Beacon (Trends / Alerts / Transcripts) and Travel (Apps)

The new(est) baby is ~2 weeks old. He's doing great... I'm feeling a bit foggy. I suppose little sleep and three other kids will do that to ya. ☕️

New Podcast Episode: Babies, Beacons and Travel

We talk about the new baby, some stats coming from the Beacon data, Ed's favorite travel apps/tools and talk about how "small apps" can make a huge difference for consumers and founders.

Grab it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify Podcasts or Google Podcasts -- and let me know what you think! 🙏🏼

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Know any MySQL / MariaDB experts? You guys are great.

The Beacon database is pushing past 500M rows this week and the people that responded to last week's email have been more helpful than they probably realize. Once I get things cranking on the front-end, I'll give them a shout here.

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Know any front-end developers?

While I'm sorting out the backend / database piece of things, I'm kicking around the idea of bringing someone in to help knock out some front-end features and polish.

Know anyone that loves Quasar/Vue, TailwindCSS and SSR+PWA? (Bonus points if they're interested in starting on an hourly basis while we figure out how to work together.)

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Beacon Trends

If you're on the Beacon newsletter already, you'll get these sorts of insights every Friday. For the rest of you, here's a couple of things that are trending across tens of thousands of podcasts this week:

• Simplisafe ⬆️ 107,500%
• Kevin Diaz ⬆️ 16,000%
• CISA ⬆️ 4,900%
• Botox ⬆️ 4,100%

Observation: Simplisafe seems to be doing some sort of big advertising push across podcasts this week. I'll have to dig into the data to verify. 👀

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Coming Soon: Beacon Alerts & Full Transcript Searches

If you've checked out the Beacon website, you'll notice that most of the links are broken and the search box doesn't work quite right... yet. (That front-end developer you're going to refer my way is gonna help in a big way!)

Behind the scenes though, the crawlers and transcribers are on fire. 🔥🔥🔥

If this sort of thing interests you: I'm currently transcribing ~500 episodes simultaneously at ~150X real-time speed... per server.

To put it another way, a 45 minute podcast episode gets transcribed in ~18 seconds. And that's happening in parallel to ~500 other episodes. 🤯

TLDR: I can't wait to push the transcripts to the front-end to see what y'all start to search.

The #1 feature request (mostly from sales reps & similar people that are using business credit cards to pay for stuff) is something I'm calling Beacon Alerts.

Think "Google Alerts... but for podcasts." The high level summary is that you save a couple search terms (and optional settings), Beacon sends you an alert if it detects anything across the podcasts it's transcribing.

If that's something that interests you, hit reply and send me a couple test phrases. I'd love to hear what you think!

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That’s it for now, have a great weekend.

-P