Meet Soundbite 👋
Podcasting has undergone a lot of change over the past couple of years. More people than ever have started listening to podcasts. The flywheel of content hasn’t exactly slowed down either, with a growing selection of podcasts each covering a different niche with a highly engaged following.
Despite signs of an industry on the up, discovering all this rich content remains one of the bottlenecks for the format. Like most platforms with massive content libraries, there’s a long tail of shows that get overlooked for different reasons.
Moments of magic ✨
Recently, I texted a friend about a podcast called The Offensive that he might like because we’re both obsessed with the gritty subculture around British football. It’s a mockumentary style podcast much like The Office but for football. That pitch alone got me interested enough but what urged me to eagerly recommend it to him was this one joke that was told.
A single moment in a 30-minute long podcast.
If there’s anything I’ve learned listening to podcasts it’s that there’s a common thread binding most of them. It’s how we get hooked. You might think it’s the host or the content. Delivery matters and the story is why we’re tuning in but a series of moments can make a show from listenable to bingeable. A moment can turn a follower into a fan who scours the interwebs and giddily recommends the entire show.
That moment for us is a Soundbite or a bite for short.
What we’re building 🎙
Daniel and I have been chipping away at a beta version of Soundbite, a podcast app to help you find hidden gems through bite-sized listens. These are just some of the beliefs that are informing what we’re building 👇
- Respect Available Eartime 👂
You shouldn’t need to sit through an hour-long episode to tell if you’ll like it or not. A short bite that previews an episode should be more than enough to tell you if you’ve hit podcast gold. - Nuance Enables Relevance 🎯
Listening experiences out there support neither the nuance nor breadth of topics discussed in a single episode. We’re trying to change that by enabling listeners to tag bites which helps with qualifying and serving relevant topics back. - Serendipity Over Specificity 💫
Recommendation algorithms can sometimes make it harder for diverse voices to break through. Social networks, on the other hand, can create echo chambers. We’ve taken steps to factor in randomness to help listeners stumble upon content that might not dovetail with their specific interests, but is still compelling enough to listen.
You can get early access to the beta by signing up over at getsoundbite.app, once you do you should receive an email confirming your place on the waitlist. Until then, why not join our Slack community?
Stay tuned 📻
