Our biggest struggle — distribution

TL;DR

This newsletter is very personal.

We're sharing our struggles with distribution and asking for help to figure it out.

Two years of Metacast

We're almost 2 years into our Metacast journey (read about the origins here).

Our growth is steady, but it's not fast. There's no hockey stick, no up and to the right chart to brag about. There are no huge step-function jumps in revenue or new user signups.

All of us have read stories where founders talk about despair. Then follows the hero's arc, overcoming the obstacle, rebirth, etc.

There's survival bias in those stories. They tell the story by working backwards from the success they've achieved. There's already a known happy ending. It's easier to tell those stories from the happy place.

When you live thorough moments of despair as a founder, there's no hindsight. You don't know how it'll end up. The future is uncertain. The only thing you know for sure is that you must do something differently.

You don't know what that something is though.

And that is the journey.

Building the product is just the first step

We wanted to launch in a few months. But in a crowded market, user expectations are high. We weren't prepared for some of those.

It has taken a long time to build the "table stakes" functionality that users expect from a podcast app. There are just a couple of things remaining that will put us on par with the other independent podcast apps, like Overcast and Pocket Casts.

We're starting to see traction and regularly receive emails like this.

I think that you all have a great app, and I'm excited to see where it goes!
– MK, a paying user

Friends send us unsolicited DMs on WhatsApp.

The new chapters feature is dope dude.
– Guang Yang, co-host of Software Misadventures podcast

We've got an amazing product on our hands. Users love it and pay for it.

If only more people discovered it!

How big of a distribution do we need?

The answer can be backed out from the revenue expectation with a very simple formula. Ben Curtis put it succinctly on the Builders Gonna Build podcast.

We wanted to make $40k a month. That was our first target. Each of the three founders would be able to make $10k a month, and we wanted the 25% to be for infrastructure.
– Ben Curtis, co-founder of Honeybadger

The math resonated with us.

If we apply the same formula, with our pricing of $2/month and a 15% cut by Apple and Google, we need ~15k paying users to make $25k/month. Each founder would get $10k and $5k would be used for infrastructure and other expenses.

In other words, we need 100x more users for Metacast to become a sustainable bootstrapped business.

Fake math of market sizing

When we first got started, we looked at the overall market size. Hundreds of millions of podcast listeners, market shares of independent apps, etc. We fell into a trap of thinking that "if only we could take 0.1% of the market, we'd be fine."

Capturing a small percentage of a big market seems easy, but it is not. You still need to somehow reach thousands if not millions of customers to grab a tiny slice of the huge market pie.

The small percentage is an excuse founders use to convince themselves that their business is viable, quit their jobs, and raise an angel round.

It's an excuse to not think about distribution early on. Because if you start thinking about distribution, you'll see just how big of a challenge it is. You may get discouraged. It's mentally easier to punt it until later.

Grabbing a small share of a big market is only easy if you already have distribution. If you're Amazon, you can release a crappy product and still have some market share almost immediately. If you're a no-name without huge following on social media and/or a budget for ads, you have to figure out how to efficiently acquire and retain customers.

We've not yet figured it out

We've tried a few things to reach potential users.

• Social media — I've been able to grow my following on LinkedIn to ~14k. We've gotten some users from it and it seems like a viable channel for the future that we keep investing in. We've also tried Bluesky and X, but have not found much success on those platforms.
• Reddit — Guerilla marketing on Reddit seems to be working for us. We comment on posts, people discover our subreddit, and become customers.
• SEO — Traffic from Google is the holy grail of organic reach. We've started to have some success and will keep optimizing it further.
• Podcasting — Our podcasts have not been compelling enough to attract a large audience. We had success with some episodes like the Jason Fried interview, but still the reach is in the thousands. We also tried posting clips on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. There were some hits. But on a whole, our podcasts failed to generate distribution for the app.
• Newsletter — We've got 500+ subscribers, but I've dropped the ball on it a few times. It's probably our most underutilized channel right now.

How can you help?

While we were in the pre-launch phase, a few UX designers offered their help pro-bono. They just wanted to see us succeed and to contribute to a project they found interesting.

That was surprising and nice. The universe gave us just what we needed at the right time.

Now, we can really use some help on the marketing front.

• Positioning — We're struggling to come up with a single-sentence slogan that would resonate with listeners of information-dense podcasts. We want a "yeah, I get it" reaction in split-second, followed by an irresistible desire to try the app.
• Marketing strategy — There are probably tons of things we're doing wrong on the podcast, newsletter, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc. We want to up our game in marketing.
• Apple/Google store listing optimization — We're way down in search results for "podcast app" in App Store and Play Store. We want to be at least in the top 10, so users discover us organically.
• SEO strategy — We see a huge potential in SEO and have done a lot of work to optimize our site. We really want to get it right.
• Social media strategy — I've had 11k profile views on LinkedIn in the last 3 months. Yet, we got just a handful of users from those. I'm sure we can do better than that.
• Reddit strategy — We'd love to do more on Reddit while walking the fine line of self-promotion that can get us banned.
• LLM agents strategy — We'd love to be referenced in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc. This is a new area and we want to optimize our site to play in that game early on.

We accept help in any format.

Chat with us over Google Meet or just send us an email with your thoughts. It can be a one-off conversation or a recurring meeting. Or it can be just a message with a few relevant links.

We're humble and open to any inputs. Any help will go a long way ❤️

Reach out to us at [email protected]

P.S.

This post was supposed to be a Q1 2025 in review, but it got derailed into the dire straights of distribution. The quarterly review is coming soon.