The Bootstrapped Founder

Hey. It's Arvid, and you're listening to the Bootstrap founder. Today, we'll talk about revising decisions, taking a step back and look at what you have and may not have with fresh eyes. And if you are locked into the wrong payment provider, Peddle, the sponsor of this episode, is one such fresh perspective to take a look at. I use Peddle for all my SaaS businesses because it allows me the breathing room to actually reflect and focus on what really matters, like today's episode.

So I recommend you take a look at it too. No more dealing with sales tax and all that stuff, these complicated payment things. Go to pedal.com to check it out. As PodScan inches ever closer to profitability, I've come to an interesting realization this week. What got me here won't get me there.

Unlike my previous ventures, the media stuff, the books, the courses, productized services, I don't think I can any longer rely solely on my personal brand and stuff like podcast appearances to generate sufficient leads. That worked for that stuff, and it helped jump start the business over the past 6 months. But I don't think it will scale to reliably new customers and revenue options anymore. This realization has forced me to confront some quite uncomfortable truths about my approach to building PodScan, And I wanna share both my reasoning and the concrete steps that I'm taking to address this challenge over the next couple months with you here today. So at its core, PodScan is a data forward product.

It's a data centric product. It's a data product. Let's just call that. The value proposition is simple but powerful, you get access to reliable and comprehensive podcast data at scale, plus alerting and all of that. But the core of it is that there is data to alert you from and to search through, right, the data is at the core.

So whether through the alerting system that tells exactly where you were mentioned, not where you might have been, but where you have been mentioned. Our discovery engine that helps you find the perfect podcast for your topics through all the data extraction stuff that we've been doing, or the API that delivers precise information with reliable performance, at least that's what I'm trying to build. Everything hinges on data fidelity. Fidelity is really accuracy, relevance, and completeness, correctness. That's the kind of stuff.

And therein lies the challenge for PodScan. While it's easy to discuss broad topics and ideas on social media, share video clips, and engage in podcast conversations, communicating this true wealth and specificity of our data is almost impossible without showing it. It's easy to talk about an idea. I'm doing this right now, talking about an idea. Don't have to show you the data behind it.

I can inform you about it. And I can talk about comprehensiveness all day long. But until my users see the actual depth of information available, it remains this abstract concept to them. And that's not very alluring. That's not very conversion inducing, right?

The idea of something is not gonna make somebody sign up. An example? Now that's the difference. And for the longest time, I've been hesitant to make the data that PodScan has publicly accessible pre sign up. The rationale here was pretty simple and I've communicated this several times on the podcast.

Protecting this comprehensive data collection from being scraped is important because the actual value of PodScan lies in its reliability and thoroughness, and that data is valuable. Now, I have watched our competitors make significant portions of their public facing data freely available, while keeping the source and the high value information behind a paywall. And I chose a different path, hoping that customers would discover this wealth of information after signing up. But that was a significant assumption, one that I'm now revising after half a year of operating the business the other way. The first step in this evolution was internal, for me at least.

I made our platform's valuable information more visible and actionable for existing users. This has been, like, the last month of what I talked about on the podcast. Right? Bringing all the contact information forward, getting the audience size estimator working well, and integrating all of this data into everything that somebody sees. Everybody that uses PodScan to look into podcasts will now see this information front and center.

Makes it more actionable. But the real transformation is coming in how we present ourselves to the world outside of the internal dashboard. And here's why I'm breaking my own rule. I'm going to create landing pages for 100 of 1000 of significant podcasts and there are quite a lot of significant podcasts out there, complete with an automated site map for the back end and interconnected data points between the shows. We're talking about at least 200,000 podcasts with over like a 1000 listeners or 500 plus platform ratings.

The the big shows, right. Not just the top 10, not just the top 100, but the big 200, 300,000 shows that people know and expect to find information from. Yes. Someone could then scrape this data, and this is what I feared all this time that somebody might get my precious data. And you know what?

I've decided that I don't really care anymore, at least not this much. What they will get would be this loosely connected snapshot of podcast data from a single point in time. Like, this is what we know about this podcast today. This is the episode that is most recent, and this is maybe how many listeners they have or whatever. I'm not quite sure exactly what I'm gonna put there, but it's gonna be there.

But the real magic that makes PodScan valuable is something they can't replicate, and that is the back end accumulation of data, the data extraction, and the continuous updates. This interconnected nature of our data and the collection system, the automatic theme extraction, continuous monitoring, these are incredibly hard to replicate, and no scraping will ever make this any easier. And I think the strategic shift for PodScan coincided with an interesting market development here, and that is charts. I don't know if you know about this. You may or may not know much about this whole podcasting ecosystem, but Chartable is a company that used to have charts for all kinds of podcasts, charts, like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all of that.

And they shut down just a couple days ago following the Spotify acquisition. Like, Spotify acquired them, and they're probably still doing all of this, like, collecting chart information. They just do it internally. They're not broadcasting this information publicly anymore. And the gap that they left in tracking podcast charts worldwide created an opportunity for me, and I jumped right into it.

I've rebuilt much of this functionality. I collect chart information from Spotify, Apple, across all available languages categories, which is a lot. I think there's a 111 or so Apple categories and a 170 Apple locations. So if you do the math, that's like 18,000 combinations of language and category. That's gonna have a lot of data, but it will be useful.

It's gonna become a core part of a public offering. So what I've been building is freely accessible charts with unique added value. Main topics from recent episodes that I automatically extract, and available contact information, guest speaker identification, everything we already have in the database, and that is gonna be part of the internal system. And a more shallow version of that that just shows the listing of the chart, the name of the podcast, maybe an indicator as to how many episodes they have, what the frequency is, that is gonna make it into the public realm so that people can see this, oh, this exists, then sign up to see more, and they are inside the platform. That's kind of the acquisition strategy here.

And for each podcast, we will not just only show the chart position, but also maybe where it's trending, across how many platforms, which locations, and then track whether a show is growing or rising, slowing down. That information I have because it's information over time and that I can show for free. And this is information that is invaluable to podcasters and agency and businesses alike because they get to see what is hip, what is important to be part of, or at least talk about. And these implications go beyond marketing. This data feeds back into our platform, improving the listener size calculations that we have, enhancing topic tracking, and allowing us to do more accurate predicting around audience size across different podcast categories as well.

Because we know who the big podcasts are and we have accurate audience sizes for these shows then we can now calculate category level insights like how many total listeners exist between news podcasts or arts podcasts, that kind of stuff. This is super interesting relative sizes of marketing categories that could be very interesting to our customers as well. And to make this data more accessible while still protecting against wholesale copying, I've been implementing very careful security measures that will expose the information in a way that prevents the most overt scraping attempts while still providing value to genuine users. It's not very easy to do this, but, working on this, I'll talk about this, in a show in the future, and I'm particularly excited about thinking where this could go beyond just a website. I think I could offer a public API, rate limited, of course, like everything else on the platform, that provides basic podcast information for free just like a website would, so they don't have to scrape it.

And that serves as this entry point for users who might later need more and can get that from the more comprehensive paid services like the paid API. See how I'm opening up. And that was a rule that I set for myself to not do with this kind of treasure trove of data. But I feel that this is the much more scalable approach to marketing the information that we have, to show people what exists. Because just hoping that they follow me on Twitter is not enough.

So looking ahead to 2025, I think PodScan will be a fundamentally different platform in terms of how we market it. We're opening up most of the basic data to the public, and we create this ecosystem of information that demonstrates the value prop through action, through data rather than words or relationship or hoping that people find me and through me find the business. And the SEO benefits of this will be significant too because we're gonna rank for charts, we're gonna rank for individual shows, but more importantly, we'll be providing real value to the podcaster community because they can find their way to PodScan through one of these things, and then find the full value of PodScan throughout the whole platform once they sign into it. And another thing I'm working on is expanding into content marketing, like creating a blog that then interlinks podcast episodes with data snippets from the platform and talks about different ways of how to get onto shows, how to host a show, how to be guests, how to sponsor, how to find sponsors, this kind of stuff. It will specifically target our core audience, booking agencies, podcast agencies, and businesses needing to be up to date with podcast information.

And to execute this effectively, looking to build a team of freelance writers and editors who can blend this kind of creative and technical writing in this specialized field of podcasting. So I'm looking for those people. So if you are such a person listening right now or if you know somebody who might fit this description, I'd love to hear from you. Come on Twitter or x as young and cool people call it and send me a DM. My DMs are open.

I'm looking for somebody who can help me kinda mix and match between technical precision and reaching out to people who care about podcasting. That's really what it is. Yeah. And it's really humbling to admit that my personal brand, the thing that I've been building for many years, and this has been invaluable in getting Potskin off the ground, don't get me wrong, but it's not enough to create this guaranteed recurring revenue stream. I have to go beyond this.

I guess that's the beauty of building in public. I get to share this realization and the pivot as it happens in public to the people who follow me for the stories that I tell. It's really kinda nice. It still is valuable. And sometimes breaking your own rules is pretty much exactly what your business needs to grow.

So the next few months will be crucial because we implant these changes and things will change that I may not even think about. So I'll continue sharing this progress and learnings as I transform PodScan, the team transforms PodScan from a data rich platform into a more accessible visible and valuable resource for the entire podcast ecosystem? After all, the best data in the world is really only valuable if the right people can find it and use it. It's not if you build it, they will come. You still have to tell them or at least show them, and that's exactly what I'm gonna be doing.

And that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening to the Bootstrap founder. You can find me on Twitter at abidkahl, a r b I d k a h l. You find my books on my Twitter course there too. And if you wanna support me in this show, please tell everyone you know about podscan.fm and leave a rating and a review by going to rate this podcast.com/founder.

Makes a massive difference if you show up there because then the podcast will show up in other people's feeds. Any of this really helps the show. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day, and bye bye.