The democratized social podcasting platform that never existed.
This is an outtake from another post, in which we come out for Matter VII and tell our true origin story. Do yourself a favour and go finish the main post after you’re done here.
By the summer of 2016 (a year after we’d started), Signl.fm was almost dead. No one was getting paid. We were living off of savings. And they were running out.
Product-wise, things had seemed to be going pretty well. We had spoken to our customers, and identified their pain. It was obvious — making a podcast sucks. Uploading to iTunes sucks. Recording, especially remotely, sucks. And listener discovery really sucks (can’t throw a stone right now without hitting someone trying to solve this one).
Solution: a “democratized social podcasting platform”.
One social place to record podcast audio, with any number of hosts, from anywhere in the world, on any device, for live audiences…and one place for that audio to live, for it to be listened to, curated and shared. Socially.
It seemed obvious that just solving for existing podcasters was a waste of time. A democratized social podcasting platform implies, well, democracy. Besides, when it comes to podcasters; there aren’t very many of them, and they don’t have any money.
So, we spent most of a year building it (wise readers may see where this is going). It was tough, but we had a working beta — a Kurento-WebRTC-based solution on an Scala stack. That’s when we realized that (a) WebRTC wasn’t going to cut it—didn’t work on iOS at the time, that (b) Scala is impossible to hire for. And… that we were probably fucked.
Well, not completely fucked. We were still committed to our mission to make podcasts social. We had a group of talented, experienced cofounders who still mostly liked each other after a year, plus whiz-kid Sam Salvail (in off of a college placement program). And; it was a great pitch — podcasts are sexy. People wanted us to succeed.
The big problem was that our democratized, social podcasting platform wasn’t really… social.
Hey now, what? People connecting, live for audiences, to record audio! Upvotes, sharing…how is that not social? The issue (which became clear to us only after we’d built the damned thing) is that longform audio is inherently nonsocial. You can’t just browse it like you do your Twitter feed. And when it comes to sharing; who wants to get hit in the face with a big stupid MP3?
We were nowhere. And almost out of runway.
In my line of work, you get asked a lot: who’s your favourite podcaster? Well, that’s easy: it’s Richard Campbell, celebrated technologist, founding CTO at StrangeLoop, and one of the fathers of podcasting. I like him so much not necessarily because of his nerd shows, but because in the summer of 2016, he joined the team as an investor and advisor. Between Richard and a little help from the Canadian Government, we were back off to the races.
