#15: Snippets
There is one thing I really liked at Google — “Snippets.”
Way back when Google was an innovation powerhouse, its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were engaged in the day-to-day operations of the company. They were not control freaks at all, but they wanted to see what everyone is working on. So all employees were required to write up short “snippets” of what they’ve accomplished during the week.
Larry and Sergey read all the snippets and stayed on top of everything happening at Google. That is, until it didn’t scale any more… then they left… then Google’s culture changed…
By the time I joined Google in 2020, no one cared about snippets. But a few people on my team still wrote them as a way to keep track of their work. I liked that and also started writing down weekly snippets as a way to reflect on what I’ve done and what I have not done.
If I had a productive week, snippets would show that. If I slacked all week, sometimes I’d just not write up my snippets at all, because I’d be too embarrassed to publish them (everyone at Google can see anyone’s snippets).
Here are a few snippets for Metacast that are worth calling out.
New feature — episode search
Let me lead with a story.
A few months ago, I attended an Avenged Sevenfold (A7X) concert in West Palm Beach, FL. I love learning about musicians before seeing them live, so I wanted to listen to some of A7X interviews while driving to the venue.
On my drive to the show, I learned that vocalist M. Shadows was going through a vocal cord surgery and couldn’t even sign the Happy Birthday song. The tour of 2023 was their return from a hiatus that lasted more than 5 years! It gave me a different perspective at the concert. I appreciated the singing a lot more.
Finding that episode was a pain in the butt though.
There’s this guy Chris Jericho who’s interviewed a great many rock musicians. His podcast “Talk is Jericho” has 1,068 episodes. It’d be impossible to scroll to find an interview in that massive library. I had to use another podcast app to prep for the concert.
No bueno. Metacast should be a one-stop shop for all podcasts for our users.
So, we’ve added episode search to Metacast. It is super useful for finding interviews on large podcasts. Like, if you want to listen to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s interview on The Tim Ferriss show from 2014. Or binge on all Elon Musk interviews on the Lex Fridman podcast.
Our search is smart. It uses all available metadata and can correct for typos. Eventually, we’ll expand it to search transcripts as well.
Dark vs. light theme & the power of building in public
Back when we first started Metacast, we had a light theme in addition to our current dark theme. It looked great, but we deprioritized it, because I don’t like light themes building for two themes was slowing us down.
I thought we could get away with a dark-themed only app, just like Spotify. But someone commented on LinkedIn that they can’t read well on a dark background. So I ran a survey. The sample is large enough to suggest that we need to have both light and dark themes.
A meta point here is that building in public has amazing benefits — we get unsolicited user inputs, we can run surveys, and we can talk to people. This wouldn’t have been possible if we were building in isolation.
We’re running our last mile now
We’re on the final stretch before a public launch.
To launch, we have just a few things remaining feature-wise — we’ll introduce in-app premium subscriptions, add limits for the free version (ads will come after launch), and add an onboarding slideshow on app startup.
Then, there are a few bugs to squish and a few papercuts to heal. And we’ll be ready to rock and roll 🤘
Stay tuned.
Bonus
In June 2023, right after I left Google, we recorded a podcast episode about taking the leap of faith.
That episode resonated a lot with the friends of Metacast, so we re-run it again — listen to episode 55 on the Metacast: Behind the Scenes podcast.
Have you installed Metacast yet?
Metacast is in open beta and is free to use until we launch publicly. 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.