50 years deep per year or 5 years deep per month. In the US that's like getting a regular coffee at Starbucks like one coffee. The one that sits there for like two hours before this or two, that kind of coffee. For the price of one of those per month you get access to the wealth of knowledge in Metacast. Hello and welcome to Metacast episode 59. I'm your host
Yves Delive. Hey I'm Arnav. We are GoFunders of Metacast, a podcast app like no other that has transcripts where you can listen to podcasts, you can read podcasts, you can save bookmarks podcasts, you can share quotes from podcasts, we also have awesome playlist and a bunch of new stuff coming soon. And this is our Metacast behind the scenes podcast where we build in public and we share how it goes. So today is episode 59 which means that we've been building Metacast for over
a year at this point and we have some really exciting news to share. Yeah and I was just thinking about it. The first episode we ever recorded for the podcast. We started the podcast before we started working on the app. That was in October 22. In a couple of months we'll be two years from the first recording, although we launched the podcast in January. So we were like let's start the podcast and then quickly build the app so we can launch it. And then the episode 59 right now
and we've just launched the app on the Google Play Store. To be clear the app has been in private beta and then in public beta for a while for a few months. We launched public beta in February and we launched private beta in August last year. So almost actually a year ago. Yeah it took us actually a year from the private beta to public launch. But yay congrats to us. Yay we launched it last Friday. Today we're recording on our Wednesday. Yeah we recorded this on Wednesday August 7th which means
we launched it on minus five days a season August 2nd. Yeah yeah. Cool. And in the behind the scenes podcast this one we try to go behind some of the business. Today we're going to talk about the launch. What kind of features we decided not to include because there was no time. What did we include? What did we think about pricing? How did we think about premium subscriptions and all that? And also the process. And another thing we strive to do is keep this behind the scenes podcast to
30 minutes. But Ilya and I live in different planets where time goes a little slower. So sometimes the 30 minutes becomes more like 45 minutes but we'll try to keep it to 30 minutes on earth time this time. Right it's like under spies where time slows down. Yeah it's a different book I think but we've talked about June so much anyway. Yeah 30 minutes challenge. What does it like to say? 30 minutes starting now. Yes. All right so let's talk about the preparation leading up to the
launch. Of course we've been building the app for a while. I think maybe a couple of months back we had pretty much of the features done but we had some pretty big problems in the app like audio playing and all that and those were an early to figure out so those we had to do and adding on subscriptions took a while too. But generally speaking the last few weeks we've been thinking about pricing features. Can we include anything else or just this is it let's go at all that. So yeah
let's talk about pricing first. Yeah. Yeah. First of all podcast apps are free. I mean apps like Apple podcasts or Spotify. I guess Spotify is sort of free because it has ads and you also pay the premium subscription to listen to music. YouTube music is it free? I don't know. Yeah because I use it not for podcasts. I use it for music but I have been paying YouTube for a while now so. Right. So yeah one of the questions actually we got from somebody on LinkedIn they asked
well Apple podcast is free. Why should I buy your app right? There are a couple of differentiating points from the free apps that Metacast has right. So let's start with this because then it backs up on the pricing. Also before we get to the differentiating things Metacast you can use it absolutely free. Just like any other podcast app or pretty much just like some of the other podcasts apps you can listen to podcasts you can find any podcasts you can use it as an audio player pretty
much free. On top of that we have some differentiating features and to use those in a pretty much unlimited fashion is what you need to pay for. So yeah let's talk about those features. Yeah. All right that's a very good point. It's just like if I was a user of Metacast I would just play the first day because I want the features that differentiate Metacast from the other apps.
Also maybe just back up a little. When we first started we thought we just added transcript and that's going to be great but then Apple Podcasts and Spotify added those features as well. So transcripts are sort of table stakes at this point I think independent apps most of them don't have transcripts yet but I think it will become table stakes at this point. So what we've done differently from Apple Podcasts and Spotify and others we really thought deeply about what do you
want to transcript for. So it's not just an accessibility feature even though it's great for accessibility it is a tool for acquiring and retaining knowledge that you hear in podcasts. So we've made our transcripts basically that's not something that you click to access. We could almost say we are a transcript first podcast app where the transcript and audio go hand in hand together and you can use the transcript to make bookmarks you can share quotes you can save those
quotes and we'll be building more and more features that help you quickly save things that you've heard access them later search them share them etc. So this is for the user who doesn't just listen to podcasts for entertainment but wants to get stuff from it like you highlight a book and you want to go back to that so you can do the same thing with podcasts with Metacast but that
not necessarily with other apps. To give a little bit of background let's say a year back there were no apps that would show you the transcript and what that means is podcasts were purely audio medium
so you could listen to it there was one app before. Oh there was one okay one or two like small apps but let's say for the majority there were none so what that means is you had to like listen to it and for portions that you wanted to remember or you wanted to share with others there was just no way you could share the whole episode with somebody but good luck to them to find out that
five-minute segment in a I don't know an hour long episode. So then we started working on this idea of bringing out the information from the audio into a visual like a book kind of format and that's what the transcript is for and then before we were done Apple also launched something similar but
think what Ilia you're saying is Apple and Spotify Spotify to a larger extent they kind of use the transcript as almost like lyrics in a song it's kind of like there if you want to go there yeah sure it's there Apple does a better job I would say but for us it's like as you're listening the specific
part of the transcript is syncing up with your listening there are some caveats but for the most part this is what happens as you're listening you can swipe the transcript and say yes this is interesting or like I want to save this for later I want to bookmark this using the words in the
transcript you can type in things so let's say that you did not bookmark something you listen to something awesome you do in bookmark later on you can load up the episode again search for a specific word and then go to that exact segment so these are cool things we do in our app I can actually make
a comparison so imagine you walk in the city and there is a wall that has a book printed on it so you could walk to that wall read the book and then move on and you never come back to that wall again because you've gone past it or you could have a paper book that you read and then you make
a nose you could highlight you put it in your bookshelf and then whenever you want to like oh I remember reading about this in that book and you pull that book from the shelf quickly find those notes and reread and refresh your memory about what you've heard or you can walk back to that wall
a few blocks away well first of all you have to find that spot where it was and then you need to find where exactly that huge wall of text you saw that and that's kind of the experience in Apple podcasts or Spotify versus Metacast so I think most users will not need what we have but we really want
the users who want to get the knowledge who want to get the information who want to get the insights from podcasts to be able to just grab them as quickly as I'm describing with the paper book but even quicker because we will also add search and other things and we also have some really cool ideas
about that information that you save but that will come at a later stage the other thing that makes Metacast different from actually all other apps I would say is what you just said when you want to share a podcast or an episode with somebody if you want to do it from Apple Podcasts Spotify you get an Apple Podcasts Spotify link and if the other person uses another app they can see the title of the podcast and you have to find the podcast find the episode it's all complicated and the reason why
those other apps do this first of all I think Apple and Spotify they are very big and they don't care but the second reason actually maybe the primary reason they want to drive traffic to their apps so if I send you a link to an episode on Apple Podcasts and it opens on Apple Podcasts for
you because you also have an iPhone then maybe you listen to an Apple Podcasts and start using Apple Podcasts instead of whatever you're using right I think that's how those apps grow so we decided to do it different so even though obviously we want people to download Metacast and listen to
the podcast in Metacast app but we also realized that people are less likely to share the link with somebody if they don't know what app they're using especially if it's like a small app but we've done the sharing in a way that it has links to the other big apps like Apple Podcasts and Spotify
and YouTube I think we'll add more apps there as well where we can so we do a little bit of extra work to add those links but it makes episodes that listen to a Metacast more shareable and also as we go forward we will be adding more of those nice features to the website like if you share
a specific quote we'll display it on a site so if the person doesn't want to listen to the podcast and they don't have Metacast they can still see and read what you want to share with them so podcast is a weird medium in this case because if you want to share an article people can skim it and
decide if they wanted to read the whole thing or they can just read the quote that you share with them but audio like you send me like a four hour long lecture episode and may or may not most like you not listen to that whole episode but we make it easy to just see the bits that you wanted to share
yeah and we have like lots of other ideas and features coming up in that space but we decided okay this is like good enough to launch the first version with the other thing that's pretty interesting we're not the only app that does this but not a lot of apps do this pretty well is playlist so what
you do in Metacast is you come in you look for the podcast that you like you follow them and when you follow them we don't have any notifications or anything like that we don't bombard you we don't pull you back into the app instead when you come to the app it's front and center for you
to tell you it visually tells you which podcasts have new episodes that you haven't seen before and when you see one just like in an email client you can swipe it and add it to like a listen later playlist and so far we have listened later and downloads to playlists we're going to add more
playlists as well as allow users to create their own custom playlist soon yes surprisingly Apple still doesn't have playlists so it's a differentiator on iOS in this regard but I think they will add place at some point I just can't see them not adding playlists for a long time Apple podcast was
really stagnant like there was no features coming for the longest time then something happened last year so I'm also expecting that they'll start working on it more and more now so yeah one thing that you will find in Metacast is just how much easier it is to manage a large number of podcasts that
you follow like I follow 65 I think podcasts give you follow about 55 last time I looked at our data but 60 on average I never have problems triaging the new episodes that come out and obviously there is a lot more content that comes out than I listen I probably listened to maybe five episodes
per week maybe five six episodes per week max and I probably get like 50 episodes per week published on those podcasts and obviously I don't listen to even a fraction of them the other apps they really don't optimize for helping you be in control of what you listen so if you subscribe to
50 podcasts on Apple or Spotify I was a good like figuring out you know what's new and if that new is interesting you will just get lost tapping in those especially Spotify because it's also mixed up with music so basically we make it easier for the podcast lovers to really be in love and stay in love and listen to the podcast that they want to listen to so those are the features we have at launch there are a few more things but that's pretty much the highlight of it right what are the
big things we decided to punt on so we actually started talking about pricing but then we started to describe how great metaphics after this whole thing of what we decided to include what we decided to punt we'll go back to how we decided on what's the pricing yes keep listening
you know it's like one of those videos where they almost about to tell you this thing that you came to here and then you just keep postponing it while selling it whatever they think this hell the features be punted on while the whole iOS app if we punted on I think this is the important thing here
we did want to launch on both platforms at the same time ish because we use flutter to develop and we are iOS users we have been in the meta cast for a while but the right couple of bugs that we couldn't fix before the android launch iOS specific bugs yes iOS specific bugs
it dates back to actually a few months we were like should we just focus on one platform instead because fixing those bugs on iOS does not help us with android so we were like okay so let's just launch an android get one platform and google podcast decided to shut down by the way on the
killed by google side note I just heard that chrome cast is being deprecated this morning okay deprecate star cast yeah so google decided to shut down their podcast app so we were like okay we should focus on launching on android first so that's what we did then we launched recently yeah
even as it's star cast I almost felt like deprecation is a regular expression at google right so wildcard deprecate yeah when i used to google you sign up for wildcard because you don't know what they're gonna deprecate right you know in AWS we had one of the best things about AWS
and joined again quick side note we'll get back to the pricing I promised within the next like seven eight minutes but in AWS one of the best things I enjoyed was there was a Wednesday morning ops meeting that everybody in AWS basically from the AWS heads like CEOs pretty much down to like
managers and engineers pretty much anybody who could make it would make it and especially the senior leaders would always be there and we would discuss things that happened good things bad things and all that but most of that meeting an hour and a half meeting was this wheel of fortune type
spin the wheel where you pick up and we as I'd like I don't know 60 or 80 services at that point there's probably way more now so there would be like 60 or 80 things on a board you can imagine those lottery boards things like that I think it's called a roulette in casinos but instead of numbers
in colors you have easy to ask three AWS chat box all those services yeah yeah so you spin it and then you pick up one service from there and then you go deep dive into it what I was wondering was maybe Google has something like that to decide what product to deprecate next
because it comes so frequently and shocking sometimes like what yeah doesn't make sense anyway back into the features so yeah we decided to punt on iOS we decided to launch android yeah also carpe android author was not working properly at the time of launch we've almost fixed that almost
as in we have a fix but we now need to get through the google play approval process to be clear android auto we didn't actually have android auto supported at all so whatever you can play is through the background like kind of mechanism of android auto now we are going to launch a full
fledged android auto app very soon yeah we also patted on a bunch of playlist that we wanted to include we wanted to have a playlist of all of your new episodes that you can easily use to triage all the new content coming in those cruise metacars would know that we have the
continuousing bar at the top of the home screen that you can scroll to find the episodes that you started but never finished so that is also playlist that we don't expose yet basically in any podcast app you pick up an episode as you're listening to it great you can stop the episode go shop come
back pick it up but if you're switching between two three episodes at the same time let's say I'm listening to a long legs episode it's like the latest one was eight hours that was insane anyway you can't finish that in one shot and meanwhile something important has happened I don't know like maybe
Donald Trump got shot or something like that right and all the politics podcasts are like buzzing right now so you pick up those episodes in any other app those previous episodes you were listening to are gone it's like impossible to find them yeah it's like that wall of text in the
city block you turn around and there's glare in your eyes you just can't find where you were before yeah so in metacars at the home screen we have a list of everything that you have not completed that you have been listening to recently in there but we wanted to also make that a playlist and
have a history of everything you have ever listened to so those did not make the cut we will get to them shortly I'd say one more significant thing we decided to cut corners on is the transcript itself we have a basic transcript we know there are like inaccuracies once in a while depending on
the speaker and all that there are problems with it right but we did build a better version of the transcript that identifies different speakers and all that but we decided this is too expensive to run right now so we punted on that that's another thing I think we're going to pick up and the
transcripts that you see in the app are going to be super crisp you will know who's speaking what and maybe able to search by the speaker right and we also wanted to use the transcripts provided by creators for the podcasts that have those transcripts specified in their feed yeah some of those
transcripts are much better quality than what we can get with AI but obviously there are different formats and let us work to make those conform to to what we need and yeah that we punted on we did experiment we imported one of the rework transcripts I forgot which episode it was
it was probably three or four months ago it looks nice it has the speaker names where chase and it's talking where Kimberly or DHL are talking in different colors it looks really nice actually you can get a glimpse of this if you install the app and there is an intro episode for
Metacast itself it has a speaker recognition in there so we do have the functionality built into the app it's just the transcripts that we use they don't have that yet but we will add that pretty soon I would say okay so with the features that we decided to include and the ones we decided we're
punting what is the pricing we came to I guess we came to pricing is 4999 I think it's a pricing of 4990 whatever it is 4999 basically 50 USD per year 50 USD per year or five USD per month which means you get two months for free if you sign up for it and also subscription compared to monthly
so if you pay monthly month you end up paying 60 bucks in a year in the US that's like getting a regularish coffee at Starbucks I would say like one coffee you probably not been to Starbucks in the US for a while I think last time I paid some like 750 that must have been like a frappuccino or
something like that yeah it was just a regular latte with one of those vegetable milks but I think you're right if you get one of those coffees from the rib coffee the one that sits there for like two hours before the service to that kind of coffee the shit is coffee you find in the store
that's so for the price of 12 of those or one of those per month you get access to the wealth of knowledge in Metagast one more differentiating things is I think Apple and Spotify they transcribe mostly new podcasts mostly new episodes that come in I'm not sure if Spotify even transcribes
things that are not hosted and Spotify itself Apple I think only transcribes the new episodes and maybe they go back on some of the podcasts we do it differently we transcribe whatever you're listening to if you add an episode to the listener playlist we will start the background job to
transcribe it for you so maybe by the time you get to the episode it's already transcribed if you start listening to it right away and nobody else listened to it before which means there is no transcript we kick off the transcription job two three five minutes later depending on the length
of the episode you get the transcript that is one of the key differential factors for now too anyway so coming back to pricing we also have a launch special which is 2450 I think it's basically a 50% off half off and the cool thing here is you get this price if you sign up for the analyst
description but you get this price for two years so if you pay for the first year and then at the end of the first year you have the option to renew at the same price so you only start paying the full price at year three I think it's a really good deal so basically you get two years for the price
of one year but you only pay half it's confusing to explain but the point is if you sign up now but till the end of August you get met a customer 2450 USD or if you didn't in your currency in another country and at the end of year one you can renew for the same price we made this special I think most there to help our existing users transition because we had all of these features for free and beta and we put a paywall when we launched and we decided that it will be just too expensive to build
discount codes and all that stuff so we just give everybody this pricing but the initial intention was to give this pricing to the existing users who have been supporting us for months at this point and given us great feedback yeah and I think we'll do something like similar for iOS users when we
launch on iOS also but how did you come up with the number exactly so today we were also going to talk about the process of arriving at the number as well as the whole launch process and it's clear that that's not going to fit in in half an hour so the whole launch process including like what
were the steps how did we decide to launch there are some interesting complicated pieces we'll maybe talk about it in the next episode but let's close today with figuring out why is it $50 how did we arrive at that so we thought five bucks is a great price by looking at what other apps charge not just podcast apps but apps in general the productivity apps also apps that are
sort of nice to have. Mathic apps is not a business critical app it's not an app that somebody will pay 20 bucks per month because it solves a huge problem for them it's an app that needs to cost such that it helps you do what you do but it doesn't hurt your wallet. If 50 bucks or five bucks month just felt like the right amount because anything below that felt too low also because we have costs to operate the app and also there is a sort of market size going below five bucks mixed
unattractive for us but I remember setting the price I think it was $6.99 so $7 we installed this in a kind of feature like on our phones and we looked at it and I think it feels expensive and I think we talked about it and it made sense but when we actually saw it on our phones
$7 a month just felt wrong and that's why we went down to $4.99 basically five dollars per month you know there is this some theories empirical they say that luxury products usually have even prices like an iPhone doesn't cost 8.99.99 right something it costs whatever 850 you
it doesn't have this stupid sense all like if you go by Gucci bag or something it costs like whatever $1,400 yeah I was way off but okay it doesn't cost 1399 and that sort of signals luxury whereas for everyday goods you have this point 99 nonsense all over the place whatever store you go to
but the fact is empirically it's research based it works so people do think it's cheaper even though it's just one cent because the bigger number number in dollars is one less it's poor right so there's some psychological barrier there so that's why we also did what others are doing
actually the cool thing there in Apple and Google when you add the prices it calculates the prices for you in other countries and when I looked at Singapore it has not 99 cents but like 98 cents they have a list of values that they can choose from it's all like 98 cents and now I
actually remember because I used to live in that country that's some kind of like a cultural thing because I saw it elsewhere too they don't do 99 they do 98 cents as this hour as it looks there is probably some history of why it is like that Singapore right we do equivalent pricing so it's 4.99
if you are using the US Android marketplace it's 4.99 per month or 4.99 per year if you are in another country you will see like your local pricing equivalent to this Starbucks coffee pricing basically we're talking about and if you're in a country that have a lower income levels
than the United States or North America and you feel like our price is too high in your country send us an email along with the picture of how much Starbucks coffee costs in your country what about places where there are no Starbucks ilia
you know even back in India I want to say maybe last 10 years or so but even some of the bigger cities had Starbucks only recently in the last five six years so I go to an upscale coffee shop upscale is in pretty good upper middle class coffee shop okay we'll start to close this episode in the interest of time and the process of launching including the checklist verification with Google approval we actually had Google reject us after they approved us the first time we'll talk about all
this in the next episode so like we always do we love podcasts so we talk about what we're listening to we would love to hear what you're listening to ilia first and then the users too if you want to share email us at hello at meracas podcast but ilia you go first yeah send us your recommendations
I've been traveling a lot in the last couple of months on a plane I've been reading a lot it just made it easier so I got a new Kindle new Kindle paper write signature I think it's called it's like the most expensive Kindle there is now from the smaller devices the user have Kindle
Oasis which was really really good but they deprecated it one of the deprecations from amazon I fell in love with ebooks again so I started reading new game on books basically I just look at what has new game and written and I just read them because I want to read everything that he's
written so I read an unci-boys it's nice fantasy book about stories it takes place in England but also in a parallel dimension really really nice if not for sex I would even say even our kids could read this but because it has a bit of violence and sex and error I wouldn't recommend this to
anyone younger than 18 yeah I also started reading never where which is another book of his also awesome books that's the one also in London that tunnels yeah I think that's the tunnels I started reading it about a month ago and then it stops there's like a parallel dimension in London two
and tunnels at the underground and like different creatures there that help the other creature that is sort of with humans it's interesting like I'm just fascinating by his imagination and I like reading his books and as far as podcasts I've been only beijing on one podcast it's a Russian
podcast called the declaration or declarative in Russian I don't think it's relevant to most of our listeners but it's a great business podcast I actually posted it in my telegram channel I'm like yeah I'm listening to this guy and I'm really liking him and one person asked like why
do you listen to him and not to the Western business gurus and all and I actually got me thinking I'm like hmm a lot of things he says you can find in Simon Signing so Tony Robinson or Tony Robbins is a Robinson podcast or their books but just culturally because of the language
because of the expressions because of the context even if what he says is a copy paste from what they say it just lands so much better with me and I underpriciate it until I discovered him so that's me right so since we recorded last time I feel like it's been about three four weeks the world I feel
like is on a speedrun over the last few years but even more recently because I'm a lot into sports so Wimbledon finished up that was epic then Olympics started they're still going on but the Olympics the tennis part of it which was insanely good and epic that finished up so I was listening
to a lot of that then there was a Trump assassination attempt Biden stepping down from the presidency and then Kamala Harris becoming this and then she chose her new VP choice so I have been consuming a lot of podcasts I found recommendations for a few independent podcasts right so there is one
I'm still listening to a lot of them so I'll bring up the names next time after I really feel like this is worth recommending but there is one that I've started liking where it's basically a democratic supporter and a republican supporter and they're really good at talking with each other
like in a civilized manner as we all should and that's kind of different from today's world of politics where everybody's just shouting past each other so I really am liking that podcast but I listen to a few more episodes and next time if I keep listening if I keep liking I'll do that but
the one episode I'll talk about mentioned today is StarTalk so I'm also like into astronomy and listen to a lot of sciencey podcast shortwave and StarTalk are my favorites StarTalk not all episodes are equal but listen to this latest episode from August 6 so yesterday which is about
the story of planet X. StarTalk is hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson very famous astronomer and like a public figure the interesting part is he's joined by a stand-up comedian on the podcast always sometimes it's not that funny to be honest but this one was hilarious and the way that Neil deGrasse
Tyson goes through the history of how we found out Neptune and then the hunt for the next planet but they did pen out and we found Pluto it was so beautifully done how long does it I want to say about 40 minutes not too long oh I think I'm confusing with the hard history the hardcore history
no those are long episodes but he does maybe one a year or so because they're more like books this is StarTalk yeah and we do little hack this time to get us to 30 minutes mark you have meetings starting in a few seconds so let's close this recording by telling people where they
can download Metacast if they haven't already yeah metacast.app we would love to hear back from you send us an email at hello at metacastpodcast.com and we would love to hear back about this podcast about the app itself or your recommendations what you're listening to what do you love to listen to
yeah and if you enjoy the app please give it a five star rating on Google Play Store if you don't like it don't give it a rating send us an email and we will see if we can make it work and make you whatever
add the things that you are missing or maybe explain the things that are not clear we change the app and make sure that you like it it works for you I mean you can't promise that we will make it work for everybody maybe it's just not that for you but if there are obvious bugs don't give it one
star and say like oh it sucks because I cannot listen to this podcast we will just make it possible listen to the podcast that you can't listen to all right then come are the us okay let me guess it all right see you next time