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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.
Hello, and welcome to the holiday edition of the Metacast Behind the Scenes podcast. Hey, Arnab. Hey, hey, hey, yeah. Ho, ho, ho. Ho, ho, ho. Not hey, hey. Right.
I think we just wanted to do a super quick episode today. We'll try to keep it under 15 minutes. Let's see how that goes. We always try to over deliver. But yeah.
We've both been super busy. Lots of exciting stuff to share with you. But I think we'll keep that for a longer episode. We'll try to record that mid-Jan-ish.
I will be out for a little bit for about 10 days. And Ilya, you're doing some travel too. So you'll be out for a little bit too.
So we'll record this after that. But we wanted to do a super quick holiday update and give you some wishes before we end this awesome year. So yeah, let's start with the business update. You want to do that, Ilya? Sure.
So we've hit 300 paying subscribers. It's just over 300 at this point. Yeah! Okay, I don't know how that will sound on a podcast, but we'll see, I guess.
You're becoming the meme of this podcast, starting with an emergency episode. All right. So, yeah, we've been like at 200 plus for the last, I think, three months. But then...
I think we doubled. Actually, no, I think it was 150 in the early September or so, early October. And then I think we've doubled the number of paying subscriptions in basically a quarter.
which percentage-wise sounds very impressive in absolute numbers. It's like extra 150 people actually.
Finding enough value and paying for it, it's crazy.
And I still keep wondering, like 300 people actually paying for this thing is amazing, right? And people are, we can see that usage also, they're actually using it. So that's great.
Along with that, we crossed, I think, 1,500 monthly active users. So about 1,200 free and 300 are paying.
This means we crossed $550 on our monthly revenue and I think about $6,300 or so, which translates to about that much in annual revenue. Yeah.
I want to say that we have the RevenueCat app installed on our phones. And we get a notification, or at least I get a notification every time there is a new subscription, there is a new conversion.
From trial to pay, there's a new trial. Unfortunately, sometimes people cancel. We also get those. And when we first started getting those notifications,
someday, like I'm talking about like half a year ago, maybe eight months ago, it would be like two or three days without any notification sometimes, or maybe like an occasional cancellation. Yeah, you go and check, are my notifications on for RevenueCat?
Yeah. And actually, nobody buys anything, right? You get nothing for a few days and then you get the cancellation. It's heartbreaking. And now it's almost too noisy.
Yeah, I agree, especially because we have the family
So on iOS, if you buy a Metacast subscription, if there are other people in your Apple account, like your family, everybody gets it for free. And unfortunately, RevenueCat sends an individual notification for...
each one of them it makes it clear that it's like zero dollars of family we know but now it is too noisy i think yeah i used to
Up until I want to say about two months back, I used to go through each notification one by one. Now I just look at like the grouped iOS. Oh, there's like 25 notifications. I'm like, great, dismissed. Let's look at the stats.
Yeah, so I have this pattern where I see that group, like 25 identifications, I unfurl it, and then I just scroll and look at those that have the number. And I think, like you said, the growth has, if you look at our, like...
We'll share maybe in January, we can share the growth chart. But it's been pretty smooth, same 15 to 20-ish percent we see month over month. Google SEO-wise also, it's been increasing at that similar rate. So all of these things are...
healthy. It's just that the base is still super small, right? So these 15% impressive growth month over month.
means actually very few people because the base of that 15% is very small still. But these are all good signs. It's going to keep growing, looks like. People are finding value.
That's good. Totally. I think what we've also seen after most of our subscribers started to come from SEO, I think we started to see a lot more monthly subscriptions.
And I think monthly users are a little bit more fickle because sometimes they use it for a few months and then fall off.
But also we get a lot more notifications. It's actually really fun to see somebody renewing the subscription month after month. Whereas an annual subscription, they paid once, right? But then they may fall off and we actually don't know, right?
unless you look at the data, but with these renewals, I'm always delighted to see those renewals, like small numbers, like $2 a month, but it means actually somebody finds enough value to keep contributing to.
to our success. And we also get these in Slack.
And now it's super, I think, noisy. So I don't go and click every single one. But there was a time where I was clicking super every single one and seeing like where they are from. Like we can see the country and whether it's iOS or.
Android, right? So I would check that out. What I also find super delightful is a lot of these monthly, right? Through SEO, they discover us, they continue for a few months and then they drop off.
And then after like 15 days or 20 days, they come back again. And that gives you like, yes, that's what we want. So they thought that they wouldn't like.
they canceled it and then it expired after some time and then a few weeks later they realized that oh no no that was good i need that thing now so they subscribe again so maybe they use another app and they just realize how um
It's just impossible to go to anything else after you use Metagast. Yeah. Well, I mean, we still have a long way to go in terms of what we want to do, but the basics are there.
At the end of this episode, I have a note to not forget to shit on Spotify. So we'll get to this. And that will be somewhat related to their podcast experience too. So stay tuned.
Okay. All right. So what have you done?
Yeah, so I almost forget last few weeks I've been working entirely on the backend. We'll talk about that in a second. But just before that, we discovered, I think via Reddit, somebody told us that downloads are not working.
Right? Credit or email, I don't remember.
Yeah, this was like within a couple of days of our last release, V125, where I added a lot of great stuff and I added a mistake in there that...
Essentially, the effect was that downloads were working as long as you had an internet connection. So, technically...
Downloads were working as long as you had an internet connection. When you did not have one...
That's when downloads were not working. So we did an immediate... No, I mean, technically they were still playing from the downloaded file, so they wouldn't stream the file, right? It's just they couldn't start playing from the downloaded.
Yeah, yeah. Like we couldn't fetch the downloaded data because I inserted some stuff into the process that I forgot that this wouldn't work if you don't have a network.
Anyway, so we did an emergency bug fix of that. That went out, I think, maybe the day or day after that, and that's been fixed. And since then, I've been working on, I think we talked about this a little bit in the last episode, but...
More than 50% of our infrastructure costs is from a single provider. I won't name who or why, but we've basically... spent a lot of time in building an in-house system to work around that and that is now live and we're going to cut off the third party solution like this week.
which means our costs are down about 40%. So yeah.
And you said it in a way that I think I would like to clarify. This provider is actually a very good, great service. It's just too expensive.
too expensive like when we started i think this was like a no-brainer like let's go with it uh but uh yeah it's become too expensive now that we have like 1500 active monthly users and all that so Yeah, then we also had issues on the web app.
when the whole world was hit with the CVE for React, React server components, this security issue, that, well, we, maybe because we hosted Vercel, so our...
We were not compromised. But I was reading those reports on Rendited where people discovered a sex.sh file that would mine cryptocurrency and stuff on their servers. So we had to urgently... patch that and I mean I mean us being on Vercel
Even if there was a compromise, it would have lasted maybe a few minutes or something like that, Max, because it was essentially serverless solution that we were using, right? They may be doing underneath containers or something like that, so that container would be compromised.
but only for a few minutes or so. But we patched it within a couple of days, I think. Yeah. And another point I want to make here is that we were upgrading from Next.js 15 to 16.
And it was painful as hell. And I remember I even had to punt on this update because everything just broke. But ultimately, I don't know, maybe I just had some kind of presence, vision.
that I still had to do it, so I spent another couple of days and did it, which made this upgrade pretty much seamless. You don't want to do this kind of upgrade where everything breaks when you also have an ongoing security incident.
Yeah. No, I mean, that's what I messaged you, right? Like either we do the next 15 minor bump or we do the 16 thing immediately. So I'm glad that that worked out. Yeah.
And I think at one point, every day there was a new CV and a new patch or something like that from both Vercel and React, right? Yeah. Crazy times for folks like Vercel.
Yeah.
Yesterday, I saw a hilarious Reddit thread saying, CV December 18th is on or something like that. So basically, people are having fun that there's basically a new CV every day and you have to go through your entire patching thing.
Our LinkedIn friend Victor Moreno had a very long post about basically he's been shitting on Next.js for as long as I know him.
And he was vindicated. He was like, this is why you don't build shit on Next.js, because there's so much complexity that when this kind of thing hits, you ask yourself, like,
Why do I even need to use this? This was not just Next.js, though. It was React. Right. It was the React server component. But I guess Next.js is probably the largest framework that uses it.
Back in Amazon, I remember like some CVs like this. Oh my God, the entire company, like basically every single developer would have a firefight over like two, three days patching everything. It was insane. Anyway, I'm glad.
of that is done and we are faster in reacting to it okay so what's happening next you want to talk about it sure so i'm going to first finish up like basically
Effectively, we are not using this provider that I talked about, but we have not turned it off yet. So I'm going to do that first. And then I'm going to start working on the next app release.
We have seen a few people hit the quotas that we have for private podcasts, which is, what was it, Ilya? Like 10 hours of private podcasts per... 10 hours of a private podcast per month.
Yeah. So in BigQuery, I saw like, I believe like three, four people regularly hit it monthly. And one of them or maybe two of them actually reached out saying, hey, can I buy like a higher...
tier and get more usage of this, right? Was it one person or I think two people maybe? I think it was one person and they were like, yeah, can I buy more hours? Basically, it's like, how can I pay you more to...
get more out of it. To get what I want, right? And we're like, okay, so we need to figure out how to make it possible for people to pay us more so they can get what they want.
So that's what I'll do next. We'll start the pro plan in the next release with higher limits for private podcasts. But we have a lot of, I think, exciting ideas for what goes into the pro thing, like some other...
audio apps support uploading your own custom audio and imagine like uploading your custom
audio files and getting all the things that you get with Metacast, like the transcript, chapters, bookmarks, scrolling, search, everything. But these things will probably take a little bit longer. Ilya and I have not aligned on our roadmap yet.
But, yeah. Yeah, we need to strategize to see how we can leverage the synergy here. Yeah, we haven't achieved our synergy on the roadmap.
So, yeah, we'll do our OKRs in Q1.
But imagine this thing where you can actually upload files, right? And listen to them with the transcripts and bookmarks and all. Like last summer, I needed to listen to some lectures that I had downloaded from like a very long time ago.
And I used Overcast for this. But I was like, I want to make notes. And I just couldn't. And yeah, I'm really looking forward to actually doing this.
But it will be sometime in... And I think we'll do it a little bit better than what Overcast does currently, which is all of your uploads go into like one single place. I actually, if I had this feature, I would like to organize it in a different way.
Yeah. Exactly. I would actually want to play it from Google Drive folder, if that's possible. I think we should look into that. That would be nice. Yeah. Because managing files was a pain in the ass with Overcast.
Because you had to do it through the web interface. And it's like, yeah, there are already tools that are specially built for managing files that we could connect to. Yeah, let's think about that. Keep the thought. Yeah.
Okay. All right. So anything else before we head into our recommendations? All right. You go first. All right. So...
I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I haven't listened to any podcasts, I think, at all in the last month. And maybe I've only listened to one or two episodes in the last two months. Because I've been...
I think this explains our weekly active user, the drop I have been noticing of a significant user. Yeah, yeah, because I previously would listen to like almost an episode a day, but yeah, now I've really been into the long form.
content more and so I have listened to Dune part 2 and Dune part 3 the books
And I'm now going through Dune 4, The God Emperor of Dune. And I have the intention to finish all six books that Frank Herbert himself wrote.
in the next month or so so I think until then I'm not going to be listening to podcasts because like I'm taking every free minute I have that I can listen
to listening to books. And, yeah, it's interesting because, like, I've previously listened, I mean, read and listened to books one, two, and three. And now...
For some reason, I really wanted to start from book two. So book two and book three, I kind of reread. And book four, I'm reading for the first time. First time I tried it last year, it felt like it was too out there, too boring, too...
weird. But now, I don't know, I perceive it differently. Actually, I really enjoy it. After having gone through the first 20%, the first 20% were difficult. Then I really got into it.
So, and I have this note, to not forget to shit on Spotify, right? So, because the book two, I think, it was not available in the library.
on a short notice. So I listened to it on Spotify because Spotify actually includes 15 hours of audiobooks if you have a premium subscription. And my pattern is that I switch between music and...
books like like when i work i would listen to music and then i would like switch the books and when you have two different apps that's very straightforward when you use the same app that's i found it to be
crazy inconvenient like extremely inconvenient to do that so I can only imagine that if you are listening to podcasts on Spotify
And you have to switch between podcasts and music and God forbid books as well all the time. I think it's a nightmare user scenario. And yeah, so...
If you haven't tried Metacast, download it now. Okay. On Dune, I have the same, like, I've tried, I think, thrice so far.
And the first three books are, I've started it thrice so far in the last 10, 15-ish years since I first discovered them. And every time I go through book one, two, and three.
They're still like big books, so it takes me like a good month and a half easily to go through them, right? But...
Book four is where I fall off every single time. I've not managed to go like more than 15% of book four in three tries. You know, it gets more interesting. I think for me, that point where it sort of clicked was...
So there is a dialogue where they talk about why all the armies are female. And it's like 3,000 years after the original Dune.
time and place right and then one of the kind of one of the people there explains kind of that theory that the society and armies driven by men, they're sort of more violent, more prone to
kind of degradation of different kinds, right? And that's why sort of the female aspect is more like nurturing, matures faster and all of that. I don't know if that's backed by any science. It doesn't really matter, right? But it just kind of gave me that...
perspective about the master plan that's described in the book that sort of started to click with me and I think it was like 26% in so but
Prior to that, I was like, do I really want to keep reading? But then I'm like, no, maybe I should. Yeah. OK, so what about you?
Yeah, I've been listening to my regular mix of podcasts, The Hard Fork, Formula One season ended, so a lot of that. Tennis, there's been some big news, so all of that. But today I won't talk about all that. I'll talk about this audiobook that I've...
been listening to i finished it actually yesterday uh the hundred year old man who climbed out of the window and disappeared okay so if you like um forrest gump and if you like the man called uva or a man called uva i don't know if you read have you read that no
No, who's that? Oh my God, that's a beautiful book. You have to, it's short. Maybe like four or five hours audio book.
A Man Called Uva. It's also now a big movie starring Tom Hanks, but read the book. It's delightful. Okay, so it's set in a Swedish setting and kind of like...
immigrants and established people and that sort of growing old stuff like that so this kind of is in a similar genre it starts in sweden it's also very hilarious just like those two books and
Like Forrest Gump, a lot of like world events over the last hundred years is tied to this person, although we don't know about him. So that's kind of like what's happening. Hilarious book. I loved it. I picked up the second book.
Yesterday. Highly recommend it. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Okay. So I think that was it for 2025. Is it 2025? Yes, it is. It still is. Yeah.
Yeah, so, yeah, I think we will have another episode up in January. We'll talk a lot more. Well, I mean, today we didn't keep to our 15-minute timeline by any stretch of.
time, like I tell. If you had more time, we would have recorded a shorter podcast, right? Maybe. I think...
Like I say, when we start recording podcasts, we kind of have like a black hole or supermassive object gravitationally near us, warping our sense of time and space. And also we just go into our flow.
is all good. We'll see you in 2026. Have a wonderful holiday season and a happy new year. We are thankful that you listened all the way into this. If you've been using the app, we are thankful.
Yeah. See you next year. Yeah. Happy New Year and Merry Christmas.