WEBVTT 00:00:00.048 --> 00:00:14.576 Hello, and welcome to the quick update about Metacast. I almost feel like we need to introduce ourselves now because it's been almost two months now. Well, no, a month and a half since we published the last one. Oh, yeah. Was it mid-July? 00:00:14.576 --> 00:00:25.984 It was like July 25th or something, I think. Anyway, it's been a while. And so, yeah, let's get to business really quick. 00:00:25.984 --> 00:00:30.079 Because I think this episode will be more like a 15-minute episode rather than... 00:00:30.079 --> 00:00:44.192 10 minutes like we usually do. We'll try for 15 minutes, but we haven't talked in like a month and a half. I mean, you and I have talked, but we haven't recorded in a month and a half. So it might be more like 20 minutes. Let's try for 15 minutes. 00:00:44.192 --> 00:00:57.039 The month of August was pretty hectic because I had some personal issues. Basically, I sent you a message that I'm taking the month of August off, starting immediately. 00:00:57.039 --> 00:01:07.343 And you thought I was going to quit Metacast because you were up in the mountains or something and you misread it. How stressful was it? 00:01:07.343 --> 00:01:22.031 No, I think I was in Quebec at that time, enjoying some joie de vivre, 10-day break. I also had some time off in August, right? The morning, we were about to go somewhere on that day on a hike or something, and I saw that. 00:01:22.031 --> 00:01:37.823 kind of quickly read it and I was depressed like the whole day because I also didn't want to like tell my uh wife or daughter about this because i thought that you're basically saying that okay i can't continue anymore um 00:01:37.823 --> 00:01:47.936 But I was like super depressed. Then next day or a couple of days later, I think we talked and then it became clear that, okay, you're just talking about August. And I was like, phew. 00:01:47.936 --> 00:02:00.287 Yeah. So yeah, August, we almost didn't talk and I almost didn't do anything. I squeezed some work here and there, but it was mostly you were the lone hero working on the app. 00:02:00.287 --> 00:02:16.895 Well, actually, you were always still on here working on the app. But yeah, the web app was sort of... being stale well we did some work minimal whatever we had to do we'll talk about it a little bit later but yeah we didn't add any big things in august yeah 00:02:16.895 --> 00:02:26.063 Right, so we also wanted to give a quick business update in this episode. We usually don't do that unless there are big changes, but actually there was... 00:02:26.063 --> 00:02:38.223 a significant change. There has been a significant change in the last month and a half or so. We grew by, I think about like, we added probably about 50 new customers in just a few weeks. 00:02:38.223 --> 00:02:52.127 Pain customers, I mean. So we're now at about 160 pain customers and about 60 trials. So the trials thing is an interesting thing because all new pain customers come to us through trials. 00:02:52.127 --> 00:03:02.927 Unless it's some kind of sale. So usually it's a two-week trial and then it either converts or it doesn't. And for a very long time we were hovering about... 00:03:02.927 --> 00:03:16.783 at around 20 active trials at a time. I thought it was more like 15 to 20-ish. It was like 15 to 20-ish. And it was actually pretty depressing because we also didn't understand where they were coming from. 00:03:16.783 --> 00:03:31.919 We just knew there was this constant stream of field trials. The conversion rate was pretty good. I think we had about, what, like 50% conversion rate at that time? 50% conversion rate, yeah. But then... starting mid-August or so, the trials 00:03:31.919 --> 00:03:44.639 first doubled, then tripled. So now we have 60 trials on a regular basis. I think it was like 50 last week. This week, it's about 60. So it keeps growing. 00:03:44.639 --> 00:03:52.336 we've noticed is we saw the direct correlation between traffic on our website and 00:03:52.336 --> 00:04:06.639 new users. And we have specific instrumentation to track anonymously, obviously, when people click the download buttons, like the App Store or Play Store buttons on the website. And so we have this graph that overlays 00:04:06.639 --> 00:04:18.704 both the clicks and the new users. And the pattern matches almost exactly, except those days where there are some events where there are more users than clicks because the users come from other places. 00:04:18.704 --> 00:04:33.072 And this trend is also reflected in Google SEO reports and as well as what we're seeing in referrers via ChatGPT and all that, right? Yeah, we all started to get some traffic from ChatGPT too, which is pretty awesome. 00:04:33.072 --> 00:04:46.415 Obviously, it's nothing compared to Google, but we are finally starting to see the SEO paying off after, I want to say, at least six months after we started really investing in it, maybe even more. 00:04:46.415 --> 00:04:52.783 And we are just starting to tap the potential. So hopefully it will be like hundreds. 00:04:52.783 --> 00:05:09.744 and hundreds of new users coming from that channel. But we also saw the conversion rate going down with that. Yeah, which is pretty, I think it is to be expected. As the number of trials increase, the conversion rate will decrease, but it's still... very healthy compared to most apps I think so yeah 00:05:09.744 --> 00:05:24.175 Yeah, I feel like the quality of leads, so to speak, right, changed. Because I think previously people were maybe more motivated, people who are coming in. Now it's just like random people who would look into podcasts and click the button. 00:05:24.175 --> 00:05:38.384 And maybe it's not what they expected. Right. They don't know anything about Metacast. Exactly. Right. They just see the thing and they try it. And if you are one of those users who tried it this way, you know, welcome. We love you. 00:05:38.384 --> 00:05:51.103 Thank you for being there. Yeah. So at this point, what we have about 160 paying customers, like you said, about 60 new in trial addition to that. 00:05:51.103 --> 00:06:05.487 Active users is a bit tricky. We're just using our subscription and app opening data, but it looks like about 1,100 active monthly users right now, which is also a pretty big improvement. 00:06:05.487 --> 00:06:15.711 before from before so yeah it's looking promising yeah i mean i think we crossed the thousand just last week like a week ago i think yeah 00:06:15.711 --> 00:06:28.351 yeah because for a long time it used to hover around 400 500 active um sometimes go up to like 700 or so but again climb down but it's been a good trend recently and i think 00:06:28.351 --> 00:06:42.639 So this all translates to what in dollars, it's still not nowhere near sustainable, the business, but the trend recently is good. We're at about 275. 00:06:42.639 --> 00:06:56.848 USD monthly recurring revenue, MRR, which means we could probably buy the new AirPods Pro 3 that's coming up, like just launched yesterday. We could buy. 00:06:56.848 --> 00:07:11.088 one every month. Yeah. If we don't pay any of our other bills or don't want food or anything else. If you didn't have to pay any of our other bills, you're right. Or we could fly to Vancouver to Los Angeles with Spirit Airlines and back. 00:07:11.088 --> 00:07:23.711 In spirit there. Cool, cool. I mean, that's sort of tangible, right? When we had like $20 MRR or $30, it feels like... 00:07:23.711 --> 00:07:36.543 Yeah, we can just get the coffee. But now it feels like, actually, what is it? Let's say it's 300 MRI, right? Divided by 30, it's 10 bucks per day. So yeah, it's like two lattes. 00:07:36.543 --> 00:07:48.447 Well, a latte is more like $8 now these days. But it's like at least two cheap coffees and a cookie to share per day. 00:07:48.447 --> 00:08:03.151 You know, sometimes we use RevenueCat for our subscriptions management. In there, I change it from like USD to Canadian dollars just to feel even better about all these numbers. Because we're at about, I think... 00:08:03.184 --> 00:08:14.879 375 to 400 Canadian dollars per month right now. So that's good. I'll change it to Brazilian, whatever currency you use. It will go out of range. Yeah. 00:08:14.879 --> 00:08:26.863 Cool, cool. So along with all this, this is great, but our costs have also increased, right? Yeah. Especially for the web side of it, which is... 00:08:26.863 --> 00:08:41.552 The website is fueling all this growth, so that's great. We have to keep investing in it. It's also burning all the money. Yeah, it's also burning a lot of money because we are seeing a... We continue to see an insane amount of... 00:08:41.552 --> 00:08:50.111 traffic the real human users are increasing which is great right like that's what we want but along with that the amount of like 00:08:50.111 --> 00:09:03.408 pretending to be real human users bots from and i don't know why but it's singapore and brazil is where we are seeing in the last month or so mostly um those are also increasing so yeah 00:09:03.408 --> 00:09:10.320 Yeah, and they pretend to be humans. They use real browsers, it sounds like. Real browsers, yeah. 00:09:10.320 --> 00:09:21.759 So we're not just saying that they're using the user agent of a browser. They're actually using a browser because they're able to get through cloud flares like detection. 00:09:21.759 --> 00:09:31.264 human or not? No, actually, they're not able to get a Cloudflare JavaScript challenge, fortunately. But they are... 00:09:31.264 --> 00:09:41.104 Oh my god, don't get me started, I guess. But because we use Next.js, we use some of the canonical Next.js, sort of idiomatic Next.js. 00:09:41.104 --> 00:09:55.936 functionality that made the app really snappy. But because of that 300,000 requests per day from Brazil, that was creating like additional probably three to 600,000 requests. 00:09:55.936 --> 00:10:03.903 Because of the way Next.js is designed, right? So we had to de-optimize... 00:10:03.903 --> 00:10:18.224 sort of un-canonicalized, un-idiomatized Next.js implementation to make it more bot-friendly. So it's interesting because we don't want to get rid of the bots, we want to accommodate them. 00:10:18.224 --> 00:10:27.807 work, as we would call it. Did you say it was about 3 million requests per day to the website right now? Or just from these bots? It is right now, yeah. 00:10:27.807 --> 00:10:35.552 Well, from all bots. Brazil, Singapore, United States are probably about half of this. And the other half is like... 00:10:35.552 --> 00:10:56.480 I don't know, millions of users from Kathmandu and stuff. I don't know. It's just like you look at these things and you're like, holy crap, it cannot be real humans. But, you know, to be... I guess to admire Brazil's ingenuity, Brazil's, I mean, scrapers, they are even reported in Google Analytics. 00:10:56.480 --> 00:11:07.312 So that's just how good they are at disguising themselves. I mean, along with this, we are getting about 500 clicks via Google and... 00:11:07.312 --> 00:11:18.111 A magnitude less, but increasingly more traffic via chat GPT. So yeah, it's the good and the bad together. So yeah. 500 clicks per day, you mean. 00:11:18.111 --> 00:11:32.272 Which is great, yeah. Yeah. Actually, it's more. I think I looked today because the numbers have grown so much in the recent weeks. I think the first week of September, we got something like 6,000 plus visitors from Google. 00:11:32.272 --> 00:11:40.207 And I suspect also not all of the Google visitors are reported for privacy reasons. Okay, so time check. 00:11:40.207 --> 00:11:52.703 Out of our 15-minute budget, we've spent 12 minutes on the first segment of the business update and general update. We have two more segments to go through. So let's kind of like jump ahead. 00:11:52.703 --> 00:12:02.080 I'm thinking maybe this update is... We should not call it a short update. We should just call it a... Update. Summer update. Yeah, it might end up being half an hour. Cool. 00:12:02.080 --> 00:12:11.456 Yeah, and I think recently I posted on LinkedIn. A lot of people replied personally as well as via LinkedIn. Google still hasn't. 00:12:11.456 --> 00:12:24.799 replied to us about our six thousand dollar bill from july and because it's pending they haven't been able to charge us for any of the subsequent months so that's kind of a 00:12:24.799 --> 00:12:38.655 Kind of like a sword, I feel like sometimes over my head. Like we don't know what's going to happen with that. But yeah, living the life of an entrepreneur. All right. So what have we done? 00:12:38.655 --> 00:12:53.535 in the last month and a half since the last update. Let's talk about the mobile app. All right, I can go first. Did you say we last sent an episode in like mid-July? That's what I said, but let me verify what I said. 00:12:53.535 --> 00:13:01.408 July 26. Okay. So in that case, we have actually had two updates of the app. 00:13:01.408 --> 00:13:25.679 We had the V123. It was a big like under the hood performance and stabilization around the first week of August. And then we are... releasing or i have just released v124 today and we'll do the change list and all that for it but this one has uh global speed control that 00:13:25.679 --> 00:13:29.039 some people have been asking for a long time. 00:13:29.039 --> 00:13:43.600 We still don't have per podcast, but now you can set like, I always want to listen at 2x, right? Or there are some people who listen at 3x and 4x. They can set like, I always listen at 3x. So you can set that up. 00:13:43.600 --> 00:13:57.967 Yeah, and Arnavita is like, Ilya, can you use the speed control in your natural flow to see how it feels? And I'm like, I always listen to everything at 1x. That's probably the only feature in the app that I personally don't care about. 00:13:57.967 --> 00:14:07.120 I mean, I'm testing it intellectually, but not as a user, because I just prefer 1x for all podcasts. 00:14:07.120 --> 00:14:21.519 Yeah, and you and I had a lot of like, I think back and forth about the UX of it. So if you are the listener, if you care about this feature and you find like something wonky in it, let us know because I also don't use it. 00:14:21.519 --> 00:14:35.919 And just you and me, because we've been building this as like, we love podcasts. And so we want to build this app. We've always focused on things that you and I care about more than other things. But now as number of people are in. 00:14:35.919 --> 00:14:52.975 increasing and they're sending these requests, we are also building those features in. Another thing that's been there for a long time is sometimes when you open the player you would see that the episode would spin for a while and then the playhead will like 00:14:52.975 --> 00:15:05.344 Start from the beginning, seek ahead to a later point, and then figure out, oh, no, no, no, no, I'm actually at the 12th minute right now from history, and then sink back to it. This has... 00:15:05.344 --> 00:15:19.696 caused some grief to some people who have told me personally that it has messed up like where they were in the episode and all that so we've done a pretty big rewrite of how audio loading audio loading works 00:15:19.696 --> 00:15:30.831 in the app and the player wonkiness should be way more stable now that's in this 1.24 episode along with that 00:15:30.831 --> 00:15:45.168 there are a few small changes like the mini player if you like minimize the player and you're like browsing other screens in the app or something the mini player will now show you the progress bar to kind of tell you where 00:15:45.168 --> 00:16:01.903 you are in the episode and um private feeds so we launched private feeds in july i think v1 122 so now we have added support for like deep links which means we're going to go out to like 00:16:01.903 --> 00:16:14.000 a few publications like maybe Substack, maybe Patreon and see if we can get Metacast added as a deep link in their thing. So like if you subscribe to a private RSS podcast. 00:16:14.000 --> 00:16:25.600 show you tap one button and it opens up in metacast so yeah support for all that yeah cool so on the web app uh like we said we've done a lot of work to accommodate 00:16:25.600 --> 00:16:40.303 And we'll probably do a separate episode on this. I think it's long overdue. So I don't think we've shipped any real user-facing stuff on the web app, but we've done a lot of caching stuff. 00:16:40.303 --> 00:16:52.495 And we also started paying for Cloudflare. So until now, we've been using Cloudflare in a free plan. And we started paying for the pro because we wanted to get more insight into... 00:16:52.495 --> 00:17:03.456 what's not working because we saw that the caching, it wasn't caching everything as we expected. And I think that was triggered by that Brazil and Singapore bot behavior that... 00:17:03.456 --> 00:17:17.022 use real browsers, it sort of broke the caching, right? And they use like a distributed IP addresses and kind of cycle through IP addresses and all that. So the traditional like rate limiting and all that was not... 00:17:17.022 --> 00:17:29.344 working against them. Right, yeah. So Cloudflare Pro, 25 bucks a month, totally worth it actually. I'm really enjoying it. I think we're getting a lot of value from it. 00:17:29.344 --> 00:17:43.231 Especially that now our Vercel bill is like $300 a month, and we want to get it down to at least $100, $150, no more than that. So the other big thing we've done on the web app in the beginning of the month... 00:17:43.231 --> 00:17:56.784 So I think we've mentioned this before. One of our very loyal users who also runs a podcast network, a horror show podcast network, reached out to us and he's like, 00:17:56.784 --> 00:18:11.503 I want to download transcripts that you guys generate. Because he was using some other service. Actually, I don't know which exactly service they use, but I don't want to mention it. Because it shut down. And he's like, yeah, they shut down. Can I use, can you do something? 00:18:11.503 --> 00:18:23.167 I'm willing to pay you X. And we were like, not only transcripts, we'll give you chapters and AI summaries also. Yeah. And he's like, I don't really need that. But like, yeah, okay, sure. I'll take it. 00:18:23.167 --> 00:18:36.559 Actually, in their case, because it's like fiction stuff, summaries aren't necessarily a good thing because they may have spoilers. Spoilers, yeah. Right? 00:18:36.655 --> 00:18:44.784 Yeah, I think in a couple of weeks we've built the feature where users can now actually sign in to the web app. 00:18:44.784 --> 00:18:57.759 I mean, right now, only that particular user and us can sign in because it's all behind an allow list. But we'll eventually open this up to everybody. I mean, the sign-in, not the download of transcripts. 00:18:57.759 --> 00:19:04.655 And so that basically paves the path for a web app where you can see your playlist, where you can play... 00:19:04.655 --> 00:19:15.663 episodes from your playlist, et cetera. So I'm really excited about that, even though it was a real pain in the ass to implement. It took about two weeks, I think, to figure out the authentication. But now the heavy lifting is done now. 00:19:15.663 --> 00:19:30.367 Oh, and you and I had, I remember now, like this is probably mid-July, you and I had a lot of back and forth about the authentication mechanism and all that, yeah. Oh my God, that was complicated. Muy complicado. If you're a podcaster... 00:19:30.367 --> 00:19:42.352 And you want to get your transcripts. And chapters and summaries. And chapters and summaries, yeah. Reach out to us at feedback. 00:19:42.352 --> 00:19:56.192 Yeah, I guess reach out to us at team at metacast.app. I think that will be the most appropriate email. Team, feedback, hello, support. Yeah. Yeah, we've got lots of aliases. Lots of aliases. 00:19:56.192 --> 00:20:04.240 Both of us receive this, both of those emails. I mean, from all of those, both of us receive all of those emails from those aliases. 00:20:04.240 --> 00:20:17.920 So yeah, we can get you access. So basically, we did this in a very MVP fashion. It doesn't look super pretty, but it works. Pretty as in like colors and all. It just looks whatever, but it works. 00:20:17.920 --> 00:20:32.544 And the actual allow list is hardcoded. And the payment is done through just a Stripe link. So we don't even have a proper payment gateway for this. So yeah, but... 00:20:32.544 --> 00:20:45.200 But we've done it, and so we would like to get more podcasters onboarded to it, even in the state as it is right now. And we'll keep improving that. And I think the way our... 00:20:45.296 --> 00:20:58.192 customer is using this right now. So he publishes the episode, then he downloads the transcript, and then he goes back to his hosting provider and uploads the transcript there so that all of the other podcast apps pick it up. 00:20:58.192 --> 00:21:07.423 I think he's using chapters also, right? Actually, I don't know because I don't listen to horror podcasts. I didn't check. I'm scared too. I'm actually shit scared of listening to this kind of stuff. 00:21:07.423 --> 00:21:17.344 But I do listen to their The Last of Us. They have a podcast that focuses on The Last of Us show. So I listen to those episodes. Yeah. Okay. 00:21:17.344 --> 00:21:27.423 Oh, man, I'm too scared to listen to this kind of... I'm too old for this stuff now. Anyway, so that was very exciting. 00:21:27.423 --> 00:21:41.536 Because, you know, we do want to branch out into maybe some of these podcaster tools. And so right now it's a bit of a workaround. But I think eventually we will have... 00:21:41.536 --> 00:21:54.880 it done in a way that you can just upload the audio file and get the summaries and chapters and transcripts before you publish the episode. Yeah. Actually, you know, as a podcast publisher, 00:21:54.880 --> 00:22:08.288 I've been always annoyed by the need to write the description and chapters. Oh my God, I hate chapters. Because you have to track topics. Keep all the context in your head, right? 00:22:08.288 --> 00:22:20.928 But now, actually, I think I'm going to use our own service. I'll just publish with a blank description and then go quickly copy the summary and chapters and then plug it in there. Yeah, let's do it. Because our app picks up new episodes within... 00:22:20.928 --> 00:22:35.887 minutes after publishing, unlike some of those other apps that I don't know why people are using. Okay, so in the other amount of infinite time that you had, Ilya, what else did you do outside of building things? 00:22:35.887 --> 00:22:50.256 Yeah, so September, so basically this week, well, this week and last week, right? I've been more like heads down. I mean, it's the first week of school and all, but I've been able to actually sit down and work well, so while kids are in school. 00:22:50.256 --> 00:23:02.048 So I've been looking at our metrics and the funnels and all of that. So a few weeks ago, maybe more like two months ago, we... 00:23:02.048 --> 00:23:12.880 removed cookies from our site, the Google Analytics cookies. We disabled cookies in Google Analytics. Putting it in, I think, layman's terms, like every website today you visit... 00:23:12.880 --> 00:23:22.784 i'm pretty sure that you will see like a cookie acceptance banner or like reject cookies or customize cookies and all that yeah and we're like this is shit like 00:23:22.784 --> 00:23:33.824 to have to do this on every website that i don't really want to do so we decided to not ask for any approvals but that means we also don't have any tracking on our website 00:23:33.824 --> 00:23:44.480 Yeah. And if you go to those customized cookies, you have like 140 vendors that they give you data to. And you look at this list of companies, you're like, what the hell is this? 00:23:44.480 --> 00:23:58.816 Most people at least nowadays have like reject all non-essential ones, which is good. But I remember like early on, you actually, if you really cared about this stuff, you had to check like 200 things to actually make it only select the one. 00:23:58.816 --> 00:24:12.784 ones that you want to allow. Yeah. Anyway, so we don't have cookies at all, which means our tracking is limited, but we compensate this by actually by getting all of the data into BigQuery. 00:24:12.784 --> 00:24:26.703 which allows us to run queries like of the people who came from Google to the podcast pages, not just one podcast, like any podcast page or any episode pages. We separate those or any blog pages. How many... 00:24:26.703 --> 00:24:40.768 of them clicked open in Metacast or how many of them clicked on download on the App Store, right? And that helps us calculate, kind of understand the conversion rates of the things that we do on the website. I think now with the traffic we are getting, 00:24:40.768 --> 00:24:55.039 I hope we will soon be able to run experiments too. So anyway, so I've been digging into all of the data, building dashboards, building reports. We have some ideas for optimizing some of those. 00:24:55.039 --> 00:25:03.615 conversions. So this is not necessarily user-facing, but anything that gives us more money is good for the users eventually. Yeah. 00:25:03.615 --> 00:25:16.991 I think money starts to be bad for the users only after it crosses a certain threshold. Right now, all we need is to survive, which actually brings us to the next... Actually, I think it's a good segue to what's up next, right? 00:25:16.991 --> 00:25:28.079 And one thing that we are planning right now is, you know, we've not done a sale since November last year. So we actually launched the app in August last year. 00:25:28.079 --> 00:25:42.144 I think we launched in July on Android or August and then October on iOS. Yeah, and I think we did like a launch sale. It was like 10 bucks a year. And I don't think we've done any sales ever since because we don't want to... 00:25:42.144 --> 00:25:53.248 train people to wait for sales. And it's just like, it's $20 per year. Yeah. But we were thinking maybe for the one year anniversary, we have to... 00:25:53.248 --> 00:26:04.736 Do something. For people who are on the, what do you call it? On the fence. But we want to do it smart. 00:26:04.736 --> 00:26:18.256 And not many people listen to this podcast, so we can be very transparent about this here, I think. So the framing we want to use for this is it's a one-year survival anniversary. 00:26:18.256 --> 00:26:30.511 The app and the business has survived one year. And not a lot of businesses do. Yeah. So I think we'll make $10 a year. 00:26:30.511 --> 00:26:44.127 Yeah, that renews a 20 bucks a year afterwards, right? And I think people who are actually listening so far into this episode, they don't care about this. They will happily pay us the $20 a year and like support us. So, yeah. 00:26:44.127 --> 00:26:56.528 I think so, yeah. And for those people who are on the fence who just want to support us, it's almost like, yeah, I guess if some of our friends just want to like, yeah, whatever, I'll just pay 10 bucks. But I don't really listen to podcasts. We don't. 00:26:56.528 --> 00:27:02.511 Yeah, really? So that helps, right? But of those people who are on the fence, maybe who are using like a free app. 00:27:02.511 --> 00:27:12.144 or the free version of the app, and they are not convinced that they should be paying. And then maybe 10 bucks is what will move them over the fence. 00:27:12.144 --> 00:27:23.983 So yeah, survivalversary is what we will call it. And we also believe that this kind of framing probably makes it easier for us to reach out to folks who are in the podcasting space. 00:27:23.983 --> 00:27:31.951 say like, hey, guys, help us out. Spread the word for us. You know what? We should build this into the app. 00:27:31.951 --> 00:27:44.912 Like the update banner that we have, a Surviviversary Sale banner. Okay. This is getting beyond the podcast into like our internal discussion. So we'll park this. But yeah, we should do this. 00:27:44.912 --> 00:27:57.200 So let's do that for the 125, which is a good segue into like, what are you working on for 125? So as discussed, we are going to add a survivor. 00:27:57.200 --> 00:28:08.960 Surviviversary sale banner into the app, sounds like, for 125. But more importantly, the continue listening playlist, that's... 00:28:08.960 --> 00:28:23.279 forever being like it's only locally synced right now so if you like uninstall the app and reinstall again all of your history is gone and you can't actually see the full list anywhere all you can do is on the home screen you can scroll and scrolling gets kind of 00:28:23.279 --> 00:28:37.551 like tiring and you can't remove anything from it you can't remove anything well i mean indirectly you remove it by completing an episode that's the only way to remove things from it it doesn't always work by the way that's another bug that i sent you yesterday yeah 00:28:37.551 --> 00:28:46.511 oh yeah yeah yeah yeah so we are making we're starting our so at the beginning of the year i think we said this year the 00:28:46.511 --> 00:28:55.711 The two big things after all the table stakes was private podcasts and playlists. So private podcasts is done at this point. 00:28:55.711 --> 00:29:10.064 Actually, we actually had our first user who said the amount of private podcast quota that you have is not enough. I want to pay more, give me more quota. So we might need to do some more work on that. But other than that, this is kind of like the feature is done. 00:29:10.064 --> 00:29:24.336 So we're starting work on playlists first with the continue listening playlist that should be coming up in 125. We'll follow that up with like history and then custom playlists and stuff like that. 00:29:24.336 --> 00:29:35.935 So you can organize your listening even better and better and better. I'm personally really looking forward to seeing all of those unfinished episodes in my continued listening and removing them all. Right. 00:29:35.935 --> 00:29:50.415 Not all of them all, but removing 90%. Right. The other small thing that we're going to add is we need to increase the number of ratings that we get for the app. It is very healthy, like it's close, what, 4.9 on it? 00:29:50.415 --> 00:30:05.215 apple or something average and i think the average is healthy but the number of ratings is not is very low i think we've got like 50 about 50 on app store and by all countries but when but you only see ratings for your country so some country you will see just like two or three ratings right 00:30:05.215 --> 00:30:20.127 And on Google Play, we have about 40, which is also not many. Yeah. So we need to increase the number of ratings. So we're going to do some work in the app to maybe prompt for it or show some banners once in a while in different places for it. Yeah. 00:30:20.127 --> 00:30:24.240 I think three, four months ago, I've been saying that... 00:30:24.240 --> 00:30:37.183 Well, I started saying that we will be working on importing creator-provided transcripts to the app, because right now we only generate our own. On the web app, we show the creator transcripts, but on the mobile app, we always generate our own. 00:30:37.183 --> 00:30:52.175 And so I think I'll finally do this before the next update. I don't think I can punt on this anymore. So then on the web app, I don't plan to do anything on that. Maybe some... 00:30:52.175 --> 00:31:03.263 caching SEO stuff if something comes up. But otherwise... That'll be web app and backend. I think we have some major changes to do. We have some ideas that can cut down our... 00:31:03.263 --> 00:31:17.392 Vercel and Google Cloud maybe billing by about half. So let's see if that pans out. That's actually, that's right. Again, you know, it's not user-facing, right? But anything that helps us save money is good for the users eventually. 00:31:17.423 --> 00:31:25.855 Yeah, I've got to do all this general stuff, like the 1.24 blog posts, release notes. Also, we've been... 00:31:25.855 --> 00:31:40.144 very inconsistent about sending emails to users, welcoming new users, re-engaging users who have dropped off. Because we don't have a system for that, so we have to always do it manually. And that's why it always slips through the cracks. But yeah, what we are seeing is there is opportunity. 00:31:40.144 --> 00:31:50.031 in like engaging users and eventually getting more paying users because it all comes down to like, can this be a sustaining business, right? So yeah, that's that. 00:31:50.127 --> 00:32:00.655 All right. Cool, cool. So let's finish this up with our recommendations. And shall we do the 30-second thing, Ilya? 00:32:00.655 --> 00:32:12.175 Let's not do this already. I think this episode is a relaxed episode. It deserves more relaxed. Yeah. It ended up being more like a full episode, I feel like. Yeah. 00:32:12.175 --> 00:32:16.991 All right, so I've not been listening to many podcasts recently because... 00:32:16.991 --> 00:32:29.104 I've started re-listening to The Sandman, the radio theater, whatever they call it. So it's not just an audiobook. It's like an audiobook with multiple voices, multiple actors. 00:32:29.104 --> 00:32:43.344 sound effects also the actually the the sandman is available as a standard audiobook also and as the theatrical like multiple voice actors portraying roles uh right 00:32:43.344 --> 00:32:53.647 I don't know, because Sandman is originally the comics. Yeah, but I think I've heard both. Interesting. So to make it into an audiobook, you would have to actually like... 00:32:53.647 --> 00:33:04.960 rewrite the comics into like a narration while you're saying let me pull it up i think i have it on audible actually we'll see yeah so there's supposed to be four uh audible acts 00:33:04.960 --> 00:33:19.759 four different books, but they've only released three so far. So it only covers 75% of the full story. But the reason I started doing this is because the second season of The Sandman came out on Netflix. And I really did not like the first season. I thought it was too... 00:33:19.759 --> 00:33:31.680 It was too weird because they changed the characters too much, in my opinion. And they also compacted the story too much. But the second season, I didn't like in the beginning, like first couple of episodes, but then... 00:33:31.680 --> 00:33:45.711 they managed to capture the essence of like 75% of the story so well that I even like rewatched some of the episodes. It was so good. And then I'm like, okay, so I really want to... 00:33:45.711 --> 00:33:57.728 listen to it again so I started listening to the first so I listened to the first audio thing then I started the second and I'm like hmm I actually want to read it too because 00:33:57.728 --> 00:34:10.224 I feel like I'm missing some of the detail without seeing the comics. So I got the comics from the library. And what I'm doing now is actually that I've never done before. So I'm listening first. 00:34:10.224 --> 00:34:20.447 And then I'm going and reading that same chapter in the comics. And so that way, some of the references that I might have missed... 00:34:20.447 --> 00:34:28.400 I'm actually able to capture them in text after I'm... Because he's very self-referential. I mean, Neil Gaiman, right? 00:34:28.400 --> 00:34:39.679 And so when you first listen and then you read, it's like you are able to get into that extra layer when you're reading. So it'll probably take me another month or two months. 00:34:39.679 --> 00:34:52.063 to get through the whole thing. And after that, you should consider doing a PhD thesis on it with the amount of work you're putting into this. Yeah, but I'm actually, I'm enjoying it so much. 00:34:52.063 --> 00:35:05.760 Nice, yeah. I just looked through my Audible history. No, you're right. It was the theatrical, the multiple voice actor version that I was listening to. Yeah, yeah. For some reason, it was like, I didn't enjoy that too much. 00:35:05.760 --> 00:35:17.248 There are other books where I have also gone through the movie version of it in audiobook format, and it was too jarring for me, I think. 00:35:17.248 --> 00:35:31.983 yeah anyway no i guess just maybe it's just not your thing because like when i when my wife and i watched the first season of the sandman and then start watching the second season she basically she fell asleep twice when we start watching the second season oh no i i i like the 00:35:31.983 --> 00:35:40.704 the TV series more and the fantasy aspect was amazing. But I think it... 00:35:40.704 --> 00:35:54.447 I didn't also stay on for the second season. And I think it was not like engaged or it was too slow, maybe I thought. That's what she said. That's exactly what she said. She's like, it's just so boring, like so slow. I'm just falling asleep. But the whole... 00:35:54.447 --> 00:36:02.976 thing there is like, I mean, in the Netflix series, right, is the silence. It's like when there is a long silence. 00:36:02.976 --> 00:36:14.992 And they look at each other and then somebody says something very short and there is another silence there. And I find, like, I get chills when I watch this and she just falls asleep. So it's, I guess, not everybody's thing. 00:36:14.992 --> 00:36:36.335 Anyway, so that's this anime. Well, to be fair, I fall asleep to almost everything I watch on Netflix. Yeah, cool. All right, so what about you? Me. So I think last time I also talked about an episode from this same podcast, The Best Idea Yet. 00:36:36.335 --> 00:36:50.288 I have just started listening to the Birkin episode. I think that is their latest episode. It came out last week. I started listening to it this week anyway, because I have been listening to a lot of US Open tennis stuff so far. 00:36:50.288 --> 00:37:04.208 Quick primer on this is for people who don't know. I don't know. Do you know about the Birkin handbag, Ilya? Of course I do. It's like, it costs like a car. Well, I mean... 00:37:04.208 --> 00:37:17.327 If you can get your hands on it firsthand from Hermes, who makes it, it's handmade, right? Then it's £12,000, I think. 00:37:17.327 --> 00:37:23.695 But it's almost impossible. So it's like a 15-year-old second-hand car. 00:37:23.695 --> 00:37:38.655 Yeah, but it's almost impossible. Unless you're like a celebrity, you're not going to get it from Hermes, right? So most people who manage to buy it, buy it secondhand. And then it costs like $400,000, $500,000. 00:37:38.655 --> 00:38:00.304 This is so stupid. This is incredibly stupid. But go on. But I think the origin of it, like how it started, is really interesting. It's like... serendipity uh basically what happened is i i won't go so deep into it just like give you a 30 second overview 00:38:00.304 --> 00:38:14.864 What happened is there was this famous French-British actress, singer, and fashion icon big in the 60s and 70s called Jane Birkin. She has a lot of famous songs that I have. 00:38:14.864 --> 00:38:32.224 also like so she was flying and she got upgraded to first class don't know why she wasn't flying first class in the in the first place but anyway she got upgraded she happened to sit next to a person and her purse the bag that she was carrying 00:38:32.224 --> 00:38:46.576 fell from like where you keep the stuff on top of your head on aircrafts everything spilled out and they started having a discussion about handbags and all that turns out this guy who she was talking to was the current uh basically the person 00:38:46.576 --> 00:38:59.103 person running Hermes, right? So in that flight... Is it LVMH now? No, it's not Louis Vuitton. I think it's still run as an independent... Is it an independent thing? Okay. 00:38:59.103 --> 00:39:14.096 Yeah, they have the same revenue as Louis Vuitton with an insanely exponentially less number of sales as Louis Vuitton. Okay, anyway, so it happened to be that. 00:39:14.096 --> 00:39:28.367 person and through this flight from paris to london which is not a long flight they basically came up with the prototype or the idea for like making a jane birkin bag and that's what this whole 00:39:28.367 --> 00:39:40.559 thing is so yeah it's a pretty cool story yeah interesting it's pretty cool story and it's interesting like how the value of an item is in the eye of the buyer yeah 00:39:40.559 --> 00:39:51.456 Because I wouldn't be able to tell the Birkin bag from, I guess, like inexpensive bag from another brand. Me too. I mean, before this episode, I had heard about the name. 00:39:51.456 --> 00:40:06.960 But I didn't know it was like first-hand $12,000 and that you actually cannot buy it. And if you buy it second-hand, it's like $400,000, $500,000. I didn't know about it. But Hermes itself does not benefit from somebody reselling the bag for half a million. No. They don't. 00:40:06.960 --> 00:40:21.456 But they're, I think, more of like a luxury brand, right? Like it's the name. Almost like a PR stunt. Yeah, but I think they get more money through their partnership with Apple and other stuff like that. Like Apple Watch has the whole Hermes. 00:40:21.456 --> 00:40:30.416 line right cool cool all right um so it's been what 40 43 minutes uh short of date 00:40:30.416 --> 00:40:42.335 Maybe we're near a black hole because time stretched from our promised 15 minutes to this 45 minutes. Yeah, so it's time warp. All right, so I hope... 00:40:42.335 --> 00:40:56.896 I will be able to publish this quickly because I did not budget for a couple of hours of episode processing. But anyway, if you've listened to this, you know, you listened this far, we thank you. 00:40:56.896 --> 00:41:10.527 And apologize for the long delay without publishing any episodes. And we talk to you later. We'll try to do now back to like every couple of weeks, I think. Yeah, I think we should try and do like... 00:41:10.527 --> 00:41:24.016 at the time we release a new version and we should target to release every new version every couple of weeks. Hopefully. But now that kids are in school, hopefully things will get better in terms of productivity. Right. 00:41:24.016 --> 00:41:27.119 All right. Okay. All right. Ciao.