TL;DR

It’s been one year since we launched the Metacast podcast app in the App Store and Play Store. We’ve survived a full year and would love to celebrate the occasion.

We’re language nerds and always appreciate a good word play. Read on to learn about our first survaviversary.

Metacast Premium is on sale for $9.99/year until Monday, October 20, 2025 (50% off).

A year in production

Just over a year ago, we launched Metacast on iOS and Android.

We set out to unlock knowledge in the vast library of 100M+ podcast episodes. From the first version of Metacast, every podcast episode had a transcript, which made podcasts searchable, bookmarkable, and shareable.

In the following 12 months, we’ve improved the experience with powerful features, like chapters, summaries, podcast inbox, private RSS feeds, and a web app. We’ve also shipped a private beta of Metacast for Podcasters.

From the very beginning, we committed to making the app powerful while also keeping the user experience simple (it’s a lot harder than it sounds). “Powerful, yet dead simple” is our core tenet. Always has been. Always will be.

We wish we were writing this post from the cozy comfort of our yachts (or from a private plane, take your pick), but the truth is that we’re still in survival mode.

The reality of bootstrapping

Building a business is hard. Bootstrapping a business is harder still. Unlike VC-funded startups, we take the risk with our own money.

The current state of business

We’re at just over 1k monthly active users, of which ~200 are paying Premium subscribers. It doubled in the last few months and we hope this trend will continue and accelerate. At this point in time, hope is still a strategy, luck is still a factor.

Our monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is on the order of $400. Our infrastructure cost is about $600/month with occasional spikes when our website gets DDoS-ed by bot traffic.

Distribution is still a challenge

We believe we have a great product. We have a loyal (albeit, small) user base. But we struggle to find effective distribution.

In the last few months, our SEO efforts started to pay off — we’re getting about 20k visitors/month on our website. Some of them try the app and become paying users. We’re also getting new users through ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.

It’s still worth it

Arnab’s LinkedIn post nailed the “why” behind being a founder:

I visit this dashboard at least once a day. This is Metacast usage in real-time, across the world.

Each dot is a person somewhere in the world listening to a podcast. It’s still small. Still growing.

But these aren’t metrics. These are real people.

Someone commuting in Australia with a podcast... Someone learning something new in Ghana... Someone in Scandinavia settling into bed with a sleep podcast...

Across all the dashboards from the plethora of tools we have, this is the one that energizes me most.

This is why we do what we do.

The journey of building Metacast has taught us a lot about product development, marketing, and ourselves. We chronicled our journey on our “Behind the Scenes” podcast, where we share the raw, unfiltered story of building a bootstrapped startup.

Let’s celebrate! Shall we?

Now, you’re probably wondering about the sale part... We’ve not done a sale since we launched and we don’t plan another one any time soon.

To mark the occasion, we’re making Metacast Premium $9.99/year for the first year. You’re eligible if you’ve never had a subscription before.

If you’ve never had a Premium subscription

Grab your chance to get a good deal. Seriously, for power users, it costs us more to run Metacast than we sell it for.

Simply download the app from the App Store or Play Store and subscribe when you see the paywall or activate the subscription in the Settings screen.

If you’re already a Premium user

Please share Metacast with your friends. Let them know they can take advantage of a great podcast app with transcripts, bookmarking, chapters, summaries, playlists, and private feeds.

If you haven’t already, please rate us on the App Store or Play Store. Every review makes a difference.

Tipping is not just for the cows

If you’re feeling extra generous, you can buy us a coffee.

Onward

We want to conclude this post with a huge thank you to everyone who’s been with us from the very beginning and to everyone who joined us later.

Your support means a world to us!

P.S. Also available as a podcast

You can also listen to us talk about the Survaviversary on the Metacast: Behind the Scenes podcast episode 71. Survaviversary: We survived 1 year in production + limited time sale for new users.

Subscribe now

It’s been a while since our last update.

Between personal time off and family trips, work slowed down. Despite the hiatus, a lot has happened—both good and challenging.

Here’s where things stand.

Note: This post is a summary of our latest podcast episode. If you prefer to listen, get it here.

Growth, trials, and SEO kicking in

The good news is that Metacast has grown.

We added quite a few paying users in just a few weeks, bringing us to 160 paying customers and about 60 trials (up from 15–20). Our conversion rate dipped as traffic scaled—expected, since more casual users are checking us out—but it’s still strong by industry standards.

Monthly active users have crossed 1,100 (up from ~500 earlier this year). Revenue is now about $275 MRR—nothing close to sustainability yet, but at least covers a couple of coffees per day.

The growth is driven by SEO.

After months of investing in SEO optimizations, we’re finally seeing results: 6,000+ visitors from Google in the first week of September alone, plus some early traffic from ChatGPT.

Watching website clicks match new-user signups almost one-to-one has been validating the hypothesis that SEO is a good growth channel.

Bots, bills, and burn

With growth came costs.

Our website now handles millions of requests per day—mostly bot traffic. A surprising amount of it is sophisticated bots, especially from Brazil and Singapore, running real browsers, executing JavaScript and fooling Google Analytics.

They’re not just annoying; they caused a spike in our infrastructure cost, forcing us to re-architect caching and even start paying for Cloudflare Pro (at $25/mo, it’s totally worth it!)

We’re getting about 3M requests from bots per day, which drove our combined Vercel and Google Cloud costs to about $600 last month. That hurts.

On top of that, Google still hasn’t resolved our request to waive a $6,000 bill from July caused by an incident. They haven’t charged us for subsequent months either. It’s a temporary reprieve, but also a sword hanging over our head.

Product Updates

Even with vacations and firefighting, we shipped a few major updates:

• Private podcasts — you can now listen to Patreon, Substack and other member-only podcasts in Metacast.

• Global speed control — you can set your default playback speed (2x, 3x, 4x if you’re ambitious).

• Podcast search in the web app — you can find, listen and share your podcast on desktop in seconds.

Metacast for podcasters

One of our earliest power users wanted to download transcripts for his podcasts, so we spun up a quick MVP that gives podcasters (on a separate paid plan) access to transcripts, chapters, and summaries. It’s still bare-bones with payments via a one-off Stripe link and hardcoded allowlist, but it works.

This also lays the foundation for web app features for authenticated users, which we’re excited about.

Data privacy

This summer, we disabled Google Analytics cookies, so we don’t store any cookies, period. No dark patterns, no vendor lists of 200 companies who do god knows what to your data.

Instead, we have anonymous data for clicks on events that matter and sync them to BigQuery, where we can track things like: “Of visitors landing on podcast pages from Google, how many clicked ‘Download Metacast’?”

It’s clean, lean, and gives us the insights in a way that respects user privacy.

What’s Next

• Surviviversary Sale: To celebrate one year of surviving as a bootstrapped indie app, we’ll run a $10/year promo sometime in October. Think of it as our “we made it through the first year” sale.

• Playlists: Starting with a “Continue Listening” playlist that syncs across devices (finally!)

• Ratings Push: Our App Store and Google Play reviews are excellent (4.9 and 4.6 stars) but too few in number. Expect some gentle nudges in the app.

• Creator transcripts on mobile: Today, we only show auto-generated transcripts; next up is supporting creator-provided ones.

And of course, the ongoing background work: cutting infrastructure costs, improving caching, refining onboarding, and keeping the lights on.

Here’s to year two.

How do I try Metacast?

Metacast is available for free on Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

Subscribe now

Follow podcasts by feed URL

Support for private podcasts has been the most requested feature for Metacast.

Now, you can add any podcast by the feed URL. The feature is in beta and has some limitations in this release (more on that later).

To add a private podcast, simply to go the Search tab, tap Add podcast by RSS feed, and paste the URL of the feed.

Metacast will check if this is a valid RSS feed and you'll be able to follow the podcast right there.

After you follow a private podcast, it will behave exactly like any public podcast you follow:

• It'll show up in your Home screen with a small private badge.

• New episodes will show up in the Following playlist.

• You'll see the transcript, chapters and summaries for all episodes that you play or add to Listen Later.

Note: Private podcasts will not show up when you search for them in the Search screen. You can access your private podcasts via the grid of podcasts on Home. If you don't see your private feeds in the 30 recently updated feeds on Home, tap View all to see all podcasts you follow.

Beta limitations

In the beta, you can only follow one private feed. We'll work out all the kinks by v1.22 and will allow both free and premium users to follow more feeds.

The primary reason for the limitation for the initial launch is cost.

We spend real money every time we transcribe an episode, generate chapters, and even refresh the feed. We don't want to accidentally shoot ourselves in the foot, so we're imposing limits in v1.21. We discussed the cost limitation on our podcast in case you want to learn more.

If you try to follow more than one podcast, the app will ask you to unfollow the existing private feed first.

Note: If the feed URL you entered is a public feed available in the Apple Podcasts catalog, it will not count against your quota.

A necessary upgrade to v1.20+

In the v1.20 blog post, we said that we have to make v1.20 the minimum required version for all of our users in order to release the private feeds feature.

Because those feeds belong to individual users, we have to make some changes to the app to make sure feeds stay private and cannot be accessed by unauthorized users. When we release private feeds, v1.20 will become the minimum version and all users will be required to upgrade to v1.20 or above.

Even if you don't use private feeds, you'll have to upgrade to version 1.20+ before you can use the app again.

Other changes

• Bug fix for a UI issue reported on Reddit.

How do I try Metacast?

Metacast is available for free on Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

Subscribe now

Some podcasters are great at episode descriptions. Some aren't.

It's common that an episode has a vague description, a guest biography instead of the topics being discussed, or missing a description altogether.

In this version of Metacast, we've added AI-generated summaries. If you're a Premium subscriber, the moment you add an episode to the Listen Later playlist or play it, a summary will be generated.

You can find summaries in the player as well as episode and podcast screens. When you search the podcast, we now use episode summaries to find the episode you're looking for.

Summaries are huge when the podcaster does not provide any description for their episodes. For example, I love Notes On Work, but Caleb never adds descriptions, and I often struggle to decide whether to listen to an episode or not based on the title alone.

When we added summaries, it finally became possible to take a peek into the content without playing the episode. In the screenshot below, you can see two episodes that have automatic summaries in place of descriptions and two episodes that don't.

It's obvious that summaries are great at adding the missing context.

Podcast chapters in episode detail screen

When we introduced chapters, we initially only added them to the audio player. Our thinking was that they help users jump between segments after they already started playing the episode.

Over the last two months, we've realized that chapters also help you see what the episode is about and decide if you want to listen to it before you start playing it.

In Metacast v1.20, we added chapters to the episode detail screen. Before you start playing an episode, you can look at the chapters, decide if/what you want to listen to, and jump straight to a specific chapter.

Faster loading of podcast artwork

Earlier this month, we added some optimizations for the podcast and episode artwork images on the web app.

In v1.20, we've added the same image optimization to the mobile app. Podcast and episode covers now load a lot faster, especially on Android devices.

Get notified of app updates

When we release a new version and you've not updated the app yet, you'll now see a banner on the Home screen prompting you to upgrade. In there, you can also tap the link to see what's new.

If you don't feel like upgrading, you can dismiss the banner until the next version is available.

Other stuff in v1.20

Ratings after purchase

We struggle with getting more people to rate the app in Apple App Store and Google Play Store. So we are starting to add prompts to rate the app at various "success points" where a user has done an action that indicates they're enjoying the app.

We're well aware that those prompts may be annoying, so we're treading carefully. In this version, we've only added a ratings prompt after you've completed the purchase of Metacast Premium.

By the way, if you're reading this and have not rated the app yet, you'll help us tremendously if you go to Apple App Store or Google Play Store, give us a rating, and write a review.

Hiding deleted episodes

Sometimes podcasters delete an episode from their feed, so it should not be available in podcast apps. We've also seen cases when podcasters moved to a different podcast hosting and messed up their feed so bad that the migration created a bunch of duplicated episodes.

We're now detecting when episodes are deleted and hide them from the feed.

Internal, but important changes

Preparation for private feeds

In v1.21, we plan to add support for private RSS feeds, so you can follow your paid feeds from Patreon, Substack, and other sources.

Because those feeds belong to individual users, we have to make some changes to the app to make sure feeds stay private and cannot be accessed by unauthorized users. When we release private feeds, v1.20 will become the minimum version and all users will be required to upgrade to v1.20 or above.

If you've not upgraded yet, please do so now to avoid disruptions in the future.

Admin functionality to restart failed workflows

Sometimes, things go wrong... Like, a transcript generation may fail or chapters are generated in Spanish instead of English.

We added internal, admin-only functionality that makes it easier for us to re-run some of those workflows. It helps us spend less time doing customer service and more time building features.

Behind the scenes

Since the last blog post, we've published two "behind the scenes" episodes:

• Ep. 69: New podcast sharing experience (QR codes FTW!). In this episode, we discuss the nitty-gritty details of the new podcast sharing experience.

• Weekly Update (May 24, 2025): Podcast summaries, private feeds, in-person meetup! Our 4th weekly-ish update where we talk about what we worked on the previous week and what we're working on next. This one was recorded in person with Arnab and me standing side-by-side at Arnab's desk in Vancouver, BC.

How do I try Metacast?

Metacast is available for free on Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

Subscribe now

In this issue, we continue sharing why we chose to build the features that we built.

We’ve just shipped a new podcast sharing experience and a new identity in both mobile and web apps.

New sharing URLs

Human-readable links

A few months ago, we introduced human-readable URLs to the web app. Instead of a mumbo-jumbo of symbols, we made the URLs look like English. Speaking technically, we "slugified" the URLs. We brought the same URL format to the mobile app too.

Why is this important?

When the link is a sequence of random characters, you can't tell where it links to without opening it. When you copy a link from the app to send it to someone or paste it in your notes, you can now immediately see if it's the right link.

"Copy" now copies just the link

When you share a podcast or an episode from the app, now only the link is copied (previously, it also copied the podcast/episode title). Having used the app ourselves on a daily basis, we found that it's a better experience, especially now that the link has all the context.

Apple users are up for a special treat with this change – you can now AirDrop the link to your Mac from Metacast and it'll magically open in the browser on your computer. This is especially helpful when you want to see the full transcript on a large screen.

Note: When you copy a transcript segment, you'll still get the quote + episode title along with a deep link (it has a startAt parameter at the end). When you open deep links, the app will jump straight to that segment.

Links now open in the browser + QR code to open on mobile

In Metacast, mobile and web experiences are complementary. All transcripts from Metacast are available on our web app where it's easy to find quotes and copy large chunks (or the entirety of) transcripts.

To make the experience of going between web and mobile seamless, we've changed how links open in the app.

• All links shared from the app now open in the web browser.

• At the bottom of podcast/episode pages, there's a big "Open in Metacast" button.

• If you're on a mobile phone and Metacast is installed, the podcast/episode will open in the app. If the app is not installed, you'll be guided to install it.

• If you're on desktop, the web app will show you a QR code that you can scan to open the podcast/episode in Metacast.

If you're reading this post on a desktop, try scanning the QR code below and see the magic.

Note: It seamlessly works for the deep links that have the startAt parameter. When you tap the button and/or scan the QR code, the app will open the exact segment that was shared.

Rebrand

Motivation

A few months ago, a designer friend of mine Mark Lekhovitser reached out and offered some pro-bono help with the visual design of Metacast.

Mark produced some stunning visuals that we've long wanted to incorporate into the app, but it never felt like the right time.

Recently, we upgraded TailwindCSS and DaisyUI packages on the web app, which got us into an "upgrade hell" (listen to our podcast where we discussed this). Since we had to do a massive overhaul of the web app's UI anyway, we decided to bit the bullet and do the rebrand too.

Web app changes

• The new ((metacast)) logo with broadcast waves around the app's name.

• Flatter/simpler colors and overall look & feel.

Light theme

The web app is now available in both dark and light themes. It'll display in whatever theme your device is using and you can toggle light/dark theme in the header bar.

Mobile app changes

On the mobile app, we've taken some baby steps to reflect the new identity:

• The app now has a new logo and a new ((m)) icon.

• Minor changes here and there, like spelling ((premium)) in the brand colors.

• All other colors stayed the same.

Stay tuned

We'll put together a separate blog post about the rebrand and a podcast episode with Mark where we'll talk about the new design language of Metacast.

How do I try Metacast?

Metacast is available for free on Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

Subscribe now

This was originally published on our blog.

The story behind this update

We launched the podcast chapters feature in beta in v1.17. It was a massive improvement of the listening experience, because it allowed users to skip long intros, ads, and uninteresting parts. Users love it.

Yet, we weren't entirely happy with the feature. It wasn't fully up to our standards. It was good, but not great. So, we slapped a "beta" label on it and decided to iterate some more to make it really good.

While we were at it, we also had a spark of inspiration and improved other parts of the listening and transcript experiences in the podcast player.

Better context in podcast chapters

One of our principles is that the transcript and the audio should work seamlessly with each other (yeah, we know we still haven't solved the dynamic ads problem, but bear with us...), so we made a few small but important UX changes:

• Chapters in the transcript — the goal of chapters is to divide the content into smaller logical pieces. So, we added chapter titles right into the transcript to make it feel like a book. It's made skimming the transcript a lot easier, because chapters serve as visual cues for the topic transitions.

• Chapter markers in the audio progress bar — this is a minor but important UX detail. The notches on the progress bar provide a visual cue for where you're at. They're not a map, but rather a compass. They give you an idea of how long the current section is.

• Chapter progress in the chapters screen — when you tap on the chapter to see the list of chapters, now you can see the progress for the chapter you're currently playing. It helps you know where you are in the episode. We also removed the transcript, Info and Bookmarks buttons from the Chapters screen, so there are fewer distractions.

• Auto-generated "Opening" chapter — we noticed that some podcasters don't list the "intro" segment and start chapters from the first topic. To address that, we added an automated "opening" chapter that helps you skip the intro straight to the first topic.

Timestamps in transcript and bookmarks

Adding chapters gave us an idea for making the transcript and bookmarks easier to navigate.

• Timestamps in the transcript — when you scroll the transcript, it may feel disorienting. You don't know if you're before or ahead of the current audio position. You don't know how far off you are. So we added little timestamp markers to provide visual cues that help you never get lost in the transcript.

• Chapters and timestamps in Bookmarks — we've introduced the same idea to the bookmarks screen. Now, bookmarks also have timestamps and chapter titles, so you have contextual cues as to where the bookmark is.

• Currently playing segment is now bolded — when the bookmarked segment is playing, it'll be bolded, just like active segments are bolded in the transcript tab. It's a small detail that makes the overall UX more consistent.

In case you've not tried bookmarks yet, try swiping a transcript segment left-to-right to save a bookmark. You can later access the bookmark in the Bookmarks tab in the player. Soon, we'll also add listening history where you'll be able to access all of your bookmarks.

Bookmark and search markers

While we were making bookmarks more contextual, we realized that other parts of the user experience can benefit from the same approach.

• Bookmark markers on the progress bar — even though Metacast has a Bookmarks view, bookmarks are best viewed in the context of the larger transcript. So we added bookmarks to the progress bar. You can see them as an orange heatmap when you're in the transcript or Bookmarks views.

• Search result markers — the search screen was a bit disorienting. When you started searching, it was impossible to tell where exactly you are in the episode. Now you can see all of the search results as a heatmap and the current result as a large red-ish dot. You can tap on the progress bar to jump between search results.
  Note: It will not move your player position and you won't lose your progress. To play a specific segment in search, double tap it and it'll start playing.

• Current player position in search — you can now see where the current player position is. It provides a visual cue for whether the search result is before or after the playhead.

New intro episode

Starting from the earliest beta days, Metacast had an audio tour of the app. Our users come to Metacast for audio, so we thought it'd be a great idea to use the medium they love, combined with the visual cues in the app, to introduce them to the core features.

Our first intro episode was 6 minutes long. We stuffed it with everything we could think of. It was a documentation site in an audio format. Now, it's just under 2 minutes long. It's short and sweet.

We had not recorded an intro episode since July 2024! The intro got wildly out of touch with the app's UI. New users got confused and sent us messages like "I can't find the triple dot you're talking about."

Why?

We love to freestyle and used to dread reading off a script. So, we summoned all our courage and recorded a new one. It only took us 5 minutes to do the recording in pretty much a single take. And... we actually had fun this time!

We hope you enjoyed this unabridged production

This post is the first installment of the "how we built it and why" series. It helps us reflect on our own decisions and also be transparent with our users.

We hope you liked it.

How do I try Metacast?

Metacast is available for free on Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

Subscribe now

In Q1 2025, the growth of our podcast app Metacast was steady, but not crazy.

As of this post's publication, our MRR is $134/mo with 500+ active users and 87 Premium subscriptions. In total, we've made $1,328 since we enabled monetization.

At any moment in time, we have ~20 active trials with about 50% converting to paid subscribers. Our biggest challenge right now is distribution — growing the top of the funnel to get more users to download and try the app.

We've written a separate post about distribution challenges. If you can help us figure it out, please reach out.

Focus areas in Q1

Our focus areas for Q1 2025 were:

• Improve the mobile app to make it more attractive for an average listener who wants a really good podcast player.

• "Secret sauce" features to add unique value and differentiate Metacast from the incumbents.

• Improve the web app to attract more users at the top of the funnel.

• Expand our reach with SEO and marketing.

We also had distractions that slowed our down:

• After Jennie's departure we had to regroup and work differently.

• Our costs started to grow faster than they should've, so we had to put some effort into optimizing them.

• Taxes are never fun, but we had to do what we had to do.

Focus 1: Improving the mobile app

We want to offer the most powerful yet simple and intuitive podcast app out there. The really good podcast app.

In other words, migrating to Metacast should be a no-brainer if you're already paying for another independent podcast app. We've been listening to our users and have prioritized features that both bring us close to the competition and make us stand out.

Chapters

You can now see a table of contents, quickly skip long intros and ads, and jump to interesting sections with the new chapters feature. We do chapters better than any other podcast app we tried. Our users noticed and really love the feature.

The new chapters feature is dope. I don’t listen to that much long podcasts, but I do listen to All-In regularly. I used to listen to the full episode, but been listening less and less. The chapters thing helps out quite a bit to jump to the bits that I find interesting.
– Guang Yang, co-host of Software Misadventures podcast

Learn more about chapters in our blog post.

P.S. We're polishing up the UI and will ship exciting new improvements in v1.18 (mid-April 2025). Stay tuned!

Podcast Inbox

You can now triage new episodes for your podcast in batches with the Podcast Inbox a.k.a. the "Following" playlist.

New episodes from all podcasts you follow are added to the Following playlist automatically. You can skim through the list at your own pace, add the episodes you're interested in to Listen Later, and clear the playlist with a tap of a button when you're done.

Don't worry about being overwhelmed by an ever-growing inbox. Episodes are stored in the Following playlist only for two weeks, so it never becomes too large.

Learn more about triaging podcast episodes in our blog post.

Minor things

• Run Metacast on a Mac. We've enabled the app to run on a Mac (install via the MacOS App Store) and seamlessly work via the iPhone Mirroring tool.

• Updated colors. The app now has deeper, darker colors.

Focus 2: Improving the web app

We've invested a lot of effort into improving our web app.

Transcripts for 100k+ episodes

The web app now shows transcripts for any episode that has either a creator-provided transcript (via RSS feed) or an AI-generated transcript. Transcripts on the web are really helpful if you want to search for specific keywords, share a quote, or analyze the text with an LLM.

When creators provide speaker names and their pictures, our web app will show them as well. See this episode from The Panel podcast for an example.

For creators: We support transcripts in all main formats — JSON, WebVTT, SRT, and even HTML and plain text. We can't wait to also support these transcripts in the mobile app. This is coming soon-ish.

AI-generated summaries

You can now see AI-generated summaries for some episodes. This is useful when the episode description is too long, too generic, or missing altogether. This feature is coming to the mobile app soon too!

New share images

We've upgraded the design of the share images. When you share a link from Metacast on social media or in chat, the images look slick with the blurry backdrop around the artwork.

Try it yourself by sharing a link on social media or in a messaging app.

Minor things

• Audio player. You can now play episodes directly in the web app.

• Light theme. If being blinded by a white background is your kind of thing, we got you covered! (just kidding) The default theme is still dark, but you can toggle it to light at the top of the web site.

• Change Log. We've added the change log for the mobile app on the website. You can see what we shipped and when here.

Focus 3: Expanding the reach

In the annual retrospective blog post, I wrote that that I dropped the ball on a lot of the marketing activities. In Q1, we've been digging ourselves out and restarting our marketing.

SEO

In Q1, we've doubled down on the content on our website to get more reach via organic SEO.

• We've added tons of search engine optimizations. Our impressions and clicks grew 12x in three months.

• We've re-done our content publishing stack. We used to publish blogs with Outstatic, but it was incompatible with my style of writing content (I want to author locally on a branch whereas Outstatic pushed directly to main). So, I didn't write much. We built a custom pipeline and started publishing more posts thanks to the removed friction — 7 blog posts in Q1 vs. 5 posts in the entire last year!

Podcasts

We re-started our Builders Gonna Build podcast with an interview with Honeybadger co-founders Ben Curtis and Joshua Wood. It feels nice to be back!

We'd not recorded anything for almost a year, partially because we didn't see it move the needle much. This time, we're approaching it differently.

• Pragmatic approach to guests. We decided to only invite people who have an audience of their own or, on the contrary, are not very public but sought after, so we can get people interested in the content. If you know someone who might be a good fit (or you're that person!), please reach out to us.

• Derivative moments. We use interviews to produce short-but-not-too-short derivative content, which we call "moments." We stole the idea from The Diary of a CEO podcast. We've published a couple of moments in our podcast feed and on YouTube. It's yet to be seen if it'll help the reach, but it's an experiment worth trying.

• Quality over quantity. We will record as we sign up good guests. We will not stick to a specific schedule.

P.S. Check out the new episode: Bootstrapping a SaaS for 13 years.

P.P.S We'll continue to regularly publish our Metacast: Behind the scenes podcast too!

Newsletter

Since we're now writing a lot more content on our blog, might as well send it out via a newsletter. Sign up to our Substack at metacastpodcast.com if you haven't already.

Guesting on podcasts

Our target customers listen to podcasts (obviously!), so we are trying to get onto other people's podcasts.

• Arnab guested on John Cricket's Coding Chats where he talked about career growth, mentoring, and the despair of senior roles. The full interview is here.

• Both of us guested on DeepCast.fm's upcoming podcast. It's not released yet.

• I was a guest on Bytes in Balance where we talked about gaming and social media addictions. The full episode is here.

If you have a tech, product management, or podcasting-related podcast, reach out to us at hello@metacastpodcast.com. We'll be happy to be guests on your show if we can add value to your listeners.

Distractions and setbacks

Jennie leaving the company

We used to be three people, now we're down to just Arnab and me.

We adjusted to the reduced capacity by siloing and reducing the code review overhead. Here's how it panned out:

• Mobile app has a single owner. Arnab is the only one doing the Flutter development right now. He pushes code without review. We collaborate on the UX, both asynchronously and in real time.

• Web app has a single owner. You guessed it. I push code without review.

• Backend is a 50/50 split. Our backend is subservient to the apps, so whenever we need a change, the person who needs it more does it. We are more diligent about backend changes, because there's room to screw up a lot of data. I usually don't push code without a review unless it's a super simple change.

Overall, this has worked well.

Spiking costs

We got a couple of thousand dollars worth of Google Cloud credits with their startups program, so we weren't paying much attention to the costs. Our bill had always been $0.

However, at some point, we noticed that the credits may run out if we do nothing, so we starting digging.

It turned out, some of our workflows weren't optimal and we were generating a lot of writes to Firestore, which in turn triggered a lot of writes to BigQuery. We use BigQuery for analytics and each query against a bigger table would cost us a dollar, because the query had to scan hundreds of gigabytes of data.

Also, our logging was too noisy and it was getting expensive. And we had too many unnecessary function invocations.

We did some targeted re-architecture to optimize the backend, then we had to rebuild the BigQuery schema, backfill the data, etc. It took a lot of effort (2-3 weeks total) that we could've otherwise spent building features.

This drastically reduced our costs, and it was a great lesson learned. We may do a writeup about it in a separate blog post.

LLM bots invasion

In February, we noticed something strange — our web app costs on Vercel were going out of control. It turned out that we were hit by tens of thousands of requests by LLM bots from Anthropic and Amazon.

It was another distraction from feature development, because we had to do some changes to the web app that we described in a detailed blog post — LLM bots + Next.js image optimization = recipe for bankruptcy (post-mortem).

It's a cautionary tale for startups running in the cloud. Always set spend limits if you don't want to go broke!

We learned a ton while dealing with bots. The story keeps developing and distracting us. The pace of crawling has accelerated — as of April 2025, we have ~300k requests daily!

It's mostly bot traffic.

We are choosing to not block the bots in hopes that we may benefit from mentions and linking from AI agents.

However, our costs are growing again. In April, we'll need to invest more time to implement better caching with Cloudflare. We'll write this up in a separate blog post.

Taxes

This year we decided to do corporate taxes ourselves. The whole thing took a couple of days, but the mental overhead of procrastinating felt like it took the entire quarter.

We wrote a blog post about the process of filing Form-1120 for a C-Corp, FL-1120, Delaware Franchise Tax, and Florida annual report.

Focus for Q2

We've not yet figured out if/how we should share our roadmap publicly, so here are our directional goals for Q2.

Product & engineering goals

• Complete "table stakes" features. We need to close the gap with the competitors on the basic functionality. We'll add support for private podcasts and custom playlists.

• Differentiating capabilities. This is our secret sauce, so we won't disclose more than necessary ahead of time. Exciting stuff is coming!

• Web app. We'll keep improving the web app, so it becomes a viable companion to the mobile apps. We also need to implement more aggressive caching to keep costs under control.

Growth goals

• Figure out how to get users to invite their friends. We need to grow our user base with people similar to those already paying for the app.

• Top of the funnel optimization. As we start getting more and more traffic onto our website, we need to make sure we actually capture new users from it.

• In-app onboarding. I'll just say that we can do a better job to increase the conversion rate.

• Figure out App Store "SEO". We're too low for the "podcast app" search in App Store. This needs to change.

• Grow ratings and reviews. We need to add a trigger in the app and find other ways to encourage users to rate the app.

How can you help?

• Download Metacast for free on Apple App Store or Google Play Store.

• Please give us a rating in the App Store or Play Store. It helps a ton!

• Recommend Metacast to people you know.

• Support us by buying the Premium subscription ☺️

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This newsletter is very personal.

We're sharing our struggles with distribution and asking for help to figure it out.

Two years of Metacast

We're almost 2 years into our Metacast journey (read about the origins here).

Our growth is steady, but it's not fast. There's no hockey stick, no up and to the right chart to brag about. There are no huge step-function jumps in revenue or new user signups.

All of us have read stories where founders talk about despair. Then follows the hero's arc, overcoming the obstacle, rebirth, etc.

There's survival bias in those stories. They tell the story by working backwards from the success they've achieved. There's already a known happy ending. It's easier to tell those stories from the happy place.

When you live thorough moments of despair as a founder, there's no hindsight. You don't know how it'll end up. The future is uncertain. The only thing you know for sure is that you must do something differently.

You don't know what that something is though.

And that is the journey.

Building the product is just the first step

We wanted to launch in a few months. But in a crowded market, user expectations are high. We weren't prepared for some of those.

It has taken a long time to build the "table stakes" functionality that users expect from a podcast app. There are just a couple of things remaining that will put us on par with the other independent podcast apps, like Overcast and Pocket Casts.

We're starting to see traction and regularly receive emails like this.

I think that you all have a great app, and I'm excited to see where it goes!
– MK, a paying user

Friends send us unsolicited DMs on WhatsApp.

The new chapters feature is dope dude.
– Guang Yang, co-host of Software Misadventures podcast

We've got an amazing product on our hands. Users love it and pay for it.

If only more people discovered it!

How big of a distribution do we need?

The answer can be backed out from the revenue expectation with a very simple formula. Ben Curtis put it succinctly on the Builders Gonna Build podcast.

We wanted to make $40k a month. That was our first target. Each of the three founders would be able to make $10k a month, and we wanted the 25% to be for infrastructure.
– Ben Curtis, co-founder of Honeybadger

The math resonated with us.

If we apply the same formula, with our pricing of $2/month and a 15% cut by Apple and Google, we need ~15k paying users to make $25k/month. Each founder would get $10k and $5k would be used for infrastructure and other expenses.

In other words, we need 100x more users for Metacast to become a sustainable bootstrapped business.

Fake math of market sizing

When we first got started, we looked at the overall market size. Hundreds of millions of podcast listeners, market shares of independent apps, etc. We fell into a trap of thinking that "if only we could take 0.1% of the market, we'd be fine."

Capturing a small percentage of a big market seems easy, but it is not. You still need to somehow reach thousands if not millions of customers to grab a tiny slice of the huge market pie.

The small percentage is an excuse founders use to convince themselves that their business is viable, quit their jobs, and raise an angel round.

It's an excuse to not think about distribution early on. Because if you start thinking about distribution, you'll see just how big of a challenge it is. You may get discouraged. It's mentally easier to punt it until later.

Grabbing a small share of a big market is only easy if you already have distribution. If you're Amazon, you can release a crappy product and still have some market share almost immediately. If you're a no-name without huge following on social media and/or a budget for ads, you have to figure out how to efficiently acquire and retain customers.

We've not yet figured it out

We've tried a few things to reach potential users.

• Social media — I've been able to grow my following on LinkedIn to ~14k. We've gotten some users from it and it seems like a viable channel for the future that we keep investing in. We've also tried Bluesky and X, but have not found much success on those platforms.

• Reddit — Guerilla marketing on Reddit seems to be working for us. We comment on posts, people discover our subreddit, and become customers.

• SEO — Traffic from Google is the holy grail of organic reach. We've started to have some success and will keep optimizing it further.

• Podcasting — Our podcasts have not been compelling enough to attract a large audience. We had success with some episodes like the Jason Fried interview, but still the reach is in the thousands. We also tried posting clips on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. There were some hits. But on a whole, our podcasts failed to generate distribution for the app.

• Newsletter — We've got 500+ subscribers, but I've dropped the ball on it a few times. It's probably our most underutilized channel right now.

How can you help?

While we were in the pre-launch phase, a few UX designers offered their help pro-bono. They just wanted to see us succeed and to contribute to a project they found interesting.

That was surprising and nice. The universe gave us just what we needed at the right time.

Now, we can really use some help on the marketing front.

• Positioning — We're struggling to come up with a single-sentence slogan that would resonate with listeners of information-dense podcasts. We want a "yeah, I get it" reaction in split-second, followed by an irresistible desire to try the app.

• Marketing strategy — There are probably tons of things we're doing wrong on the podcast, newsletter, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc. We want to up our game in marketing.

• Apple/Google store listing optimization — We're way down in search results for "podcast app" in App Store and Play Store. We want to be at least in the top 10, so users discover us organically.

• SEO strategy — We see a huge potential in SEO and have done a lot of work to optimize our site. We really want to get it right.

• Social media strategy — I've had 11k profile views on LinkedIn in the last 3 months. Yet, we got just a handful of users from those. I'm sure we can do better than that.

• Reddit strategy — We'd love to do more on Reddit while walking the fine line of self-promotion that can get us banned.

• LLM agents strategy — We'd love to be referenced in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc. This is a new area and we want to optimize our site to play in that game early on.

We accept help in any format.

Chat with us over Google Meet or just send us an email with your thoughts. It can be a one-off conversation or a recurring meeting. Or it can be just a message with a few relevant links.

We're humble and open to any inputs. Any help will go a long way ❤️

Reach out to us at team@metacast.app

P.S.

This post was supposed to be a Q1 2025 in review, but it got derailed into the dire straights of distribution. The quarterly review is coming soon.

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The year was both exciting and challenging, both on business and personal fronts. We got to experience the rose, the gold, and the shades of gray of bootstrapping a new venture.

This large post is an unfiltered reflection on the year (also available as a podcast).

Where we started

The team

At the start of the year, there were three of us. We all came from the AWS Chatbot team where Arnab and Jennie were software engineers and I was a product manager. In 2022-2023, all of us left our cushy big tech jobs to try something new and exciting - building a product we wished had existed.

It's important to note that we set out to build a calm company, a company where people can do their job during flexible business hours and live a full life outside of work.

The product

At the start of the year, our podcast app Metacast was in closed beta. We launched the beta in August 2023, just a few months after starting the business. A dozen people were using the app and giving us feedback

The app was lacking a lot of features. We were rushing to make it "feature-complete" to launch it publicly.

The business

At the start of the year, Metacast Inc, a Delaware C-corp, was not making any money. We were not paying ourselves. Our infrastructure and tooling costs were ~$50/month.

The rose & the gold – what went well

Open beta launch

The year started with a full-on crisis.

We wanted to be ahead of the big podcast apps in providing listeners with access to transcripts of any podcast ever published...

On January 26, 2024 at 6:40am ET, Apple announced that they were adding transcripts to Apple Podcasts.

We panicked for a few hours, then decided it was time to launch the open beta, which we shipped on both iOS and Android in early February (we covered the full story of the crisis in all its emotion in our newsletter).

This is how the app looked like a year ago. We've shipped a lot of new features since then, but the core parts of the app have not changed. We believe we did them mostly right the first time!

Launching the app publicly allowed us to get more feedback, both good and constructive, mostly through our subreddit r/metacastapp and emails. Many of our friends and ex-colleagues tried the app and shared their feedback.

We spent a few more months adding features, fixing bugs, and learning more about our user base.

The first all-team offsite

In April, we we had a full-team offsite in my home in Florida.

We didn't have money to book a proper "offsite," but Jennie was going to travel to Florida from Costa Rica for personal business, so we grabbed the opportunity to hold an in-person event. Our only cost was Arnab's ticket from Vancouver to Miami.

The three of us worked together on a 75" TV screen in my living room, enjoyed my signature rendition of the Thai pineapple fried rice, and had some drinks in the evening.

Together, we solved the issue that seemed unsolvable, a nasty problem with overheating Android phones. We had discussions about the future direction of the app and the state of the business.

Arnab stayed a little longer and got to know my family, ride bikes with my son, and see the John D. MacArthur state park, arguably the best beach in South Florida.

It was truly a fantastic time that we'll forever cherish as something special.

The public launch

After the open beta, we focused all of our energy on launching Metacast to app stores.

We had an iOS problem we couldn't solve, so we decided to launch on Google Play first, then swarm on the iOS issue and launch on the App Store later.

Metacast for Android launched in July. The iOS version launched in September. The first public version of Metacast had transcripts, bookmarking, playlists, and search.

The launch was fairly smooth except a few rejections by Apple and a few violation notices from Google. We documented our entire launch journey in the case study How we launched Metacast mobile app on App Store and Play Store.

Reception by users

After the launch we got some really amazing testimonials from users.

The transcription feature is like having a personal assistant who never misses a word. Now I can find that elusive quote or subject without scrolling endlessly.

Metacast is the only app that allows me to visually bookmark what I just heard on a podcast.

The aesthetic is clean/simple/straightforward, and I prefer the dark theme by default. The logo is also cool, for what it’s worth.

Reddit being Reddit, we got some disgruntled hate on there. We offered the hater to schedule a chat with us and never heard from them again. It's easy to hate anonymously for no reason other than "haters gonna hate."

Having been in product development for many years, we choose to double-down on the things that people love, take in the constructive feedback (with a grain of salt, of course!), and ignore the haters that can't be converted into passionate supporters.

The first money

The public launch allowed us to finally start charging for the app. After over a year of working on the app and pouring our hearts, souls and money into it, we could finally see if anyone was going to pay for it.

We started Metacast Premium at a price point of $4.99/mo or $49.99/year (US Dollars), but quickly walked back on that price. We heard from people it's too expensive, it didn't compare favorably to other indie apps, and even we felt like it's too high. So, we dropped it to $1.99/mo or $19.99/year (pricing case study).

We also ran a few promotions. When we first launched and during Thanksgiving, users could subscribe to Premium for only $9.99/year.

In November, we hit a milestone of $500 in total revenue.

We ended the year with ~60 paying customers bringing in just over $80 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

This money doesn't yet cover the infrastructure and tooling costs. We spend about $200 per month on third party software, including Google, Vercel, GitHub, Descript, Riverside, etc. But it's good to be able to offset at least some costs.

The growth has accelerated in January 2025, but that's a topic for another post!

Bonus: Indie hacker friend saved the day!

In November, we had an outage, which resulted in an unexpected win for both ourselves and a friend of ours.

Our podcast transcription jobs running on a reputable AI infrastructure startup started failing for no apparent reason. There were no errors, no nothing. We opened a ticket but didn’t hear back.

That would’ve been frustrating to say the least if not for the serendipity that followed.

A few days before the outage, an indie hacker friend of mine emailed us about his experiments with a transcription API that was faster, cheaper, and higher quality than what we were using. We started experimenting and made the switch pretty much overnight.

What started as an outage turned into a win for us, our users, and our friend. Migrating off the big service to a small indie-powered API resulted in a 5x improvement in transcript generation speed. We can now do more for our users at less cost.

The lesson? When life gives you lemons, make margaritas!

The shades of gray

We could've portrayed just how awesome it is to bootstrap a startup by publishing anonymized revenue charts, user testimonials (of which we have plenty!), and happy pictures of founders coding away on a beach while sipping cocktails.

"It's not all rose and gold. Even Apple knows that."
Arnab Deka, co-founder of Metacast

Despite all the good things and the excitement, building a company does not equal just building and marketing a product. There's a whole baggage of deep blues and dark grays that comes with it.

Let's start with the saddest part of 2024 that hit right at the end of the year.

We're down to 2 people

Jennie joined us at the end of 2023 as a software engineer, taking no salary and working for equity. She could afford that for a while after moving from the US to Costa Rica and dramatically reducing her expenses (we covered this on our podcast with Jennie).

However, life is not static, and due to personal reasons, Jennie had to move back to the US and take a full-time job that could pay a salary. She left Metacast at the end of the year.

We'll miss Jennie as the most pragmatic, no-nonsense part of the team and wish we can work together again sometime in the future ❤️

What does this mean for Metacast?

Losing a senior engineer was obviously a big hit to our productivity, so we made some changes to how we operate:

1. We've become more pragmatic. We'll do fewer or even no code reviews. We'll optimize costs less. Shipped is better than perfect.

2. I'm back to full-time coding. This is the discovery of the year for me personally. I'm really enjoying it after all those years of being a manager.

3. We've specialized. Arnab and I now have a clean split of coding responsibilities. Arnab's time is 100% in the mobile app. I'm dedicated to the web app.

We're optimizing for shipping value to users faster. It might mean we miss an occasional bug, but at our scale we can still afford that.

Reaching a sustainable revenue stream is more important than a risk of occasional embarrassment.

Not making money is a huge distraction

We've not talked about it much on our podcast, but living off savings is not fun. All of us had to make some significant adjustments to our lifestyle until we make it work. It's a lot of sacrifice.

About a year ago, my wife and I had a discussion about money. The options were few – move to a place with a cheaper cost of living or go back to corporate. We chose to sell everything, downgrade our lifestyle, and move, so we could extend the runway for Metacast. Looking back at the last summer, it was the hardest year of my life.

Arnab and his family too had many discussions about the opportunity cost of not earning money while we work on a startup. His family had to accept the lifestyle change, become more frugal, and learn good financial habits.

Such changes are not only time-consuming and expensive. They make you second-guess your path and wake up with panic attacks. The emotional toll on a founder is real.

But in the end, there won't be any regrets for not trying. I'd rather be a broke person who followed his own path than betray my dreams to stay safe within the well-trodden path.

I want to conclude this chapter by thanking our spouses and kids for embracing the unknown and supporting their husbands and dads on the entrepreneurial path. Not surprisingly, kids are very flexible and have been able to adapt to the changes very well.

Dropping the ball on the newsletter and podcasts

In 2024, I dropped the ball on the newsletter and the podcasts.

In the previous year, we published the podcast weekly. The newsletter was coming out every other week. Never missed a bit. We interviewed some amazing people like Jason Fried, Dave Thomas and Dennis E. Taylor. We mused about bootstrapping.

We were raw and honest. We were genuinely having fun.

Then, mostly because of my life situation, we stopped interviewing people. We started slipping the "behind the scenes" schedule. I made attempts to recover my content production habit, but to no avail.

Unexpectedly, I was saved by getting back into coding. Starting in November, I spent most of my time in coffee shops working on our web app. It gave me the grounding that I was missing in life.

It also gave me the inner calm to continue with the content. This long post is hopefully a testament to this.

Parting thoughts

At the start of 2024, we were like children – happy and excited. With nothing to look forward to but more life, viral growth, and financial independence.

Then, we got a taste of reality. Building a product at "podcast scale" takes time. Building the user base takes time. The life needs to be taken care of.

2025 is the year for us. We're determined to make our Metacast dream happen.

The signs are good.

1. We're seeing a good trend in user growth and engagement. Since we launched, 1.3k users played 18.5k episodes from 1.3k podcasts. More than 500 people try Metacast every month.

2. The Premium sign-ups trend is encouraging. Users sign up for premium almost daily. Sometimes, multiple times per day. We've earned almost $1,000 since we launched in app stores.

3. We're mostly done with the core capabilities of the app – transcripts, playlists, and search – and users use them as we intended! We're going to ship some exciting new features in the coming months (private podcasts, custom playlists and some AI stuff), making the app even more valuable to both premium subscribers and free users.

4. People are enjoying the simplicity of the app. This is no accident, we prioritize simplicity in the world where all software eventually becomes bloatware.

5. We're investing in SEO and are already seeing some results both on our own and on Reddit. We'll talk more about this on our "behind the scenes" podcast.

The business is growing at a bicycle pace. We need to turn it into a car drive pace. Then, into a plane ride and hopefully into a rocket ship eventually.

Here comes the grind.

Stay in touch

• Follow Metacast: Behind the scenes podcast

• Download Metacast, a podcast app with transcripts on Apple App Store or Google Play Store

  Subscribe now

There’s something special about it. Even though there are tons of memes (and even movies!) about the fights over Thanksgiving dinners, I’m pretty sure it’s not true for most American families.

People get together from all over the country to share a meal over a conversation. And I’d like to believe most of them really enjoy it.

As things go in corporate America, this great family holiday was also turned into a celebration of consumerism. Amazing deals, deep discounts, violent fights over TVs at Best Buy.

The “Macy’s Day Parade” song by Green Day captures the spirit of consumerism like no other:

Today's the Macy's Day parade
The night of the living dead is on its way
With a credit report for duty call
It's a lifetime guarantee
Stuffed in a coffin, ten percent more free
Red-light special at the mausoleum

Give me something that I need
Satisfaction guaranteed to you
What's the consolation prize?
Economy sized dreams of hope

Now, Black Friday is such a big part of the culture that I wonder how retailers are able to sell anything throughout the year. People simply wait for the the next Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Prime Day, Labor Day, Christmas, you name it.

After 11 years in the US, I learned one thing — never pay the full price for anything except Apple’s devices. Though, you can get those at a cheaper price too if you have friends at Apple or know someone who qualifies for an educational discount.

This Black Friday, Arnab (our CTO) and I hesitated — should we do a sale for Metacast Premium? What if people never buy the subscription at the full price?

The discussion was short. The decision was simple.

At our scale of under 50 paid subscribers, any paid subscriber, at any price point is a win.

So here we are — Metacast Premium is on sale for first-time users for $10/year (50% off) until end of day Monday, December 2. Simply download the app on the App Store or Google Play and get the subscription in the Settings screen.

The discount will apply to the first year of Premium on iOS and first two years on Android.

Happy Thanksgiving you all (if you celebrate). Please enjoy the time with your families!

xoxo
Ilya & the Metacast team

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• We’ve made our first $500, here’s to the next $500!

• New features in Metacast v1.12

• New podcast episode

💰 We made our first $500!

When we first got started, we had our doubts about the viability of Metacast as a business. Then, when you build on something for a year and don’t see any monetary results (because you can’t charge users in beta), more doubt starts to creep in.

In October, we hit $500 in cumulative revenue.

It may not feel like a lot when you're used to getting thousands of dollars in your bank account from an employer.

But it means a world to a new founder.

• It's a sign of validation from early users. Thank you all who trusted us with your time and wallets!

• We can now pay our infrastructure bills from revenue.

• We're more motivated than ever.

Now, the grind has just begun....

On to the next milestone - $1,000!

If you've not installed Metacast yet, get it on the Apple App Store or Google Play.

If you enjoy the app, please spend a minute and give us a review on the app stores.

📱 New features in Metacast

Sleep timer

When we built the first version of our podcast app, we decided not to add a sleep timer.

Who needs a sleep timer anyway? It seemed like an obscure use case to fall asleep while listening to a podcast. Right?

It turned out that people do fall asleep while listening to Rogan, but there was one more, totally unexpected use case that was outside of our mental model.

In the recent years, there has been a proliferation of podcasts that play white noise, sounds of nature, and boring stories that help people fall asleep.

Instead of paying for a white noise app or getting interrupted by ads on YouTube, someone uploaded white noise audio files to podcast hosting and let people use any podcast app as a white noise app.

For people who listen to white noise to get asleep, the sleep timer is literally the sleep timer.

After getting enough requests, we've added a sleep timer to Metacast.

Coming up!

We’re working on some exciting improvements to the app like timestamps that you can click and an inbox for episodes from podcasts that you follow.

Stay tuned!

Get Metacast on the Apple App Store or Google Play.

🎙️ New podcast episode

On the latest episode (#64), Arnab and I discuss our recent chat with a VC-backed founder who is on the verge of closing shop. The conversation made us reflect on our bootstrapping journey and the pros and cons of taking outside money vs. bootstrapping.

Follow Metacast: Behind the Scenes on whichever Metacast version you use to listen to podcasts 🙄 or any other podcast app and YouTube. Links are here.

🌯 That’s a wrap

If you’ve not downloaded Metacast yet, get it on Apple App Store or Google Play. Please give us a review, it means a ton and helps our distribution.

For only $19.99/year or $1.99/month, you get access to transcripts for any podcast ever published that you can read, bookmark, search, and share as well as unlimited playlists and many more new features coming soon.

• We’ve dropped the price of Metacast Premium by 60%. Here’s why.

• New features in Metacast v1.10 and the story behind them

• Metacast: Behind the Scenes podcast update

• Podcast recommendations from the Metacast team

💰 Dropping the price of Premium by 60%

Earlier this year we launched the Metacast Premium subscription at the $49.99/year and $4.99/month price points. We also wrote up a case study about our thought process.

However, the world is not static. A few short months later, we are dropping the price by more than 50%!

The new price point

Starting today, the new price for Metacast Premium that includes access to transcripts for any podcast ever published, unlimited playlists, and eternal love from our team is $19.99/year or $1.99/month.

The best thing — the launch special for the iOS launch is still valid through the end of October 2024, so you can get Premium for the first year for only $9.99.

If you're a Premium subscriber, chances are you purchased the subscription for $24.99 (or $24.50 on Android) during our launch special. Your subscription will renew at the new $19.99/year price next year. If you have any concerns about the price change or want to get a refund for the difference, please contact us.

How we made the decision

In one of the recent Metacast team syncs, our Sr. Engineer Jennie said it out loud — "it's too expensive." Arnab and I had thought so too, but we didn't yet get to the boiling point. Jennie was the trigger for us to revisit the pricing.

There were a few factors that helped us make the call to drop the price.

Gut feel

A podcast app is not a critical or even a must-have app on the user's phone. Our gut feel told us that $50 is a bit too much for a non-critical consumer app.

I pay $35.99 for 1Password that is critical for my day-to-day functioning in life. I use it daily. But even so, every time I get a renewal notification, I feel like it could've been cheaper.

Market realities

There are free alternatives, such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube Music. The free experience may be crappy, but ultimately, how much is the extra convenience worth to the user?

Also, most of the other paid podcast apps are cheaper. We came across a subreddit of another indie app where people talked about pricing, what's cheap, what's expensive, etc. We realized that we're priced above people's willingness to pay considering the functionality we currently have. Metacast doesn't yet have enough premium features to command a premium price.

Decreasing costs

When we first got started in mid-2023, transcribing episodes was the biggest and most unpredictable cost. Over time, the cost went down by an order of magnitude. Additionally, now we know how much we spend on the user on average. The number is significantly lower than our estimates a year ago.

That gave us confidence that a lower price won't make us broke. As time goes on and Metacast grows, we will also start benefiting from economies of scale.

To protect ourselves even further, we have put caps on the monthly spend for all services that we use. In the "worst" case scenario, we'll have so much usage that we'll have an outage. It's a good problem to have, because reaching that level of spend would mean we have tons of paying users.

Hedging bets

$20/year feels a bit low. The biggest risk is that there's not a big enough market for building a sustainable business at this price point. We need ~60K paying users to reach $1M in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

Initially, we had plans for ads in the free tier. However, the more we thought about it, the less we liked the idea. We decided to ditch ads (for now) in favor of a more affordable paid tier with a hypothesis that more users would convert to paid. We can always introduce ads if we must in order to survive.

At a later point, when the app is more mature, we can also re-introduce the higher price point for "Super Premium." We can do that when we understand what kind of features users are willing to pay a significant premium for.

Is this the right call?

We're a bootstrapped startup with no prior data. All we can rely on is a model full of assumptions. The hypothesis is that the lower price will attract more paying users, and it'll work out in the end.

Now that we've lowered the price, the "it's too expensive" objection is no longer valid. If people don't pay for Premium, it means we're doing something wrong.

Hopefully, the lower price will help us collect more data and build the right thing for the right user with the right willingness-to-pay.

If you've not installed Metacast yet, get it on the Apple App Store or Google Play.

If you enjoy the app, please spend a minute and give us a review on the app stores.

📱 New features in Metacast v1.10

New speed control

Someone asked us to support 4x playback speed in Metacast 🤯 We asked "why?" and got surprised (meta-point - always ask your users why they want something...)

We learned that people who have visual impairments can develop an unusually sharp listening skill and are able to consume content at very high speeds. This makes sense. They can't read, so they listen to podcasts/books at "reading speed."

It turned out some "regular" people also develop the skill of comprehending information at high speeds for efficiency. They want to get through massive amounts of content quickly. That's definitely not me, but the use case makes sense too!

You might also wonder who listens to podcasts on 0.5x?

Obviously, there are people with cognitive impairments who need to slow down audio.

But we also discovered that some people learn a new language by listening to podcasts in foreign languages. Slowing down the playback helps them comprehend the speech. FWIW, I often find myself needing to slow down Marc Andreessen when I listen him talk excitedly on the a16z podcast!

Up until now, we had a very rudimentary speed control. It was an embarrassing second-class hack just to get by through the first release. Now, the speed control is a first-class citizen that lets users adjust speed from 0.5x to 4x with 0.1x increments, sane defaults, snapping and a feel-good haptic feedback.

Get Metacast on the Apple App Store or Google Play.

“Un-chaosing” playlists

If you're in tech, you know that backlogs become HUGE and unmanageable. In our podcast app, we made it dead-simple for users to add episodes to a "listen later" backlog. The simplicity backfired and we had to fix it.

After a few months of using Metacast, our personal backlogs have grown to hundreds of episodes. The overhead of finding the next listen has become unbearable. The backlog has become unusable.

We have a search box inside the backlog, but it's only good if you know exactly what you want to search for. You must have intent. If you just want to listen to "something interesting," it's almost useless.

We went back to the first principles - how do people choose what to listen to?

In podcasts, a "show" is the ultimate criteria when choosing the next listen.

I may be in a mood for listening to Lex Fridman talk to a scientist, or a narrative-style, dense Founders podcast, or Joe Rogan chat about conspiracies with Peter Thiel.

To help our users un-chaos their backlogs, we made it simple to see the backlog grouped by shows in a "pivot table" view. If you use the app long enough, you'll have a bunch episodes you saved but never bothered to find in the huge backlog. Our new feature makes it really easy to discover those gems.

On a personal note, it also helped me see that I mostly listen to "podcast bros."

Get Metacast on the Apple App Store or Google Play.

🎙️ Podcast update

New episode

On the latest episode (#63), Arnab, Jennie and I chat about our decision to reduce the price. It’s a short & sweet 20 minute discussion followed by the typical recommendation of podcasts we’re listening to.

New podcast cover

We’ve made our podcast cover more similar to our website’s design with the fancy purple waveform behind our backs.

Follow Metacast: Behind the Scenes on whichever Metacast version you use to listen to podcasts 🙄 or any other podcast app and YouTube. Links are here.

🎙️ Podcast recommendations

Here’s what we’ve been listening to recently and recommend to others.

Jennie

• Handsome — an awesome comedy show.

Ilya

• The Mark Zuckerberg Interview (Acquired) — an amazing live interview that gives you a window into Zuck’s psyche.

Arnab

• #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America (Lex Fridman Podcast) — lost civilizations of the Mississippi basin.

🌯 That’s a wrap

If you’ve not downloaded Metacast yet, get it on Apple App Store or Google Play. Please give us a review, it means a ton and helps our distribution.

Also, for only $19.99/year or $1.99/month, you get access to transcripts for any podcast ever published that you can read, bookmark, search, and share as well as unlimited playlists and many more new features coming soon.

Rest assured, we’re still committed to building in public. We have written a few blog posts and published our behind the scenes podcast on a regular schedule. The newsletter fell by the wayside, and we’re fixing that now!

In this newsletter issue, we’ll share our woes with being rejected by both Apple and Google (well, it’s less dramatic than I’m making it sound, but still…)

🚀 First things first — we’ve launched on iOS!

Now that we’re in production on both iOS and Android, we’d want to ask you for support.

• Download Metacast from Apple App Store or Google Play Store.

• Give us a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review if you feel like we deserve it (if not, please write to us directly at feedback@metacast.app). Reviews are super important for apps to gain user trust in app stores.

• Tell your friends about the app.

Alright, without further ado, here are a few noteworthy takeaways from our launch on iOS and Android.

You can also read our entire case study with screenshots in this very long post on our blog or listen to us ramble about it on the last 4 episodes of the Metacast: Behind the Scenes podcast.

Rejected by Google

We launched on Android in early August. What we didn’t know at the time is that we’d get three violation notices right after the launch.

Google approved the app, but a few days later, they sent us three rejection notices . At first, we had a “the sky is falling, we're going to be removed from the Play Store” reaction. We dropped everything we were doing and looked at it. For me personally, the state of mind was that of David threatened by Goliath.

The violations were for different reasons, but all were fairly easy to solve:

• Undisclosed collection of Device IDs. We didn’t realize Firebase was collecting data that Google deems Device IDs. We updated the Data Safety questionnaire, which resolved the violation.

• User testimonials. We’ve included a few user testimonials in the app’s description and screenshots. Google didn’t like it and we decided not to push it and removed them all.

• Copy is not clear. The third violation was a mystery. It said that the copy on one of the app’s screens wasn’t clear. While we were considering ways to fix the issue, it got auto-resolved. Our hypothesis is that someone else at Google looked at our app and decided it was clear after all.

We’ve not had any more issues with Google Play afterwards.

Rejected by Apple

Apple takes a different approach to rejecting apps. It front-loads the rejection, so that you don’t get into the App Store until they’re satisfied. They’re also set up to respond to your messages when you have questions.

We got several rejections that were confusing, but overall easy to fix. It only took us a week, mostly because we couldn’t figure out the Apple App Store Connect UI.

• In-app subscriptions not submitted. We were confused by Apple’s UI and didn’t click the right buttons on the right forms… That was easy to fix but took a few unsuccessful attempts to figure out.

• Introductory offer missing. We’re offering 50% off Metacast Premium to all users until the end of October. The discount info was entered into Apple’s system correctly, but Apple’s reviewer didn’t see it. Once we pointed it out, the issue got resolved.

• Missing Terms of Service and Privacy Policy links. Apple requires developers to make ToS and Privacy Policy links clearly visible in the app and also paste URLs into the app description text. We had the former, but the reviewer didn’t see it on a small device, so we updated the UI to make it clearer. We also pasted the links to the app’s description. That resolved the rejection.

After we addressed or clarified the issues with the Apple’s reviewer, the app was approved and we soft-launched it in the Apple App Store on September 20.

You get 50% off Metacast Premium if you subscribe through the end of October.

Ending the beta

We’ve ended both closed and open betas on iOS and Android. The process was clever but complicated and we would’ve done a couple of things differently if we were launching a mobile app again. Read about it on our blog.

Import your podcasts from other apps

If you’re a premium subscriber, we now offer an option to import your podcasts from apps that support OPML export.

Read more about the feature, the OPML standard and how we “built” it on our blog.

We’re so back!

We’re so happy to be back with the newsletter. Please send us a note if you have feedback or questions for the app, the newsletter, or the podcast. We’d love to hear from you!

More resources

• Case study: How we launched Metacast mobile app on App Store and Play Store

• New on Metacast blog: Podcast Import/Export via OPML

• Latest podcast episodes:

  • 59. Metacast for Android launched!

  • 60. First haters, first violations, the launch process and smelling like teen spirit

  • 61. Confessions of a lonely founder, Flutter & iOS woes, app positioning

  • 62. Rejected by Apple

This is a very short announcement and we will appreciate your support.

We’ve submitted Metacast to Product Hunt, the site where startups announce products to the world. We’re doing this for three reasons: 1) get exposure to potential customers, 2) get social proof in case we win the product of the day, 3) get a high-value backlink for search engine optimization (SEO).

If you already have a Product Hunt account, please support us with a review, a comment, or an upvote here.

To celebrate the Product Hunt launch, we’re extending the 51% special discount for Metacast Premium on Android to anyone who signs up by the end of this week (Sunday, September 8).

Thank you!

P.S. I’m writing a regular newsletter update that will land in your inbox in a few days.

Download Metacast podcast app

You'll learn why we chose the $4.99 per month / $49.99 per year price point, how we thought about the launch pricing, why our prices end with .99, why our free trial is 2 weeks, and how we set pricing outside the United States.

At this stage, we are still testing whether people will be paying for Metacast Premium with the current set of features and whether the price point is right. We're running an experiment and documenting our findings in public.

Context: Business model and value prop

Before we get into pricing, let's first look at the business model and the value proposition, so you have an idea of what we're charging for.

Metacast is a podcast app for iOS and Android optimized for people who listen to a lot of information-dense podcasts and want to get the most out of their listening.

The podcast listening functionality is free to all users, whereas more advanced features are offered on a "freemium" basis — you can use them in a limited way, but to unlock the full capability of the app, you must subscribe to Metacast Premium.

The value proposition of Metacast vs. other apps:

• UX optimized for knowledge podcasts — our user experience combines audio and text transcripts and makes it really easy to switch between reading and listening, save bookmarks for later use, share quotes, or search for content inside an episode.

• Transcripts for every episode — whether you're listening to a super popular podcast or a niche show that has 5 listeners, Metacast will have a transcript for you if you're a Premium subscriber.

• Simple yet powerful playlists — in the next few months, we'll be adding powerful playlist-based workflows to help you organize your listening.

• Podcasts-only app — unlike some other big apps, we don't mix podcasts with music, audiobooks, and other types of content. Metacast is dedicated to podcasts, so we can fine-tune our UX for the podcast listening use case.

Our aspiration is to build the most intuitive yet powerful podcast app in the world. Our ambition is to stay small and independent, and dedicate the next decade of our lives (or more!) to podcasting. We're just getting started.

Now, let's get into pricing decisions.

How many pricing tiers should an app have?

When we first started looking at pricing, we considered multiple tiers:

• Free — limited access to advanced features, visual ads in the app ($0)

• Ad-free — same as Free, no visual ads ($1.99)

• Premium — unlimited access to advanced features, no visual ads ($4.99)

• Supporter — same as Premium at twice the price ($9.99) for users who want to go above and beyond in supporting our small independent team

First, we removed the ad-free tier. Leading up to the launch, we decided to punt visual ads until later, so this tier naturally fell off.

Later, we also removed the Supporter tier. Getting a bit of extra cash from super fans would've been nice but it'd inevitably have made the UX and purchase experience more confusing.

In the end, we reduced our paid offering to a single choice — Metacast Premium.

Less is more. Simple is king.

What is the optimal price for a mobile app subscription?

Even before we started building Metacast, we did some financial projections and sensitivity analysis at different price points.

We modeled revenue according to the Price Elasticity of Demand from Microeconomics 101 — lower price leads to more paying customers, higher price leads to fewer paying customers.

We based our assumptions on how much other apps charge for subscriptions. We looked not just at podcasting apps, but also at note-taking apps, productivity apps, and various consumer apps we personally pay for.

The intersection of our research and financial model resulted in a price point between $4 and $7 per month (all prices in this post are in USD). Psychologically people are used to paying this much for apps already, and this price range offers us a path to profitability with a reasonable number of users.

Should we charge less or more?

When we were playing with pricing, we put the maximum price of the range ($6.99/month) into the app's purchase experience. We installed the app on our phones and assessed how it made us feel.

$6.99/month felt too expensive.

The reason for this perception is that an awesome podcast app is somewhere between must-have and nice-to-have on the scale of importance. It solves a real problem, but can users live without it? Yes, they can.

People are less likely to pay for something they deem "nice-to-have." So, we have to be realistic about how much it is reasonable to charge for Metacast.

In the end, $4.99 made us feel good. It also made sense from the revenue perspective (if the assumptions in our model are correct).

Coffee price as a reference point for app pricing

You can frequently hear developers comparing subscription prices to coffees. Like, "get [awesome value] for a price of a latte."

We always thought the coffee reference point made sense. Our target audience is professionals who earn a good living and use podcasts for education and self-improvement. A stereotypical office worker stops at a coffee shop on the way to work to grab a cup of joe. Measuring app's price in cups of coffee creates a familiar anchor in people's minds (or so the startup wisdom says).

On our podcast episode about pricing, we compared our Premium price to a "stale Starbucks drip." Most people from our target audience in North America and Europe can afford it. It also serves as a great reference point for international pricing (keep reading).

Pricing in other countries

Residents of different countries have different purchasing power. While five bucks can be nothing to a professional in New York, it's a lot of money for someone in a small town in India or Peru.

Google Play Store and Apple App Store let you set country-specific pricing. We looked at the intimidating pricing form on the Apple App Store Connect and realized it's a tedious exercise that we're likely to get wrong anyway. At launch, we set the same price for all countries, converted to their local currencies automatically by the app stores.

In our podcast, we said that we're willing to lower the price in specific countries with some crowd sourcing help from the users. We asked them to send us a note with a picture of a coffee shop menu. We'll be happy to look at those requests and lower the prices to make the app affordable everywhere in the world.

While asking for coffee shop pictures may sound silly, we think that if we ever receive coffee shop pictures, they'll make for great community engagement and social media content.

P.S. We've not received any pictures yet. If you feel like Metacast should be cheaper in your country, please take a picture at your local Starbucks or hipster coffee shop and contact us.

Why we use 99 cents — $4.99 vs. $5.00?

Everyone who's ever been in a supermarket in North America is used to prices that end with .99. Pretty much all apps in the App Store have prices ending in .99 too. So, it must be working, right?

Brady Hodges, Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri, writes in his article .99-ending prices: Are they really as effective as we assume?:

There has been a long-standing debate among researchers regarding what makes prices ending in .99 so attractive to consumers. Some argue that consumers tend to focus on the left digits, rounding the .99 down (e.g., viewing $18.99 as $18). Others say that consumers pay attention to the .99, rounding the price to its nearest whole number, perceiving the small difference as a discount, or even associating the .99 ending with an “on sale” or low-price appeal (e.g., viewing $18.99 as $19).

What caught my eye is that researchers don't doubt the effectiveness of the .99 pricing, but rather argue about the cause for its effectiveness. For us, it's a good enough justification to go with the flow.

We briefly looked at using a whole number price (e.g. $5 even), which is often used in the luxury goods and service industries. A whole price indicates "completeness" and has a luxury feel to it. We didn't feel like it made sense for us at such a low price point.

How to set the discount for an annual subscription?

Obviously, we want users to commit to a full year of subscription. This way, we get more revenue at the sign-up time and have a full year to manage churn before users need to renew.

There must be some give-and-take with the user. An annual subscription has to be a good deal.

We've seen two approaches:

• Good discount — discounts usually range from 20% to 50%. The most common we've seen is "two months free" where paying an annual subscription costs as much as paying the monthly price for 10 months.

• No monthly pricing at all — some apps, notably 1Password, only have an annual fee. To our earlier point above, an app like 1Password is between critical and must-have on the scale of importance, so they can afford to charge a large amount upfront.

Ideally, we'd love to treat our annual subscribers well and give them a deep discount. We recently paid an annual fee for Descript at 35% off compared to the monthly pricing. It felt like a really good deal.

But we have operating costs and at the current scale, we cannot afford charging too little purely from a cost management perspective.

We settled on what most other apps do — the annual subscription is $49.99, "two months off" compared to the monthly pricing.

Also, $49.99 is a pretty number. It made us feel good.

How long should a free trial be?

Let me begin by saying that we strongly dislike apps that don't let us properly test drive them before asking for a payment. In our opinion, a free trial is absolutely necessary for users to get a feel for the value before making a monetary commitment.

Listening to a long podcast episode can sometimes take multiple days. Listening to a couple episodes can take a week. We wanted to give users some space when they sign up for Metacast Premium. A two-week trial period seemed reasonable, so we settled on two weeks.

Whether you sign up for monthly or annual subscription, with or without our special launch pricing deal, you get a two-week trial period before making a payment.

How to set the special launch pricing?

Prior to public launch on Android, Metacast had been in private beta for a year and in public beta for half a year. Our beta users, especially the very early ones, jumped hoops to use the app and were patient with many bugs that we fixed thanks to their feedback.

We wanted to give them a special treatment with a launch pricing deal. However, when we looked at what it'd take to implement discount codes, we thought it'd be easier to give special launch pricing to everyone without discriminating between existing and new users.

When setting the launch price, we wanted the price to be attractive from a monetary perspective, but we also wanted to incentivize a longer commitment.

We made the launch pricing only apply to annual subscriptions and arrived at a deal that made us feel good — $25 for the first two years (50% off the regular annual price). By signing up, you pay for a year and have an option to renew at the same discounted price for another year. If you cancel, you lose the option to use the discount.

The drawback of our launch pricing is that it's somewhat hard to explain in a short sentence.

Actually, it's 51% off...

If you look at our app or the announcement blog post, the launch pricing is 51% off (not 50%). The reason for this is somewhat silly, but it highlights our obsession with UX.

When we configured the 50% off deal in Google Play Console, the price was displayed as $25.00 in the app. Even though it's a whole number, it was showing decimal points. It drove me crazy.

I wanted to fix this, but it turned out that price formatting method from RevenueCat's Flutter SDK does not support displaying whole numbers. Writing our own currency formatter seemed unreasonable. We "fixed" the problem by adding an extra percentage point to the discount to introduce a decimal part to the price, making the launch price $24.50.

Next steps

We launched Metacast on Android just a couple of weeks ago. Everything written above is being put to the test as you're reading this.

Stay tuned!

Follow our journey

• Watch/listen to our CTO Arnab and me talk about pricing on episode 59 of the Metacast: Behind the Scenes podcast

• Join our r/metacastapp subreddit for more build-in-public posts

• Follow me on LinkedIn, X or Threads

• Subscribe to this newsletter

Subscribe now

Both of us are heavy podcast listeners. Each of us follows 50+ podcasts and listens to ~60 episodes per month. We get most of our information and knowledge from audio podcasts while walking, driving, and doing chores.

We wanted more from our podcast apps.

• We wanted podcast apps to help us retain and go back to the knowledge we heard on a podcast. The podcast apps wanted us to listen to new episodes.

• We wanted podcast apps to help us triage the ever-growing flood of new content published on podcasts. The podcast apps pushed everything onto us.

• We wanted podcast apps to help us find evergreen content in the vast library of 80M episodes published since 2001. The podcast apps wanted us to listen to the most recent episodes on a few big shows.

• We wanted podcast apps to help us share insightful moments with friends and co-workers regardless of what podcast app they use. The podcast apps were only interested in us sharing the link to their app, so they acquire more users.

Metacast was born as a solution to our personal pain points. We wanted ease of use and access to all the knowledge locked up in the enormous library of podcasts.

Today, we're launching v1 of Metacast for Android in Google Play Store. This is just the first step toward our dream of building the most intuitive and most powerful podcast app.

Read on to learn about the key features of Metacast, and why we chose them for the initial release of Metacast.

Podcast transcripts

Podcasts are a perfect medium for learning, because most people listen to podcasts while driving, walking, and doing chores — when they can't read anyway. However, audio is inefficient for retaining knowledge.

Audio is linear. You listen to audio second by second. You can't skim it. You can't search it. You can't highlight a sentence. You can't show it to other people.

If you listen to a 3-hour long episode and want to go back to a specific insight you heard on a long drive, you'll have to either take note of the timestamp in the moment or listen to the whole episode again to find the thing you're looking for.

We constantly found ourselves taking notes in note-taking apps and/or screenshotting the podcast app to save the timestamps of key moments in podcast episodes. At some point, I even wrote a chatbot that helped me remember key insights from podcasts.

We decided that the first step toward unlocking the knowledge is to make audio non-linear and visual with transcripts. We wanted audio and transcripts to be complementary and interchangeable. We wanted the experience to feel like reading a book with audio narration.

So, we designed the podcast player such that both audio and the transcript are always there. We agonized over making Metacast intuitive and distraction-free. We removed unnecessary clutter until there was nothing left to remove to help you get the most out of the episode.

In Metacast, you have access to transcripts for every episode of every podcast. Sometimes, a transcript is available instantly, sometimes you need to wait for a few minutes while it's being generated. Our vision is that the transcript for every episode ever published is always there for you when you need it.

With the podcast transcript, you can:

• Find relevant episode segments by skimming or searching the transcript.

• Skip ads by visually skimming the transcript.

• Bookmark quotes to re-read, re-listen, or share them later.

• Share a quote along with a deep link to the specific timestamp in the episode.

• Learn a foreign language by following the transcript while listening.

• Read instead of listening when it's more convenient. For example, on your daily commute, you can seamlessly switch from listening in your car to reading in a noisy subway, and back to listening when you walk from the subway station to your office.

The transcript functionality has been in Metacast Beta for some time now. Our initial users confirmed the hunch that transcripts improve the podcast listening experience.

"[Metacast's] transcription feature is like having a personal assistant who never misses a word. Now I can find that elusive quote or subject without scrolling endlessly."
‐ Moe N., Software Engineer, BC, Canada

"There are times where I don't want to listen to the audio, but re-read through the transcript to help me remember certain details from a podcast episode."
‐ Ashwin, Sr. Software Engineer, California, USA

There's a lot more we want to do to make transcripts even more useful. In the coming months, we'll be adding speaker recognition, chapters, summaries, detection of ads, and much more.

Reimagining podcast playlists

We've always struggled with triaging the flood of new content and planning podcast listening for long trips. Playlists are an obvious solution to these problems, yet some podcast apps don't have playlists at all or their user experience is confusing.

Our vision is to make triaging new episodes quick with powerful workflows centered around a combination of automatic and manual playlists. Our guiding principle is to give users full control without overwhelming them.

The v1 of our vision is a simple Listen Later playlist that you can add episodes to from any podcast. Listen Later is your listening queue that you can easily rearrange and filter.

Listen Later is useful for:

• Saving episodes you don't have time for right now. Often, you won't have time to listen to a new episode when it comes out. Perhaps, you want to finish the episode you already started, or you're not in a mood for this kind of content at this very moment. You can save the episode to Listen Later and get to it when the time is right.

• Planning long drives or walks. Before you hit the road, you can arrange episodes in Listen Later in the order you want to listen them. Metacast will play episodes in this order, so you don't have to distract yourself from driving on a highway to manually pick the next listen.

• Binging on a podcast. Pick the episodes you want to listen to, add them to Listen Later, and listen continuously.

More playlist types are coming soon. You'll be able to create custom playlists, use one of our automatic workflows, or set up rules that fit your habits.

Little things matter

One thing we've been dissatisfied with in other apps is that they aren't great at little things.

We've spent hours debating user experience decisions. Our yardstick is always "Is it intuitive to the user?"

If it isn't, we look for other solutions. We do extra work, so you don't have to.

"I love Metacast for the simplicity and the intuitiveness of the app. The app has the right amount of content/detail and there's no information overload when looking at my phone screen. All the controls on the app are self explanatory."
‐ Ashwin, Sr. Software Engineer, California, USA

Intuitive home screen

We went an extra mile to make the Home screen useful. We help you see at a glance which of the podcasts you follow have new episodes and also see which episodes are new.

Everything is a swipe

The only thing Metacast users need to learn is that everything is a swipe. Any time you see a list of things (episodes in a podcast/playlist, bookmarks, segments in the transcript), swipe to reveal the actions.

Played episodes are easily distinguishable

In Metacast, it's always obvious which episodes you've listened to, so you can easily skim podcasts and ignore the episodes you've already played. Or to the contrary, you can more easily find the episode you've previously listened to.

We will be adding a Listening History feature to make it easy to find episodes you've enjoyed and quotes you've bookmarked!

Episode search

If you know the name of the guest, episode topic, or episode number for a particular podcast, Metacast makes it easy to search for those podcast episodes.

Try searching Arnold Schwarzenegger's or Josh Waitzkin's interviews published on The Tim Ferriss Show 10 years ago. With Metacast, it's a piece of cake.

Sharing podcasts with users of other podcast apps

When you send a podcast or episode link from Metacast, your friends can open it in Metacast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube if the podcast is published on those platforms. While we want to attract new users to Metacast, we also respect the fact that users have a choice and provide links to most popular apps.

Simple settings

Metacast doesn't have many settings yet, but our promise is that you'll never be confused by any of them.

Metacast Premium

We have a dream for creating the most intuitive and powerful podcast app for podcast aficionados. We're a small bootstrapped team and have not taken any venture funding. We want to stay independent and do right by our users rather than chase growth at all costs. To realize this dream, we need to build a sustainable business.

The basic podcast listening functionality of Metacast is free. Metacast Premium users get access to full transcripts, unlimited playlists, and more advanced features through a $49.99/year or $4.99/month subscription in the US or an equivalent amount in local currency in other countries. Premium users support the development of Metacast and make future development possible.

To celebrate the launch, new Android users get a 51% off deal for the first two years if they sign up for Metacast Premium until the end of August 2024.

Here's how it works — you pay $24.50 for the first year and have an option to renew the subscription at the same price for one more year. The discount will be applied automatically in the app during checkout. If you have questions about the subscription, please contact us.

Install Metacast

Install Metacast podcast app for Android from Google Play Store.

Note: Metacast is also available for iOS in beta. You can install it on your iOS device via TestFlight. We're adding iOS-native features and fixing up some technical issues, and will be releasing Metacast to the Apple App Store soon. Learn more about installing the beta via TestFlight in our FAQs.

P.S. We build in public!

Follow our journey on our "behind the scenes" podcast or newsletter.

👉 Listen to the episode: Metacast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or watch on YouTube.

It’s been a year since we started working on Metacast. In this episode Arnab and Ilya reflect on the journey and compare working on a startup with the old corporate days.

Segments

• [05:14] No going back to corporate

• [06:00] Annual reviews

• [13:22] Best year of Ilya's career

• [15:28] Frustrations with corporate

• [20:11] Anxiety and collaboration

• [26:20] Playing a long game

• [27:12] Letting go of old habits

• [33:52] Getting back into coding

• [37:01] What's new in the app

• [40:34] Book & podcast recommendations

Show notes

Metacast

• Get Metacast for iOS and Android

• r/metacastapp subreddit

Links

• Ilya’s LinkedIn post with reflections

Podcasts

• Metacast Ep. 24, part 1: Leaving jobs at Google and Amazon to start a podcast tech company

• Metacast Ep. 24, part 2: Non-linear career paths, culture at Google vs. Amazon

Books

• The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss

• Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

• Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa

• The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi

• Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

• The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield

• Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by Kara Swisher

Podcasts

• What Are Sperm Whales Saying? Researchers Find A Complex 'Alphabet' on the Short Wave podcast

• Was the 401(k) a Mistake? on The Daily podcast

• Google Eats Rocks + A Win for A.I. Interpretability + Safety Vibe Check on the Hard Fork podcast

• Adam Mosseri on the Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin podcast

Movies & TV

• Shogun TV series

• Revolutionary Road

• Ford v Ferrari

• We’ve talked to a power user who made us think about positioning Metacast is not just for learners, but also for people who seek simplicity.

• Our first power struggle.

• A primer on the D-U-N-S number that Apple and Google require companies to obtain to be in app stores.

🎙️ You can also listen to the expanded discussion of these topics on our podcast on Metacast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or watch on YouTube.

The positioning dilemma

We saw something interesting in metrics — there was one user who had more sessions and listened to more episodes in the Metacast podcast app than either me or Arnab. Considering that we’re the heaviest users and use the app for testing a lot, this was unexpected.

So, we reached out to the user to ask them a few questions.

It turned out, they were a Google Podcasts user before Google killed it and were looking for a simple replacement. Their partner saw my post on LinkedIn, tried Metacast, and recommended it. It was nice to learn we had this unexpected organic reach, but more importantly we learned a ton about this user’s usage patterns.

For this user, the superpower of Metacast was its simplicity.

I’ll quote:

You're not trying to cram a lot of garbage down my throat.

We agree with them. We built Metacast such that you’re always in control of what you’re consuming. It’s a tool, rather than a recommendation platform with a feed.

Since we want to capture Google Podcasts users, we need to figure out how to position Metacast to appeal to both people who want to extract knowledge from podcasts and people who just want a simple podcast player. These goals are not mutually exclusive; in fact, our functionality already achieves them. But marketing is a different story. It gets confusing very quickly.

If you have any ideas that could help us with positioning, please reach out to us at feedback@metacast.app.

Our first “power struggle”

Talking to the power user made us prioritize a feature we’ve been thinking about for a while. We added a tabbed view to the player to make it easy to switch between the transcript, show notes and bookmarks.

I spent a lot of time figuring it out the look and feel for this feature, and eventually settled on a 5% transparency.

Arnab didn’t like it and we had a prolonged argument, which eventually had to be settled with the help of an experienced third party designer-friend. He didn’t notice the transparency at all, but liked it after we pointed it out. So, we kept it.

But this argument raised a meta-point for me. How do we settle these in the future?

The problem with the argument was that it was a matter of taste. I liked transparency. Arnab didn’t. Both of us felt strongly about it (though I probably felt a lot stronger). The Slack thread was 111 messages…

I’d like to quote David Ogilvy, a legendary advertising entrepreneur:

Search the parks in all your cities. You'll find no statues of committees.

In a big company, we’d have settled for something that pleased both of us. But in this case, it felt like if we follow the same approach, the app will end up in a graveyard, killed by a thousand compromises. So I stood my ground, even though it was uncomfortable.

This made me think of 37signals where they have an operating agreement that dictates that Jason Fried has the final word over UX and DHH has the final word over technical stuff. I think it was on this episode of REWORK.

I don’t think we’re there yet, because so far we’ve been able to reach a resolution via negotiation. In the future, if we ever feel like negotiations make us ineffective, we might look for something like 37signals’ approach.

N.B. The “power struggle” wording is obviously click-bait. This argument was mostly fun and I’m happy to have Arnab as a co-founder!

D-U-N-S Number

To publish an app in the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, companies are required to obtain a D-U-N-S number from an entity called Dun & Bradstreet (individuals don’t need it).

We got our DUNS when we were first setting up our developer account almost a year ago. It was fairly straightforward except that… they misspelled my name as LLYA (seems to be common in Spanish-speaking regions, because there are lots of Spanish words that start with a double L).

Oh, well. This was an omen of the things to come.

Misspelling a name that was typed into a form can only mean one thing. Someone looked at it and re-typed it somewhere else manually. This could only be a human mistake. We had to open a support case to correct the spelling and it seemed to have been resolved.

As we’re getting ready for launch, Apple sent us cryptic email saying that we need to confirm if we’re a trader (I can’t help vocalizing it as “traitor”). After doing some research, we found out that if we charge users in the EU, we’re a trader. If we’re a trader, Apple will publish our business address and phone number on the App Store.

Ouch.

To avoid disclosing our personal addresses, we signed up for a business address and tried to update Apple App Store Connect. This required an update to our address in DUNS, which turned out to be quite an adventure. I wasted a few hours over the course of a few weeks dealing with D&B.

I’ll spare you the details; you can listen to the entire convo on the podcast. I’ll just say that it took multiple days, two support chats, a support case, and a special non-public (or at least not easily discoverable) link.

And the icing on the cake? We discovered that my name was still spelled as LLYA, so I had to request to correct it again.

Our advice to mobile app entrepreneurs — get started on DUNS early and get a business address and business phone before signing up for it.

What else is happening with Metacast?

• New features! We’ve shipped some cool playlist features and a UX upgrade in v0.69 and v0.70.

• UX upgrade! We’re working on an overhaul of UX for Transcript and Bookmarks tabs in the player. This is coming in v0.71 next week-ish. The app now looks a lot more polished!

• Web app update! Metacast.app now has links to Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube for episodes that you share from Metacast. If you use Metacast, you can share links with other people even if they don’t use Metacast.

• Getting ready to launch! We’re implementing a paid subscription functionality, onboarding flow, and a few finishing touches here and there. We hope to launch in Google Play Store in the coming weeks!

Ad break — have you installed Metacast yet?

Metacast is in open beta and is free to use until we implement the monetization features. Please give it a try and send us feedback. Your support and help means a ton to us! Download Metacast for iOS and Android here.

Bonus content

Check out the new episodes on the Builders Gonna Build podcast:

• Ep.8: John Crickett on growing your LinkedIn and newsletter audience

👉 Listen to the episode: Metacast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or watch on YouTube.

We're discussing the dilemma of positioning Metacast as both powerful and simple, break down the recent power struggle about 5% transparency of a UI element, and share our experience with the DUNS number that developers have to get to be in Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

Segments

• [01:36] The positioning dilemma

• [09:51] Remaining features to launch the app and recent updates

• [13:06] Power struggle between Arnab and Ilya

• [17:16] DUNS (doh...)

• [22:44] Book and podcast recommendations

Show notes

Metacast

• Get Metacast for iOS and Android

• r/metacastapp subreddit

Links

• D-U-N-S Number

Podcasts

• Microsoft episode on Acquired

• The Point of Convergence

• The Emerald: For the Intuitives

Books

• Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

We took a forced break from the podcast and the newsletter due to travels and sickness. Now, we’re back!

Here are a few snippets of what we’ve been up to in the last few weeks!

🎙️ You can also listen to the expanded discussion of these topics on our podcast on Metacast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or watch us on YouTube.

TikTok-ification of release notes

Since we started our subreddit, we’ve been experimenting with release notes. You might have seen the text+images updates like this one. They were fairly tedious to produce and not always easy to follow, so we started publishing release notes in a short video format.

Check out the quick walkthrough of new features in Metacast v0.68 (our latest open beta version). A new video for 0.69 is coming shortly!

YC Application

Applying to YC is becoming a tradition for us. We’ve just applied for the third time!

The process of rewriting the application makes our thinking crisper and helps us tighten the value proposition . Writing the application is valuable in itself, even if we don’t submit it. Also, it’s always fun to hang out with Arnab to record the founders video in person!

We’re not sharing our founders’ video because there’s too much detail about our roadmap, but here’s the 3-minute demo we submitted with the YC S24 batch application.

Offsite

The full cast of Metacast met up in Florida in-person for the first time!

The three of us worked together at AWS before, so it’s not the first time we meet, but it was the first full-team meetup as a Metacast team.

We got a lot done: fixed a problem that haunted us for a few months (see the next snippet), got on the same page about app subscriptions, chatted about pricing and money, etc. We also had a dinner, rode bikes, and watched alligators in the Everglades national park. It was fun!

But it’s also very tiresome to always be around other people! IMO, the optimal ratio of in-person days to WFH days is 9:1, or 1 day every two weeks.

I recommend listening to the podcast starting at 15:40 where we reflect on what it’s like working in person.

Make Android cool again

Houston, we had a problem.

Both iPhones and Androids dreamed of electric sheep were hot to the touch when using Metacast. The issue was notoriously hard to reproduce. Eventually, we fixed the bug on iOS but Androids kept getting hot. We weren’t comfortable charging for the app with this issue, because it was so obviously buggy.

During the offsite, we set a goal to make Android cool again, once and for all. And we made it. I won’t bore you with details. TLDR — a security feature we didn’t need was eating up the precious battery and heating up the device.

We turned it off and voila — Androids are not so hot any more! Not even lukewarm.

We want to thank our beta user Ilya K. who patiently sent us logs, offered advice and tested bugfixes until we figured it out!

Paid subscriptions

We’re getting close to launching publicly. A big dependency for the launch is an ability to charge for premium subscriptions.

Software can’t be free unless one of the following is true:

• Developers pay for you using the software with VC money

• Big customers (“whales”) pay for the usage smaller customers (this is done in the hope that some smaller fish will grow into whales… why would anyone believe a fish can become a mammal? some do though, but it’s very rare)

• Developers sell your data to third parties

• Ads are all over the app

We will explore an ad-supported model, but we hate ads and so does pretty much everyone. I’m yet to meet someone (not working in ads) who’d be like — “I love when ads cover 60% of the screen. They help me discover new products.” Ads are annoying.

At launch, we’ll have just one premium tier that includes all features of the app. We’ll have special pricing for our beta users, so if you’re not on the beta yet, try it out at metacast.app.

We’re in the process of configuring paid subscriptions with RevenueCat, a service that makes implementation of subscriptions across platforms less complicated. They take 1% of your revenue once you cross the $2.5k MRR threshold, which is reasonable at our scale (we’re a small fish, not even a dolphin yet).

We’ll probably write a blog about this at some point. Stay tuned.

New website!

We’ve launched a new website at metacast.app. It’s more than just a landing page with links to Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

Now, when you share episodes from Metacast, the links will open in the browser if you don’t have an app installed.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, we also added links to Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube. The hypothesis is that by making it easier for users to share episodes (regardless of whether the recipient has Metacast), we’re building a viral loop back into the app.

There are still a few rough edges, but check it out!

The site is built on Next.js and hosted on Vercel. We’re also implementing a blog with Outstatic where we’ll eventually be writing more search engine-friendly, long-form content.

The site was built by Jak, a recent grad of Purdue university who first started as our design intern, then became a contractor for the website. We’ll have Jak on the next episode of Metacast: Behind the Scenes.

US corporate taxes

My least favorite part of Metacast is the admin work…

Even though we haven’t launched yet and made just a few hundred dollars in revenue last year, we had to file taxes. Boy, this is expensive! We filed with a tax professional and paid $1,800 for his services.

We could've done taxes with Fondo for $1,450, but I wanted to talk to an actual CPA in person the first time we did it. We used a local tax specialist who previously did my personal returns. It turned out to be a good decision, because I messed up our books (in QuickBooks) due to lack of experience in accounting. The CPA helped rectify those.

In addition to the federal corporate tax filing, we had to pay a $450 franchise tax to the state of Delaware where we’re incorporated. Delaware offers great liability protection — that's why startups choose DE to incorporate — and startups have to pay for the privilege to be incorporated in the state. Fair enough.

Because we have no tangible assets on the balance sheet, we only paid the minimally required $450 for 2023. We used tax prep startup Fondo for the filing, and it cost us just $1 to file.

Read my full post about admin expenses on LinkedIn.

Ad break — have you installed Metacast yet?

Metacast is in open beta and is free to use until we implement the monetization features. Please give it a try and send us feedback. Your support and help means a ton to us! Download Metacast for iOS and Android here.

Bonus content

Check out the new episodes on the Builders Gonna Build podcast:

• Ep. 5: Interview with The Pragmatic Programmer’s author Dave Thomas

• Ep. 6: Interview with one and the only Chief Cloud Economist Corey Quinn

• Ep. 7: Interview with 37signals’ co-founder and CEO Jason Fried

These episodes are re-runs from last year. We’ve just recorded a brand new episode for season 2. Coming out next week!