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Metacast is a podcast app for podcast lovers. We are building a powerful tool that helps you get the most out of podcasts. Auto-generated transcripts and chapters allow you to quickly skim episodes, search for content, and bookmark segments. Chapters, automated playlists, listening history & stats, and much more is coming.
On this podcast, co-founders of Metacast talk about building the company and the product.
Is it going to be disrespectful to our listeners if I greet them by saying, yo? Well, I guess, yo, listeners, welcome to the Metacast Behind the Scenes podcast. Yeah, you're making this about yourself, Ilya, in Spanish.
Well, that's a cultural blunder, I guess, that I've just committed. So let me reverse it. Anyway, so yeah, this is our regular update about what's going on. So yeah, let's...
jump straight in into the general updates. So what's up? I'm looking at our notes and you said that Vercel costs are under control. Oh, I think I wrote this. You did that, I think.
Yeah, oh my God. This is what happens when you jump straight into recording right after doing other things. Yeah, so I think last time we reported that we had our Vercel costs. Vercel is where we host our web app.
that they went all the way to like almost 300 bucks last month. And that was up from probably like 100, 150. So that was a lot. Yeah.
Yeah, we've done a bunch of actually things to counter that. We've migrated our backend
the Firebase functions from V1 to V2. I know it's very technical, but like we sped up our backend, which made Vercel consume less.
Time. Compute time, right? Yeah. So we made things faster. And we also, I think last time we talked about those bots from Singapore and Brazil. So we...
just activated a nuclear red button approach to those bots. We're like, okay, let them all pass the JavaScript challenge. And well, to no surprise, none of them do. So it basically cut down probably like a fourth, maybe a third of our traffic.
Like immediately. And so I think to date, today is October 10th. And our building on Vercel starts on September 18th. So it's what, like three weeks.
We only spent about 30 bucks on Vercel compared to 300 last month. Yeah. Huge improvement. Huge improvement, which means we don't have to raise prices just yet, right? Yeah.
So speaking of which, do you want to talk about our numbers? Yeah, so I think last time we recorded, what was it, about a month ago?
I think it was less, actually. I'm afraid to turn on my phone with Metacast because my AirPods will switch to it.
it will screw up the recording. I think it was like three weeks ago and I think we said 160 people or so we were on track for 200, which we did. We crossed 200 yesterday.
200 active subscribers, 1,200-ish, like, basically monthly active users.
In terms of MRR and ARR, ARR-wise, like annual revenue-wise, we have crossed $4,000.
And MRR-wise, I think we have gone from maybe the ramen stage to the sushi stage, but not fancy sushi stage. Well, we can afford this because now we've cut down the Vercel costs.
Yes, yes. So I think MRR is at a point where...
I can maybe buy a Shure SMB7 mic at some point in the near future. You also need an audio interface, which is another $200 to $300.
Not there yet. Another few months, maybe. Yeah. So I was looking at those charts and we were at 100 paying subscribers in the end of May. Like last week of May is where we crossed the 100.
So it took us about 8 to 12 months on both Android and iOS to cross that. And it took us four months to double this. So it's kind of...
It looks nice on the chart where the slope just starts to go steeper. Yeah.
And I mean, to be fair, maybe you can post a slope on like the notes or I don't know if you can put an image in there. But anyway, the point is...
That is not like a one-time trend. I think we have been seeing acceleration.
since we launched but then the scale of that acceleration is not enough yet and but i think it's healthy it's been accelerating ever since and recently i think since the summer it's actually been
a bit of a step forward in that acceleration, which is leading to faster and faster growth. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right. So what's new in the app?
Hopefully next week we'll do the release for... No, that's what we are working on, right? So let's follow the agenda. And I was listening to this Justin Jackson episode where he was talking about like maniacal...
He wrote an app to make them follow the agenda for the podcast, which is kind of funny. Anyway, so I think we want to talk about...
What's new since the last episode that people can actually use, right? Right, right. So I think let's start with our big thing. So we've survived another year. And we've survived a year in prod.
Yeah, since launch. Yeah, I think July last year is when we launched on Android and October, late September, I think, is when we launched on iOS.
2024 that is, right? So it's been about a year that we've been in prod and we've had our ups and downs and all of that. But...
But we've survived. So we wanted to celebrate. A lot of businesses. I think what I heard somewhere was that more than 90% of businesses fail in the first year.
Not necessarily due to like finances, but whatever reason, right? Like the people cannot continue or they have conflicts or they can't work with each other, whatever. There are so many reasons. Yeah. Well, they don't know what our relationship is like, right? Behind the scenes.
Not everything that happens behind the scenes. What do you say? What happens behind the scenes stays behind the scenes.
Right. Well, no, I think we do have a good working relationship. So that's definitely a positive. Actually, I think that also marks an anniversary for us of sorts. We've known each other for 10 years now.
Oh, yeah. 2015 October is when we met, yes. Maybe not October. I think I started in August, maybe 2015 August, but it's like at the 10-year scale.
a couple of months here and there. That doesn't matter. But yeah, we've been working together for 10 years. I mean, with a short break. Cool, cool, cool. All right. So we are doing a survivalversary. That's what we call it. Say it again. Survivalversary.
Okay, say it again slowly. I've practiced survivalversary. Okay. Yeah, it's like survival, anniversary of survival. And we...
Don't want to do any sales just overall, but this is a special occasion. So we are doing a $10 a year sale for new customers. So only customers who've never had a trial, never had a subscription.
And I guess that's less for the existing users. It's more like if you're on the fence, if you're a free user, you're on the fence or if you're a premium user and you feel like
You're enjoying the app. Now is the time to recommend the app to your friends and family and all of that because $10 a year, it's a steal. Yeah.
And if you don't like it, it's like you won't regret spending 10 bucks. Yeah. Can you even get like one sushi roll for 10 bucks? Maybe at Walmart. Depends on where you are. Somewhere in Idaho, you probably can. Probably, yeah.
But for like one sushi roll price in Idaho, you get like an entire year worth of this. So, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Or like one pumpkin spice, oat milk, extra hot, whatever, less caramel latte in Seattle. Before tips. Before tips, yeah.
Okay, cool. So let's survive a bursary. I guess go share with your friends. It will really help us a lot.
And you're posting a blog post about it and trying to spread the word, right? Yeah, I think it's already live. Well, it is already live at this point. So we just haven't shared it anywhere yet.
We will also link it in the show notes. And actually, we do share some of the numbers and also your excellent LinkedIn post in there. Oh, yeah.
Cool. So, yeah, it's actually worth a read. I think it's a good sort of vulnerable and, you know, interesting blog post like all of our blog posts are. Right.
Anyway, so the other thing that we launched just a couple of days ago is create a transcript. And I think we have to explain this. So up until two days ago, anytime you requested a transcript.
transcript was generated for you in the Metacast. Actually, it was a workflow using AI to transcribe the text and do all the other, you know, machinations with it and then it shows it to you right so but the podcast spec the podcast rss feed spec actually has the tag for
transcripts in JSON, VTT, SRT, and HTML and text formats. People who host on the hosting providers like Transistor, Buzzsprout, and the other kind of the good ones, you can... The good ones. Yeah, the good ones, yeah.
You can either upload the transcript that you export from Descript or you type it, you know.
However you get it, yeah. However you get it. Or like in Transistor's case, I think you pay five bucks a month and you can get Transistor transcribed for you and then also fill in all of the transcript tag with all of...
with all of the five different formats so that whatever the format that the app supports they can you can use it so we've used those
transcripts on the web app. Because on the web app, it was easier because we just show the transcripts. We don't sync with them. Yeah, we've been using it on the web app for what, about two, three months now.
Or two months, maybe? I want to say it's probably almost half a year now. I think we shipped it when I was in Vancouver with you in May. That's what I feel like. Around that time.
But on the mobile app, because, you know, there is less space, there is also like the bookmarks and other stuff that you need to do. So it's a bit more involved. Like the bar is higher. But we finally...
Done it. So we've moved that big rock. So whenever a creator has a transcript in their RSS feed in JSON, VTT, OSRT format, because those are structured formats, if they...
meet all of the criteria, then we use those transcripts. Those two criteria is like the format should be correct. There shouldn't be any weirdness in there. It shouldn't be corrupted. And second,
a segment cannot be longer than 1000 characters because otherwise it doesn't fit on the screen and so in terms of like what people can expect
Is this episode that they're listening to right now, does it have like your and my names and colors and stuff? No, because we are too cheap.
Maybe we can do it just for this episode. We'll see. Well, I think instead we should spread the goodwill instead of making me do work now. Actually, I did mention that the transcript...
Some transcripts will have the speaker tags so that actually the things that people say are broken down by who says them by name.
And we support that. Actually, the app has supported this from day one. But because it's just more expensive to transcribe with speakers, we never did it. But the feature was always in the app. So now we've made this change. And if you listen...
to a podcast like The Panel from Transistor. So it's hosted by Justin Jackson, one of the co-founders of Transistor, and Brian Castle, his friend, sort of podcast co-host.
So they do publish transcripts. And if you listen to those podcasts, you will see Justin and Brian.
like as headers and different colors. So today I was actually writing public transport. And because it was underground, it was so noisy. I had to switch between text and audio.
And I was listening to the panel. It's just so much easier to follow when speakers are separated.
It still has all of this like, um, um, and all of that stuff, right? Because that's how transcripts are. But just the fact that they are spread by the speaker. And when you read, you can kind of also like hear their voices in your head.
so cool. I feel like it improves the quality of the app quite a bit for those podcasts that have the transcripts with speakers. And over time, that segment of podcasts that support multi-speakers and all that will increase.
Yeah. It could probably take on 10 years. I don't know. It's just like this whole thing moves so slow. I mean, or we could get more and more profitable and start.
like doing it ourselves diarize like this is what our original idea was to diarize the diarize is the process of like detecting different speakers and all that right no
well depends on the speakers if they're like word vomiting too much then maybe yeah well i guess yeah i guess if you transcribe my speech that might uh might apply
Okay. What about, oh, you also wanted to talk about the tip jar that you added. Did we always have it and we just never added it? Yeah, we always had the buy me a coffee link. But I think we kind of neglected it.
We never published it anywhere. Yeah, maybe we shared it in one of the blog posts, but just forgot about it. Right. Basically, you were like, some people may be generous enough to tip us.
We were like, okay, yeah, why not create this? We have heard from people emailing us that I love this thing. Like I would pay X amount more per year or...
Somebody recently asked for like a higher tier and they were like, I would happily pay like three times, four times, whatever it was more.
In the past, we have heard more people who are like, we want to support you. How can we support you more? So that's what we always had. I think, buy me a coffee somewhere, but we never added it anywhere. So where did you add it, Ilya?
I'll add it to show notes. Okay. Yeah. Cool. I think let's just do this. Let's just start adding it to all episode show notes. Episode show notes. Yep. Going forward. Cool, cool.
So it's like if you want to chime in for like one third of a pumpkin spice latte. Before tips. Before tips. You can use that link. Yeah. Okay. All right.
All right, so now we have just a couple of minutes left. Yeah, so let's go through what we are working on right now. Yeah, jump straight into this exciting feature you're working on. Yeah, so I mean, this has taken what...
I want to say three weeks now, and there's still more stuff to do. But right now in the app, all the history of whatever you have listened to is local to the device. So it's not synced anywhere on our backend.
And the continue listening section is that's where you can only like see a little bit of it at the top of the home screen. The playlist says like coming soon. Actually, it has said coming soon since the launch like a year ago.
that is coming to life we're going to sing
your listening history to backend. So if you like move to a new phone or you uninstall and reinstall for whatever reason, or you move from Android to iOS or iOS to Android, all of your history and everything will.
more with you. But more importantly, you will be able to...
Mark episodes as complete. Remove episodes from continue listening. I'm like, you're listing those capabilities when we get into the value for the users, right? And there will be a listening history.
So you will be able to see all of the episodes that you've listened and go back, look at your bookmarks. Because right now it's kind of very clunky. I think it's one of the bigger, I would say most...
asked for features and most inconvenient things in the app is that you can't easily go back and look up what you've bookmarked. So no more. In 125, we will have that.
Yeah, and I think this is the one thing that people have asked over and over again is marking something as like completed.
which we don't have. I mean, the only way to complete it is to actually complete it in the audio or like you can drag it to the end and that will mark it as complete. So that is done.
While doing this, I discovered a couple of interesting bugs. We've had like duration, like sometimes the duration of the episode is not accurate. So that should be more accurate now.
Yeah, stuff like that. That should be coming hopefully next week. Yeah, one of those bugs actually is why you cannot mark an episode as complete sometimes. Yeah. Even if you finish listening to it.
Yeah, so the other thing that we will be looking at this cycle is optimizing how podcasts are refreshed. Actually, now we use a third party provider and it costs us over 300 bucks a month.
I mean, that is like 70.
Or 75% of our cost, I think, is that one provider, right? Now, yeah. Now, after the Vercel cost went down, yeah. But we realized that we could get the same capability for free for at least some of the podcasts.
Yeah, to optimize our costs so we don't have to raise prices. So we will work on this. And yeah, so...
What else, Ilia? Oh, the caching thing. I know we've done a lot of work since, I think, I want to say about February is when the LLM started, or not just LLM's bots started attacking our website. Since then, it's been...
in an uphill battle always to like keep up with them and add caching and all that and i think recently we've seen that the caching invalidation
which is like we have already cached something, but there's now a new episode or something has changed and we need to like un-cache it so that we can fetch it again from backend. That has not been working consistently.
It like works sometimes, doesn't work sometimes. So I think we need to do some work on that in Q4. Yeah. In Q4.
One of the Q4 goals. It's very corporate. Yeah, let's create an OKR for that. Yeah. Also, after we finish that creator transcript, I was looking at the backlog and I'm like, hmm, actually, now I feel like we are starting to see some opening for doing some new feature work on the web app too.
So I feel like things are getting more stable now. So because I think we talked about that, that we have a private beta of a podcaster kind of tools feature. We actually added authentication.
to the web app. So we can start implementing some of the features for users who listen to mobile so they can log in to the web, see their playlist.
I was even thinking maybe they should be able to see their bookmarks. So that if you copy the entire transcript with bookmarks marked up somehow, then paste it to LLM, then maybe it can do better summary for you.
by also counting your bookmarks. So stuff like that, right? Yeah.
Basically, we are starting to think, what can we do for authenticated users? And I think the opportunities are endless. And actually, that is a good segue to our next section.
Yeah. So we want to do the recommendations. Are we going to time it to the 30 second thing? No, let's do it relaxed, but like not...
Not abuse it. So speaking of the endless, those who listen to this podcast, they know that I've been binging on The Sandman since like last year. So I've just reread.
the whole thing. And I've understood it a lot more now, like the origins of the myths and all of that. So I found the podcast called The Endless.
the Sandman podcast where two women basically they take an issue of the Sandman the issue I mean like the comics from the late 80s and the early 90s and they discuss it so I'm kind of going the extra mile now to
really dig into what was in Neil Gaiman's hat when he wrote this. And after that, I'll probably reread the whole series again. Right.
Cool. While you have been digging into Sandman, I've been sifting through the sands of time in my head.
Since you said we are not beholden to the 30-second timer, I'm going to abuse this a little bit. But you said you had a hard stop. That's what I was betting on. I have a timer going on. We have four minutes left. Okay.
But I won't take four minutes. Anyway, so I have always been kind of like fascinated with astronomy and the universe and cosmology and all that.
I think since we started supporting private feeds, right? Like, what, a month ago, maybe? A month and a half ago?
I subscribe to a couple of Patreon-supported feeds for StarTalk and stuff like that. And when going through the back catalog of episodes, right?
Listening to and trying to understand, like I've always had a shallow understanding of like stuff like string theory or how the deep.
parts of what is in matter, like all the quarks and spin and all that, the modern way that we started thinking about physics and chemistry.
right that not the atoms and molecules and all that which is still true in the classical sense but now we know that matter is like waves or it can be waves it's all like quantum worlds underneath so i started listening
to a lot of that sort of stuff. It's been fascinating. A couple of podcasts, I would say, is one StarTalk, yeah. On Patreon, you can get the whole back catalog and ad free and all that. So that's good.
There's one more called Big Think that I have started loving. But this is, I think Big Think is more of like a YouTube.
channel so every day they would have like i don't know like every day now that i subscribe to it on metacast every day there's like six or seven new things at least sometimes 15 new episodes and they're like three minute four minute kind of shorts
mostly for YouTube, I think. But once in a while, they'll have an hour and a half of like
Let's say a noble winner from this thing, trying to explain what string theory is to lay people like me. So yeah, I've been going through that, thinking about...
You know, some really, really high-level stuff.
Okay, I'll try to condense this to like 30 seconds, okay? We live in a world where there are three spatial, like X, Y, V spatial dimensions, and there is a dimension of time, which is always flowing.
the same rate forward, right? Like we can't stop that part, the time dimension. Whereas the space ones, we're free to move around, whatever we let, unless we're in a jail.
What would happen if you were in a universe where maybe the Y and B dimensions, two spatial dimensions and time. And time.
and time those are the three things you could freely move about but not one of the space dimensions right so like really fascinating stuff so yeah big thing big thing
Okay, and on this scientific note, ciao. Okay, bye. Bye.