What's up everybody, this is Cortland from IndieHackers.com and you're listening to the
IndieHackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a ton of money in the process.
And on this show, I talked to these IndieHackers to learn about the latest ideas, opportunities,
and strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same.
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In this episode, I sat down for a casual chat with Mabashar Iqbal.
Mabs is one of my buddies.
He's been on the podcast before.
He's probably the most prolific IndieHacker that I know.
He's got something like 100 side projects under his belt.
And today we talked about the podcasting space.
How much bigger can podcasts get?
Where are the opportunities for IndieHackers to build cool stuff here?
And what is Mabs himself working on?
We're still like right at the beginning of this thing in terms of like podcasting.
Yeah, I know he's been around since like what, 2005 I think was the first podcast or whatever.
So it's been like 15 years, but it feels like there's still like so much room for people
to kind of really make a lot of money in this space and to, yeah, and just for a lot of
interesting things still to happen, I think, especially from the content side, like New
York Times has been on a purchasing spree as well where they've been acquiring podcasts
as well.
So I think from the content side, there's a consolidation happening from the creation
side.
There's been some acquisitions there, but I think they're just like the number of like
tools and stuff that are just like popping up to make recording podcasts and video as
well, like really easy as well.
And so, yeah, so I think there's like lots of different avenues in terms of the industry
isn't like just about making a simple, here's a podcast and here you can listen to it.
But kind of as we talked about, there's like podcast studios who are kind of organizing
around like a whole slew of different podcasts.
But then there's all these tools that are right coming up as well.
And yeah, it's just a really active and really interesting space.
Yeah.
So you're working on founder path right now, you're full time on founder path.
Yes.
But being mobs, obviously, you've got a lot of other stuff going on on the side.
And a lot of stuff working on is in the podcast space.
So maybe we should start just by talking about what you're working on.
I know that you're working on pod hunt, which the last time we spoke about, I haven't checked
out the website in maybe a few months, but I assume it's probably still the same.
It's basically like product hunt for podcasts.
So if you want to discover the best podcast episodes, you can go to pod hunt.
And it's like every week or every month, you take the best podcast episodes, everybody
can upload them.
And then you can discover what you want to listen to.
Yeah, it hasn't changed much because it doesn't really need to change much.
Like there's not really too much functionality to really add there in terms like the core
functionality of the sort of site itself.
Yeah, it's just like you said, people come in, they sign up, they can submit episodes,
they can upvote episodes.
And then we just have kind of like this daily leaderboard of what people have upvoted and
what people have submitted.
Right.
Like I said, it's been around for about 14 months now.
I'm still the most active user on it, which is, I don't know if that's good or bad, but
it kind of is what it is.
But yeah, but people are, I mean, like every week, people are submitting their own episodes,
people are submitting other people's episodes as well.
So I feel like the traction's increasing rather than decreasing, which I think is obviously
a good sign.
And so yeah, so that's an interesting one, you know, it's an interesting one, mostly
because just like with product time, I don't really see like a clear path to like making
lots of money with it because, you know, it's one of these interesting things that people
would use if it's free, but I don't know that people would actually pay to kind of use it.
Like if, like if product time went to a fully paid model where people had to pay these products
on, I don't know that people would use it that much anymore.
Yeah, it seems like one of these ideas where you probably just try to make it big.
And once it's bigger, you look for avenues to make money with it.
And right now, you've got a cool kind of part of it, which is the newsletter, and it says
get the best new podcast delivered to your inbox weekly.
I think the newsletter could be an interesting avenue, because so many people are making
money on newsletters nowadays.
And even if people don't like build a habit of showing up to podhunt.app, your website,
you know, habitually checking that every single week or every single day, they do check their
email every day.
And if every day they're getting a list of the best podcasts to listen to, and it's pretty
much like in the startup slash tech space, those are all the podcasts that seem to get
uploaded to your site, for the most part, I could see people paying to subscribe to
that, especially if there's some like editorial behind it where like maybe you or maybe you
bring in someone who wants to start a newsletter, and it can't, you know, really get off the
ground doesn't have an audience, but they can just come run your newsletter and it already
has 600 subscribers, maybe they do like a revenue share with you or something.
So they're producing the content, editorializing it, and you split it, I can see people paying
for that that aspect of it.
I think every day would probably be a bit of a stretch, but I think once a week, I think
would would kind of work, especially if we're focusing in that kind of startup kind of indie
hacker scene, kind of that space, just because I don't think there's that many podcasts come
out every day that would kind of make it worthwhile, you basically have like one episode every
day, which would probably wouldn't be too interesting.
But no, having like a kind of a recap of the episode in there, so people can kind of know
what's in there, but then also like look at the impact of like if you know, if like, you
know, we were just talking about the podcast industry.
So if there was a podcast talking about the podcast industry, having some other information
that somebody could kind of pull in just kind of expand what's there as well, I think would
be would be a really interesting thing as well.
So I think that's absolutely something I've kind of considered, you know, it's not something
I can do with a full time job as well.
It's kind of not it's not a full time job, but it's but it would be quite a lot of work,
I think, to kind of kind of make something that really work.
What's your goal with it?
Like, what do you want to do with pot hunting?
I built it mostly just because I like listening to podcasts, and it's a tool that I thought
would be interesting.
I use product and obviously I've been using that for five years now.
And so it's just one of these things that didn't exist that I thought should exist.
But yeah, I mean, I think longer term, my plan was always just to use it as kind of
like a honeypot to kind of attract other kind of avenues and making some money.
So like build some applications for either podcast listeners or for, or for podcast hosts
or for podcast studios or whatever.
And then just kind of use it as like a honeypot to kind of make money kind of elsewhere instead.
That was, I think, always a long term plan.
Obviously, we've found about being, you know, my main thing now, it's, it's still kind of
the plan, but it's also not like a super urgent, super important part of the part of the plan
either.
I was talking to Daniel Vassallo a few weeks ago on the podcast and he had, he's got like
a SaaS app that he's working on, but he kind of like abandon it to work on other stuff.
And in the meantime, it's just kind of growing in the background.
So we got it to the point where it was no longer like a cost center for him.
It was actually like break even slash making money.
And now it's just kind of growing slowly in the background.
And I like how you've got so many things are working on it all times, basically, you can
kind of set it and forget it too.
So you can create pod hunt, put it online, and now people can contribute to it.
It's really working.
People can send them to the newsletter.
It's all growing.
Even if you don't really work on it in a given week or month or something, like you'll come
back and it'll be like slightly bigger.
So it's always there for you to come back to.
Yeah, I think that's one of the interesting things that if you look at my, I worked on
portfolio of the, you know, how I'm not going to count how many things are on there right
now.
But if you look through most of those, you'll see like probably about half of them are on
like this autopilot thing where it's like I made it.
I was really excited about making them.
I still use them, but I don't really update them anymore, but they're all kind of fully
automated where they just go pull some API content from somewhere or they go scrape some
content from somewhere.
And the people are still finding value there because the, because the website is still
up today.
So I built a website three years back called new movies coming out.
It's a website that just lists, because I was tired of like IMDB and those big news,
big hobby sites that yes, they list like what the movies are coming up and they make it
so hard to find.
And, you know, I don't know what's coming out next and I have to go like six levels
deep to find this, that list of what's opening next week or opening the week after that.
So whether this is really one page website, I think I went back to it about a year after
I actually launched it and there was like 1100 people on the email list.
And I was like, I haven't touched this since I launched it.
Like, where did 1100 people come from?
And so yeah, so that's always been kind of one of my strategies is like, yeah, I don't
want to spend a lot of time working on this stuff, but once I've launched it, I don't
really need to, but I can always come back to it and say, look, here's a new feature
I want to add now.
I mean, now I can email it out to 1100 people who are actually finding value there as well.
How many different mailing lists do you have right now?
Yeah, that's probably a bad thing.
But yeah, I think I probably have, I know there's probably like 20 or 30 mailing lists
that I have that all have somewhere.
But you've got, I'm on your portfolio, you've got 97 projects listed.
And you've got like a status for some of them, like dead, autopilot, active, sold, zombie.
What does zombie mean?
Zombie just means I've stopped updating it.
It needs to be updated, but the site's still up and it's still there.
It still has value from like old archived content.
Kind of dead.
It's kind of dead, but it's the living dead.
It's the living dead.
Exactly.
And a few of them are podcast things.
You've got pod hunt, which you talked about.
You've got podcast hosting review.
You've got podcast ping.
You got other stuff.
Why are you building so much stuff in the podcast space?
Like you said, I think it's still a lot of opportunity there, but it's also an industry
that I'm really interested in as well, just because I listened to a lot of podcasts.
I talked to a lot of people in the podcasting space all day long as well.
And I think it's an overlap of something I'm interested in, something I see a lot of opportunity
for in the future.
So why not, you know, if I'm going to be spending my free time working on something, I'd rather
be working on something that has potential to continue to grow rather than something
that would just, that's kind of already reached its plateau.
I think a lot of people would question whether or not podcasts have much room for growth.
I mean, it seems super saturated, but then you could also go look at what some of the
bigger players are doing.
I think the founder of Spotify was talking about how he thinks that podcasts are still
kind of early days.
And they're obviously investing super heavily.
They spent like $600 million in the last year, just acquiring podcasts and podcast hosting
companies and podcast tools and podcast networks.
And they're just talking about the fact that podcasting is going to blow up in the future.
And so even if you are an indie hacker trying to research and do your own market research
and you're coming up short and thinking, hey, podcasts look saturated, you can kind of place
your faith in Spotify's market researching teams who clearly think there's a lot of growth
coming in the future for podcasting.
And I have like anecdotal evidence for this too.
I mean, I have a lot of friends who started podcasting, I've had a lot of friends who
started listening.
My mom listens to podcasts now, which is crazy to me, even though it's just my podcast really
that she listens to.
It just seems like there's a lot of room for growth.
Yeah, I mean, the way I see it is across all the mediums, there's been this natural trend
of people start this new way of sharing content, whether it's newspaper content, whether it's
TV content, whether it's radio content, it all typically starts as a hobby, somebody
puts something out and they share it with their friends or whatever, then it becomes
kind of a little bit more mass appeal.
Again, it's typically furry at that point.
And then there's kind of a tipping point where it starts to get, oh, there's enough people
listening now, we can kind of do advertising on it, things like that.
And then it gets to the point where it's like, oh, now we can actually start charging for
the actual thing that we want to do.
So if you look at like TV and movies, it probably took what, 80, maybe 100 years to go from
TVs being, yeah, people producing content in terms of motion picture stuff.
And yeah, people were charging for like Hollywood movies, you know, for a really long time.
If you look at like TV, for the longest time, TV was free over the air.
You didn't really have to pay for anything.
Eventually we got cable TV and then you had to pay for specific channels.
And then you got things like HBO.
And now you've got things like Netflix, where you have to pay for specific things that you
want to watch.
And so I think if you look at that parallel in terms of podcasting, we're just about to
that point where it's like, Netflix has just started, right?
Like it's, it's, I think we're kind of at that point.
And if you were investing when Netflix just started kind of making their own content and
charging for it, I think I'd like to invest in that kind of space.
And so that's kind of where I think podcasting is right now.
We still got a good, maybe still a good five or 10 years where it's really going to mature
in terms of people creating and charging specifically for really high quality audio based content.
So let's talk about ideas because I've got, I wrote down some ideas that I have for people
who want to be involved in the podcasting spaces and the hackers.
The first one I have is start a podcast network.
A podcast network is basically instead of just doing one show, you partner with other
people who have shows, or you hire other people who have shows.
And you kind of work together as a group to basically produce shows under one brand.
So you have Gimlet Media, which did this, you have Barstool Sports, you have the Ringer,
you have Wondery.
There's a lot of podcast networks, you've done this successfully.
And I think pretty much all the ones I just listed have gotten acquired for hundreds of
millions of dollars.
It's super lucrative.
They all raise money from investors.
They use that money to acquire listeners for their podcasts.
It's really hard to get listeners to your podcast, even if you have a really good show,
unless you have access to some really solid distribution channel, it's just difficult
to grow through word of mouth alone.
So if you can raise some money, you can now start advertising or paying for podcast ads
and other shows.
You grow super quickly.
You have this group of people that you can learn from.
So when you're doing a podcast by yourself, it's kind of hard to figure out.
There's not very much insight into why you're growing or why people are downloading.
But if you've got like 10 other podcasters you're working with, it's way easier to bounce
ideas off of each other and figure stuff out.
And then what's the end game?
You either make a ton of money from ads, because you're getting all these listeners, or you
just get acquired by one of these podcast hungry companies like Spotify, or Apple who
are trying to own the podcasting space.
I think the biggest struggle for the indie hackerspace specifically is a lot of people
want to stay independent.
They want to stay separate.
They don't want to go raise money in terms of spending and things like that.
I think it's a good idea.
I think there's also some legal things that you have to be concerned about in terms of
just understanding, especially if you're joining forces at different times in terms of how
long the podcasts have been around for.
Somebody's going to bring lessons a month, and somebody's going to bring along 5,000
lessons a month, or even kind of under that, whatever the scale is.
So just understanding what the legal...
How you organize yourself so that everybody has a fair shot at being part of it and understanding
who owns it.
I think if there was a template out there that outlined how you could structure something
like this, I think that would alleviate a lot of people's concerns about, how do we
even start something like this?
I think you just have to talk to people.
I think that's the...
Because there aren't that many podcasting networks, and there are media networks and
other mediums.
There just aren't that many podcasting networks, so I think you just have to figure out who's
doing it.
I'm working on this for Indie Hackers, and I'm just emailing people and talking to people.
I'm in a different situation because Indie Hackers doesn't have any revenue plan.
I don't have to make any money.
So I don't have to...
It's a very easy sell if I go to a podcaster who's got a bootstrapping related podcast
and say, hey, join the podcast network.
I'm going to try to get you more downloads and give you some mentorship, and I want nothing
in return.
I'm just trying to spread the word.
But I think if you are not me, and you're trying to do this yourself, I would talk to
people who've started podcast networks, I think you probably need some sort of advantage.
So maybe you can do this if you already are a media company with some sort of distribution
advantage, or you just have money.
Maybe you're a SaaS, you've got extra money to spend, or you've raised money.
Yeah, and I think it's also interesting to think about who would you want to partner
with as well.
I think that's also the important thing to think about.
Where's the overlap in your audiences?
Is there an overlap in your audiences?
Is what they're trying to do, are you going to partner with a competitor in your space
in some way, or something like that, as well, which might not be a bad thing to do.
Just because, again, you're trying to grow the industry as a whole, rather than what's
my share of the industry.
If you can build a network, that's going to spread more word about your industry.
The food industry used to do this a lot.
The pork industry, with all of the pork farmers, would form a coalition or a cooperation, whatever,
and they would spend all that money on advertising to have people eat more pork instead of eating
chicken and stuff like that.
I think that's actually a really good idea if you're trying to grow an industry as well.
Having a podcast where people can hear more about your industry and what's happening in
the industry is an awesome way to make your industry expand as well.
I think, also, you can just think about it as a way of cutting expenses, too.
If you're paying an editor to edit your podcast and stuff, if you can have three or four podcasts
come together, you'll probably get a cheaper per podcast episode rate for editing that,
and also for hosting, it'll become cheaper as well because you're paying less for hosting
per podcast as well.
Those economies of scales that come in, and that's part of the reason that Spotify is
buying all of these things is because they've already got the infrastructure and the back
office operations that the incremental cost of running another podcast for them is tiny
because they already have all of those.
They have the sales team already to sell the ads.
They already have the hosting already squared away, so it's not a big deal.
Any extra income they make is just all profit.
It's not just about putting out more episodes, but also think about the infrastructure costs.
I think that, especially early on, I think, it would have a huge impact, I think, as well.
I think that's a super smart point.
Like you said, this happens in other industries, too.
Things get unbundled.
You see people starting individual newsletters, I want to be my own media company or have
my own podcast.
Eventually, people realize, this is ridiculously hard.
I don't want to do all this stuff.
We should bundle back up.
Let's partner together and start our own group or media company or something.
Also, you've seen us with YouTubers and TikTokers and Twitch streamers who are combining forces
and living in these houses to produce content together.
I think this is going to happen with newsletters.
You see a lot of people on Substack doing their own thing.
I think a year or two from now, you're going to see a lot of people who have joint newsletters
or newsletter media companies where they all partner together and they have different voices
and they sort of outsource a lot of the work.
They don't each have to take on all these repetitive jobs like editing and copy editing
and promotion, finding advertisers.
Maybe it'll happen with podcasting too.
I think maybe there's a room here to build another platform, like a hosting or publishing
platform where you cater specifically to people who want to build a network.
Right now, everything is kind of catered toward individuals, but you specifically targeted
people who want to group up.
You build a bunch of features in that direction and you go around pitching people who either
already have these early networks or you help them form these early networks.
Maybe there's some space here where you're doing something that nobody else is doing
and you're kind of preempting the way the industry is going to go.
It actually reminds me a little bit of what happened in the blogging industry as well,
like 10 years back.
Everybody was starting their own blog and then they realized, God, trying to find advertisers
to sell their little square ads in your little sidebar, which is hideously hard and to kind
of manage it all in terms of putting ads up and taking ads down.
How do you share traffic?
If you don't publish every day, there's all these little blogging networks that popped
up.
The things like Pine Rules was one of those that I was kind of around a lot sort of at
the time as well.
It was the same.
It was just like, we produce content, we don't produce content every day because we're not
really doing blogging per se.
We kind of run an agency, but we want to blog too.
We're kind of building some software, but we want to blog too.
Blogging wasn't like the end of kind of what they were trying to do, but they understood
that there was value there and there was value post finishing whatever they were doing.
That would continue to have value for the next project and the one after that too.
And so yeah, so I think if you want to look for a model, I think that's a really good
model in terms of it doesn't have to be like in terms of everybody agreeing and kind of
giving over control because I think this is kind of what you're doing with the Indie Hackers
Podcast.
You're not really taking any ownership stake, you're not really telling the podcast what
they have to do, but you're saying, look, we're going to build a distribution hub essentially
for content of this particular kind.
Obviously with Stripe, it's a little bit weird, but eventually if you're like, okay, now we've
got 100,000 people coming to this website every month to find new content.
Now you can start to advertise as well and kind of make some money as well.
But obviously like I said with Indie Hackers, it's a little bit of a weird situation.
I like this idea though, because you're comparing to like blogging networks where there isn't
necessarily an owner who's profiting off of all of this, it's just kind of a coalition
of people who are all loosely networked together.
And I think that avoids some of these particular problems with like I messaged Sam Parr and
Sean Peery this morning about a podcast network.
I was like, have you guys ever considered this?
Because they have a really cool show, My First Million, I listen to it all the time.
And well, like, you know, how do you scale up a show?
Either show us get really big, or you have to turn into a media company.
And Sam was basically like, hell no.
If you start anything like this, you know, working with creators, they can very easily
turn into divas.
And it's super true.
Like I've seen this with Barstool Sports, they have a pretty big podcast network.
And they got such a huge distribution channel, they have so many fans that they can take
pretty much unheard of people, put their show on their network and start distributing it
and just blow them up.
And so they just go out and find really talented people like they found these two women who
had the show called call her daddy or something.
And they were super entertaining, super talented, everybody loved them.
The show went from like 100 downloads a month to like, I think millions of downloads a month,
right after they got added to Barstool Sports.
And now it's just hella drama, because any creator who's in the situation is gonna realize
how much they're worth.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, why should I, why should I stay here with you taking a cut?
Why don't I go independent?
And then you've got to figure out how to keep them on and keep them happy, but not pay them
like 100% of the revenue.
And it just like Barstool is smart about it, because they just publicized literally all
of the drama, and they make podcasts about the drama going on inside.
But I think most people don't want that kind of drama, they're trying to start a company.
Yeah, and it's funny, I mean, if you think about how Spotify started, it was basically
just a music network of artists, right?
Like, because again, they didn't own any of the music that they had on Spotify.
But yeah, they figured out, obviously, it's a little bit different with the way that the
industry works from the royalty side of things.
But essentially, they just got content, they built a hub, they just attracted people and
the hub.
And then they paid a percentage of the revenue back to the sort of people that were actually
listening to the music.
And I think you could do something similar, obviously, with podcasting is a little bit
different, because you don't know who's playing what episodes and all that kind of stuff.
But if you were going to fund the network with advertising, you could do that in terms
of we know how many people visited your particular podcast page on the networks, we're going
to give you x percent of the revenue of the ads, you know, you could you could organize
it like that.
I think it would be probably pretty easy to spin up something like this.
And once you get to a certain amount of scale to sell ads, I think would be really easy
as well.
Because people who are not on your network, but want exposure on your network would pay
for the ads.
And people who want exposure, but they don't necessarily want to pay for it would want
to be part of the network instead.
So so I think there's lots of different opportunities there to kind of attract more talent, but
also attract people who want to pay you to be a part of it as well.
I'm curious what you think about Spotify, because you mentioned that they started off
with just music.
And their founders talked about how he just realized, he said, Oh, when I started Spotify,
I thought it would be nothing but music.
But now I've realized our mission is really all of audio.
And we're going to do is capture the podcast space.
And you know, they've been doing that they've been buying every big show, it seems like
every big podcast network, they just bought a big podcast host yesterday, called megaphone
for like $250 million.
They're just trying to own the podcasting space.
And there's this idea called brace, extend and extinguish.
Have you heard this?
Yes.
Yeah, it's kind of funny.
I mean, Microsoft did this in the 90s, and the Justice Department investigate didn't
like it.
This is the exact phrase that use internal in the company.
This is not something that other people said, like Microsoft executives saying, yeah, we
embrace a standard.
So standard might be like RSS for podcasting, or HTML for websites.
You know, they use it, everybody loves them, they play nice.
Once they're big, they extend it and add also proprietary features.
And then they extinguish it.
They try to kill everybody else.
So they're the only owners.
That's what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer, I like it, because they embraced open standards
at the beginning.
And then they're like, well, we got to add this little thing that only works in Internet
Explorer, and it's proprietary, nobody else can implement it.
And yeah, and that's kind of how they kind of did kill the market there.
I have mixed feelings about as far I mean, I like what they're doing.
I think, obviously, apart from the content side of things, like in terms of buying the
Joe Rogan podcast, obviously, you know, at some point, they're going to make it.
I guess that's the one thing with podcasts, right?
Like it's very difficult to not let people listen to podcasts at all on other platforms.
Because you've got this, at least at this point, you still got these RSS feeds and things
like that.
And even if you look at iTunes, even though iTunes has original content inside of their
kind of podcasting space at all, it's essentially just an unpublished RSS feed as well, just
because it has to feed into the iTunes application as well.
And so if you don't, the RSS feed is you can you can figure out you can listen to it on
whatever platform you want to listen to it on.
So as long as they don't push too far down that road of like, you know, really putting
in that walled garden around their content and make it so that you have to listen to
it within within their kind of platform and do that.
I'm cool with them doing it because one is just helping solidify the industry.
Like I think like a year or two ago, people didn't really know what was happening in podcasting.
Nobody knew it was going to be big, but they didn't quite know how big and they didn't know
how it was going to take up to the next level.
I think Spotify answered that in terms of like, there's a lot of money here.
There's a lot of opportunity here.
And we're putting a lot of money with, you know, in terms of staking that we think is
going to be really big, but but, you know, but because they're a Swedish company in Europe,
I think one, they're going to be a hamstring a little bit more than something like Microsoft
was in the U.S. just because of the way that the legal systems work in Europe as compared
to over here.
So I'm kind of hopeful that the sort of regulators will keep a kind of close eye on things a
little bit.
And so far, I don't think they've done anything horrible to the industry yet.
So until they do something horrible to the industry, I can't really fault them for kind
of doing what they have done kind of until now.
I don't know.
I kind of see it coming.
Like I'm looking ahead.
It's like, well, Spotify is a $50 billion public company.
They're not trying to make small moves.
They're trying to make big moves.
And I think they're completely right.
It's very hard to stop people when podcasts are published on this open standard from listening
on other players.
But Spotify is kind of moving in that direction where they're like on the extend step of embrace
extend extinguish.
So they've got, I think they just introduced polling this year, where as a podcast host,
you can kind of add polls to your podcast.
So I could ask a question and listeners right now would see on this Spotify app, a poll
pop up and they could give me like, you know, or vote on different answers and see the results.
And I can see the results too, as the host and no other podcast player can do that.
And so if they keep extending the sort of spec for podcasts and adding all these proprietary
features, you're going to see lots of podcasts that like only really make sense.
If you're listening on Spotify, the poll, it just doesn't show up at another player.
So you kind of have to download Spotify and then they've extended it, but ideally they
get a lead and then they can work toward extinguishing every other platform because they've got a
monopoly.
But I don't think they're there yet.
I think if I look at my downloads right now, it's something like 10% of my downloads come
from Spotify and 30, 40% come from iTunes and Apple podcast, which is really kind of
the Internet Explorer podcasting where they own the whole space.
They're built into iOS and Mac OS.
So you like everybody has it as their default podcast player and they haven't really done
anything to innovate.
So they're almost exactly like Internet Explorer.
Yeah.
I said, I mean, I can see it coming to like, I mean, why would they spend that amount of
money not to kind of try and control it from end to end, but they haven't quite yet.
So like you said, I can see it coming too, but until they actually do something that's
kind of horrific and horrendous, that's going to hurt the industry.
You're going to reserve judgment.
I can't blame them for something they haven't done yet.
It's like a minority report where you'd be like, you know, like, have they actually committed
the crime yet?
I don't know.
I can't sue them for the crime they haven't actually committed yet.
This is like the empire, like floating outside your planet, building the Death Star and you're
watching them build the Death Star and you're like, maybe they're going to use it for good.
It's just a really big taxi that they're going to use to take people from one place to another.
It's not really going to be something that's going to like annihilate entire planets though.
They did a survey too.
I was reading a tweet from a journalist who opened Spotify and he got a survey and it
was like, let's say there was exclusive Spotify only podcast content and we had another subscription.
How much would you pay for it?
Three dollars a month, eight dollars a month.
So like they're surveying users to try to lock up some of these content, like these
podcasts.
Joe Rogan is going to remove all of his content from I think YouTube and other like the sort
of Apple RSS feed.
I mean, it is going to be interesting to see how they do.
I mean, like it happened everywhere else, right?
So why wouldn't it happen in podcast?
It happened on in TV.
Everything used to be over the air.
Then it went to cable and now it's all streaming and you have to go buy specific things.
I mean, it happened elsewhere.
So it is going to happen in podcasting too.
It's no matter when it will happen.
I guess, you know, ultimately, too, as long as they're treating the talent well, can you
really argue with it, too, as long as Joe Rogan is making a whole lot of money from
it and he's producing great content that people want to listen to and they're willing to pay
for it.
Can you fault them for that either?
Like as long as they're treating people well and making a lot of money along the way as
well.
I don't like it, but I can understand it and to somebody I have to live with it as well.
We don't have a choice.
Right.
So what are your ideas in the podcasting space?
We talked about Podhump, but you've got podcast ping.
You've got a couple others.
What are you thinking about building?
Yeah, I mean, I think it comes down to, yeah, there's obviously, you know, when you think
about podcasts, there's things that you need to do.
You know, obviously, there's things like hosting that you need to do.
There's just like any other content, you know, you need to be able to promote your content
and do all those kind of things.
So, you know, I'm thinking about like, what's the life cycle of a podcast and how can we
ease that a little bit?
How can we make it easier for people to start podcasts, how can we make people to host podcasts
and how can we make it easier for people to promote podcasts as well?
So I've kind of got a few things, kind of a few irons in the fire there in terms of
so there's podcast ping, which is okay, you've got a podcast, you've got people listening
to it, you've got advertisers advertising on it.
But now like your website for your podcast, your podcast feed itself needs to actually
be up and available so people can access it and listen to it.
How do you know if your website is down, how do you know if your RSS feed is offline because
of your hosting company or whatever.
So podcast ping is just a service for podcasters just to keep an eye on all of the different
parts of your podcast and make sure that people can access it.
And when it's offline, it will just email you and tell you, hey, there's an issue and
people might not be able to listen to your podcast.
That's one thing that I've been building, podcast hosting review, which is one of the
ones you mentioned when you look through my I worked on list there.
Yeah, again, people need to be able to know where to host their podcast.
And like you mentioned, there's apps like Anchor, there's the Agafone, Transistor,
Buzzsprout, like, you know, 50 probably now different hosting options into hosting your
podcast.
So how do you know which is a good podcast or a host or a bad podcast host?
Mostly you go and find reviews of a bunch of them and see which ones are good or not.
So podcast hosting review is a site that kind of aggregates all the different hosts and
then aggregates the reviews of all of those as well.
So you can make a well-informed choice about which features make sense for you, what kind
of makes sense from a functionality standpoint and a price standpoint, too, hopefully, as
well.
So that's kind of another thing.
There's a couple of others which are kind of in the works that I've had in the works
for a while, but, you know, can only do so much, but one of them is more like if you've
got an idea for a podcast, how do you know if it's a good idea?
How do people actually want to listen to a podcast about that particular topic?
And so it's kind of a kind of like a Kickstarter kind of idea where, you know, people come
up with an idea.
They kind of make a page for a podcast that they're thinking about and then people can
say, yes, I would listen to that or I would pay X amount to listen to that.
So something along those lines just to kind of get a sense of is it actually a good idea
to actually do this podcast just because you can record an episode about something doesn't
mean you should.
These are great ideas.
I like the podcast hosting review site.
A few years ago, I interviewed Steve Benjamin's on the IndieHackers website.
So if you Google like site builder report, IndieHackers, his interview will come up.
And I don't know what he's making now, but at the time he was making like $40,000 a month
as a one person operation.
And he just had a blog where he was reviewing website builders.
And so when you're thinking about like, oh, should I go with Wix?
Should I use Squarespace or Webflow?
Like his site will come up and he has like this whole rating system for how he reviews
different website builders, which ones you should use, and he's kind of like this objective
reviewer.
And he has a standard where he doesn't let any of these companies pay him to influence
his reviews.
And so he's just been working at it for years.
And then I think he takes like an affiliate sort of fee.
So if you end up clicking on one of these website builders, and going through his website
and buying their services, he gets some sort of cut.
And the fact that he can make 40 grand a month doing that, basically just reviewing tools
that other people made, he's kind of like a curator.
So the fact that you can do the same thing in pretty much any industry, okay, what podcasts
host should I use?
I think the answer to that question is not obvious.
Even to me, when I started Indie Hackers, I just kind of like, I think someone just
he was a listener.
After a few episodes, it's like, hey, you switched to our hosts were new or any hackers
and I wanted to support them.
And I had no clue what to look for.
But now I know a lot more like they're different podcast hosting kind of download measurement
statistics.
So one of the things I realized I switched to transistor this year, and my downloads
dropped like 40%.
Turns out, there's a bunch of different ways that podcast hosts measure your downloads.
And there's a lot of ways to get fake downloads from bots, etc.
And some hosts are just better at filtering those out than others.
And there's in fact, like an entire standard called the IAB, sort of v2 standard and like
chartable uses it, but other podcast hosts don't.
So if you actually want accurate stats, you need to pick a host that uses the standard,
which is the vast minority of hosts.
So probably most podcasts out there are getting way fewer real downloads and they actually
think so if you had a site like this, you could tell people about this kind of stuff
so they just don't really know.
Yeah, in terms of that kind of stuff, especially if you want to start, you know, having people
pay you to kind of advertise on your podcast, you know, have having something that follows
a standard like that.
Because you can say that my host is IAB certified, that people know that they're actually getting
or at least industry wide, they're getting it's the same standard, right in terms of
I've got $100,000 now, compared to who, but it can compare to all the hosts who are using
that same standard as well.
So yeah, it's funny because I do go back to this parallel to like, it's like the blogging
industry a lot because it is it really is like a very because I was so I was doing some
research to see what what people were making just doing blogging and stuff.
And yeah, I found there was probably a good number of people making 20 $30,000 a month
from blogging.
And how are these people making money from blogging without, you know, plastering this
their blog with lots of ads on there and stuff like that.
And I found the vast majority of people who are making good money with blogging is, you
know, showing people are the people how to do blogging.
But how do they make money from that it's an affiliate program with all of these different
hosts for hosting, right, whether it's WordPress, or Paloo host, or you know, any of these other
kind of site hosting and blog hosting platforms.
And they have pretty generous affiliate programs, some of them are just kind of a one time payment.
But you know, anywhere from like 50 to 100 dollars if somebody actually signs up, and
then some people do it more like it's just going to be a recurring amount.
So if somebody signs up for the amount of time that they sign up, you'll make 10% of
whatever they pay to sort of host as well.
And so yeah, so I'm kind of hoping that you know, once podcast hosting review kind of
establishes itself, that there's some opportunity either through featuring hosts or doing affiliate
links or whatever, mostly I did podcasting hosting review as a way to kind of be a kind
of a lead magnet for podcast ping, right?
Like if somebody's coming to podcast hosting review to find a host, at some point they're
going to need podcast ping to know if that host is actually up and if the feeds up and
all that kind of stuff too.
So I've got my own reasons for kind of starting podcast hosting review, but I can also see
a good opportunity to actually a way for it to actually make some significant income on
its own as well.
It's a cool thing about working on a lot of a lot of products at the same time, they have
this, they just like work well together.
And if like one of them works really well, you can use that to help drive a lot of traffic
or users or data to another one that maybe wouldn't have succeeded on its own.
But like, you've got this cool synergy going on.
And podcast ping in particular, I think is a cool idea because it's a tool.
So I talked to Rob Walling a few weeks ago, he's investing in, you know, companies that
otherwise would have bootstrapped.
And he's really big on picks and shovels, there's a gold rush, people are all doing
a particular thing.
Don't do that thing that everyone's doing.
Just build the tools that they need, you know, sell them some shovels where they dig for
gold and like, you don't have to find any gold, you're gonna get rich.
And if podcasting seems to be a big thing, everyone's starting a podcast, what are the
different tools that you can make to support podcasters instead of just being a podcaster
yourself, which is super competitive and hard and kind of stressful.
You can make an uptime monitoring service or podcasts, you can make a...
What else is there?
There's Wave, which does kind of like, you know, clipping audio and sharing it to social
media.
And I had their founder on the podcast earlier this year and they're crushing it.
They're selling kind of this tool to podcasters to help them basically get more listeners.
You've got a...
I wonder if somebody has like a podcast hosting, kind of like a podcast site builder, because
I was looking at the Sentax podcast and they have a beautiful website that looks nothing
like any other podcast website I've ever seen, where you've easily got like a list of all
the things you can build and they've got all their players and like, it just looks great.
I think they've got...
There's an indie hacker actually who runs Podcast Page.
I think it's podcastpage.io, I think it is, which is basically just you point your RSS
feed at it and it will make a beautiful site for you automatically.
This is cool.
Yeah.
So that's another interesting avenue for...
It's supporting the industry as a whole, but you're doing it in an interesting way.
Yeah.
I mean, I think, obviously, if you can make money doing something, you can make money
helping other people do the same thing, right?
So in terms of like what your market opportunity is, yes, you can build a podcast and you can
build a very successful podcast and in a few years you'll make a lot of money, or you can
build a tool that people will pay you right from the beginning that will help you make
some money along the way and hopefully will become...
I mean, like, I think Wave was doing something like 30 or $40,000 a month now.
That's pretty damn good money.
Yeah.
We're using Riverside to record this.
I've used so many different podcast recording platforms, so a lot of people use Zoom, but
Zoom isn't made for podcasting.
So back when I started, I was using Zencaster, which is the coolest thing ever at the time
because it's like you log onto the website, you just give your guest a link.
It's like no fuss, no hassle.
They jump in.
You don't have to record separate audio, it just recorded locally in your browser, in
your guest browser, and then would upload their locally recorded version.
So it would be super crystal clear audio quality.
And then I switched to Squadcast, which was cool because it added videos.
I can make eye contact while I'm talking to you and I'm on Riverside, which will record
the video.
And as far as I'm aware, all of these companies are actually doing really well, just creating
basically the same tool for people who want to record podcasts.
Yeah.
And that's just another sign, I think, that the podcast industry is at such an early stage.
This is a very...
I mean, tools like this, the fact that they're really just popping up over the last six or
seven months or so, just is another sign that one, there's just a lot of opportunity for
people who are still looking to improve their workflow in sort of putting out podcasts and
things.
But I also think tools like this that make it easier for people to put out more podcasts
will just mean that there's more podcasts coming out as well, which means that podcast
industry as a whole, even though people like Spotify might try and wall up certain parts
of it with the celebrities and stuff.
But the cool thing about podcasting has literally been that anybody can publish a podcast.
And I think tools like this are just going to make it so that more people publish more
stuff like this as well.
So that kind of, I think, compounds on itself.
And I think that's kind of the other reason I think I'm just really kind of into the space
itself.
Well, listen, we have a million other things on our list to talk about, but we basically
just talk for an hour about podcasting, we'd even get to the creator economy and all this
other cool stuff.
But I want to have you on later to talk about this stuff, because I think it's very tied
in, this idea that you as an indie actor kind of have this choice.
Do you want to be someone who creates content?
Do you want to build tools for people creating this content?
Or do you want to build kind of the platforms that connect listeners or readers to the people
creating the content?
And there's people doing all three of them, and there's a lot to be said there.
You've got some cool stuff you're working on in both areas.
And so do I.
I think the important thing there is leaning to who you are.
Some people are going to be really awesome in front of a microphone, and they're going
to want to talk about lots of content and talk to lots of different people.
And some people are going to want to write code in the background and things like that.
So there's no one right answer for kind of everybody.
But it's awesome that there's so many different options now.
And I think there's kind of a few exceptions in terms of there's some really talented people
out there who are happy to do all of those.
Obviously, those are like the sort of elite kind of rock stars out there.
I don't think you should let that put you off if there's something that you're interested
in.
There's lots of different avenues that you can explore, and I think there's lots of opportunity
there as well.
Yeah.
And I'll add to that.
I think your kind of funding choices play into that as well.
Because if you're trying to build a platform, a platform is almost always kind of a winner
take all thing.
Like Spotify is trying to own all the podcasts for a reason, and they have to kind of raise
a war chest to do it.
Whereas if you're an indie hacker, you don't want to raise money.
I like the tool-based approach that you're going down, that the Riverside guys are doing,
that Wave is doing, where you don't really need to raise money to build a tool.
You could just build a tool in a very short amount of time, make it super quick and dirty
and scrappy, sell it to early adopters.
And then if you get big enough, you can raise money.
Riverside just raised, I think, $2.5 million they announced, and they're doing a ton of
revenue in a very short amount of time.
Riverside did not exist this time last year.
So you kind of have that splitting path.
So I think if you're an indie hacker, consider the tools that are missing or the niches you
can target.
Yeah, one of the things I had on the list to talk about was the idea of what's the valuation
of Hop Into?
They went from eight months ago not existing to a $2 billion valuation.
They just raised $200 million, I think, earlier this week.
So again, that's a tool for doing virtual events because of the pandemic that we're
a part of.
And so I'm just identifying these trends and building a very simple tool.
It's a very simple tool, right?
It's virtual events.
I mean, people have been trying to do this stuff for years, but because the world changed
around them, it went from hero to I think they were going to do $80 million in revenue,
I think it was, in the last six or seven months.
Being in the right place at the right time can be really helpful as well.
Super helpful.
Well, listen, Mabs, it's been a pleasure as always.
Can you let listeners know where they can go to find out about all these different projects
you're working on and whatever is top of mind for you?
Yeah, the best place to connect with me is on Twitter at abasharikbal.
If you want to see the list of the 97 soon to be 98 projects that I've been working on,
it is iworkedon.com.
All right, Mabs.
Take it easy.
All right.
Thank you.
Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode and you want an easy way to support the podcast,
you should leave a review for us on iTunes or Apple Podcasts.
Probably the fastest way to get there if you're on a Mac is to visit ndhackers.com slash reviews.
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Thank you so much for listening and as always, I will see you next time.