S11 Bonus: Arnab Deka, Metacast

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Guys, I've got something cool to tell you about. As an engineering leader, a manager and an engineer myself, I'm geeking out over a new product I'm just discovering that helps me with each of these points of view. The great team at SEMA, builders of the SEMA intelligence platform, have been working on what they call the product roadmap radar.

It's this integrated solution that uses generative AI to observe your code and JIRA in order to summarize, synthesize, and make it easier to deliver your roadmap. It not only helps keep your roadmap on track, but it helps reduce the time engineers spend in meetings. Cue all the engineers clapping. The product roadmap radar is extremely easy to setup. Just enable your integrations and let AI do all the mapping for you. My favorite part? I'm glad you asked.

The radar doesn't just tell you about your roadmap. It suggests changes you need to make. based on the code that's been written and the stories that have been addressed. No commenting, no special setup, all regenerative AI. It gives you an outside view of your roadmap based on the code and projects a terminal.

date based on outstanding work and activity again no comments no special setup it even detects shadow work when development is being done but Jira isn't being updated I'm pretty jazzed about it and I think you will be too take a second to watch a short button awesome demo video. Go to codestory.co slash prr to watch it today. You'll like what you see.

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And then if that succeeds, we'll go on to other things. So in that first beta and the first release itself, we had basics. You could listen to any public podcast out there. But we didn't have playlists, we didn't have any other features other than this awesome transcript. I'm Arnab Deka, I'm the co-founder and CTO at Metacast. This is Coke. a podcast bringing you interviews Tech visionaries. Six months moonlighting. That's the last episode. Go share.

It's an industry. I don't exactly know what to do next. It took many goes to get right. who built the teams It's people. The teams help each other achieve more. Keeping scalability top of mind. All that infrastructure was a pain. Yes, we've been fighting. Total waste of time the stories you don't

in the headlines. It's not an easy thing to achieve, Mike. Took it off the shelf and dusted it off and tried it again. Drive the ups and downs of the startup life. You need to really want it. It's not just about technology. All this and more on Code Story. I'm your host, Noah Lappart, and today I'll Arnob Deck. the best podcast app out there with transcripts linking to the best most interesting content

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Arnab Deca lives in Vancouver. He was science or software engineering. In fact, while he was studying civil engineering, he felt building things and eventually building software outside of tech he has a family man and loves to sup that's stand-up paddleboarding with them and his dog he also Astronomy and is known to attend a star party or two telescope in hand. Arnob took a sabbatical And on this journey, he realized that he likes deep work and interacting with customers directly.

to high-level strategy He met with his now co-founder, Thank you. for it. This is the creation story of Metacast. So Metacost is a slowly but surely maybe hopefully building the best podcast. out there but okay so let's get into what the product does and all that why did we start building it right Once I got to the principal engineer level at Amazon a few years back now

I started realizing that I was not enjoying my job as much anymore. I took a sabbatical, introspected a little bit and I think I figured I find... focused work, talking directly to customers and things with a small team. my job was becoming more and more like the strategy discussions, really long term 5 year, 7 year planning and that sort of stuff.

And I did enjoy those, but I definitely had that itch of, I need to be building something of my own too. So around this same time, Ilya is my co-founder. Elia and I used to meet often. He had already moved in the US at that time or somewhere else in the US at that time. I was in Vancouver

But we would sometimes meet in Seattle because he was working for Google at that time. So he would come to Seattle, I would drive down, He and I worked in AWS together for four years or so, and we had a really good wavelength match in how we think about work and

So there was already some seeds of we want to build something together someday. But I think one walk back in 2022 when we had discussion about podcast and we realized that nerds we love like i basically get all of my world information via podcasts like starting from tennis to formula one to like politics to everything else in the world history i get everything because I love that medium. Neither of us were like happy with the apps that were out there at that time.

So we thought okay let's actually maybe try building something. it goes. So that was like years and a few months ago. That's how I started.

So let's dive into the MVP for Metacast, right? It's that first version of the app, the podcast app you built. What sort of tools were you using to bring it to life and how long did it take you? We knew that to build a podcast listening experience, it'll have to be an app. It's not gonna be a web app. Because people want to install those things like stream audio and all that through their apps.

And we didn't want to build like iOS and Android and all of those things separately because we didn't know if our idea is even worth building or not at that time. So we decided to do a quick prototype in Flutter, which is an open source framework but started by Google. It allows you to build iOS and Android and desktop apps also. We don't use that right now.

from the same code base and it actually gives you a pretty like it's a native you won't know that you're using like a different framework or something like that so we started with that before even the mvp We built out a prototype That itself took 3-4 months because

I had come from a background of backend engineering. So APIs and high-scale event-driven stuff back in AWS. That's been basically my life work so far. Building an app is very different. So that first build itself took 3-4 months and what we focused on is just the transcript experience so back when we started two years ago

No other app had like this sort of automatically generated transcript from the audio. If you listen to this episode on metacast right now you'll see what i mean back then nobody had it so we've started with just that screen that player and Everything else, like the catalog of what podcast you could listen to and all that, everything else was hard-coded, believe me. and then we ship

Our shared ship is wrong. We haven't even released an app at that point. We installed that nascent prototype app on my phone, on Ilya's phone, and a couple of close friends who told us that they like podcasts. and we saw some seeds of yeah there is something in here right like people are liking the experience and they're asking for more and more things so then we started building the actual app

And what you would call an MVP, that took another like four months, I would say. So we launched the first beta on iOS and Android. in February 2024 so about a year and like couple of months back so this is all in all about eight months of work went into the first data within that first version tell me about some of the decisions and trade-offs around how you built it and i hear you

I hear you mention the transcription part of it, and that's probably one you could touch on there too, but maybe if there's any more or more stories around there, I'm curious about those decisions, trade-offs you had to make, and how you coped with them. Our primary focus was transcription. and the way we thought about the world at that time was let's build the best podcast app that allows you to use the transcript to do powerful things and then if that succeeds we'll go on to other things.

So in that first beta and the first release itself, We had basics of you could listen to any public podcast out there, but we didn't have playlists, we didn't have any other features other than this awesome transcript. And with the transcript, what you could do at that time when we launched this was not just listen to the audio like you do in every other app, but you could skip ahead like you could read ahead. You could search for different snippets inside.

that using the transcript you could type it in and jump to like different sections You could bookmark. specific clips or share like very specific clips for recover apps. Now to this day, there's only one or two other apps that can do these kind of things.

And our users tell us that our UX, the user experience that we provide for these things is basically the best that they like so far. So yeah, that was like the main... trade off our decision that we did guys i've got something cool to tell you about as an engineering leader a manager and an engineer myself i'm geeking out over a new product i'm just discovering that helps me with each of these points of view

The great team at SEMA, builders of the SEMA intelligence platform, have been working on what they call the product roadmap radar. It's this integrated solution that uses generative AI to observe your code and JIRA in order to summarize, synthesize, and make it easier to deliver your roadmap. It not only helps keep your roadmap on track, but it helps reduce the time engineers spend in meetings.

Cue all the engineers clapping. The product roadmap radar is extremely easy to set up. This only takes about five minutes. Just enable your integrations and let AI do all the mapping for you. My favorite part? I'm glad you asked. The radar doesn't just tell you about your roadmap. It suggests changes you need to make. based on the code that's been written and the stories that have been addressed. No commenting.

no special setup, all regenerative AI. It gives you an outside view of your roadmap based on the code and projects a target completion date based on outstanding work and activity. Again, no comments, no special setup. It even detects shadow work when when development is being done but Jira isn't being updated. I'm pretty jazzed about it, and I think you will be too. Take a second to watch a short but awesome demo video. Go to codestory.co slash prr to watch it today. you'll like what you see.

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So let's move forward then. So you've got that MVP, it's working, you're getting that feedback that people like the UI. How are you progressing and maturing the product? And I think to wrap that in a box, what I'm looking for is how you build your roadmap. How do you go about deciding

this is the next most important thing to build or to address within Metacast. Very quickly after our launch, we started getting people people were excited this is not by no means like success right if we still haven't received like an enormous hockey stick or anything like that but since the beginning it's been a steady linear growth which is encouraging on its own for an independent business like ours

but one of the first things that we heard is okay i love the transcript experience and what you have imagined and built into this but if you want me to use this as my podcast app I need playlists. I need speed selection. I need like all these other 15 things that other apps do standard. That needs to be there for me to convert into your app as my primary mode of podcast listening.

that kind of changed our roadmap and it makes sense now thinking about it and so we started building on that i want to say about six months later the first beta so october 2024 is when we finished chunk of work and we said okay we have the basics of

pretty robust podcast app with the superpowers of transcript at this point. We launched that in last year so that about six months ago and since then it's again been like very percentage growth the number of people will touch upon this a little bit later the number who discover us is very small. That continues to be a challenge for us.

I'm like pretty much dependent business but of the let's say like about hundred people let's say new hundred people find us every month of them about 50% up actually use the app and are retained users and about 10 percent of them actually convert into a premium subscription so those things are great and these people about what else they need and that's reshaping our roadmap all the time.

I'm curious about team, right? And this will be interesting because I think it's a So I'm curious, one, how big the team 2. How are you going to future and what are you going to look for in those people to indicate they're the winning horses to join you Ilya and I when I said we are wavelengths. One thing we realized that we like when teams with a gorgeous know very well and we trust each other to build the best experience.

our users. Having said that, I don't imagine unless the world changes around us and forces me to take up a job like before again, I don't imagine I'll ever work in a place where there's like more than And that's like the similar version we have for Metacast. teams can deliver huge things on their own, rather than huge companies.

more bureaucracy around right now we are we started with two A few months later, we had a friend and previous co-worker and many Jenny she was living in Costa Rica at that time and her life was life allowed her to like participate and she said hey I'll jump in too so up for about a year she contributed basically daily to Metacast. She built out a lot of cool features for Metacast. But a few months ago, her life changed. Something around it changed and she had to move back to the US.

And in the US she cannot like keep doing this for us so she had to take a jump. We actually talk about all of this, about our perspectives on what kind of teams we want to work in, about Jenny joining us and leaving us in our Metacast Behind the Scenes podcast. This episode is brought to you by Propello. People take authentication for granted, but it's more than how customers log into your product.

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Guys, I've got something cool to tell you about. As an engineering leader, a manager and an engineer myself, I'm geeking out over a new product I'm just discovering that helps me with each of these points of view. The great team at SEMA, builders of the SEMA intelligence platform, have been working on what they call the product roadmap radar.

It's this integrated solution that uses generative AI to observe your code and JIRA in order to summarize, synthesize, and make it easier to deliver your roadmap. It not only helps keep your roadmap on track, but it helps reduce the time engineers spend in meetings. Cue all the engineers clapping. The product roadmap radar is extremely easy to set up. This only takes about five minutes. Just enable your integrations and let AI do all the mapping for you.

My favorite part? I'm glad you asked. The radar doesn't just tell you about your roadmap. It suggests changes you need to make. based on the code that's been written and the stories that have been addressed. No commenting. no special setup, all regenerative AI. It gives you an outside view of your roadmap based on the code and projects a target completion date based on outstanding work and activity. Again, no comments, no special setup. It even detects shadow work

when development is being done but Jira isn't being updated. I'm pretty jazzed about it, and I think you will be too. Take a second to watch a short but awesome demo video. Go to codestory.co slash prr to watch it today. you'll like what you see.

Okay, so let's move forward. I'm curious about scalability. And I know it's semi-early days, right? But has there been any interesting areas where scalability has popped up and you've had to fight it as you grow? Oh yeah, yeah. Even like recently, our latest couple of weeks back, we had a LLM bots, like basically, I won't say an attack. They were probably trying to discover our content. But let's jump back a little bit.

So both Ilya and me and Jenny, we come from Big Tech, right? Amazon, Google and all that. So we knew that some of the fundamentals after we decided that, okay, there is viability here. Let's build this out. This is going to take years, but let's start this. We knew that some of the fundamentals will be hard to change later.

So those things like the data model and the architecture, we decided to put more work into that and come up with those things early on. Basically to keep it flexible for later because you can't like know what's going to happen in the future.

And nobody should build software imagining that they'll know what's going to happen in the future. And especially in startups, you just don't have the time to do all that. So we tried to keep our data models, architecture, it's basically API based mostly serverless almost everywhere to keep our costs as well as infrastructure those kind of maintenance stuff low because it's just two or three of us And that has

work pretty well i would say however so how it works on our app is when a new user comes in they'll see the catalog is lazily populated so if they search for a podcast we find it And that's the time that we'll import it into our catalog in the backend. So at this point, we have about 2 million episodes and all that in our backend and with transcripts and all that. It's quite a lot of data for a small team. people. One of the challenges was about couple of months back

we started publishing like our podcast catalog and all that open on the web. And that's when we started ChatGPT and OpenAI and Anthropic and all of these and lots of other bots. We're getting about like 300,000 requests. we had not built all of this with caching and all of this in mind in the very first beginning so we started The performance was still great because of the fundamentals with like serverless APIs and data model and all that, but our cost started spiraling.

so we actually published a newsletter and we talked about this on our recent podcast episode if you want to go deeper into it but we did a pretty big like re-engineering recently about a month back to optimize this quite a lot and we cut down the cost like 50 to 70x recently.

So, as you step out on the balcony and you look across all that you've built thus far with Metacast, what are you most proud of? In AWS, I worked on a couple of cool little things as well as some big projects towards the end. The AWS chatbot, the whole notification system, all of that I was like the main developer for, main principal engineer for. Those things I am super proud of because the day we announce it, people jump on it.

thousands of thousands companies like they take it on the way to get AWS critical notifications into slack and all that I started on so I am proud of all that however with metacast I feel like the pride is different right now and we're very open about our numbers and everything so i'll tell you on this podcast too but so we have about 800 right now steadily growing not a hockey stick

said but it's a good sign that it's growing steadily and out of the 800 about 100 are paying for it and out of those hundred a good chunk regularly like messages to tell us why they like things or when things break features that they're requesting for This is the kind of thing that I could not have built at a large company, right? Even though the number is very small knowing that there's 800 people around the world using this app daily for hours

And then telling us about it, leading us to take the next decisions for it. I just love that kind of work. And that's what I'm, I think, most proud of right now. Let's flip the script a little bit. Tell me about a mistake you made and how you and your team have responded to it

The first one we touched upon this earlier. Very early on our hypothesis was that transcripts is the main thing and we put in a lot of energy making the transcript experience the best the way like you can search through it the way you can bookmark share and all

Once people started using it, that's when we realized, like I said earlier, that we need to build all these other things that people expect from a podcast app too. And I feel like we could have built 80% of the we built into transcripts in half the time if we had not focused on making

that the primary focus of the early part of the work so that's one of the things if I were to do it differently I would do that The second thing is we knew that discoverability for like an independent business or an app like that is always hard. Having said that, I don't think we still realize how much of a black box like App Store and Play Store are. So even now, like we've tried lots of tricks in there. But even if you search for like podcast app with transcript,

which is our USP. If you do that on Google, you'll see us on the first like four or five, within the four or five. Whereas in App Store, you will see hundreds of apps that have nothing to do with podcasts or transcripts before we get to ours. That's something that we haven't been able to crack yet.

So we thought, what can we do in this space? We need to increase our downloads and ratings. Ratings are good, but there are only very small number of ratings compared to what Apple and Google seem to prioritize. So we started focusing more and more on Google search based SEO. This is something I think we could have and should have started even earlier, right from the beginning.

Let's move forward then. This will be really exciting because it's still early days for Metacast. What does the future look like for the podcast app, for your products, and for your team? Right now we're the standout app in a few areas already like the transcript UX Our playlist people love them. We recently launched automatic chapters and people love them too.

And I think the simplicity and yet the power of the app, that's something that most people appreciate. Having said that, this is still like only the very beginning of the app, right? We have some big features we need to add to catch up with established other big podcast apps, like private podcasts, for example, and ability to support Patreon feeds, that sort of stuff. We need to add custom playlists.

Maybe even tweak more and more people who are coming from like the overcasts that they're asking for like audio engine. Like the ability to voice boost and automatic silence streaming and all that. So that sort of stuff we need to build on. And I think beyond that...

Ilya and I have some big plans for the whole area right growing beyond just the app into a podcast platform but that requires some critical mass adoption for the app to make some of that possible and so i think for the future the vision is very clear It's time and effort and are we able to execute it given all of the other constraints that startups face which is runway and all of those things.

Let's switch to you. Who influences the way that you work? Name a person or many persons or something you look up to and why. maybe because of my background I'm really inspired by people who didn't have the perfect formal education or perfect background to land on where they are but rather made it through grid, persistence and hardware. So in this space there's quite a few inspirations. I always think about Airbnb. Brian and Joe, they were designers.

who learned to code who learned to build did lots of other things and got rejected again and again but kept on going and today like airbnb is an amazing big Another one I would say is Slack, Stuart Butterfield. think he's like a philosophy major or something like that self-taught and then kept building and iterating things until he figured out what he wants to eventually build

And so these kind of stories always inspire me. I love how I built this podcast and the book also. It's also available as an audiobook. There are like amazing stories like this in there.

then coming back to like my tennis kind of love and all that for people who are familiar with tennis like we just we are at the sunset the end of the big four part of tennis right where there was Federer and Nadal for the longest time and then Djokovic and Andy Murray So all these four, I love all four of them and I'm inspired by all four of them. But what I naturally gravitate towards more is people like Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray who

didn't necessarily have all of the natural talent and didn't have an easy start. They struggled really hard really early on, but with years and years of relentless hard work, they became legends of their own.

So last question. So you're getting on a plane and you're sitting next to a young entrepreneur who's built the next big thing. They're jazzed about it. They can't wait to show it off to the world. And can't wait to show it off to you right there on the plane. What advice do you give that person? Having gone down this road a bit. So first I'd say congrats and kudos

It's never easy to like I think take time out of your life and work and all and build something. So they've clearly built something and they're like excited about it and I'm gonna look at it. I'm gonna share their passion and joy. And then I think once we start to think about what's the next few things, what's my advice, I'm going to say, okay, let's buckle in because it's going to be a wild ride. There are more chances of things failing than succeeding in the startup.

Validate the idea before you decide to go all in. Make sure that it's like a real problem that real people care about, not just you, right? And once you have done that, I think That's the second assessment you need to do is are you ready to commit to this idea because once you have found that early validation It's going to take years and years of hard work to actually come out with something that's seen as a successful product. And that's going to meaningfully change your life.

Unless you get really lucky. Like you launch on App Store maybe and the next day Apple picks it up and shows you at the top. Or maybe you go for fundraising and get like a really good VC round or something like that helps you grow fast early on. It's going to be years and years of hard work. And so make the stage of life that you're in your family. and most importantly finances are in place to allow you to go on this journey because I feel like startups are more like

marathons? Like we feel like they're sprints, right? Build fast, let's go release. but they're more like marathons in disguise, I feel like. That's totally true, and that's fantastic advice. Larnab, thank you for being on the show today, and thank you for telling the creation story of Metacast. Thank you, Noah. Thanks for having me on the podcast. And this concludes another chapter of Code Story. Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Lappart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts.

or the podcasting app of your choice. And when you get a chance, leave us a review. Both things help us out tremendously. And thanks again for