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​Podcast, YouTube, Blog​

Dear founder,

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It’s been a month since I started my latest business adventure. And today, I’ll share with you what happened in a month, how I approach talking about it, what that gets me, and where I’ll go from here.

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Let’s start with the numbers: within this first month, Podscan has attracted over 400 users, of which ten have become paying customers. Revenue-wise, this translates into roughly $300 of Monthly Recurring Revenue. There are a few hundred users who are on their 10-day trial right now, with around 50% of them actively using the platform.

Is Podscan profitable? Definitely not. Not yet, at least!

From the start, it was clear to me that trying to transcribe every podcast everywhere wasn’t going to be cheap. I’m running four cloud servers that each have a GPU attached, so I can use machine learning and AI systems to work with my data. Each of these servers costs between $200 and $400 per month, depending on the kind of graphics processor it runs. This costs me a total of $1200 just to be able to keep up with the stream of podcast episodes being released every day, and maybe throwing a few older episodes in every now and then.

And then there’s the database. I run a managed DB on Amazon Webservices, or rather their RDS offering, where I have a small cluster of a regular MySQL server and a read replica. Those cost me around $500 a month to run. The read replica is a new addition, and it makes it possible for me to offer a performant interface and API that doesn’t have to deal with all the data inflow that my main server has to handle. Add a few cloud servers for my main server, the full-text-search, and file hosting, and we’re roughly at $2000 a month in expenses.

This means I need to have at least seven times the customers I have now. Which seems absolutely doable, particularly as I have seen strong payment intent from users with the budget to go for my mid- or enterprise tier plans.

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Before we dive into who paid what, let me shout out Growth Tools' giveaway.

Bryan Harris has understood that in the digital economy, one thing is more valuable than anything else: attention.

And just like when Noah Kagan promoted Bryan's work to 100,000 subscribers ten years ago, you now have a shot of appearing on his list of 230,000 entrepreneurs.

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If there is ever an example of paying it forward, it's this.

​You can find it right here.​

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I have a fun story to share here. Two weeks ago, I decided that my $99 enterprise plan was laughably underpriced. I had just checked a few competing social listening tools and saw that they price their high tiers in the hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. So, thinking I had all the time in the world, I just 5xed my price to $499 a month. I adjusted the price inside of Paddle, and then flipped the numbers on my landing page. Minutes after that, I got an email from a user who had just signed up a few hours prior. They had been checking out the pricing page right in the middle of me updating it, and were confused why the price had just jumped. They even assumed they might have been in some sort of A/B test!

And then, they asked if they could buy at the old price.

Let me share my train of thought with you here: “Oh, but I just increased it. I want them to pay the full price! How will it look if I give them a discount?”

Which, after some reflection, was the completely wrong approach. What I did instead was embracing their willingness to pay. I extended them an 80% discount, created a coupon code for them, and they bought a few days after. Right then, I talked about it on Twitter, shared this story, and I got another email from someone who expressed interest in the enterprise plan. I created the same discount code for them, and sent it over.

These are two customers who are willing to pay $100 each a month for my product. This is the kind of selling that will get me to break-even, and I have chosen to be very liberal with sales at this point.

And you might notice that these are all perpetual sales, all subscriptions. I did toy with the idea of a lifetime plan, and I want to share why with you here today.

It turns out that Podscan’s expenses lie almost completely in the podcast ingestion. The marginal cost of checking a newly transcribed podcast for keywords or even running it through my local LLMs for semantic checking are minimal. They’re marginally zero, really. A new customer doesn’t increase my costs significantly. Costs will likely grow at 10% the rate of customer growth.

Which makes an early cash injection via a few dozen or hundred life-time deals a very interesting prospect. If I can build a monthly expense runway for half a year, I can push this into profitability, knowing that even if someone were to use the product for a decade, they’d incur manageable costs.

This is something I’m still debating. Not sure where to go from here.

But I certainly will share this journey as I go through it, and that’s another important part of this recap.

I’ve been building Podscan in public from day one, and my relentless sharing of the product development process has caused a few beneficial things.

First off, my rather influential peers have amplified my efforts. Founder friends I love and admire have given their feedback, retweeted, and praised the efforts I have put into Podscan. That peer validation has been a very motivating presence in my life. Besides that, many of them have been trying out my product and shared their honest feedback with me. Several have even purchased it, although they are the minority — which is important to me because I don’t want to operate under the illusion of having customers when it’s just well-intentioned financial support from my friends.

Beyond that, I’ve gotten extremely valuable product, design, and technical feedback on Podscan and its components. Whenever I talk about transcription, AI experts come out of the woodwork and offer an opinion. When I share screenshots, designers do the same. And the moment I talk about marketing, marketers chime in. So far, probably 80% of those comments have been kind, useful, thoughtful, and actionable. Which is just showing how great my personal audience is. And in responding only to those comments, I am setting an example for what I want to see.

Building Podscan in public has also created a sizeable idea backlog for me. Not only do I get people’s expertise, I also get to tap into their dreams and ingenuity. Dozens of DMs have arrived where people tell me how they see themselves use a future version of the tool, what they envision it being used for by their peers, and what might be possible with all the data I accumulate.

This brings me to the value of the business, the actual asset.

I realized that I am building something extremely unique here: I am transcribing podcasts that nobody ever transcribed before — or ever will. Niche pods with just a few hundred listeners get the same attention as those with millions. Small shows are just as searchable as the big ones, which is a massive treasure trove for data analysts and marketers.

And I know that Apple has announced that they’re going to generate transcripts for all the podcasts listed on their platform, but they likely won’t make them publicly available for anyone else to use but the user of Apple Music or Apple Podcasts.

What Podscan is building over time is a massive database of otherwise undiscoverable content. At this point, I have over 700.000 transcripts in my archive. Hundreds of thousands of these exist nowhere else. And while it’s not impossible to transcribe all of that yourself, it’s much easier to just use an API like Podscan to have direct access. Which is exactly why people buy the enterprise plan: to have full API access to build their own tools on top.

So who is my target customer here?

I have found two distinct segments: one are founders and businesses who themselves need access to podcast metadata and the full transcripts Podscan provides. They care about reliable access and a well-documented interface to the data. The great part here is that the ecosystem is built on open standards and doesn’t change much, or at least not very fast. New standards slowly evolve and will allow me to resiliently implement them into the system.

The second segment, and that’s the one I started out with, are marketers and agencies who need introspection into spoken content. From podcast guest booking agencies to the PR departments of larger organizations, anyone who has a vested interest in knowing every single mention of a keyword, name, or brand is a prospective customer. The more urgent that need, the better, because my real-time alerting feature is aimed at providing fast access to new mentions. I’m still zeroing in on the perfect customer profile, but I know that it’s someone who has a lot to gain from quickly reacting after an episode with their trigger keyword was released.

I have started marketing this product to podcast production agencies, and I will keep doing this for at least another month. Being able to find mentions of your clients and then placing them on those shows is a very clear value prop, and I’m in the middle of creating a landing page for that purpose.

And fortunately, a lot of these agencies have been emailing me, trying to place one of their clients on my show. So I’ll just email them back with my own offer. So far, this approach has created a few trials, let’s see where this goes.

A couple final thoughts on the first month:

• I didn’t expect the API to be such a success. Half of my paying customers pay to have that access.
• Setting up email automation from day one via ConvertKit was absolutely worth it. In every email I send, I offer to have a 15min chat via Zoom, and people have been taking me up on that a lot!
• Several partnerships and funding offers have already arrived. I’m trying to be careful with my commitments because I believe that Podscan benefits from having figured itself out before it joins forces with other businesses and people.
• Twitter is a great initial marketing platform, because it allows me to find people who know who my next customer should be.
• My internal blockage at this moment is reaching out to people outside my audience. The mix of imposter syndrome and dislike of cold outreach is something I need to work on.

But I’ll get to it. The goal for my second month is to get to $1k MRR.

So let’s do it.

And you, my dear reader, can help me with this. If you had an idea, a crushing piece of criticism, or a helpful piece of advice come to you as you listened to this, please share it with me as a Twitter DM, an email to arvid@podscan.fm or a voice message at podline.fm/arvid — I appreciate every single piece of feedback you can give.

Should I run lifetime deals? Do more cold outreach to a customer I haven’t even thought about yet? You tell me!

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I'll share a few updates about my SaaS on the pod, and I'd love to know what you think about them! Please leave a voice message at podline.fm/arvid 🥰

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And if you want to track your brand mentions on podcasts, check out podscan.fm!

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