What I learned creating a podcast software

Hello Indiehackers,

I recently started a new side project called www.SearchPod.io that is a software for podcasters. I want to share everything I have learned and done so far as a second time founder.

MY BACKGROUND:

My first software company (still running) grew to 40k MRR in the first 2 months and continuing to grow since; however, I had a huge audience built. This is the first company and idea that I am building without an audience.

IDEA BACKGROUND:

I have a podcast for my business with roughly 50k downloads. I'm looking to grow my podcast and want to rank it in Google yet Wordpress sites are annoying and making a new podcast page every week takes too much time. I also wanted a way to showcase any offer or opt-in that I mentioned in the episode with ease.

THE SOFTWARE:

The software takes a podcasters RSS feed, creates a fully SEO optimized website for it, dedicated episode pages, sends the site to Google to be crawled and indexed, and will automatically update and refresh every time you post a new episode. The software is functional but missing a lot like the auto refresh and transcription. The selling point of this software is the automatic transcription (currently not automatic in the backend).

MARKETING IT:

The biggest issue is definitely marketing it because my audience that knows and trusts me is in a completely different industry. However, I have been talking to every podcaster that I know to get feedback and beta users. Inspired by things that don't scale, I used my software on Russell Brunson's marketing secret podcast and Jordan Peterson podcast. I then shared these sites on Facebook groups that love those people, and they absolutely fell in love with the site. I hope those sites will attract podcasters who learn about it through the powered by links. This is just my current test.

BIGGEST TAKEAWAYS:

1. Starting a software company is hard!
2. Talk to anyone and everyone about your SaaS even if you think they don't have use for it
3. Do things that don't scale (get the site functional, spend no more than a week on it)
4. Find your target audience and think of ways to reach them
5. Use your product to market your product if possible
6. Make user calls a mandatory part of the onboarding phase
7. Don't discount the product, but overdeliver and offer more
8. Don't spend a long time developing anything, use packages and components