So I walk up in a sleeper train in the morning and I'm looking at my Apple watch and the reason notification from GitHub. It doesn't just start with the holy shit, holy shit, it finally worked. And it was like, what a way to start a day. Hello and welcome to episode 61 of the Metacast Behind scenes podcast. I'm Léa Bessilov. And I'm Arnaugteca. We are co-founders of Metacast, a podcast app best known for transcripts.
So we are all about transcripts. We have transcripts for every episode ever published. If you don't, you can easily generate one. So the app generates transcripts for you on demand. So you can get access to any transcript that you can bookmark, you can search, you can share quotes from it, you can save quotes from there. And as we develop the app further, transcripts will be more and more advanced. So that's the thing that we want to be known for. And actually
we will talk about that specific thing in the episode later today. We are in production on Android. So you can download Metacast on Google Play Store. And we are also in beta on Apple through TestFlight, which you can get through the Metacast.app website. And we will be very soon launching on App Store. And we are also going to be talking about that in today's episode. So this podcast is where we talk about how we build apps, how we build the business, building
public stuff. So Arnaugte, what are we going to be talking about today? So I think first we have three or four topics. We'll see how long we can do it. We'll try to keep it to about 30, 35 minutes today. I think loneliness of being in a very small company. That's one of the topics. Then we had a pretty cool request from a couple of users and we decided we don't have time to build the feature, but we hacked our way around it. So we'll talk about that. Then last few weeks,
added to the loneliness I've been banging my head against some iOS and Flutter was. So we'll talk a little bit about that. We'll probably try not to go too deep technical in there. And finally, the thing that Ilya mentioned is what do we want Metacast to be primarily known for? So we're going to talk about that. And then of course, like we do, we'll close with what we're listening to and reading and all that. Let's go. Let's start with the confession of the lonely founder.
Yeah. So last couple of weeks, Ilya and Jenny have been away. We have had times like this. So with Jenny, how long has it been October 1st, 2023, right? Yes. Yeah. It's about a year. Okay. So it's been just about a year, less than a year. Before that, you and I were talking on like WhatsApp and Signal and all that, I think mostly. But after Jenny started, we primarily transitioned into Slack.
So our Slack has been, even though it's just three people, it's been pretty vibrant because we not just share what's going on in our work, but we also talk a lot about our life and what we're reading and listening. Interesting things that are happening in our life as well as not interesting things, I guess. But last two weeks, you both were away and you were away in a way that you both didn't want to use Slack. We were unplugged. Unplugged. Yes. Both of you. And we have had times where
two of us or three of us were away for like a week. But I think we were still maybe checking Slack or responding to it sometimes things like that. This time was like truly unplugged for both of you. And I think in the mornings, my ritual is like, I wake up around 7 a.m. and I open Slack and see what's new because you both are time zone wise like ahead of me. So there's already like things happening or you may have responded to some things that I asked yesterday. So I go through it and
unconsciously, I guess I was getting a bit of a dopamine hit kind of effect from it. Like people do from Instagram and Reddit and all that, right? Like you open it up first thing in the morning and doom scroll through it. And these last two weeks, I felt like, oh man, this is so sad. Like there's nothing happening, right? And I don't know if you noticed or Jenny noticed, but I kept posting things on Slack and we kept ignoring them. Yeah, yeah, which is fine, right?
I didn't expect you to read it, but it's like, okay, when they come back, we'll talk about these things. I don't want to forget about it. So it kind of reminded me of that. And I'm glad that we're a small company, but still there's so much collaboration. Whereas I now feel like I don't know how indie solo developers, solo entrepreneurs go through it because they literally have nobody to talk
to. Right. And you go to your family and they're like, when are you going to make money again? So it's like pressure from all sides, right? All sides. Yeah. And nowhere to release that pressure into. Right. And it's like, you almost don't want to talk about this stuff, the family sometimes. Stuff. Maybe that's why people go to co-working spaces and the meetups and all that, just to talk
to other people, right? As you were talking about this, it made me think that let's say six months ago, we were also at a different stage where yeah, we were knocking out some features here and there, we were working mostly on smaller things where we were releasing every two weeks. We had a lot of progress and there was also a lot of collaboration going on. I think to the last couple of months, we entered in this kind of vlog stage where we needed to launch on the Google Play Store and now we
are working on the iOS launch. It's just a bunch of lonely and interesting work that has to be done that's not around like, oh, how about this feature or like, how do you make these UX different, right? Or like, look how I redesigned this. It's more like, I'm going to my head on the wall. Why is this not working? Right. And it's like so complex that nobody else even wants to look into this. I'm like, we can't, I'm gonna figure it out. But it also creates this environment where,
I mean, you're feeling lonely because you're just working on this and we can't help you really. So there is not much communication happening naturally, right? And when you're banging your head on the wall, I don't think there is a natural desire to like think about big picture and you're just so focused and also frustrated, which, I guess, compounds the problem, right? That's our CDO. He kind of, I think once in a while, reminds us that he's part of the company
because he does nothing else. Although to be fair, I think that period of going through it was painful because we could not get it working. I literally have like over 100 commits trying to get this one thing to work, could not work from the tooling that we have Xcode and all that. There is no obvious hints or clues or errors at why it's not working, right? So that's why it was
very difficult. But once it worked and that was on a beautiful Friday afternoon, I think it finally worked, then it felt like all of this was worth it because we got unblocked for our iOS we had like three features left to deliver for iOS before we launched on iOS and all three were actually coded, but we could not deliver it in a way to Apple devices where they would work. So that was unblocked all in one go and that was like amazing. Actually, I think it's a good segue
into our next topic about iOS and flutter problems that we had. So those three features were links. I think it's called app links or something. The idea is so when you have a Metacast.app link that links to a podcast or an episode, if you have Metacast installed near your phone, instead of opening a browser for you, it opens the app with this episode. I think people should be familiar with this mechanics from apps like Airbnb and Twitter, I mean, app, right? You click on
link it opens the app for you. But another like super cool thing we do is if somebody sends you a link to a Metacast, any podcast episode with a deep link inside the episode to a specific part and you tap that link, it'll open it up right there and you can read it or listen to specifically
that segment. It's basically like YouTube, right? If a link has a time signature or time stamp, it goes straight there, which is really cool because if you have a very long legs episode and you want to share a specific moment with somebody, in other apps you have to tell people, okay, go to one hour, fifty three minutes and listen from there. Whereas on Metacast, you can just send a link from that moment on and then people will open it and listen right from there. So that thing wasn't
working. It worked, but then at some point it broke and you can talk about why it happened. Basically, what was happening is you would click on that link and it would open the browser for you. We had no way to trigger an app to open when you click link. Whereas it works on Android and we, from our perspective, didn't change anything. We even had a consultation with Apple on this. I guess we can talk about that too. The other feature that was not working was Apple signing. It gave us the clue
as to why the other thing, the links were not working too. And the third feature was the Bluetooth device integration. Like if you wear AirPods or if you're in your car, if you do like the play pause button in your car or on your headphones, it would play in pause. But skips were not working. Like if you wanted to skip forward for 30 seconds or skip back for 15, actually I forgot what our defaults are. 10 and 30. So we skipped backwards for 10 and skip forward for 30.
Right. And we also make it configurable at some point. It just wasn't working. So like if you in the car, if you click next to previous, it just would do nothing. It just wouldn't react. Which was very annoying for people who are driving and they want to skip an ad or something because it's like five minutes of ads. And you have to open your car dashboard and like tap on the screen. It was a very inconvenient experience. So that was not working. It's been going on for a
long time. I want to say months that we were struggling with this. That's when I think at some point we decided this is like taking too long. Let's just launch on Android. And I think we talked about this in the last episode. I think one episode to go. Episode 59, I think that's when we talked about that. Yeah, features we decided to punt on, right? But now that we have to launch an app store, we had no options to get figured out. It was existential, right? So yeah, Arna, tell us the
glory story of this. Yeah. So these features Apple sign in and like universal links. They are native iOS features and they require you to like set up what Apple calls it or capabilities for your app. They're like extra capabilities. Like my app is able to send push notifications or it supports these universal links or it supports Apple sign in and you have to configure it on Apple's side like a website and also on your app. And there's a bit of madness in the way that
Apple has created to be fair. So Apple created this whole ecosystem app ecosystem first. They created a lot of things that are only Apple specific. You require Xcode to build all this. Xcode is a tool that Apple provides for like building iOS apps. So you have to use Xcode and Xcode uses like all sorts of certificates and profiles and basically like security or cryptography management features. All of this have to work in conjunction to make such features that are native to iOS work on your app.
So what was happening is before we move to our like automated build mechanism CI CD, we use tram line and GitHub actions to build the app every time we push a commit. Before that we were building it manually. So Xcode when you're building it manually on your MacBook, there's a flag that automatically manage profiles and certificates. And so we're doing that and it was beautiful like
everything works. You don't have to think about anything. When you want to automate the build and you still need to use Xcode, then you have to basically manually configure all these certificates and provisioning profiles. Basically like if you're on a Mac keychain, you have to automate a lot of keychain actions and all that on our build servers. In the human language, it's a huge pain. Yes. Yes. And to be fair to Apple, they came up with it first. So that's why I think Google
Android did a much more simplified, more standard way of building apps than they did. So what happened is when we moved our build into our build servers on GitHub, Xcode silently was basically saying, oh, I can't find this profile or actually not saying that's why it was silent, right? Was nowhere it was probably unable to find a profile or the certificates in the right place. And it said, oh, these features, I'll just drop them. So that's what it did. And there was no
indication in the build logs itself that it was doing that. I mean, directly. So the end effect is that there is no errors. The build works. It ships the app to test flight or app store. And it just doesn't enable these features on the device, which is why it was very hard to debug. If you see errors or if you get a clue as to what is going wrong, you can figure it out. But if you don't see any
effect, it's harder to figure out what's going on. It's kind of like you're back in JavaScript 20 years ago. Yeah. So I went through like a hundred steps of trial and error of configuring things in slightly different ways with Xcode and all that. All of this is scripted and automated thankfully, it was not manual. But like we would do one little change and then we have to push a new release to actually test it out. And then after a while once the app is deployed, you find out that it's
still not working. So that was about a hundred or so at times of that. Eventually, I just deleted all our automation and started from scratch reading the documentation again. And even then it didn't work. But I think by going deeper and deeper into all this Xcode details and documentation, eventually, I think I figured out what was wrong. And that was that Friday afternoon when the first time Universal Links and Apple signed in and everything worked on our debug build.
And I think it was a couple of days before that. I sensed so much frustration from you. I mean, you were not shy saying that you were frustrated. It had been like 10 days every day. I just keep trying and error because we have no other option. We have to make it work. Exactly. Yeah. And I remember I'm like, let's talk and you obeyed it. Our meeting. But then finally, you picked up the phone and I think you were walking with our studio. And I think we talked for a good
hour or so. For my perspective, I felt like it helped relieve some of that frustration. Even though we didn't really solve anything, but it's more like talking about the founder Londoners. Because I felt like I had to talk to you. You asked deeper and deeper questions about what is wrong and like what's happening and all that. And it has also a rubber duck effect. It makes me think twice about what is actually happening and think about all of this again. So yeah,
that definitely helped. I think finally getting it worked made it feel like, okay, this was worth it. I mean, to be fair, we had no other option other than to make it work. But when it finally worked, it felt amazing. And now I feel great that all these freezers are working. Yeah. And actually, it was so interesting to find out about you making it to work because it was just before I became unavailable for my travels. Right? So I woke up in the sleeper train in the morning and I'm
looking at my Apple watch and the reason notification from GitHub. What did you say? Holy shit. I made it work. Something like that. It doesn't just start with the holy shit. Holy shit. It finally worked. Finally worked. Yeah. And it was like, what a way to start a day. Yeah. You should post that screenshot in the release notes somewhere of this episode. Yeah. Maybe you should make it the cover
image for this podcast episode. Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to ask you how about the other one, the audio issue. The background audio. Yeah. So we have had background audio working for a while with Android. But like you said, Bluetooth and car controls for skip and rewind were not working on iOS only on iOS only. Yes. It was working on Android. And that was also pretty weird because this one comes down to be doing enough trial and error. So the thing is when you're building in development mode on a
Macbook, you're using an iOS simulator. It's not a real iOS device. It's supposed to simulate an iPhone pretty accurately. And for the most part, it does pretty much 99% it does. But for these kind of things where it requires system native feature integration, it behaves differently. So we could not debug or we could not figure out what is wrong with this thing on a simulator. Basically, your code sitting on your Macbook running on an actual Apple device is more complicated than like
you could probably imagine. So that's why we have to like again, go deeper, read a lot of code, like underlying libraries and all that. And I think eventually yesterday we got this feature also working. It was a similar, I think kind of frustrating path. But once it works, it feels great because we've been struggling with this on and off for months like you said, right? And eventually, we decided we punt on it because we need to focus our energies. We made the Android launch and then
we came back to this. Right. Well, huge congrats. Yeah. So our iOS launch is coming very, very soon. Now that we are all done with everything, hopefully Apple approves it quickly too. Yeah. Very accordingly. So September 4th. So this episode will come out in a couple of weeks by that time. We will hopefully have submitted to Apple at least. Yeah. You are doing the product hunt launch first and then we'll do iOS and then do it again. Yeah, we are doing the product hunt launch actually tomorrow,
which means for you listeners 13 days ago. Yeah, next episode we can talk about how the product hunt thing went because at first I was actually very excited about product hunt and like let's do it. I was reading all of these posts people talking about how they got the product of the day. And then the same time you open the Reddit and they say like product hunt is like I think they use the word scam. It's like it's designed to just drive more people to the platform. It's like not helpful. You
know getting the real users from that unless you're building four startup founders. Yeah, I think for SaaS focused at in B or other founders, it works. Yeah, my point is that it's mixed. So we will go through that ourselves and see how it goes. I'm curious. All right. So the next topic we have is a request that we heard from a couple of users who were migrating from other apps. In the podcast world, there is a thing called opml. I think it has much to do with podcasting actually the actual
abbreviation. Anyway, so opml is an XML file format. So you can export all of your podcasts in opml file and then other apps can import it. It's outline processor markup language. It's very generic basically. Anybody could use it. Yeah. But essentially like when you listen to podcasts, if you have been listening to podcasts for a while, you probably have 30, 40, 100 plus maybe podcasts that you have subscribed to over the years. And when you switch from one app to another,
you don't want to go through manually and hunt those hundred and subscribe again. And we did not build this feature right away. So what is the feature? Like you can export from some apps, not all apps. I think support exporting it, right? Not all apps. Yeah. But some of the independent apps do. And also with Google podcast shutting down, they had the feature to export to opml. So people will
ask us to import their opml files. We decided to do the what's called Wizard of Oz approach, where instead of building the feature to import the file, we created a runbook for doing it manually, which consists of parsing the file, getting the feeds from it, then doing some magic to find them in our catalog. If they're not in our catalog to import them and then using a backdoor sort of script kind of thing to update the production database with those records to subscribe the user
to those podcasts that you want to be subscribed to. Yeah. Pretty much what you would want the app to do, but like you said, it's a lot of complex steps. And there's a lot of edge cases in the process. So we decided it's not worth building this whole thing right now. Let's semi-automate it, right? That's what we did. To be fair, we were not really thinking about the edge cases. We were like, we just
don't have time for that. And then when we did the first import, I was premiering myself and I spent probably a good day, maybe two days going through that, figuring out the process, figuring out all of those edge cases. And I had this holy shit moment where like if you started building this, it would have taken us probably three or four times longer than our best estimates, just because of all of those edge cases. We're not even talking about the edge cases here, but we're like, okay,
it'll probably be a while before we actually have this feature. But we did this for one user and another user sent us an email with their file. So the first user had I think 120 also podcasts, which we were able to import about 117. I think the second user had over 300. And they were like, wow, okay. So that was way beyond what we imagined a person would have in their library. The interesting thing though is after we did that, it was great. And then we get a
regid thread from the first user. He's like, I can't follow any more podcasts. He was just getting an error. And the error wasn't super helpful. It was something like cannot follow a podcast. So we started looking and figured out that we actually had a limit of maximum 100 podcasts that you could follow. We did not hit this limit when we were importing the podcasts for the user because we get it through the back door. It did not have to go through those checks that the app goes through.
So that's why it couldn't follow anything because it just wasn't working. It was hitting the limit. And we had to urgently change that limit and push a new version to the Google Play Store to fix that. We still do have a limit just because we have to protect ourselves too. Because there is cost associated with the podcast that people follow. And also there could be some technical issues, I guess. No, I think we went deeper and we figured out there are no scaling or technical
concerns here. It's just a cost related. Yeah. And the reason why we initially set the 100 limits, we were like, who's going to follow more than 100 podcasts? You and I, we listened to a lot of podcasts. I just looked at it right now. You're at 78. I'm at 58. But we do have a lot of users in the 40s and some users in the 60s and 70s. So I think initially we set this because of the feature that we decided not to build actually. It was something to do with home. We couldn't
figure out how to make it computationally inexpensive to show a big number of podcasts. So we set it to 100 and we were like, if somebody has more, they will complain and then we'll figure out what to do. Yeah. And then somebody complained and we had to undo that decision. Increase the limit here. But yeah, it was an interesting exercise. The reason actually this approach is called Wizard of Oz. It kind of looks like the app is doing something on the background, but it's actually
human behind the curtain that does the actual work. Well, we didn't automate it to this extent. People were sending it to us by email, but you were thinking about creating a form where people can submit the file and then it would actually look like something is happening automatically, but it was yeah, a person kind of. So the last topic of today's positioning, right? I think I mentioned in the last episode that I felt like I've not been reading enough nonfiction professional literature
in the last couple of years. So I picked up a few marketing books. One of them was 22 laws of branding by Al Ries. I think the author is and there's the second author I don't remember. The same people who wrote 22 laws of marketing. I read maybe four or five chapters and the thing that really stuck to me there was what is the word that you want your customers to be associated in their mind with your product? And they were making an example of what do you think about when
you hear Mercedes? Do you think about prestige? What do you think about when you hear BMW? It's like driving, right? Or maybe like a different version of that, but it looks like luxury. But also the book was written like 20 years ago. So maybe there were fewer luxury cars back then. So Mercedes was probably like the top of the pack, right? And they have multiple other examples which I was reading.
I was like, yes, it makes sense. Like photocopying is zero. PCs were IBM's back in a day, right? Volvo is safety and it really got me thinking what should be that word that we should own or should try to own, right? Who is the app for? What is it known for? What is the first association that comes with it? I think only today I was walking with my kids on the street and it just came accidentally out of nowhere
transcripts because that's what we started with. But we were sort of shying away from the like transcript is just a feature. We also have powerful playlists and there is a lot more kind of in the roadmap that transcript is just implementation in detail for. There also like other apps have transcripts to now. Like Apple has them, Spotify has them. I think it will become a table stakes feature at some point.
Maybe within a couple of years in all podcast apps. But what we've been always thinking about and we'll continue to be really doubling down on is how do we make knowledge extraction from podcasts really, really powerful and transcripts is the core fundamental user experience and the underlying infrastructure for that. Knowledge extraction and retention and recall, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like learning, knowledge learning, information. So these are the words that
we want to be associated with, but they have to weigh great. But the transcript is something that user can see, user can touch quite literally, right? Because we have these things like bookmarking and the sharing quotes and we'll be making more and more powerful enhancements to those. So basically we want to be the app that is the best in transcripts. Just like if you think about the
indie apps, you could think about overcast that's been the best in the audio enhancement. Because they like skip pauses, they have the smart speed control that you know it's really good and dynamically good features, right? Which other apps don't have and we could be kind of similar in
a way, right? For transcripts. So transcripts should probably be the words that we are associated with and we should be using that more and more and as we are continuing to evolve features that are centered around the transcript, I think it will be more and more apparent as to how we are differentiated from other apps in this regard. Yeah. The path ahead I think is very long, but the power that the transcript provides is amazing. I think we'll get there now that we've
implemented, we are about to release on iOS. We have launched on Android and I think we're very close to actually being feature complete as far as a podcast app goes. Then I think that's when we start doing the things that nobody else is doing. Well, we already have some features that nobody else is doing, but that's when we actually focus maybe 80% of our time on these kind of things
that nobody else has. Actually, I'll tell you this now in iOS because we are part of the internal users group and I get paywall in the iOS app that prevents me from seeing the transcript and the problem with the sandbox testing of paywall is that you have to like click the button, you enter your Apple iG passport which you know is paying the ads by itself. I think it only works with 15 minutes and 15 minutes later it resets back to the paywall and I started listening to
fewer podcasts because of that. It makes me anxious that if I want to highlight something, the transcript is not there and I may not be in the position to enter the password. And also one of my favorite podcasters, he's primary channels YouTube, but they were also cross posting to podcasts. I think I mentioned that show declaration that I was listening to for the half a year or so. The last two or three episodes, he only posted on YouTube and I even wrote him like, why they
post on podcasts, but he has a large volume, he never responded to me. I almost didn't want to listen to those on YouTube even though I have YouTube premium, I can listen to this in the background, but not be enabled to highlight because he has a lot of interesting stuff there that I always highlight. It makes me anxious because like, how am I going to make notes of what I heard? So, I think that whole transcript thing is really, really powerful. We just need to find the
way to talk about it, to market it, to the right people because that's nothing. I think we figured out our work. Now, the next thing is like, who is our tribe? Who is the tribe that you market to? I think it's least kind of knowledge junkies like us, but where do you find them? Yeah, I think reaching to those right people, marketing to them, that's the next, I think,
growth area for us. I'm enjoying that journey because even if we were in a team building and app like this inside a big corporation, we wouldn't be getting all these other experiences of like, how to figure out which channel to market to and how do you market it and all that. So, I'm really enjoying all of these other things that I'm learning to. Even though you had like 15 users if you were a family, on a launch date. Or at least people will check it out immediately.
Yeah, but then you probably get flooded with basic requests and you year away from your vision. You know what's interesting? One of our friends sent me a text probably a year ago with the announcement that Amazon Music had transcripts in on the same 2017, 2018, 2019. So like a while back. So they did a pilot with a few podcasts and I found those. And only those specific episodes of those specific podcasts had the transcript.
So apparently they abandoned it for whatever reason, right? But we can really keep to the vision and really like keep going down that route. Right. Okay, so let's close this out. What are you listening to or reading? So I already mentioned the 22 laws of branding. In it's interesting. It's one of those books where I read five chapters and chapters are very short. They're like five six pages. And I feel like I've gotten out of this book what I need it. So I can stop.
The other book that I'm actively reading is actually a Russian book called National Dazor, which is translated as Night Watch. I think it was translated into English. It's sort of fantasy, sci-fi-ish kind of story about vampires and magic and the interesting thing I noticed about this one is I think it was released in the late 90s and there was a movie. And the movie really made the whole series of books. It's a three book series.
It just exploded after the movie in early 2000s. So I read it when I was 20 or so. And I barely remember it. So now I just picked it up again and I started reading it. What's interesting when you read the book half the life ago because I'm 14 now, I'm seeing just how much more I'm able to relate to the book. The whole thing happens in the like mid 90s Moscow. I wasn't from Moscow but I was part of that. I was in nature at that time.
There could be like a phrase from five words. I can build a whole experience by just reading like somebody entering the whole way of the house and he sees X. And by just that X which is like one or two words, I'm able to reconstruct the whole picture which I'm not able to do with some of the American books because I didn't grow up in that environment which is pretty cool. Yeah. I'm halfway through the first book and I'm really enjoying it and I'm trying to get my son hooked on that but has some
romantic stuff in there as well. And as far as teenagers go he will probably be like, and stop dreaming. The moment he sees and you can romantic notion in there. Are these the movies available outside of Russia or so? They might, I mean they're over 20 years old. The movies are not as impressive as the book. It's one of those movies where you watch the movie, the movie is good but then you read the book. You're like, okay, that movie is just nowhere near the
book. The book has just so much more depth. It must have been translated. I think it's one of the sort of seminal Russian contemporary books and I've never been listening to podcasts much recently. If you got a lunch on App Store and remove that freaking paywall, it's for me to get back into that. Okay. 4b. So I have some family visiting and some friends. Actually the same friends that were here when you were here last year just around this time. So they're back here. Even when we are in
the car, I'm not listening to podcasts because I don't want to bore them with my podcasts. Other than that there's of course US Open going on this year. Farmula one is really exciting because there's like at least three or four different people who can win the whole thing. Whereas the last few years it's been just one person who is one everything. But outside of that the Dave Girl book by the way quick callback. So there is music in that book in the Dave Girl book but it's their own music.
For the other songs like ACDC or Metallica he talks about he just says like okay we can't afford to pay royalties for every listen of this audiobook back to them so that's why they didn't include it. So I'm listening to that. I'm slowly progressing to that Dave Girl book. So far so good. I love it. I think the podcast I will mention today. So if you like to hear about app development or the struggles of getting big and doing a rewrite and all that then I think this was great
because Marco who's the creator of the very popular overcast app. I think at some point it was maybe even now it's the biggest podcast app on iOS outside of Apple and Spotify probably. It's one of the big ones. It's a single developer written. It's been over 10 years. It had become hard for him to manage that app. He decided to do a whole big rewrite with a new app and that's been a journey because he decided to change some things, cut some features and people got really
mad about that. Marco is in two podcasts. One is called accidental tech podcast and episode 596 of it called a new foundation for progress. That's the one just before the launch they did talking about the launch and what he's looking forward to and all that and then there was a lot of backlash after the launch. So in his other podcast called under the radar episode 300 the aftermath that's when they talk about what were the problems and what is he doing about it and how does he
think about all that. These are both from the creator himself and other people but then I've also found this really interesting another podcast called comfort zone and they did an episode called I like to read my podcast recently in the last two weeks and this is a pretty independent look at the rewrite and what worked, what didn't work and how they think about it as a user so I like that episode quite a lot too. Yeah, I started listening to the ATP podcast too. That's like an hour and a
half long and in the middle is a whole segment about very deep technical stuff. So yeah, I've never developed in Swift but it was interesting to listen about the problems he was facing and the trade-offs he was making between the user experience and the technical simplicity. It was interesting trade-offs. It also gives us a peak inside the mind of our competitor which is pretty cool. Competitive research. Okay, so let's close this out. So yeah, the app is on Android right
now and beta on iOS launching very soon on the app store. You can find the links at metacast.app that's our website. There also you can find this podcast and our newsletter that Ilya does give it a listen. If you have any feedback or thoughts or features or requests for us and it are way at hello at metacast.app. Hello at metacast.com. That's for the podcast. Yeah, for the app it's my feedback at metacast.app and we start publishing blog posts on our blog at metacast.app and we
also cross-post them on our newsletter at metacast.com. I think what I need for previous previous one. Basically I took the discussion that we had and then wrote in a say about the topics that we discussed specifically about pricing. I think pricing was the main topic that we covered in episode 59. It covers more than the podcast and also it goes into more depth. It has links. I generally think that our newsletter is getting better in that regard and it's worth to be
subscribed to at metacast.com. If you're a person who likes to read rather than listen then use the newsletter more but then I'm wondering why are you here 35 minutes into this episode listening to it if you don't like listening. Exactly. I think it's for par with social connection which actually didn't know if we ever covered this term in the podcast. I remember it was Justin Jackson on one of our interviews. He mentioned this term. Then I had to google it because I didn't
know what it meant. Par social connection is a connection that is developed between people is like a one-sided connection. If somebody is listening to us talk they develop bond with us but we may or may not know them. We are feeling like they know us really well whereas we may not be aware of their existence. I definitely have that feeling towards some of the podcasters that I
regularly listen to. That's what's called par social connection. We've met a few of such people who listen to our podcast and all that and those have been wonderful to me in person. You remember when we met one of those people who also seemed like it feels so weird because I know so much about you and like you're just the only for the first time but they only know the voice so they only know us as like a voice plus some images probably conceived in their brain.
They make a watch the YouTube videos. That's true. We do post on YouTube. I should have done my hair. My wife was just meeting someone she calls an Instagram. We never discussed it before and she told me it just felt so weird that she knows so much about that person and to that person she is just like a random person who wrote to her on Instagram and they decided to meet. Yeah. Okay so till the next time stranger on the audio waves will or you'll hear us next time
I guess we will hear you unless you send us an email at helloatmetacastpodcast.com. Yes. Bye. Bye.