99 Percent Meta

Stuff we talk about:

- Our thoughts on building Nexcast podcast and how we would have ran things differently from the founder.

- How to stop preoptimizing

- Why we're doing this episode; to know what it's like to be a podcaster and hopefully create a community

- Our resolutions for this podcast and how

- how we could record all of this and just give it to Gimlet for their StartUp show

Our second episode for our 3 part series about what we learned over the summer.

- We talked about the importance of prioritizing the venture and the impact of why us not prioritizing the startup enough will cause us to fail.

- We care about money and freedom, and that's why we're keeping our other commitments like jobs, but is that the right decision?

- We're back after a long time of no episodes!

- We cover what we learned over the summer

- We decided we didn't want a normal life with friends.

- We go over why we decided to choose venture and our plan of action behind this decision.

- What it's like to lose sight of the vision and ending in a mini depression

- How Tanha and Jon managed to regain enthusiasm

- How doing the startup full-time gives a better success rate. Why don't we do this full time then?

- Building an app that you would use yourself

- Eating our own dog food. We force ourselves to use our own app

- Moving faster and breaking more things

- Special thanks to Phillip. You made our day!

We get a reality check from an incumbent in the podcasting industry. 

Things we talk about:

- Why incremental changed in the podcasting world is best

- Why we're choosing to not make incremental changes despite that being the best bet

- If our instincts about the podcasting industry is right

Something we didn't talk about though was the incumbent's motivations. They of course want to everything to stay status quo because they're a leader right now. If our startup takes off then they're threatened. 

In this podcast we get a reality with our priorities for this summer. 

- How the environment and social life is affecting our venture

- Our next steps on how to get back into the right mindset

- Cancelling the Japan trip because we don't deserve it

Today on 99 Percent Meta we talk about:

- our user research on various people's from varied level of podcast listening on their listening experiences
- how we conducted our user research; inspired by Airbnb to ask for their 10/5 podcasting experience
- insights for on how people got into podcasting either through their friends or stumbling on to them through blogs or Spotify
- how some users would like like to talk and interact with the podcast host
- how users discover new podcasts and episodes
- why some users stopped listening to podcasts
- why we want to talk to podcast creators, app creators, and anyone in the industry

Today we talk about

- Decision making of what is the right entry way into the podcast industry. Should we cater our app to podcast creators or podcast listeners?
- Who's advice should we follow? Should we be more strategic where we focus on finding holes in industries and filling them for higher odds of success or follow our "passion" where we build something cool without caring about the market much? There's a demand in the side of podcast creators with lack of analytics, should we pursue to fill that need (aka be entrepreneurial) or build the most out of the box podcast player?
- What is our passion? What do we want to be building out of this startup? Are we too naive and have a developers mindset?
- What are our odds, and where do we want to see ourselves in a few years

We talk about how we're going to approach Gimlet Media to find out if there's anything we can do to serve them.

More specifically we explore the following:
- Why Gimlet and not any other podcast company?
- What does Gimlet say they want?
- We mess up our pitch
- How we can help them: more engaging branded podcasts with call to actions, listener habits, asking what their user wants

Images:
The music room we're in: https://s3.amazonaws.com/99percentmeta/99pm003musicroomsmall.jpg

The iPad mind map: https://s3.amazonaws.com/99percentmeta/99pm003ipadmindmap.jpg

Whiteboard screenshot: https://s3.amazonaws.com/99percentmeta/99pm003whitebaordscreenshot.JPG

Email we sent them:

Hi Matt and Alex, nice to meet you! My name is Tanha and my team is trying to build a podcast analytics service that focuses on the user experience through search and recommendation. I also CC'd my cofounder Jon in this email!

We would love to know what do Gimlet listeners and Gimlet Media wants? What can an app do to help you put listeners first? If anyone on the Gimlet team has 15 minutes to spare for a phone call sometime this week to pick their brain?

So far we've made a basic prototype on iOS with less than 100 users, that doesn't have any searching or recommended capabilities. It's just curated episodes from us. Here's a link to our app.

PS. We've also made a podcast episode of about this email inspired by Startup. Here's a link, if you want to listen!

Thanks!
Tanha

We talk about how much work other people in their startups do. Are we doing too much work? Are we putting our efforts in correct places?

Should we move into the Chinese podcasting market? Are meet ups the right way to network with people?