Side project idea: How do you keep track of notes on podcasts?
I've been enjoying making my way through the Indie Hackers podcasts. One frustration I have is that I want to highlight something that's been said, or take a note associated with the sentence just spoken by the interviewee.
My ideal solution: Something like Medium's "top highlight" feature, associated with the podcast transcript. It's technically feasible but tricky enough to represent a real side-project.
If you look at this Quora post it really looks like there's no solution in this space: What's the most effective way to take notes on audiobooks or podcasts?. Proposed solutions are:
- Use pen and paper (doesn't work when you're on-the-move)
- Trying to cross-merge with Evernote (doesn't pause the audio or import what's been said)
- Use the Voice Recorder app to capture sound output (srsly?)
- Personally I've used daft solutions like taking a screenshot on the phone showing the time signature. (It doesn't really work)
I'd love to work on this as an indie hack, but I don't have any capacity. Anybody who agrees with this pain point is welcome to take the idea and run with it. Or suggest alternative solutions?
I've actually built Podclipper to tackle this problem (https://www.podclipper.com). You can try a live demo on the landing page.
Podcasts subscribe as a service for their listeners, and benefit when clips are shared to social media, because they're presented as engaging and playable pull-quotes.
As a listener wanting to take notes... you can simply store clip urls to revisit later (i.e. in a file, Evernote, etc.). In the future, I'm hoping to offer "highlights" like you suggest, but need to work my way there.
The Indie Hackers podcast doesn't integrate Podclipper yet, but perhaps you want to drop @csallen a note that you'd love this feature 😜
Hey Levi! Really impressive, I love it.
Have you considered taking a more aggressive approach to getting user adoption? Right now you have to convince the publisher and then convince the user to opt in to your app. It's the two-sided market problem.
I wonder if there's a clever route here like Just Eat, who manually added restaurant menus at first in order to capture the traffic and own the channel, until restaurants had no choice but to opt-in to their ecosystem. (This is off-the-top-of-my-head)
Thanks! Keen observation on the two-sided market problem. Definitely struggled with this.
I'm currently pitching to podcasts primarily as a marketing tool. Enabling them to share excerpts to their own social feeds. They see value in this... and the purchase is justified by considerable labour savings vs alternatives, as well as the novel and well-received listener experience w.r.t. the clip format.
The plan is to turn focus to listener adoption once enough shows adopt as a marketing tool, and made Podclipper available to their audience as a byproduct.
I'd considered an intermediation-style approach, but couple issues:
I'm bootstrapping this, and there's significant compute costs to sync audio and transcript. I've invented novel tech which syncs an order of magnitude cheaper and faster than alternatives, but would still be prohibitively expensive to operate this way.
Smart strategy, but not my personal style. I prefer a friendly working relationship with customers, than have them reluctantly purchase because I managed to intermediate (ala Yelp, Just Eat, etc.).