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​Podcast, YouTube, Blog​

Dear founder,

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Sometimes, you have to pivot. And that's harder than it seems: old assumptions are deeply ingrained, new frontiers look scary.
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But right now, Podscan needs this. And today, I'll share what happened, why I'm changing direction, and where this will go.

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🎧 Listen to this on my podcast.​

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As Podscan inches closer to profitability, I've come to an interesting realization: what got me here won't get me there. Unlike my previous ventures—books, courses, and productized services—I can no longer rely solely on my personal brand and podcast appearances to generate sufficient leads. While this approach helped jumpstart the business over the past six months, it won't scale to reliably source new customers and revenue.

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This realization has forced me to confront some uncomfortable truths about my approach to building Podscan, and I want to share both my reasoning and the concrete steps I'm taking to address this challenge over the next three months.

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At its core, Podscan is a data-forward product. Our value proposition is simple yet powerful: access to reliable and comprehensive podcast data. Whether through our alerting system that tells you exactly where you were mentioned (not where you might have been), our discovery engine that helps you find the perfect podcast for your topics, or our API that delivers precise information with reliable performance—everything hinges on data fidelity.

And therein lies the challenge. While it's easy to discuss broad topics and ideas on social media, share video clips, and engage in podcast conversations, communicating the true wealth and specificity of our data is nearly impossible without showing it. You can talk about comprehensiveness all day long, but until users see the actual depth of information available, it remains abstract.

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For the longest time, I've been hesitant to make our data publicly accessible pre-signup. My rationale was simple: protecting our comprehensive data collection from being scraped, as the actual value of PodScan lies in its reliability and thoroughness. I've watched our competitors make significant portions of their public-facing data freely available while keeping the source and high-value information (guest appearances, social feeds, contact information) behind a paywall. I chose a different path, hoping customers would discover this wealth of information after signing up.

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That was a significant assumption—one I'm now revising after half a year of operating the business.

The first step in this evolution was internal: making our platform's valuable information more visible and actionable for existing users. But the real transformation is coming in how we present ourselves to the world. I'm breaking my own rule: we're going to create landing pages for hundreds of thousands of significant podcasts, complete with automated sitemaps and interconnected data points. We're talking about at least 200,000 podcasts with over 1,000 listeners or 500+ platform ratings.

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Yes, someone could scrape this data. And you know what? I've decided I don't care anymore. What they'd get would be a loosely connected snapshot of podcast data from a single point in time. What they can't replicate is our backend accumulation, data extraction, and continuous updates—the real magic that makes Podscan valuable. The interconnected nature of our data collection system, the automatic theme extraction, and the continuous monitoring—these are incredibly hard to replicate.

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This strategic shift coincided with an interesting market development: Chartable's shutdown following their Spotify acquisition. The gap they left in tracking podcast charts worldwide created an opportunity. We've rebuilt much of this functionality, collecting chart information from Spotify and Apple across all available languages and categories. This data won't just sit in our database—it's becoming a core part of our public offering.

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We're creating freely accessible charts with unique added value: main topics from recent episodes (automatically extracted), available contact information, guest speaker identification, and more. For each podcast, we'll show not just its chart positions, but where it's trending, across how many platforms, and in which locations. We can track whether a show is growing, rising, or slowing down—information that's invaluable to podcasters, agencies, and businesses alike.

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The implications go beyond marketing. This data feeds back into our platform, improving our listener size calculations, enhancing our topic tracking, and allowing us to make more accurate predictions about audience sizes across different podcast categories. By knowing who the big podcasts are and having accurate audience sizes for those shows, we can now calculate category-level insights—like comparing total listenership between news podcasts and arts podcasts, or understanding the relative size of the marketing category.

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To make this data more accessible while still protecting against wholesale copying, we're implementing careful security measures. We'll expose the information in a way that prevents the most overt scraping attempts while still providing value to genuine users. I'm particularly excited about potentially offering a public API that provides basic podcast information, serving as an entry point for users who might later need our more comprehensive paid services.

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Looking ahead to 2025, Podscan will be a fundamentally different platform. We're opening up most of our basic data to the public, creating an integrated ecosystem of information that demonstrates our value proposition through action rather than words. The SEO benefits will be significant, but more importantly, we'll be providing real value to the podcast community.

We're also expanding into content marketing, creating a blog that interlinks podcast episodes with data snippets from our platform. This content will specifically target our core audience—booking agencies and businesses needing up-to-date podcast information. To execute this effectively, I'm looking to build a team of writers and editors who can blend creative and technical writing in this specialized field. If you're such a person or know someone who fits this description, I'd love to hear from you.

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It's humbling to admit that my personal brand, while invaluable in getting Podscan off the ground, isn't enough to create a guaranteed, recurring revenue stream. But that's the beauty of building in public—you get to share these realizations and pivots as they happen. Sometimes, breaking your own rules is exactly what your business needs to grow.

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The next few months will be crucial as we implement these changes. I'll continue sharing our progress and learnings as we transform Podscan from a data-rich platform into a more accessible, visible, and valuable resource for the entire podcast ecosystem. After all, the best data in the world is only valuable if the right people can find and use it.

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If you want to track your brand mentions on podcasts, please check out podscan.fm — and tell your friends!

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Thank you for reading this week’s essay edition of The Bootstrapped Founder. Did you enjoy it? If so, please spread the word and ​share this issue on Twitter.​

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