¶ Introduction and Funding Metacast
Hello and welcome to the weekly-ish update of the Metacast Behind the Scenes. I don't think we've done the recording in the last two weeks. Which is why it's weekly-ish right now. Right, yeah, not the weekly update. And actually as you can hear in the background probably I have some birds chirping around me. This is one of the reasons why we are doing this.
with a delay, because I'm out on vacation with my family. I'm actually in Hawaii right now, on the big island, the beautiful big island of Hawaii. And we are doing this very much the Bobby Althoff style. If you don't know who Bobby Althoff is, it's a real good podcast. It's her podcast. I don't listen to it anymore. It's too Gen Z for me. But she would do this kind of thing where... She would interview people out and about. So there was one recording that she did.
in a zoo, where basically it's just two people sitting on a bench in a zoo, and with all these animals chirping around them. So yeah, I'm like, if she can do that, we can do that too. So that's why today you will hear some interruptions from my side. see how that sounds. It's an experiment. Next week I'll be out hiking Ilya and then we'll record while I'm hiking. Well, that's going to be like a really awesome experiment, like recording without internet connection. Yeah.
All right. So yeah, you want to start with some general updates from the last week-ish? Yeah, so in this type of episode we generally cover what we've done and what we are going to be working on and some podcast recommendations. So this time we also do some general updates. One of them was already about me being out and about.
But the other one is that, you know, we really want to be working on Metacast and we need money to be doing this. And one of the things that we are starting to explore is consulting work. Arnab and I are really good at analytics because we've done this. all of our careers so we've been
talking to a couple of potential clients to do some consulting work with their teams to help them get data for their products. And that would be actually a good way for us to maybe split a bit of time and make some extra money to keep working on. metacast but that also means a bit of distraction from
the main Metacast project. We wanted to be transparent that that's what we are also working on. Well, it has not impacted the project yet, but if you start making money that way, there will be a bit of impact, but hopefully actually also you can compensate. that by maybe hiring more people or hiring
contractors to work with us. So there is some arbitrage going on and we'll talk more about that on our bigger, longer episodes if slash when we land our first customer. And I think just quick update on Metacast. been seeing this kind of growth since we started about six months ago. That's still the same trend. At this point, I'm just looking at the dashboard right now, we have about 130 uh in um either subscribed like paying premium or in trial combined about 130 and we seem to be getting like a
New few trials every day, which is great. The trend, it does feel like a bit of an uptick, but it's not like significant hockey stick kind of uptick. Yeah, and hopefully with V1.21 we will start to see more of an uptick. I just want to make sure that it's clear that we do want to make Metacast our only thing we work on. also the realities of life unfortunately yeah okay cool so last week uh on metacast
¶ Launching Private Feeds Beta
What we did is we have the private feed MVP or a beta, if you will, that's in beta right now. There are four or five people who actually subscribed for the beta on Android. So they may be seeing. that already but on ios uh we haven't gotten anybody it's a more complicated to get people into beta so we haven't so yeah that should be coming out i would say
Maybe this week or at the very least early next week. This has been one of the... biggest feature request that we have had from like all over the place which is allowing you to add your patreon and other kind of like sub stack feeds and all that as private feeds into the app while it's in
There are a few unknowns on our side, especially related to like cost and all that. So we are limiting it to just one private feed for this release. And we'll be increasing that very soon in the next release while we figure out. what those limits should be. But even with that one private feed, unlike most other apps, if I'm correct, you will get unlimited, like basically transcripts, chapters, and summaries for any of the episodes for that one feed.
So that's coming very soon. But you have to be premium subscriber for that. You do have to be a premium subscriber for, I don't know if I built that or not, but I should go back and check. So I'm just adding feature requirements on the go. This is why we are calling it a beta. Yeah, you can add a private feed even if you're a free user. But if you want to get transcripts and all that goodness, that's good in the premium. And the primary reason for that, well, obviously other from...
us needing to make money. It actually costs us, right? With public feeds, the same transcript and chapters and summaries will be reused across multiple people. With private feeds, it will be specifically... for that user who added the feed. So if somebody adds like 100 feeds and that publishes like hourly episodes and we transcribe all of those, that's a lot of money, that's expensive. So that's why we have to carefully manage the rollout of these features so that we
don't accidentally get a high cost spike and have to roll things back. So we would rather roll them out incrementally than having to take things away if we mess something up. Yeah. Okay. And aside from that, there's been a few reports of specifically the duration on the lock screen and sometimes on the episode screen might be off. And we have done some work for that.
and I'm continuing to do some more work on that. We'll see if that's part of 1.21 or the next one. But yeah, we're about to launch that. Cool. How about the website, Ilya?
¶ Web App Search and Website Updates
Yeah, so since the last update, we've launched the search of podcasts on the web app. Basically now on any web apps page in the header, in navbar, you see the search box. And you can find any podcast that's available in the Apple iTunes directory because that's the API we use there. And yeah, you can open that on the web app. You can listen on the web app. You can see transcripts if they're available. you can scan your QR code to open it in the mobile app as well.
That feature is particularly useful when you want to add links to maybe like other things that you're doing. For us, in particular, when I'm doing the show notes for episodes and I need links to episodes that we talked about, so that gives me actually a very quick way to... find those podcasts on the desktop with my keyboard as opposed to
like doing it on the mobile app. I think it's also helpful for like research. If you know that podcast has transcripts and you want to find those, find specific information without actually listening to the podcast. doing it on the web is just so much easier than doing it on the app. So I think also, I don't think we talked about that, we launched a new
page that talks about the apps features on the web app, a website that's just helpful for marketing. Hopefully SEO also. Yeah, for SEO too. I guess SEO is part of marketing. I also started working on the docs section for the website. I really went for it. I really wanted to have a good...
section where we have pages that document how the app works so that any questions can be addressed with documentation, also good for SEO. Arnab looked at this and he was like, isn't it too much work? Is this what we should be working on right now? And I'm like, yeah. Fuck, he's right.
¶ Upcoming Work and Recommendations
So yeah, I kind of scratched that. Yeah, I guess we can transition to what we're working on next, right? And I can start, right? So for the next release, because I'll still be out and about, so I'll have more limited time. to support the 1.21 release with the private feeds, because we will need to explain things there to users, especially it's beta, it has limitations, so there will be a blog post for this. I'll also start working on...
optimizing our website to get more customers from SEO. Now that we are seeing more and more people coming in, we have the data pipeline established to get the data from Google Analytics into BigQuery so we can have So we have better querying of the data, better access to data. We will start optimizing more because I feel like with the number of visitors we're getting to the website we should be getting more users and That will be I think my primary focus for the next few weeks
Cool, cool. And I'll first work on getting this release out. We're basically UX testing. If the private feeds and all that are working is expected, and then we should be ready to release it. All right, let's close this out with our 30 second recommendations. I will show you the timer, Ilya. And let's start with... you. One, two, three. Mine is quick. I've been listening to a lot of Alex Harmozi stuff. The podcast is called The Game. What I like about that podcast is that
He talks about the boring businesses. It's basically all the consulting, lawn mowing, whatever, right? And that's highly applicable to what we are thinking about doing with consulting, with our analytics consulting practice. So, yeah, that's been very informational and inspirational. So, Alex Harmozi, the game. And that is exactly 30 seconds. Okay. Cool. All right. So I'll try to do this now in 30 seconds again. One, two, three. First one.
I am learning Spanish for a while now. So there is I found a new interesting podcast called News in Slow Spanish. So it's kind of like news from the last week, but in very slow Spanish. Loved it so far. And then people may know. I'm a pretty big tennis nerd. So Roland Garros final last Sunday was epic. Like in 10 years, we'd probably be talking about that. And last one is on the Served podcast. Andre Agassi has an episode. Really good.
Yeah! Because it was so quick, you'll have to send me the links for the Tenus podcast. Can you use our web app, Serge? It will help you do it faster. All right. And that concludes our weekly-ish update. And the next weekly-ish update will probably be in a couple of weeks too. Cool. Bye-bye. Bye.