Podcast Player + Community

Vision 🎙️

I love podcasts! And I wish that I could connect more strongly with fellow listeners who have similar interests. Think podcast player meets Reddit / FB groups... I want the ability to have communal playlist well as a forum to discuss what we're listening to.

I probably can't do all of that myself (yet), but I can probably build a niche podcast player that attempts to service a podcast genre well. If I were to see any traction then I would know my hypothesis of podcast player + FB group might be onto something... 🤔

The goal of the player is:

• 🔍Explore locations and events from episodes
• ✍️Contribute to show notes like Wikipedia
• 🔥 Connect with other fans

Enter HistoryCast: historycast.glideapp.io, a podcast player with a focus on history. Users can comment, contribute to episode pages, and support creators.

Risks 🚨

There's still substantial risk on why this won't thrive from a product standpoint. Any thoughts how I can hack around some of these?:

• Users can't search for "all" podcasts in the world

  Currently, I have a form where users can submit podcast requests. I could look into an Integromat integration that takes these submissions and then queries Feedly for hits. Then, take the top hit and connect its RSS feed to the player.

• Doesn't support 1.5x, etc listen speeds.

  Personally, that's a must! I only listen to podcasts in 1.5x speed.

• A user can't "live" add locations to the episode page.

  Users submit a form to the page, and I'll have to take a stab at which episode
  the notes are affiliated with. Glide doesn't support form buttons tagging which screen the submission comes from.

First Users? 👶

As far as getting users to the platform, there are a number of disparate subreddits for history podcasts. The goal is to aggregate them under one banner: HistoryCast. I suspect Reddit is the best distribution platform for getting users.

Advice? 👇

History might not be the right play here. I love history, but should I focus on building -the- Joe Rogan podcast player, -the- Barstool Sports podcast player, etc? These are podcasts that have huge audiences and well-defined user groups. Get a small fraction of these users, and that's still a lot! The risk with this approach is that Reddit and YouTube seems to meet this audience's needs. A history podcast player would aggregate across smaller podcast audiences.

If there is a better way to do that than what I am doing currently, I need the feedback!