Listen Notes homepage.
Listen Notes is a standalone podcast search engine website. It’s not a podcast player. It’s not a mobile app.
But why a standalone podcast search engine website? It’s actually two questions:
- Why a standalone podcast search engine? Isn’t this available in any podcast player apps?
- Why a website? Why not an app?
Why standalone podcast search engine?
If you are old enough, you may remember in late 1990s there were a lot of portal websites (or web portals). Those portal websites offered 10,000 different things, e.g., news, weather, chat room, e-commerce, and of course, SEARCH ENGINE.
Excite website in 1998. Do you notice the search bar?
Then Google came out. Why the world needed yet another search engine? Isn’t it available on any portal websites?
Google website in 1998.
Then in 2018, there are a lot of podcast player apps that provide some kind of search ability. Why the world needs a standalone podcast search engine? Isn’t it available in any podcast player apps?
Apple Podcast app
There are a couple reasons why we need a standalone search engine for different verticals, either web search engine, podcast search engine, gif search engine, recipe search engine, or any vertical search engine.
Firstly, search engine is a utility tool, and it’s used frequently and it needs to be fast. It not only needs to be fast in terms of page load speed, but also needs to cause little mental burden for users. This is why a search engine on portal websites or a search feature in podcast player apps won’t feel right. The search engine is buried among 10,000 different features on portal websites or podcast player apps.
Secondly, search engine is simple, but simple doesn’t mean easy to build. How could you explain to your parents why Google, a seemingly simple website, needs to hire thousands of engineers just to work on the core search feature? By the way, why Yahoo! or Excite or Microsoft didn’t send 50 engineers to build a search engine and crash the 2-person company Google in 1998? Haha. Search engine is more than keyword matching. Search relevance is key and is super hard.
Why a website? Why not an app?
I heard that an apartment near Central Park in New York is awesome and some celebrities are buying such apartments. Why don’t you buy an apartment there?
Source: caandesign
For most people, the answer may be obvious: lack of money.
People understands that if you don’t have enough money, then you can’t buy expensive things.
I heard that a mobile app is awesome and well-funded startups are building apps. Why don’t you build an app?
For most people, the answer is not obvious: lack of resources, i.e., time, energy, money…
People have difficulty understanding that it actually takes tons of resources to build a sophisticated digital product. By building a digital product, I don’t just mean writing code. I mean having a lot of users & becoming a sustainable business.
To some degree, building a mobile app is more expensive than buying an luxury apartment in New York.
Yes, you can spend less than $50k to hire contractors to write code for you or you can spend a couple months yourself to write code. But where do you get users? How will people know the existence of your app? This is the most expensive part in building an app: marketing. Nowadays, it’s pretty common for well-funded startups to just spend money on Facebook Ads to drive app installs. It’s burning money.
Cost per app install using Facebook Ads. Source: adespresso
For a new college graduate, he/she may just rent a small apartment. As he/she grows older and earns more money, he/she may buy a house. When he/she makes more money, then he/she can buy a bigger house. People understand that it’s unrealistic for a college graduate to buy a big house upon graduation.
But people don’t understand why you can’t build an iOS app, an Android app, a website single-handedly and instantly. People don’t understand that actually you can build a website first, then when you have more resources, you can build an app later. It’s a process, a sequence.
So, why website first? Two reasons.
Firstly, most people in the world don’t know what is podcast. How can you convince people to download a new app nowadays? Why they should download a new podcast app if they don’t know what is podcast? On the other hand, a website is platform-independent and it’s easy to be discovered and shared. Let people try podcasts first. Let people get a taste of podcasts first. Be patient. Podcast is not mainstream yet. Don’t ask people to download an app. Show them the url. Simple.
Search podcasts & episodes on Listen Notes.
Secondly, for the few people who already listen to podcasts, they already have their favorite podcast player apps. How can you convince them to switch to a new app? Listen Notes takes a different approach here: be neutral and work with other podcast player apps out there. How? People search on Listen Notes, build playlists of episodes on Listen Notes, then bring the playlists to their favorite podcast apps & listen there.
Build playlists on Listen Notes and Listen on your favorite podcast apps.
Generally speaking, people just don’t want to download & install new apps.
But so and so startups are building this and that?
Yes, there are quite a few well-funded startups in the podcast space. And you can see that some of them are expanding very fast, trying a bunch of things aggressively, e.g., Netflix for Podcasts. It’s VC-driven development. They are building things to raise next round of venture capital. I know some founders of these well-funded podcast startups don’t even listen to podcasts themselves. It’s tempting to build a lot of things that look good on paper. It’s like lottery winners often buy a lot of unnecessary & expensive things at a very fast speed.
It’s interesting time. And it’s an interesting space. We’ll see.
So, Listen Notes is just a standalone podcast search engine. And Listen Notes is just a website, not a mobile app. Give it a try or share it to people who don’t listen to podcasts: https://www.listennotes.com/
