SMS #1: How to Turn Every Commute Into a Learning Experience

I love podcasts. My introduction to the medium came in 2015 when my obsession with all things Hip-Hop led me to discover a hilarious show called ‘The Brilliant Idiots’.

It took a whole year of exclusive commitment to that one podcast before I began to add other shows into my rotation. Eventually, however, my listening habits were less shaped by the goal of entertaining myself but rather educating myself. Given that many of the most popular podcasts nowadays are ‘TED Talks Daily’, ‘Radiolab’, ‘Planet Money’, and ‘Stuff You Should Know’, I’m clearly not the only one using audio as a means of consuming educational content.

But where are listeners finding the time? Typically North Americans press play on their favourite podcast apps when commuting to and from work/school, when at the gym, when on Lunch, and when performing low-stimulation tasks like cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry.

This is significant because the average podcast is 43 minutes and 24 seconds long; too long to fit comfortably in the windows of time we usually allot to them. In fact, research shows that only 35% of podcast consumers listen to entire episodes.

If we make the following two assumptions, I believe we have an opportunity here:

1. People are interested in learning through audio content.
2. People want to consume shorter, more concise audio content.

Before Reading On…Note that this article by no means represents a comprehensive business plan. Rather, it is the foundations of a full model that I give you complete authority and ownership to build from. In plain English, if you’d like to ‘steal my startup’, go ahead.

ELEVATOR PITCH 💬

‘Teachable Moments’ is an audio content sharing platform that enables users to inject entertainment and education into the short gaps in their routines. Whether you want blogging advice, astronomy facts, or stock market tips, you’ll find a short, informative listen to parallelize with any errand, commute, break, or chore.

VALUE PROPOSITION💡

This new medium for discovering and enjoying audio lessons creates value for listeners, content creators, and advertisers alike.

Value for Listeners:

For listeners, not only do you have short, educational content that can be enjoyed within any block of time allotted to it, you also have a more streamlined method of discovering new content. Rather than simply subscribing to individual content creators, listeners can also subscribe to topics of interest. Fascinated with space? Subscribe to the astronomy topic. Your feed and autoplay queue will then be populated with the most favoured lessons bearing the ‘astronomy’ tag.

Value for Content Creators:

For content creators, ‘Teachable Moments’ represents an opportunity to painlessly establish oneself as a thought leader in their field of expertise. Unlike podcasts that require creators to record and edit their own audio using expensive software (or if they really mean business, professional studios) before uploading each episode to an RSS feed, ‘Teachable Moments’ has an in-built suite of tools that allows creators to record, edit and upload their lessons without ever leaving the app.

Just finished a digital marketing campaign for your company and want to share some tips? Take 15 minutes on your lunch break to post a lesson.

Value for Advertisers:

For advertisers, no longer will you have to research and sponsor individual podcasters, rely on them to read your ads, hope that the supported episode gets a high number of views, and pray that their viewership engages with your product.

On ‘Teachable Moments’, ads follow a similar model to YouTube. Here, advertisers can record an ad that is up to 30 seconds in length and sponsor a ‘Teachable Moments’ topic that aligns with their company’s product/service. Trying to increase downloads for your WordPress plugin? Sponsor the ‘blogging’ topic on ‘Teachable Moments’ and have your ad appear as an unskippable audio clip before each episode bearing the ‘blogging’ tag until you’ve reached the number of listeners you’ve paid to reach.

No more ‘fingers crossed listeners don’t fast forward through our ads!’

REVENUE STREAMS💰

So how does this thing make money? As is the case with most apps, revenue will come in the form of advertisements and premium membership.

Advertisements:

I feel hypocritical here…

In my days as Director of my university’s student-run incubator, I would often get annoyed when student entrepreneurs came in with ideas for businesses that majorly rely on ad revenue. The reason being that this source of income depends on you scaling to a massive (and equally as important, active) userbase. Translation: you won’t be paying your employees (much less yourself) until you have thousands of users who use your platform regularly.

But whatever, I’m a hypocrite. See section, ‘Value for Advertisers’ above to see how ads will be implemented on ‘Teachable Moments’.

The advantage of having advertisers sponsor categories rather than individual content creators is that you, the founder, get to be the middle man handling all transactions — transactions that the business can take a slice of.

You may be thinking to yourself, “But Rayhan, if I take a slice of the ad revenue, won’t advertisers try to go directly to content creators anyways?”.

Probably not. YouTube takes 45% of ad revenue, leaving 55% to creators. As much as this may sound like highway robbery, when you consider the ad-targeting, analytics, and overall convenience of running ads through YouTube, that margin begins to look a lot less daunting.

Bear in mind that this model comes with great benefit to the content creators as well. Unlike a podcaster who must first achieve a certain level of popularity before spending valuable time negotiating with potential sponsors, the ‘sponsor a topic, not an individual’ model used here allows for content creators with small followings to get a piece of the pie as well without having to directly interact with a single sponsor.

Still, I’d recommend not being greedy to start. Advertisers will naturally be skeptical of putting their promotional dollars towards this new, untested platform. Therefore, I’d suggest you go the route of ‘underpromise and overdeliver’ until you catch steam.

15–20% sounds like a fair start.

Premium Subscriptions:

The subscription model comes with its own host of problems — especially if part of your service is already being offered for free.

You can’t have premium incentives be as simple as ‘no more ads if you pay 5 bucks a month’ because that means there would have to be ads to want to avoid in the first place. You will not sell a single premium subscription until you scale your userbase and begin running ads.

You also can’t limit your freemium users too much in the hopes that they’ll go premium (for example, ‘you can only listen to one episode per day’ without premium) because you want users to adopt your platform and use their voice to promote it — just because you aren’t directly monetizing a user, doesn’t mean they are of no use to you.

In the case of ‘Teachable Moments’ I would recommend the following premium features (given a 30-day free trial of full access).

1. No more ads. Applicable when ads are eventually integrated
2. Ability to freely navigate and play episodes. Sounds weird, but this is similar to the Spotify model — in freemium mode, you will be able to autoplay episodes from your topic of choice, but will not be able to skip through them or find specific episodes.

How much should you charge? $5/month sounds like a good number. It’s what I, and many others, pay for ‘Medium’ and I believe that’s a solid sweet-spot for platforms toting user-created content.

SHORTCOMINGS🤷🏽‍♂️

Despite my enthusiastic presentation of this potential business, I acknowledge that every idea has its shortcomings. Here are some for ‘Teachable Moments’.

• Lower Audio Quality for Listeners:

Part of the value prop for content creators is being able to do everything (from record to upload) right on the app within 15–20 minutes. Of course, this means that much of the ‘Teachable Moments’ content will be unscripted and may suffer from poor audio quality (background noise, filler words, etc.). This may make for a more authentic, conversational vibe that users end up really liking, but you can’t count on it.

• Smaller Viewership for Content Creators:

Podcasts use RSS Feeds so that their content can be listed and consumed in several different places (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, etc.). In the case of ‘Teachable Moments’, content created on the platform will be exclusively available to the platform’s user base. This is, for the most part, a very very good thing, but it may discourage content creators from adopting the platform since it will only be available to the Teachable Moments audience.

• Poorer Influencer Effect for Advertisers:

When I look up a product I learned of in an ad on ‘The Joe Rogan Podcast’, it’s not just because I liked the sound of it. It’s because Joe Rogan told me to. The ‘Teachable Moments’ advertising model (as explained in ‘Value for Advertisers’ section), while an upgrade in most cases, requires that companies create and read their own advertisements. You lose the influencer effect of having a content creator with a dedicated audience personally endorse your product.

Thanks for taking the time. Subscribe to my email list here to be the first to hear of new startup ideas to come!

Until next time…