Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…If you want to discuss something, you have to discuss this. I will say it's incredible how there was a thing with clear product market fit that was unloved, unmaintained, and hard to discover. In our world of podcasting, that was Apple Podcasts and the small team at Apple that was looking after it. They didn't turn it into a real business. There wasn't a prioritization at the company. As a podcaster, it was always hard to get in touch with someone or be like, can I get editorial on this thing? I don't even know. It's this weird black box. It's basically just like a directory, where it's a key value store, on the left side, they have a URL, and on the right side, it just points to my RSS feed. Then Spotify comes along and just like, oh, well, we have tons of users, we're just going to expose this right on the main feed. So much of our growth in the last year or two years has come from Spotify, specifically because more people are listening to podcasts on Spotify. There's some cannibalization, but there's an enormous amount of brand new markets because it's easy to find. As a total neophyte to this world, we have both been just gobsmacked by what percentage of our users are coming from Spotify. I would never have predicted how big of an audience was on Spotify because it just didn't occur to me that Spotify had done that well in podcasting, until we started releasing these episodes, and we're like, wow, more than 50% of our audience is coming from Spotify.…

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