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9 Podcast Product Ideas for Indie Hackers

I’ve previously written 7 Ideas for Newsletter Products.

If you know a tool exists that solves these problems, drop it in the comments.

If you are a podcaster, drop some ideas into the comments for other indiehackers to try to build for you.

Late 2019 I ran a podcast as part of my newsletter: Influence Weekly

There were two distinct parts. One was me, just me, talking about the news of the week. The other was companies in influencer marketing reacting to that week’s newsletter. I kept these all asynchronous without having to do calls or schedule appointments. It worked for me. The podcast didn’t work for me though. I shut it down at the end of 2019 after doing it for 20 weeks.

Also I guest on a podcast probably every 3 months. So I have some what of that perspective too.

The tool I used to produce and distribute the podcast was Substack.

WTF?

Yes, I used substack to run a podcast.

WHY?

Because I already was sending a newsletter through substack. I sent an early preview of my weekly free newsletter to paid subscribers. And they have a feature in beta to do podcasts. When I tested it out, I loved the simplicity of it. It’s in my browser, It’s already in a newsletter format. I write a few “notes”. Hit play. Start to record. Stop recording. Edit the notes and send. Done.

NOW

There's an incredible amount of passion and energy in the podcast space right now. At this exact moment.

I'm thinking about starting an Indie Hackers podcast network.
Cortland on Sept 21st, 2020

55% (155 million) of the US population has listened to a podcast.
via Podcast insights

Andreesen Horowitz wrote about investing in Podcasting in 2019 saying then there were 700k podcasts, while now Podcast Insights says 1M podcasts exist. 42% YOY growth in the creator market.

As far as advertising goes, Podcasts are the least monetized medium per minute.

Not only is the industry big, it’s growing and there are gaps to be filled.

Sources

I’m using 2 main sources for maps of the industry. A16z’s Market Map and the Audio Lumascape

9 Ideas

  1. Episode Highlights / Sampling
  2. Syndication / Renting
  3. Micro Production
  4. Guest Concierge
  5. About Me
  6. RadioLab for The Rest of Us
  7. Cameo for Podcasting
  8. Choose Your Own Adventure
  9. Better Analytics

1. Episode Highlights

There are great tools to produce audio snippets in visual and video form. But how can I highlight sections and send those through a process? Seems like I need Zapier, BannerBear, and something else.

Snipping parts of audio seems like a truly impossible task right now. What If I wanted to curate podcasts? Can there be a tool to curate podcasts into a single sampled piece? Obviously some copyright issues. Which might be solved with the next problem’s solution.

2. Syndication / Renting

Can I rent someones RSS feed?
Can a podcast rent to me their audience? If someone wants to rent my audience, I’d like to add a short intro before the episode to explain what’s going on.

3. Micro Production

Other than upwork and fiverr, there’s not a verticalized audio engineer board. Nor is there a way to hire talent on demand.

Creating a podcast review service could increase the quality of those who want advice on what to do to make things better.

I made Newsletter Review in about 30 minutes with Gumroad and use Loom to send videos. Charge $40 to listen to the two last episodes. Suggest audio corrections, topics to cover, ways to market the podcast.

4. Guest Concierge

Create a dossier on my next guest. Can I go back and forth with my guest prior to the show to build up a few great questions they want to answer and will be good for my audience? So often podcasts are dulled by the two people speaking getting to know one another. This would increase the quality of the show and increase the specificity of the content they go over.

This is sort of a feature that matching services should do. If you as an indiehacker make this, you might be acquire-hired by spotify or one of these services.

5. About Me

Can I hire someone to produce a podcast about me? Schedule 10 episodes per quarter. I set up the topics, and potential guests from my contacts lists. Make it so I can schedule podcasts as easily as Calendly. Set 2 hours a week, find people who can fill those slots. Record our convo and put out the podcast. Lots of busy professionals, solo-founders, CEOs would love to pay for this.

If the customer does have a bit of time on their hands they should be able to edit easily. Which brings me to my next product idea

6. RadioLab for The Rest of Us

Some podcasts are just absolutely amazeballs. Well researched, well produced, well edited. Can you do that for an average joe? Kapwing is doing for video what someone should do for podcasts.

7. Cameo for Podcasting

So much podcasting is about getting more downloads, more subscribers, more more more. What about less?
Why would you produce a podcast for one person?
If you were told to research one thing, or go through some process, for 20 to 40 hours and then produce a 1 hour audio review or audio summary. You would, for $1,000? I bet there's a small and rich market for this.
Sorta like a Podcast for a Billionaire.

8. Choose Your Own Adventure

Can I make short pods that can be listened to in different order based upon active choices. Or can a listener be an active character with traits that build upon each section?

9. Better Analytics

Downloads suck!
What other analytics should podcasts have?
% listens? Unique Listens?
While Spotify is going to dominate this, where’s our indie tools? Something like SimpleAnalytics for Podcasts would be killer right now.

  1. 2

    Nice list. I'm working on Podcast Ping: Uptime monitoring for Podcasters!

  2. 2

    I'm actually building the first idea there but initially I'm focusing on video highlights for podcast episodes release and automatically posting that to twitter or Instagram. Still figuring out the messaging to validate the idea here https://podclip.tk. Overall great list. The last one especially is pretty intresting.

  3. 1

    Great article. Ik this was three yrs ago but hello.podium.p a g e does shownotes

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