You have to pay more to get a certain shelf location. Like the eye level, that eye level just before you can share. It's like the whole science to make you buy more. And then you pay for that. And it's exactly what Twitter is doing. It's merchandising your tweets. Except when you go into a wild mark, the key difference is you go into the areas that you want to buy stuff from. Let's say you go into your cereal's eye. Here's some beer for you from the influencer. Yeah, exactly.
That's what is, I think, going wrong in Twitter. Now it's like, I have no idea why I'm seeing these things. Hello and welcome to the Metacast podcast episode 43, Arnab, Michael Hoast. Can you believe this? 43 episodes. We should just record this segment and play it in every episode now. I mean, like the intro. Yeah, like we don't believe that we are 43 episodes. It yeah.
Right. Yeah. Anyway, so this is Metacast behind the scenes podcast where Arnab and me, Ilya, we talk about how we build a software company called Metacast. It is a podcast app that will do some pretty amazing things that no other apps can do today. And what can do as well today, rather. So we are still in close beta, launching very soon.
If you are interested and if you don't like your podcast app, if you want to try something new, go to metacast.app, put your email in there and we'll send you an email when the app comes out. And keep listening. So today, Arnab, what are we going to talk about today? We're going to talk about social media. We're going to first talk about your and my personal takes on it, our experiences.
And I think the crux of today's discussion is how do social media and a small startup business go hand in hand? How can it help? How what's your strategy for it and all that? Yeah. Aside from everything else, as the CEO of our company, you are also our social media manager. That's true. And I should one thing that we are doing differently from this episode going forward is we will try to stick to one topic. So yeah, I think we've covered a lot of stuff in our previous episodes.
So this time, we want to try to just take one topic and stick to it without deviating on, well, we will go on tangents, but without actually planning to take like three or four different topics and then you listen to this and you're like, I'm interested in topic two and three, but not in one and four. So yeah, we are trying to make it easier for the audience. So we'll try our best, but there is no money back guarantee because you're actually not paying us to listen to us. Yes, so it's free.
Take it to leave it. And that's kind of a good segue in social media, right? Because social media is, I guess, free for most part. And you take it for what it is or well, you are out of social media. So let's start with our first experiences. What was your first intro to social media? It's an excellent question, our name. Thanks, you wrote it. I know, that's why, maybe that's why I like it. I think my first exposure to social media was through BBSs, a board bulletin system. A bulletin board.
A bulletin board system. What was the first B? A bulletin board system. A bulletin board system, yes. So it's a thing that runs on somebody's computer, like a piece of software for DAWs, for Microsoft DAWs. And then you call into this person's modem. Basically, you have to know this person's home phone number, which they advertise somewhere. You call it from your modem. You connect to it, and then you have about an hour to download files, so you can leave some messages.
You also download messages that other people left. So it's like forums, but you don't go to the website to see everything there. You download it. You read it offline. It's like mail. Then you write responses, and then they get uploaded back to the board, merged there. And then other people download it. It's very asynchronous. Was it anonymous, or did people have... I should have a good question. I think people just had nicknames.
But the admin could obviously track back a unique name to your phone number. They call you and just tell us how you're blocking it. I see. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I see wasn't a thing in Russia, really. Well, at least wasn't a thing in my circles. I'm talking about late 90s right now. And then there were forums, which I kind of enjoyed, as a... It's kind of... We feel like it's ready today. That's essentially a forum. But previously there were these PHP, BB, so it's PHP, bullet and board, software.
That was a common software to run it. Yeah. It's basically BBS migrating onto the internet. That's what... How those servers... That's what BBS was. It's kind of asynchronous communication, I like that. And I think... I think we will talk more about our favorites later. But I think I think I think is actually what defined how I use social media. Because I think you was one in one communication. I think you was from AOL, right? I think you was originally a startup out of Israel.
And they built it there. I think it was essentially like a clone of AOL messenger. I don't know. I've never used AOL messenger. I think I was in AOL messenger aim, right? ISQ was, I think, a European sort of... I guess that's out of the world. A equivalent of this. It was a very simple but very cool piece of software with sounds and emojis. It was amazing. Yeah. But you could only do one-on-one chat. Before emojis were called emojis, yes. I think they were just called Smiley's. Smiley's, yes.
And for people who don't remember or don't know, ISQ is literally I for ICE, C for clear, Q for queen, so ISQ, but it's true for ISQ. It's kind of funny because I remember actually finding people, because you could find people by names, by locations, by whatever they typed in there. ASL. What's ASL? Oh, that was one of the first questions that you would ask when you meet somebody is. A slash S slash L, A's sex location. Oh, interesting. OK. OK. And I never knew this thing.
But yeah, I remember, like I liked one girl, it's cool. And I just found her on ISQ and you were chatting. It's just so... It was interesting because you could reach to anyone anywhere in the world. But at the same time, I think I used it in a very hyper-local way. So I was chatting with people from the same city, who, whatever reason, we chose the chat over the internet as opposed to meet.
My experience with these early, I don't know if we can even call them social media, but these forums and messenger platforms, I think me and a few of my friends, there weren't many internet users at that time in my small town in India, right? And we were maybe some of the first few, definitely not the first wave, but it was still not common at all, right? Like people wouldn't know what you're talking about when you say hotmail or ICQ. And so there was nobody local to follow or talk to.
It was mostly random. And maybe that's why the ASL kind of thing. I thought it was very popular all over. Like when you meet somebody, you come to know them. Like you ask that. And you join different channels and try to explore. It's interesting what you mentioned about you didn't have enough people using the internet locally, which I don't think we did many people using the internet locally either. And that's what made all of those ICQ users really special.
Because you know that somebody has to have a computer. And if somebody has a computer, they are our kind of person. And it's like a different kind of cast. It's probably a bad word. But it's a different cast in some way. I am really curious. How did you find out that they were local, that they were in your area? I think there was a field for Siri in the search. OK. Yeah. You just look for it. OK. Just look for somebody in there. But you could also localize by agent, let's say by first name.
And then because the pool of users was so small, let's say you look for somebody with a certain name, a certain location, certain age, and you get like five people. And you can just, you can actually just ping them. Do you go to this school? Do you go to this school? Yeah. And then people use those only yellow pages. Yeah. I mean, like spam was a foreign concept. It's like every time you get a message, it was like, oh, somebody message me. And you just engage in the conversation.
Cool. My first one was awkward. I don't know if you ever used it. It was insanely popular in India and Brazil. Is it a Google thing? So Google bought it. It's literally that engineer, the person who built it, his first name was awkward. Like awkward boy cotton or something like that. I'm probably massacre in the last name. But Google bought it. And but it was already kind of becoming big. It was insane. Like everybody in India and I've heard Brazil. I like teenagers had that.
Yeah. It was like a Facebook clone. It was before Facebook. I want to say Facebook was a clone of it. But yeah, it was very similar. It was before Facebook. You have walls. Kind of like my space was the original one. I was never that much into my space. But I did experience it. My space was almost fading away by the time I started using all this. But yeah. So my space was a social network for musicians and stuff. Yeah, but not just me. Eventually everybody had a my space page.
But it started with artists and musicians and all that. But orcote was like everybody had a wall. Like the early Facebook, you'd have a wall. And you go and post another wall. It's right in somebody else's wall. Yeah. Graphic. Yeah. Yeah. Like poke them and stuff. Yeah. Anyway. So what's your favorite social network now? You read it. You know it already. In fact, it's kind of like the only social network that I like and I enjoy. So I'm generally like not.
I get turned off by like the influencers. I mean, everybody does, I guess. But I honestly do get turned off by content creation. I'm doing air quotes, right? And influencers and stuff like that. And then there's just. I think after more than a decade of reading these things on various social media platform, my machine learning brain inside my head is finally tuned to recognize like this smells like bullshit immediately, right? And the amount of bullshit on Reddit is very low.
Which is a bit surprising because it's an anonymous platform, right? I mean, you can choose to be anonymous if you wanted to. You can create as many profiles as you want. You can give it random names. Most people use it like that. But I think the mix of anonymity, the subreddit culture where it's like small communities of things that you're interested in, small as in maybe like millions, but still small in case of social media. And I think the upvote, downvote culture, right?
It's not or it wasn't, it probably still isn't very algorithmic. Unlike LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram or TikTok, it's not an algorithmic feed. It's like people are voting, downvoting and you're seeing like what's rising up to the top. So that mixed with anonymity, I think makes people talk about stuff that they care about and give their opinions freely. Unlike where you attach your name to it, there's a certain prestige and thing that you try to grow your aura and stuff like that, right?
As soon as your name is tied to it. So maybe that's why it works. But also I think once you put your real name on it, you can be tracked down, right? Which is surprising, like that's counter intuitive, right? If you can't be tracked down, it makes you feel like there would be more trolling and stuff on that. And of course, Reddit has trolling and all, but the upvote, downvote culture, I think basically helps take care of that.
Yeah, it's kind of aggressive, anonymous, downvoting of any content that the community doesn't like and it just reads out. I think as long as you have certain critical mass of active participators. Right. And I think it's like that the culture of every subreddit gets created by the users that are in it, right? The posts that they like or the kind of discussions they like will naturally float to the top. And if you like that kind of discussions, you would love that subreddit.
So it's kind of like self-curating. Do you think a new Reddit could be created? Now let's say assume a Reddit didn't exist, right? And all you had was the TikTok Instagram. So basically this niche of forums was not taking, right? Do you think it would be possible to recreate what Reddit has done? Or it actually would have to have been born back in the forum days. How old is Reddit? It's like 10, 15 years, 20 years? And I think it started like Reddit actually replaced Dig.
That's how it started, right? Like Reddit was already there, but not very popular. What was Dig? Dig was like a Reddit kind of thing with just global forums. forums with communities and upvote downloads and all that. Very popular in the tech circles. And then they from what I remember, they did some rebranding and like look and feel change and all that people hated it. And there was some disconnect between the Dig team and the users also.
And then Reddit basically came along and everybody migrated, mass migrated to Reddit. Oh, interesting. They would strap their audience from an existing site. Yes, yeah. But Reddit recently has had struggles like this, right? There's a big disconnect between the team running Reddit, especially the CEO and the user base. In fact, the moderators of Reddit, they had like lots of, they stood up against Reddit. As recently as like six months ago, right?
And Reddit was brought down by them for like three days and stuff like that. But I think it's becoming really hard, maybe impossible to recreate the whole thing. Because the technology part is not the hard part here. I mean, it is hard to scale it and all, but it's not undueible with sufficient resources and like funding, you can totally do that. It's migrating the people and the culture over. That is I think really hard.
Yeah, and also with so many social networks, just in general, like do I commit to this? Do I not? And yeah, remember all those networks like Google Plus? It was very promising, but eventually it went nowhere. What were some others? Threads, right? Threads is actually not dead, I want to say. It's doing well. So the benefit it got is it's by meta, right? So it started with 100 million users. It requires an Instagram account to even. It requires, but like pretty much everybody in the world.
And you can't remove it. And an Instagram, it would occasionally send you notification that also it started with thread and sometimes I would tap it without recognizing that it actually is going to take me to a different app. So there you go. I am an active user, even though I kill it right away. So I think there's some, it's hard to know what's happening exactly, but.
But according to some independent platforms like Verge has been talking about it, Kasey Newton from platformer, he has talked about it recently. It's definitely, I mean, the big thing is it started with 100 million users, right? And it's not just the numbers, but actual engagement is apparently, it's not dead for sure. Now it's not replacing Twitter at the same time. It's like its own thing at this point.
The thing is meta has enough funding, enough money to keep it going and like slowly grow this thing into something else over time. Makes me remember that joke about some startups during the dot com boom where you could feel like your next to come fire when you were next to their building because they were burning cash like crazy. Right. Do you remember that your app that was social? Oh yes, it was social. You can you can use some of it.
All you could do is send a yo like there was one button yo and you do that. And recently there is a new one called bump. So you literally like bump other people and that's it. That's all you do there. You bump other people. What do you think? Do you think it's reddit or say Twitter or whatever is like replaceable? I feel like people will just find ways to use existing networks in a different way if one of those other ones shuts down.
To give you a case in point, Instagram in the Russian speaking, I don't know if world is the right word, but like because people are spread geographically, right? But Russian culture, right? Russian speaking culture. It took off initially like everywhere else with just people sharing their pictures.
But then the sort of influencer thing, pick it began with lots of, I mean, it's not just those influencers that you and I think about when they say this word, but just like somebody who is doing, you know, bake cakes or something, right? And they maybe they have like a small school where they teach people how to bake cakes. And then they start posting very large text posts on Instagram. So the picture is just there because Instagram requires the picture. But the g-stovet is in the text.
It's 2,200 characters. And then if you don't fit in it, then you can also do that carousel of 10 pictures. You can just screenshot from wherever you write this post like in Apple notes or something. And then you have nine more screenshots that you can swipe. Your readers can swipe. And that started to take off with lots of people just posting their thoughts, which is what Twitter does.
Which is like when you showed me because in my world within Eric Pukkhoot's world of Instagram, this wasn't a thing, right? Like I had never seen this. You showed me and you started posting this, right? And I started, I followed you and I asked you, I think maybe at some point like what's going on with these text posts because you can't copy or you can't like, anyway, the usability of text and images low. And then you said it's very popular.
And now I think through our beta, I followed some more people from your like network that are on Instagram. And it's very common, yeah. I'm seeing more and more of this, yes. It is very common. And it was originally used as an outlet for people to just talk about stuff that they cared about. And then once it became more monetizable, that's when things started to go a little bit south. And also Instagram's algorithms now favor reals the video content over text. But I think it's not dying yet.
Like regular people still do those text posts quite a bit. Influencers mostly switch to videos because that's what the platform favors more. But yeah, but do you answer your original question if Twitter were to shut down? Like Twitter threads is exactly what people in Russia were doing on Instagram. It's just you do it to this kind of a single post, right? It's opposed to multiple, some smaller ones.
But yeah, if somebody something like a Reddit were to shut down, I don't know what's going to replace it. But think of it, Facebook groups is actually very similar. Like technology wise, user experience wise is actually very similar, except for the downloads and upload. Or they could start to create more things on Stack Overflow. Because I think Stack Overflow has a bunch of other topics, not just some development. I don't know how popular it is.
I think Quora kind of, actually Quora is another one. You can also ask a question and people can comment and there is upload and download mechanics. So I feel like there are other places where people could be just like, oh, we can go there and use this in a different way because the software is kind of the same over a similar. The thing is, it's not driven by the creator of that app. It's more of a choice taken by some community. And that's the effect of social networks, right?
Like a few key people, the influencers, not saying it in a negative way. But the actual influencers in your social network, if they move to anything, you will move with them. Right, yeah. Up to a degree though. So we observed that when one half years ago, the Russian government threatened to shut down Instagram, which they eventually did. But I think also there was some rumors of Instagram pulling out of those countries. And some people started to migrate to Telegram.
And you could see that, let's say you have 10,000 followers on Instagram. But then Telegram, you probably only get 2,000 of those. So when people have to move, then they start to consider who they follow, maybe like you said, maybe they follow somewhere else. Maybe they just like, screw it. It's good excuse to just believe the social media altogether. Yeah, it's interesting. But to your point, I think people will find other means to do what they want.
But I think right now we are at the point where there is just so much social media. I think as a regular user, I just stick to two pretty much. So it's Instagram and LinkedIn. But I'm starting to get into Reddit mostly because of our company. I don't feel particularly drawn to it. I mean, every now and then, I'm still, I haven't built a habit yet. But as an influencer, I think it's really hard now because you have to be everywhere.
And the formats are slightly different and expectations are slightly different. And what works in different platforms is usually very different. You will be surprised how many people told me like, why don't you do the same thing? Like, you know, I post, well, I guess I used to post, not that much anymore on Instagram, those text posts. People will be like, oh, why don't you do this in English too? I'm like, on Instagram, it's not going to work. It only works in our culture.
It's not going to work elsewhere. Exactly. It's very local. Exactly. Even though that local world is like millions of people. Right. Yeah, by our company, like it's not as relevant. So, but the relevant network for this is linked in. So there is some reusability of content. Another case in point, YouTube Shorts versus Instagram Reels or TikTok. YouTube Shorts has a one minute time limit.
So if you want to reuse the content, you have to adhere to like the lowest common denominator, which would be like the length limit of YouTube Shorts. Whereas the other ones, you know, allow longer ones. I don't know, it's just, it's a pain in the ass. I think for creators to like really be everywhere. I think as a user, right now, the most times I spend on of all this is Reddit. A distant second is LinkedIn.
And then the others, I use threads and X like almost equally right now, which is to say I don't use them. I have the apps once in a while. I'll see the like the notification like red dot and I'll go in there and it's kind of irrelevant. Especially X, I feel like what the heck it's the decisions that they're making is just bizarre to me. You know about the blue tick, right? Like so you pay $1 and you're a paid user of Twitter or X and your posts and your replies get promoted.
So now when I visit Twitter, all I see is like things that I have, I don't follow these people. Like yes, there are some that I do follow, but most of it is stuff that I have no connection to. No interest in these topics, but I what I notice is that it's all blue tick marks on top of it. I feel like now there, I don't know if you've heard there. This is called like premium, right? It's like $8.
Now they're introducing a super premium or something like that, which is $16 and you're going to get double the boost. Oh, yes, excellent. You promote your content more. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of interesting conceptually, it's like merchandising in stores, right? So like supposedly anyone who has a more or less decent product can sell it, can sell it Wal-Mart or you know, Whole Foods or whatever.
I mean, requirements are different, but let's say Wal-Mart like, probably buy anything that anybody produces there. But then you have to pay more to get a certain shelf location, like the eye level or whatever, like that aisle just before the cashier, whatever, it's like the whole science, right? Like to make you buy more, there are certain locations. And then you pay for that. And it's exactly what Twitter is doing. It's merchandising your tweets.
Except when you go into a Wal-Mart, there's the key difference is you go into the areas that you want to buy stuff from, right? Like let's say you go into your cereal's aisle. Here's some beautiful food from the influencer. Yeah, exactly. You wouldn't expect like somebody else selling like a random thing in the cereal section. And that's what is I think going wrong in Twitter, right? Now it's like, I have no idea why I'm seeing these things. Anyway. I feel like threads is kind of the same.
I remember joining threads. I followed a bunch of people. I followed Don't Postmage. But I still get a full feed of just a random stuff from some people with a blue tick marks. I think threads started with like all these companies jumping on. And it was fun for the first couple of days. Like R.E.I and all these, every company in the world, they had like fun things to post. And it was fun. Then it started feeling like this is just ads in a new format, right?
So they have dialed down those like company posts quite a lot. But yeah, I think the engagement of both X and threads, like at least my personal take is it's both R0 right now for me. I find it absolutely useless. Yeah. Yeah. So we want to talk about also the AI content creation. And I just, I remember first time I noticed that as somebody commented on my post, you shared it with me and you asked, do you think this is AI? And I said immediately yes.
Yeah, because for me it was like very suspicious because it's the same kind of sentence structure across multiple comments that basically just takes a one sentence summary of what you wrote. Let's say you write something about building an MVP and then they reply with you something like, oh, building an MVP is a great way to test your hypothesis. Something like that, right? It just re-sites what you said. But then it also does something like, how do you think it could be improved?
Like absolutely generic question, right, that can be added under any post and it would still work. And so then I, because I have very good memory, right? So I just patterned match and I also know this person. So I see this. And if this was some just a random, I would just ignore this, right? But this person maybe I should ask him if he's doing this just to point out that it is, it's just so obvious, so obvious, right?
Yeah, he mentioned to me that he used a plug-in for Chrome that automatically does this kind of comments and it boosted his, I forgot the metric, but LinkedIn has some kind of metric for the quality of your profile and the more you engage with other people's posts, the higher that metric goes. So basically, he was just justifying this. But I don't know this person enough to confront him. Because for me it's like, but he always you might trust by doing this.
Yeah. Maybe like do it on random people's posts. See this goes back to the very first thing we started with. As soon as you attach like your real persona to a thing, it's human nature to try to like grow it and earn karma, right? That's not social networks called this, right? And the way to do is takes you away from your authentic self more often than not.
Oh man, like after I listened to that interview of LinkedIn folks on the Entrepreneur magazine podcast, they brought up the phrases authentic soft so many times that it felt like LinkedIn comp. It became, it's probably like LinkedIn corporate jargon thing. So to me, like whenever I hear authentic soft now in relation to LinkedIn, I'm like, I said, the cringe. Yeah. I'd say LinkedIn is still like the second most thing that I get value from after I read it.
But the amount of just fluff in LinkedIn has gone crazy recently. I feel like with which at GBT and all that, there's so many posts that are there is no substance to it. People just try to game algorithms because they're trying to boost their profiles, grow there. I don't know what there's value to it. No, there is value to it. I mean, now we can talk about the business side of things, right? So there is definitely value for this. Actually, that episode, I'll link to it.
It's from June this year, the Entrepreneur magazine podcast. It's called Problem Solors. Jason Fiverr is the editor in chief of the magazine. And you had two people from LinkedIn on the interview. So many people use LinkedIn as top of the funnel, where they, like at the end of each post, you would see something like, I'll subscribe to my newsletter. And when people subscribe to the newsletter, then you get their email.
And then you can kind of, I guess, monetize it better because you have more control over this. You can sell some sense and promotion. You can start to control the narrative. You start to control when people actually see what you do, right? There is less influence of algorithms when you do that. So yeah, so basically the goal is to get as many followers on LinkedIn as many impressions. So you drive traffic towards the next stage, which is newsletter, which then they kind of monetize.
They don't always monetize it, right? It could be like in our case. We also want more people to subscribe to our newsletter, more people to kind of follow us on LinkedIn. So that when we have an app, we can drive more awareness of the app, right? So actually, your social media profile is a very important asset because that's how you reach people for free. A good example, actually, we could use here is Jason Fried and DHH from 37 signals. They post very useful content.
I mean, some of that could be a little bit sensational to attract more eyeballs, but it's still useful. Very rarely I see stuff from them that's like, oh, this is bullshit. I should probably never, I probably never seen that. There's always some value there, right? And it's a very thought-provoking usually. Yeah. Yeah. It could be just like, it could be just rent, right? But it's still very self-provoking.
Yeah. The value that you get from that is they don't sell anything to you directly in these posts, but you do follow them and you learn about them and through them, they earn your respect. And they mention base camp in Hey multiple times. And you can just get to know what they do, what they sell, etc. And also they engage with you when you respond to them. I mean, obviously they get so many comments, they can't respond to everything, but usually I guess life hack for our listeners.
If you happen to see the post after it was published maybe like two or three minutes ago, you could be the first one to comment or among the first few. And actually then you get a chance to get a response. If there are already like 50 comments, there is just no way they are going to respond to you just because there is just so much stuff.
Because they also get comments from yesterday's posts from posts a week ago, etc. Like when my post went viral, I responded to as many comments as I could, that eventually I just gave up. Because also LinkedIn is absolutely terrible at managing comments at this scale for the creator. Yeah, anyway, so this is a very good example of creators who like through their voice, through them sharing useful stuff, people discover them.
Another one that I want to call out, who I discovered maybe half a year ago, his name is Alex Hormozzi. He's an entrepreneur. He did some kind of gym turnaround kind of stuff selling membership through digital marketing. It's like very unsexy kind of stuff. But he made like 100-5 minutes doing this and he branched on other things. He's kind of similar to Navale Ravi Kant in a way. Basically whatever he says, it can be quite generic but it's so timeless and so thought provoking.
Hormozzi, I listen to podcasts with him, he mentioned Navale a few times. So I think he kind of draws inspirations from there as well. But like every time I see Hormozzi, I want to read his stuff. And actually I'm going to buy his book too. And these are kind of, I guess, examples of great influencers. But then I have some others that I occasionally see. This stuff is just so obvious that they post. I guess I'm how they get thousands of reactions and reposts.
And I almost lose hope in human race when I see this is coming even for this. Additionally I feel like I know exactly the kinds of posts you're talking about. It erodes my engagement with the platform itself. Yeah. Because the platform pushes it onto you. And this is the thing is there is no down vote button there. LinkedIn doesn't know if you just swept it because you didn't have time or because you were like absolutely up a poll and you didn't want to read it.
Why are most social platforms very opposed to the down vote thing? Like I know YouTube famously took it away, right? And I think most don't have it since then. I know early on Facebook used to have it. But again, that is one of the most critical things to read it's success is the up vote and down vote mechanism. And it's not just up vote, it's also down vote. I think social media is in the business of encouraging creators to create as much content as possible.
And they want to remove any kind of ego hurting friction from it. They want to promote volume, not necessarily quality because with sufficient volume there will be some quality. Yeah. No, I think they want to promote quality, they balance this. But I think the moment you add something like down vote, the volume will drop sharply. And then you will probably have people who have thicker skin remaining. So you almost like you undemocratize content at that point.
So it's like imagine if you work in a team, right? And you just say something. And what you said is really stupid. For whatever reason. Stupid as in like maybe you don't have the context, maybe you don't have enough experience. But I mean, you've been in these kind of meetings, right? When somebody says something and you like, it just doesn't make any sense at all. So imagine you're an intern, right? You're like 18 year old, the intern in the room of like senior engineers.
And you say something and all like 10 of them would say something like, this is dumb. What are you doing here? What's it even again? Or sometimes it's like really senior leaders who have no connection to what's happening on the ground. Yeah. Yeah. Some random people like some random person picked in and he's like, who is this dumb fuck? You know, because that's what that's what the downward do essentially, right?
Even though it's just a down button, a down down arrow, but people create stories behind like all like they hated me or they didn't like me or whatever. And it reduces basically for them, posting something becomes a risk. Then they start to think like should they post it or should they not post it? I think instead what what social media does is social media networks do, they deprioritize your content if there is less engagement.
So it's almost like they only they don't know what is bad content from what is average content. Exactly. So it's almost like they prioritize what they consider the equality content, but they ignore sort of they don't have any negative signals except maybe like you just skimmed it, but it's an implicit negative signal. Whereas engagement like like or I mean a reaction or a comment or repost, I think repost is probably the strongest of all signals. It's very strong positive signal.
However, so I've read about this thing. It's called engagement pods. Have you heard of this? So it's like a bunch of people and I think in my network I have people like this. I won't name them, but they always comment on each other post. I saw that. So they have like a WhatsApp group or something where they will be like, oh, like I'm posting this at this time and then whenever they post this like everybody swarms and like likes and writes some comments like, oh, like awesome.
This is totally amazing. You know, this kind of generic stuff. And I see this because one person I follow actually two people, people I follow, they always comment on each other's posts and it's almost as if it's all scheduled like orchestrated. And so LinkedIn tries to actually fight this, but I mean, you cannot do so much. Right. I mean, some for some cases this is actually meaningful, right? Like for you and me, you are for Metacast. You are the person creating most of the posts for us.
So of course I repost or like comment on a lot of those things, but that is organic, right? Versus this gamification of creating a paid partnership in some way without actually paying somebody, right? That's what this is trying to do. You scratch my back, I scratch yours, right? Because imagine if we had 10 more people in our chat, like five of your friends, five of my friends who would always be liking our stuff, but then also we would also be liking theirs.
And that's what engagement policy is. It lacks sincerity. Talking about LinkedIn, I think we have to mention LinkedIn lunatics. Oh yes. Do you want to talk about that? Oh, you discovered it. You introduced me to go for it. Okay. Like I said, it's my favorite social network and Reddit is very quirky. So there is a subreddit called LinkedIn lunatics. This is where people take screenshots of the most and. And cringy. Cringy, yeah, that's the right word. Because I don't want to say bad.
It's not necessarily bad, but it's obvious how like LinkedIn, e influencer, this content is. So they posted there. It's hilarious. Go go check it out. Yeah. Yeah. Some of the best ones are like posts that mimic those influencers. Yeah. Like one of my favorites is, do you remember that when such a guy sitting on the balcony in like a condo somewhere like any high rise? Oh, yeah.
And he's like, yeah, I went to an interview, but then I saw this dog and the dog had like a dog on the way to the interview. Yeah. The dog had a broken leg. So I like could go to the interview. I took the dog to the doctor and then like I came to the interview. I was late and then I go to the CS, he's he's office and it turns out that CEO is a dog. That punchline is just so just had me in tears. We have to post that YouTube video. It's really good.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I also want to talk about what we are doing for our social media. I would say we haven't figured it out yet. I think it's been a work in progress for many months and I'm starting to get more intentional about it as in like, you know, I've listened to that podcast. I'm starting to think about, I guess first of all, like what's our goal? It's starting with the goal. The goal is to make sure we have a distribution channel for the app.
So when the app comes out or when the app is ongoing so we can reach more people, basically promoting our app, implicitly and explicitly and have them try it out, sign up. We need to have a lot of reach. Reach means like a number of people because we are building consumer app. And the way to reach people for us, we think is mostly through social media and because we think that our audience are more likely to be among kind of educated people with the means to pay for an app subscription.
So and also with our backgrounds. So we think like targeting tech people working in tech is the kind of is, you know, where we can get some traction at least initially. Right. Right. And then only early on you said that it's very hard nowadays because you have to post it everywhere and every, every platform is like slightly different or it prioritizes different things. And I think that's one of the things you need to figure out early on.
Yeah, because we actually try which platforms are you targeting? Yeah. Yeah, we usually try to be all over the place. You take those shorts from from the podcast. We post them on Instagram on TikTok on YouTube. Twitter. Twitter. Twitter, yeah, threads. But I think eventually where we started to get some traction is LinkedIn, but not with videos mostly just basically take the stuff that we discussed in the podcast. Re-write that in a short post. And then yeah, some of those took off pretty well.
Like tens of thousands of views, the highest reach one was like 850,000 views, almost a million. It went viral. But I've not been able to repeat that after that initial one, right. So I'm now approaching this more intentionally. I'm trying to understand when based on the stuff that I read, like what signals LinkedIn looks for it. It turns out LinkedIn looks for signals like are you qualified to talk about what you're talking about? Right.
And so in my particular case, we've given my experience, like talking about like careers in big tech, talking about product management. That's what makes me kind of more qualified from the LinkedIn perspective. You're an expert in that space, yes. Yes, yeah, because of my resume, right? That LinkedIn has. And then also it looks at who engages with this post. Let's say if I post something about Google and then a bunch of engineers and product managers like this, then they're okay.
So he was a performance product manager at the big tech. These people like it. Therefore, let me show it to more engineers who might like it. And that's just how it works. And also it seems to favor lists. So you do like top five things I learned or something. You know, this kind of post. I generally don't like those. And it's not my kind of style of writing. But don't do it. I already started doing this.
But at the same time, what I noticed is sometimes I come across a post by some, let's say, random dude. Like a good example. There was this guy called Ryan parallel man, I think. He's a staff engineer at Instagram. And just somebody, actually somebody who both of us know, Howard, he liked his post and I just like, look at it. Not bad. So I subscribe to this guy. I followed him. And he was reading his post and he always does lists.
And I realized that if I don't know the person enough, lists actually give me a way to quickly skim it. Right. And then decide if I actually want to read it. Whereas if you have like 2000 characters or just pros, it's very hard to understand what the post is about before you commit to it. And lists allow you to just like skim a couple of headers. And you're like, OK, it makes sense, let me read it.
So I'm just starting to get more intentional about trying to look at this from the audience perspective as opposed to like, what do I like to write, you know, to do better. Right. So this is kind of like the second step, if you will. First, identify the platform that you need to put your stuff in. Second is find unit, get better at it. What's after this? I don't know, we haven't hit that growth yet. So I think we are at this point where I think we are not qualified to give advice yet.
So we are just like, I guess, sharing what has been going for us. And also it's easy to like subscribe to a bunch of influencers who have great following. And then all of a sudden, your feed is just these people because they post every day, sometimes multiple times per day. And then you feel like everybody has great following just because you subscribe to these like 20 people. But I think as a matter of fact, probably 99% of people, they are in the same stage as us.
They're just trying to figure it out. I'm not like, I'm inherently, I'm glad that you're doing this for us because somebody needs to write and it's important, like, like you said, but it's just not something that comes naturally to me and I don't enjoy. Yeah, you know, I kind of enjoy writing and I always enjoyed writing even at Amazon because Amazon has a specific structure you have to follow. But I even enjoyed writing within the structure too.
Because a structure gives you some guardrails and then you just like, you know, it's like software in a way, right? So if you use a no SQL database, you can do join across tables and then you make up some creative solutions to accommodate for the limitation that the system imposes on you. And I think it's the same thing in writing. So if I decide that I want to use lists, then I can perfect writing lists, right?
I guess one not necessarily mistake, but maybe a bit of a misguided approach that I used initially, right? I was waiting for an inspiration. Like I was waiting for an inspiration to write something and then some of those would really take off some of those, like, wouldn't. But I think it's like when you rely on inspiration alone, if something doesn't take off, it really hurts.
Because like you poured your soul into this and you know, for whatever reason, like people didn't like it or algorithms didn't like it and it just fell flat on its face, right? So if not inspiration, you have to rely on perspiration. Perspiration, yeah, and discipline. Yeah. Yes. Discipline and you just, it becomes like you produce content, you become a content factory. Then you start to kind of optimize more because it comes more from the brain, less from the soul.
And then maybe that's how you get more engagement. I know we will see. But one thing I started doing now is. That's how also you become like less authentic over time. We will see about that. We challenge there maybe if you see that something works and you start doing more of that. And yeah, that you could lose your authenticity. So what I'm doing for now is like, whatever discussions we are having, likely discussion we are having right now.
Before I post the podcast and I'll listen to the entire thing in this script, I take notes of what could make a good LinkedIn post. And then I just take that part of transcripts, that part of content. I tried putting it in the chat GPC and asked it to summarize it for me. It's just so cringey, it's unusable. Yeah. Well, it could be like formal like. Yeah, it could be like, get me the five insights from this and then you just rewrite those five insights. That's fine.
But just generally, like I would latch on to two or three sentences and then I could develop this into a post. So yeah, my approach now is I want to spend two days a week producing the podcast, but also creating let's say five or six of those LinkedIn posts for the week ahead. So that. And I and our newsletter talking about the stuff that you write. That is my favorite piece. Like, I actually look forward to it every week. I love the newsletter.
Yeah. I think the newsletter and the podcast is where we can afford to be much more authentic. There's that kind of lower reach, but it's also something that like I don't want to compromise on this. I think even more than reach, even if in the future, we have a lot of listeners or a lot of like readers for the newsletter. It's not a thing where you have to cast it according to somebody else's rules. Unlike LinkedIn or some other like you said, LinkedIn refers lists.
So you're going to start writing lists. You don't have to do this in your own podcast or in your own newsletter because nobody's like creating these rules that is going to promote your content based on that. That's actually very true. Yeah. That's very true. All right. So I think we should start to wrap this up. Yeah. Yeah. So 45 minutes stretched to like almost 60 minutes at this point. Time, dilation, everything. Right. So the thing that we are looking forward to, what are you reading now?
You start first. Yeah. I start. So I've recently finished the book. Yeah. So by the way, I almost want to insert like a divider like a horizontal rule, HR tag here. It's like, yeah, at the end of every episode, we recommend some books and podcasts as of a few episodes ago. So the couple of things, I mean, I'm reading the death end. I'm still keep reading this last book from a three-body problem trilogy. It's awesome, but it goes very slowly because it's a 600 page book.
But the book I recently finished is Duff McCagans How to Be a Man and Other Illusions. So Duff McCagans is a bass player of Gants and Roves. I never really admired bass players, for me like the guitar players and singers and the drummers were all the heroes. But I kind of started to get an affection for him because he's from Seattle. And if you go through whatever all the security and stuff, the Seattle Tacoma Airport, every now and then the TSA announcement is in Duff McCagans.
He's like, hey, this is Duff McCagans and here's the TSA. TSA asks you to watch your bags and stuff like that. And it's just so touching for me. It's like, oh my god, it's like a guy from Gants and Roves is doing this stuff. I guess it's a meta point here about serendipity. I was just browsing books about Dinos Dores in the public library. In some obscure corner of the library here in Browse County. And next to it, there was a guitar bookshelf.
And I just switched to that and I started browsing books. And there there was a Duff McCagans book because they put it next to the music video of guitars. And I actually picked it up. I'm like, okay, it's free, right? Because it's a library. So I might as well just skim through it. Browse, yeah. But then I read it in a few days. I really enjoyed the book. It's like, it's so refreshing. He doesn't try to teach you anything.
The book is called How to Be a Man and then in braces and other illusions. And it's almost like it implies that there is no such thing as teaching how to be a man, right? And let's talk about like him and his drug addiction, how he overcame it through sports and how he like shares stuff. By age 30, he never played on stage sober. He never wrote any songs, not being inebriated. And then how he found himself in like family and martial arts and I think running.
And all that, he talks about his daughter, his wife. It's just such a light read from just like regular dude. That's what I like about his book. It's like he doesn't try to be like a celebrity, he doesn't try to teach you anything. He just regular dude, he just turns 50. A lens to his life. Yeah, just a glimpse into his life. I enjoyed it so much. I'm probably gonna reread it and I also ordered another book by him called It's So Easy. And there was a qualification there.
It's so easy and other lies. But that's also a pun because it's so easy, it's one of the popular Guns and the Roses songs that he wrote. Okay, anyway, so that's what I've been enjoying recently. Right. And also I've been listening to a bunch of podcasts but we could leave those out. I haven't had much time recently, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Sword of Still going on on the side. The podcast that I regularly listen to, the Weiserworld, Hartford, those are going on.
But the last few days, I don't know about you, but growing up, one of the biggest kind of introductions to Western culture, pop culture and all that was friends. I don't know if you've heard one of the cast of the friend series Matthew Perry, right? He was my favorite actor. He passed away. Yeah, just recently. Couple of days back. Yeah, so that was kind of like a big thing for me because not only was it one of the first introductions into like America and American life.
I started watching it after I moved to the US when I was like 24 or something like that. And I related with it quite a lot, right? And I felt more at home with it. And especially his character, kind of like the goofy kind of humor and yeah, all of that. So I really related with him. So that was kind of a shock. I have been going through Reddit posts that kind of like talk about his favorite moments and all of that.
Yeah. It's kind of interesting how we kind of get engaged when somebody's passing or somebody's tragedies. Like, once kind of a couple of actually a few stories in that Duff MacKagan's book that really stood out to me, right? He wasn't a playing with Kurt Cobain. He was playing from a late to Seattle. Cobain was also from Washington State. He lived in Seattle. And he tells a story of how they like they were both sort of depressed. And so Cobain died when he was 27.
So MacKagan I think is a bit older than him. He was maybe like 29 or 30. And he said like I wanted to invite Kurt to my house, but then like there were like a bunch of people and all and he just like disappeared into the crowd and like a few days later I learned that he like shall himself, right? And this kind of story is for some reason like it is for me. I think it's maybe just part of our human nature.
Just we tend to like one of the find out more maybe as to why and maybe also celebrate the people that we really admired. Yeah. So speaking about our app and addictions, it's a broad topic and we all close on that. I was just chatting with somebody on Instagram and she said that her because I mentioned one of my stories, my problem with alcohol when I was very young. And she said that her son is going through something like this and she's like how did you get out of this?
So I mean I was talking about myself being like 20. And I'm like maybe should listen to this podcast with Carlos Taner, the guy who founded the Ayabasca Foundation in Peru because he was a heron addict and then he went there after the first ceremony like he was no longer an addict and then he started this center and it's been like 20 years since then, no drugs since then.
But then I listened to like two or three of his episodes where he was a guest and each of them is over one hour long and I didn't remember which one it was. So I used the archive to find exactly where he was talking about the Ayabasca. I mean he all he talks about is Ayabasca because that's what he does, right? It's his center but specifically that story about the addiction and surprisingly it was not the first podcast I thought about.
So if I sent her the first link it would have been the wrong link. So then I checked the other one and I found it there and it started like six minutes, 53 seconds and I'm like okay so just check this out. Unfortunately I couldn't send her a deep link to our app but just being able to so easily locate information in the podcast. I was like wow this would definitely be worth a monthly subscription price. Right. Which you know as founders we are exempt from this as well.
Anyway so yeah if you want to check out you know what the future of podcast apps is go to metacast.app and put your email in. So subscribe to our newsletter at metacastpodcast.com. Follow this podcast and what does the people do with podcasts I guess not much until our app comes out. And you can also send us an email at helloatmetacastpodcast.com. We always are elated to receive just nice words from people who listen this far and just reach out to say thanks. Yeah thanks for listening.
Thank you. Okay. Bye.