there. And I'm going to listen to it sometimes soon. 00:14:14.000 --> 00:14:28.000 Right. And my use case for this is I do listen to especially right now a lot of daily news podcasts. And there's a whole bunch of them that was in my listen later playlist from months ago. 00:14:28.000 --> 00:14:43.000 That I don't care. You don't care about daily news from two months ago, two months later. So this helped me very quickly find out all those episodes and like remove them from the playlist, which actually brings us into the next few things we are going to work on. 00:14:43.000 --> 00:15:01.000 Because while we have this awesome playlist feature, we're seeing a lot of people are not discovering it or not using it. If you use the playlist in Metacas, the way it's supposed to be used, which is you open the app, you see the home screen, you see blue dots for podcasts that have new episodes. 00:15:01.000 --> 00:15:14.000 You go into them and then you swipe and add them to your listen later playlist. Now at this point, if you have added them to listen later, then they get automatically transcribed. So when you listen to it, they're like already for you. 00:15:14.000 --> 00:15:30.000 And they're also presented in a linear list. You can order it and basically if you're going on a drive or going on a long hike, you can keep playing them in order. So that's the way it's supposed to be used. But we have finding out that a lot of people are not finding out about the playlist or 00:15:30.000 --> 00:15:37.000 other features in the app. So that's going to be the next thrust of our November work. 00:15:37.000 --> 00:15:49.000 Yeah, and we also found out that I guess I want to share the numbers, but a very large percentage of people never get past the signing screen out of those who do a significant percentage, never play an episode. 00:15:49.000 --> 00:16:04.000 Like they somehow don't discover the features. We don't know what's going on there. The goal for the next month, in addition to finishing up the playlist features, we will also be working on on boarding and improving the experience of discovering the features inside that. 00:16:04.000 --> 00:16:21.000 We do know that those features are really awesome. We've been using them for a year now ourselves. I mean, most of those. But if you don't know that you can swipe, well, you don't and you never discovered that feature, right. More on that will be coming, especially as we build this, we ship this and we measure the impact. 00:16:21.000 --> 00:16:31.000 I think that will be actually the first time in the app's history where we can ship something and see how it moved the needle. It will not be an A B experiment, a B test because it's in the sample size, 00:16:31.000 --> 00:16:37.000 still too small and also it's too complicated, I think. But I think we will be able to see the before and after and it will be really good. 00:16:37.000 --> 00:16:49.000 Yeah, and we're at a place where we're starting to see. I don't want to say like an enormous number of new people every month, but a significantly good chunk of people are discovering the app every month. 00:16:49.000 --> 00:16:55.000 So we want to work on like trying to get them to use the app more and more and retain them. 00:16:55.000 --> 00:17:02.000 It's like hundreds given that we are doing any paid marketing or anything. Yeah, it's in a few hundreds, not just one hundred. 00:17:02.000 --> 00:17:07.000 Actually more than a few more than a few. Okay, let's just leave it at that. 00:17:07.000 --> 00:17:14.000 All right. So let's get to the meat of today's episode. You mean we meet somebody. 00:17:14.000 --> 00:17:21.000 We met somebody. Yes. We had a very nice hard to heart open chat. We told them about how we do things. 00:17:21.000 --> 00:17:27.000 It was pretty medium rare. Blood was coming out of that conversation. 00:17:27.000 --> 00:17:33.000 I want to connect this back to the pink noise that you somehow did. 00:17:33.000 --> 00:17:39.000 Okay, yeah, I thought the conversation itself was very nice because they told us a lot of things. 00:17:39.000 --> 00:17:44.000 So we want name because we are going to share some details that shouldn't be identifiable, right? 00:17:44.000 --> 00:17:51.000 But we spoke to someone who has a VC backed startup and early stage VC backed startup. So let's just keep it at that. 00:17:51.000 --> 00:17:54.000 In the course of the discussion, we heard some really interesting things. 00:17:54.000 --> 00:18:01.000 I appreciate the amount of detail that they went into and we also shared our side of it, right? 00:18:01.000 --> 00:18:09.000 It was kind of like I think reflections from both sides. Like you said, they're VC backed but they're raised seeds multiple seed rounds. 00:18:09.000 --> 00:18:17.000 So in total, it's close to a million dollars, which is significant for multiple seed rounds. That is pretty good success. 00:18:17.000 --> 00:18:23.000 And because of that kind of raise, they are able to go much faster. They've been able to hire. 00:18:23.000 --> 00:18:28.000 I think they have like four or five, six full time employees at this point. 00:18:28.000 --> 00:18:35.000 Different engineers compared to us three people. But because they have full time employees, they have technology. 00:18:35.000 --> 00:18:53.000 They're scaling up faster than I think we are. What I mean by that is in our case, for example, we don't want to suck in the whole podcast world and every 75 million podcast episodes that are out there and transcribe them because that would be costly. 00:18:53.000 --> 00:18:57.000 We don't have the funds to pay for this. Like we would be able to afford it. It's just not possible. 00:18:57.000 --> 00:19:09.000 Right. They're not doing this. But in their domain, something similar to this, they're taking like the top, let's say 80% of the things in their domain and doing some heavy ML work on that. 00:19:09.000 --> 00:19:15.000 And we are intentionally staying vague so that we're not exactly talking about which company and what they're doing. 00:19:15.000 --> 00:19:18.000 Yeah, they do a lot of data processing that is expensive. 00:19:18.000 --> 00:19:30.000 So they have a lot of like fixed cost every month in terms of this data processing ML algorithms and because of the scale that they're running it at, even though they're fairly new. 00:19:30.000 --> 00:19:34.000 I want to say they haven't reached product market fit yet. 00:19:34.000 --> 00:19:41.000 They haven't figured out exactly who's going to use it and all, but they have scaled it up pretty well for this early stage. 00:19:41.000 --> 00:19:48.000 Because they have five, six full time employees who are basically earning quite good salaries, normalish salaries. 00:19:48.000 --> 00:19:54.000 Their monthly fixed cost is few tens of thousands of dollars. 00:19:54.000 --> 00:19:58.000 Yeah, that includes both the employee cost and all of that data processing. 00:19:58.000 --> 00:20:06.000 But yeah, it's like several tens of thousands of dollars. It's a lot more than a handful of tens of thousands of dollars. 00:20:06.000 --> 00:20:12.000 Which means that the thing is they have raised, let's say close to a million dollars, right? 00:20:12.000 --> 00:20:17.000 But they're outflow every month is almost 8% of that or so. 00:20:17.000 --> 00:20:25.000 Which means you're run away at this strategy of having five, six full time employees at this scale is less than a year. 00:20:25.000 --> 00:20:30.000 Basically, you're going to run dry up money in less than a year at this rate. 00:20:30.000 --> 00:20:38.000 And they also took the approach where they have a paid cheer in their product, but overall the premium model similar to ours, right? 00:20:38.000 --> 00:20:45.000 And I think if you run premium, a miracle must happen for you to become profitable in a year. 00:20:45.000 --> 00:20:54.000 Because they haven't found that right product market fit yet, they are finding it very hard to raise more funds at this point. 00:20:54.000 --> 00:21:04.000 Because imagine from the perspective of the seed investors who have put in, let's say, I don't know, $300,000 or something like multiple rounds of this. 00:21:04.000 --> 00:21:10.000 Are they going to put in more money towards this without seeing that validation yet? 00:21:10.000 --> 00:21:15.000 They're struggling against this, which means that they are facing a few hard choices at this point. 00:21:15.000 --> 00:21:25.000 They're basically running out of money, so they either have to cut a lot of people and scale down their operations or in the worst case, just basically close down the shop. 00:21:25.000 --> 00:21:30.000 Right. That's a very painful position to be in as a founder, I think. 00:21:30.000 --> 00:21:35.000 Because like you said, scaling things down would investors prefer that? 00:21:35.000 --> 00:21:43.000 Even if you scale things down, you still be holding to those investors because they own sharing your company, they still have expectations. It's really rough. 00:21:43.000 --> 00:21:50.000 It's almost like a one way door, I feel like, right, taking this seed investment at that larger level. 00:21:50.000 --> 00:21:58.000 Like 100K is a different matter, I think, especially if you know the angel investor and they're okay with losing that money, I think it's okay. 00:21:58.000 --> 00:22:10.000 But million dollars is quite a lot of money, especially in multiple rounds, which shows that they have basically decided that, yes, I'm going to invest more and more into this for like three for consecutive rounds. 00:22:10.000 --> 00:22:20.000 And at that point, they're not going to be okay with you scaling things down because you're already not seeing that validation. 00:22:20.000 --> 00:22:28.000 I don't know if it's possible to scale things down. If you only have a tiny bit of money left, are you going to be operating like a bootstrapper without paying yourself? 00:22:28.000 --> 00:22:34.000 But then you still have those investors on the cap table. If you succeed as a bootstrapper, you still owe them. 00:22:34.000 --> 00:22:43.000 Yeah, not that this hasn't happened before. There are some examples of this happening, but it is very rare and it is very hard to go through all this. 00:22:43.000 --> 00:22:49.000 And I was listening to all of what they were telling us, right? I'm like, fuck, I'm whether you didn't take any money. 00:22:49.000 --> 00:22:54.000 It was just a volume from my head. I'm like, I don't want to be in this position because we could have been in the same position. 00:22:54.000 --> 00:23:04.000 Depending on how much money we would have taken, you know, all of that. I feel it's a bit weird to say that if we took that money because we don't know, like we didn't even try to be entirely honest. 00:23:04.000 --> 00:23:13.000 Like, we didn't even try to raise any money. So we don't know we could have failed. We could have spent months trying to raise money and not gotten anything out of it. 00:23:13.000 --> 00:23:32.000 But I mean, it's like, yeah, that's one scenario. We could have spent months trying to raise the money instead of building the product and not get any money or we could have gotten money and we could have succeeded and built the next big thing right next Spotify or it could have been closed down or like being this kind of slog where it's not quite working yet. 00:23:32.000 --> 00:23:42.000 But then there are still expectations and it just becomes like a day job with a lot more stress compared to like an employment plus I feel like as soon as you hire people and 00:23:42.000 --> 00:23:53.000 you start scaling things up, it's almost a juggernaut that has to keep going. It's a snowball that has started rolling down the mountain. Now you can stop it. 00:23:53.000 --> 00:24:01.000 So if you run out of money or you run out of the snow, that snowball is basically going to bust and it's all basically over. 00:24:01.000 --> 00:24:14.000 Maybe our thinking is just not the same as theirs. Maybe they're just like, oh, I want to like hire as many people as I need to validate this thing. But then if it doesn't work out, well, I'll just get rid of them and maybe use contractors. 00:24:14.000 --> 00:24:24.000 It's a valid strategy to but it requires a very different mindset, which I don't think you or I really have to operate in that fashion. 00:24:24.000 --> 00:24:34.000 I think the fundamental difference is in that one year or two year period where you have raised money and you have hired people and you're trying to like grow. 00:24:34.000 --> 00:24:42.000 What are the activities you're focused on in that one or two years? First of all, raising money that takes a lot of time and effort. 00:24:42.000 --> 00:24:50.000 Hiring people, getting them into your company, making them productive, helping them succeed, that takes a lot of effort. 00:24:50.000 --> 00:25:00.000 So I think the founders in that case are actually not focusing that much on building the actual thing, which is what is the core difference. 00:25:00.000 --> 00:25:12.000 And we've been saying it for like two years now. So I think everybody who listens to this podcast knows but Ilya and I and Jenny, we love building things and this would take us away from it. 00:25:12.000 --> 00:25:24.000 Coming to I think the positives and the downsides of our approaches, if we could hire three more brilliant people, imagine the kind of speed that we could add things that. 00:25:24.000 --> 00:25:34.000 So our outlook right now is this is a third party podcast app. This is not competing with like Apple or Spotify or something like that, right? 00:25:34.000 --> 00:25:52.000 It's going to compete with the pocket casts and overcast. If we are able to execute for like two, three years at this space, keep producing the good stuff at good quality, then maybe in two, three years, we're able to compete with some of those third party apps. 00:25:52.000 --> 00:25:56.000 Even we're able to cover comparable market share. That's what you mean by competing rate. 00:25:56.000 --> 00:26:04.000 Yeah, or maybe even a small chunk of those apps, the third party apps, but we're looking at like two, three years down the line. 00:26:04.000 --> 00:26:09.000 That makes us a sustainable business. So basically like where it all starts to make sense. 00:26:09.000 --> 00:26:23.000 Exactly. But we're still like, I want to say at least a year, but maybe even two years away from doing that, even if we're producing at the rate that we are and we keep the quality and scale of the app up. 00:26:23.000 --> 00:26:35.000 So that's a long time frame. It's a very slow process and we don't know actually at the end of two, three years if that's going to happen or not because a lot of things have to go right. 00:26:35.000 --> 00:26:41.000 You need a lot of other luck. Luck as in Google SEO is one of the luck things. 00:26:41.000 --> 00:26:50.000 Or maybe somebody sharing your things, it going viral. Those are kind of the luck things that factor into things going big. 00:26:50.000 --> 00:26:56.000 So it's going to be a very slow long process at the end of which we figure out whether it makes sense or not. 00:26:56.000 --> 00:27:08.000 But if we do, then it is a sustainable small business. Now that we've talked about it, it almost feels like the VC backed or seed backed strategy is almost like an experiment. 00:27:08.000 --> 00:27:21.000 Basically, you take this long two, three year time frame and shorten it to maybe six months or a year, you do it fast and you figure out whether it works or not and then you give up if it doesn't work. 00:27:21.000 --> 00:27:25.000 Yeah, and you also do risk yourself because you're paying yourself personally. 00:27:25.000 --> 00:27:34.000 Yeah, but I feel like it's not entirely free. Yes, you're getting salary, but the same people who are investing in you. 00:27:34.000 --> 00:27:42.000 If you have multiple repeated occurrences of this thing where you're not able to use their money, well, you're not able to give them that money. 00:27:42.000 --> 00:27:45.000 Then I'm going to keep investing in you again and again. 00:27:45.000 --> 00:27:51.000 Right. And you have to find other people to invest in you, but they also talk to the other people who were no longer investing here. 00:27:51.000 --> 00:28:03.000 Again, it's also our outlook from the side, but I think you do have to have something that had at least moderate level of success for people to believe in you outside of the company because that's a very different ballgame. 00:28:03.000 --> 00:28:22.000 Yeah, on the other hand, though, you and me and Jenny to an extent, we were okay with the bootstrapping approach because we were okay with cutting down our lifestyles or making some changes or like basically not making money for a period of years. 00:28:22.000 --> 00:28:40.000 A lot of people are not in that kind of space. So their only option is to raise seed rounds or things like that. But I think even in that case to me, it's starting to feel like the ideal position, right, for raising money would be after you have had some validation. 00:28:40.000 --> 00:28:55.000 First of all, you have more leverage. You probably have more indicators of the long term success of your product with that too. So you're going to find it easier to raise money, but also I think the acceleration that you're anticipating is going to go better with that approach. 00:28:55.000 --> 00:28:58.000 Right. Shall we move to the next section? 00:28:58.000 --> 00:29:01.000 The last section. Yes. 00:29:01.000 --> 00:29:24.000 So it's a section of what we are reading and listening to. And I do want to start first because you said something about luck. And I'll be listening to a lot of interviews with musicians. I probably think ten of them with all sorts of different guitarists, vocalists, bass players, folks, mostly from the 90s and the 80s that I used to listen to and still listen to mostly from the metal world. 00:29:24.000 --> 00:29:38.000 Like the system of down guns and roses, kidro, etc. But the reason why I want to bring up the luck thing here, I was listening to an interview with Matt Chattos, who is the singer for a bunch of sevenfold to metal band out of the kitchen California. 00:29:38.000 --> 00:29:47.000 I was playing in a small cover band for a few months in Seattle. And the guy there who was like 15 years younger than me or something, he introduced me to this band. 00:29:47.000 --> 00:29:57.000 So because those guys, they are our age, well, it's a little bit older, they were like 42, 43, 44 thing. So yeah, just give or take our age. They're amazing. I was at their show last year. It was incredible. 00:29:57.000 --> 00:30:05.000 Where was that show in Palm Beach? Yeah, it was maybe 10,000 people. It wasn't too big. It was an outside amphitheater, maybe 5,000. 00:30:05.000 --> 00:30:11.000 That's perfect, actually. I love going to that size of like not the 60,000 people experiences. Yeah. 00:30:11.000 --> 00:30:19.000 Right. Yeah, I was like three rows from the stage. It was really good. Yeah, he was on some like podcasts down over zoom. Like quality wasn't that great. 00:30:19.000 --> 00:30:29.000 It doesn't do too many interviews. I was really curious to listen to him. And he said that I think it was their third record, things called the city of evil, which he said like they expected to sell 60,000 records in the first week. 00:30:29.000 --> 00:30:40.000 It's like 300, not 300, 300 records. Basically like it flopped. And then it was like that for some time. And then I don't know what TRL is. 00:30:40.000 --> 00:30:49.000 Like a show, an MTV or something. So that show picked up another song called the bad county. It's one of their signature songs. The audience just goes crazy when they played. 00:30:49.000 --> 00:31:01.000 And he said like next week we have like 20,000, like 40,000 records, like 60,000. And then they ended up making $30,000 each from that record. He's like nobody bought houses, but it was the first real success that they did this record. 00:31:01.000 --> 00:31:17.000 And I think it went gold or something. It did hit some of those milestones like billboard gold and all that. Yeah, I think it was 2005, maybe 2007 when this was out. But that was luck. So basically they were just like whatever it's not working right. And then somebody picked it up. And it just went crazy. 00:31:17.000 --> 00:31:26.000 And then the other thing that I heard in other podcasts. So there is this band called skid row. They were just like gigantic in late 80s playing like 400,000 people cry out. I think they're guitar player. 00:31:26.000 --> 00:31:40.000 He was school friends with John Banjoe. They were the same age. They were like going to school together. So they made a pact that whoever becomes successful first helps the other guy. And then Banjoe got successful first. He got very famous and very big. 00:31:40.000 --> 00:31:50.000 Then when skid row was up in coming band, Banjoe helped them out. But then they kind of propelled them forward. Right. So it's just this kind of like lucky breaks that could really mean a step function. 00:31:50.000 --> 00:31:58.000 I hope you will have some of those two one of the method points. I wanted to make about this interviews that I was listening to. They were really hard to find because those people they celebrities. 00:31:58.000 --> 00:32:08.000 So don't just go and random podcasts, but also they sort of old celebrities. All these in like their heyday has passed. Some people like Metallica guys they could go on like the rug and podcast. 00:32:08.000 --> 00:32:18.000 There could be something there. Right. But some of those bands that are no longer popular. You have to have podcasts that really has like a diehard fan of that person to invite them. 00:32:18.000 --> 00:32:26.000 I think they are more used to the television because they are the MTV sort of era people. So lots of those podcasts are YouTube first. 00:32:26.000 --> 00:32:35.000 And some of those I had to actually listen to on YouTube because they just weren't available in the audio format. But then I got into this range. I'm like, I want to listen to interview this guy. 00:32:35.000 --> 00:32:49.000 And I basically had to Google all of those people find those interviews on YouTube and then go and find those and podcasts as well. While doing that, I actually discovered a bunch of really cool long tail podcasts that would be nowhere in your charts. 00:32:49.000 --> 00:32:59.000 Just regular guys talking to these people and pretty cool. But one specific podcast I found is like hosted by Recrubin and Malcolm Gladwell called the Broken Record. 00:32:59.000 --> 00:33:08.000 And I think they also have other people hosting the interviews. But I'm like, what they have a podcast like Recrubin and Malcolm Gladwell both together. I had no idea it existed. 00:33:08.000 --> 00:33:24.000 And so imagine just how many podcasts like that there are. And I almost see it as a mission now to given that we will have the information about what's actually being said in the podcast who the guests are to build this kind of recommendation engine that's not just feeding you crap like Tik Tok does. 00:33:24.000 --> 00:33:34.000 But more like really serving your interests in knowledge domains like of experiencing like you said it was very hard to find it should not be that hard to find. 00:33:34.000 --> 00:33:43.000 It should be just like I like skid or metallic guns and roses show me the interviews and then I can pick and choose from right now nothing of that exists like a judge. 00:33:43.000 --> 00:33:46.000 It would listen to some interviews. 00:33:46.000 --> 00:34:07.000 So one example Jason Fried we were interviewing Jason Fried I think last year at some point for our builders going to build podcast and I wanted to go and find out what are the other podcasts he has been in so I can listen and find out like what has he talked about already and we want to ask new things or maybe we want to dive into some of the things he have talked about. 00:34:07.000 --> 00:34:11.000 And I asked chat GPT. This is at least six months back. 00:34:11.000 --> 00:34:22.000 So I was like he even have to go. So chat GPT was also like much inferior at that time. So maybe things have changed but at that time it gave me very confidently a list of like five things. 00:34:22.000 --> 00:34:26.000 Okay, these are the podcast goal is into them and you'll have everything. 00:34:26.000 --> 00:34:30.000 Either the podcast did not exist at all. 00:34:30.000 --> 00:34:37.000 Or the podcast existed but there was no Jason Fried in that or Jason Fried was in there but they didn't talk about his business. 00:34:37.000 --> 00:34:52.000 He was about something else completely. Anyway, it was like a total waste of time. So and it doesn't have to be well until we build such features though because you did the hard work of listening to these episodes and you're going to put them into the show notes of this episode. 00:34:52.000 --> 00:34:55.000 If people are interested, they can find the links right there. 00:34:55.000 --> 00:35:00.000 Yeah, we move on actually on to share quotes that I heard one of those episodes. 00:35:00.000 --> 00:35:09.000 It was from Sinister Gates who is the guitarist of when Sam and fold and he said that doing anything well is the hardest thing in the world. 00:35:09.000 --> 00:35:11.000 And they just stuck with me. 00:35:11.000 --> 00:35:16.000 He was talking about his craft because he's like I don't hear about the big picture. It's like somebody else takes care of this. 00:35:16.000 --> 00:35:21.000 I just want like perfect like the harmony and all the separate. That was the context of like this craftsmanship. 00:35:21.000 --> 00:35:29.000 And he's like doing anything well is the hardest thing in the world. And I just get goose bumps when I repeat this now because he's right because he said if it was easy, everybody would be doing it. 00:35:29.000 --> 00:35:33.000 Okay. Okay, so what am I reading? 00:35:33.000 --> 00:35:39.000 Obviously right now lots of politics formula one is in a crazy season after three, four years. 00:35:39.000 --> 00:35:44.000 It's kind of an exciting season. So a lot of that. But the two things I'll talk about today. 00:35:44.000 --> 00:35:54.000 Okay. I saw a mention of an audiobook on LinkedIn. I think it was Melissa Kwan, but might have been somebody else about product positioning. 00:35:54.000 --> 00:36:02.000 This book called obviously awesome. Admittedly, I haven't gotten through more than about 25% of the book yet in about a week. 00:36:02.000 --> 00:36:08.000 But so far, I think it has set up a good because I'm a developer. I'm not a marketer. 00:36:08.000 --> 00:36:15.000 So the importance of product positioning is I think the first focus of this book. So that's done. 00:36:15.000 --> 00:36:24.000 It does promise a framework for how to go about this for any business. So I'm going to expect an update on this in the next few episodes. 00:36:24.000 --> 00:36:30.000 I'll come back on this book and give you what I think. But I'll talk about a quick one. I didn't actually write it down. 00:36:30.000 --> 00:36:35.000 So this might be a surprise for you as well. It just occurred to me when you were talking about it. 00:36:35.000 --> 00:36:38.000 Okay. Planside me. 00:36:38.000 --> 00:36:50.000 This morning, I was on Reddit and somebody asked for like, Hey, given everything that's going on today, I need some light fun listening for today. 00:36:50.000 --> 00:36:56.000 So we're recording this on November 6th, by the way. It's just next day after the US election. So the country is in shambles right now. 00:36:56.000 --> 00:37:01.000 Well, yeah, yeah. And we don't want to get into all that for all sorts of reasons. 00:37:01.000 --> 00:37:04.000 I guess I have to count reason shambles. I should say. 00:37:04.000 --> 00:37:13.000 Yeah. So which makes sense. And some of the pop recommendation there was porn my dad wrote. I think that's the right one. 00:37:13.000 --> 00:37:16.000 Okay. And apparently it's very funny. 00:37:16.000 --> 00:37:18.000 Is the podcast or is it an episode? 00:37:18.000 --> 00:37:22.000 It's a podcast. And there's a lot of episodes of it. 00:37:22.000 --> 00:37:28.000 Podcast is called porn my dad wrote. I think, but I just found it like while doing the walk right before this. 00:37:28.000 --> 00:37:36.000 And I'm using my phone to record right now. So I can't look it up. But if it is wrong, we will post the right link in the show notes. 00:37:36.000 --> 00:37:45.000 But whatever it is, the story is this. And I haven't actually listened to the podcast yet. But a lot of people said it's a very fun listen. So I am going to listen to it. 00:37:45.000 --> 00:37:49.000 I added it to my listen later playlist. So I am going to listen to it. 00:37:49.000 --> 00:37:59.000 The thing here is our app is still very small. So we have listeners. I want to say in the range of less than 100 daily. 00:37:59.000 --> 00:38:10.000 Like we said, we talked about some of this already. We didn't want to scale up and like suck in every podcast and every episode in the world because we can't afford to do that as a bootstrap startup. 00:38:10.000 --> 00:38:19.000 So what we do is when somebody goes into the app and searches for a podcast, that's the time when we go and look for it. 00:38:19.000 --> 00:38:24.000 And we tell them in the app that okay, we are importing the podcast and then we import it right. 00:38:24.000 --> 00:38:35.000 The thing that I found really interesting is this podcast was already imported. And a few of the episodes were already transcribed. That means somebody else had already listened to it in our app. 00:38:35.000 --> 00:38:41.000 And I found like, wow, that's pretty cool. That somebody else used our app to like find this and transcribe it now. 00:38:41.000 --> 00:38:50.000 I'm also using my phone to record, but I have the iOS simulator open to my computer. So I looked it up. It's called my dad wrote a porn. 00:38:50.000 --> 00:38:53.000 Oh, my dad wrote a porn. Yes. 00:38:53.000 --> 00:38:59.000 Yeah, interesting grammar decisions here. The port my dad wrote. I think it's a better sounding name. 00:38:59.000 --> 00:39:05.000 So whoever the author of this is if you'll listen to us, there could be better name. You know why I said that name. 00:39:05.000 --> 00:39:14.000 Do you remember that like about 10 years ago, there was a extremely popular Twitter account called Shit, My Dad says it was hilarious. 00:39:14.000 --> 00:39:23.000 Oh, it's like that jokes. No, it's go look it up. And I think we should probably find a link and post it here to shit. My dad says if you don't know about it, 00:39:23.000 --> 00:39:31.000 hilarious things there, dad would say it's not jokes. Dead serious, sarcastic things most of the time, but it was hilarious. 00:39:31.000 --> 00:39:36.000 So in the description of this podcast, it says that this is the award-winning comedy podcast. 00:39:36.000 --> 00:39:42.000 So apparently it's one of those podcasts that like the broken record I was talking about. Maybe it's actually super popular. 00:39:42.000 --> 00:39:49.000 We just have no idea. We just never heard about it. It's like blacks won. It didn't exist until today, but I'm going to have to listen to this. 00:39:49.000 --> 00:39:52.000 So what was the name again? My dad wrote a porn. 00:39:52.000 --> 00:39:59.000 Okay. And they have lots of episodes. Looks like they have stopped producing, but the last few episodes are best of their take. 00:39:59.000 --> 00:40:02.000 So I've added a few of those to my listen later. 00:40:02.000 --> 00:40:08.000 Yeah, they started in the best of in 2023. So last episode was in December, 2020. 00:40:08.000 --> 00:40:17.000 Yeah. So okay, that's our wrap. I think this ran longer than our 30 minutes, even though we aim to do it in 30 minutes. 00:40:17.000 --> 00:40:25.000 I think it was a good episode. Let us know what you think, especially if you have thoughts on the whole VC-backed versus bootstrapped pros and cons. 00:40:25.000 --> 00:40:31.000 Obviously, we only presented our viewpoint in it. If you have thoughts, we'd love to know about it. 00:40:31.000 --> 00:40:39.000 If you have any other pornographic podcasts, then you recommend one on LinkedIn the other day. 00:40:39.000 --> 00:40:50.000 And so on the day of the CEO, there is a podcast episode that told the big porn debate. I cringe a little bit at first, but then I listened to it and it was very educational. I really liked it. 00:40:50.000 --> 00:40:58.000 Cool. Cool. All right. So you can download the Metacast app app, Metacast.app, very easy. 00:40:58.000 --> 00:41:06.000 And there you can find links to our newsletter, our emails. If you want to tell us anything, send it to hello at MetacastPodcast.com. 00:41:06.000 --> 00:41:13.000 Or if it's about the app at feedbackappmetacast.app. See you next time. See you.