Pod Hunt

When I originally had the idea for Maker Podcasts I thought it would be a good way to promote Pod Hunt.

A bit of side project (of a side project) marketing.

I think the collections feature is now a good place, so I decided to post the Makers collection to Product Hunt. Figured this was an appropriate place to post the collection, given their audience.

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/maker-podcasts

I've also added another collection for design related podcasts:
https://collections.podhunt.app/design

Really excited to open this up to Pod Hunt users to see what collections they build.

Earlier this week I announced a new feature: Curated Collections.

Curated collections are another attempt at solving the problem of podcast discovery, still focused on podcast episodes and not podcasts as a whole, and a natural extension of what Pod Hunt is trying to achieve.

I wrote more about how I had the idea for a new website MakerPodcasts.com, and why I decided to build it as feature into Pod Hunt instead: https://practicalmvp.com/blog/announcing-maker-podcasts

I was trying to find new ways to promote Pod Hunt and Maker Podcasts seemed like a good way to do that, even as a separate site, but even more so as a feature of Pod Hunt itself.

I'm hoping this will increase the number of backlinks and help with the overall search engine rankings for Pod Hunt.

The first collection is called "Makers" and focuses on Makers who share regular updates on their journey building, launching and scaling their businesses.

https://collections.podhunt.app/makers

What other collections would you like to see?

Update on all the stats I've been tracking:

📄 Pageviews 51,624

🏠 Visitors 11,413

🙍‍♀️ Users 728

🐦 Followers 525

📼 Episodes 847

✉️ Subscribers 311

💵 Revenue (supporters) $470 ($39.17 MRR)

Pod Hunt: https://podhunt.app

I felt it was the right time to focus on promoting Pod Hunt instead of continuing to add more features at top speed.

After some thought I decided the best way to promote Pod Hunt would be on podcasts, shocking I know!

Anyone listening to podcasts is a potential user, anyone hosting podcasts is a potential user (and supporter). Even if I didn't make an appearance on a podcast, just reaching out and talking to more podcast hosts would have been advantageous.

I started by putting out a simple tweet (https://twitter.com/mubashariqbal/status/1174461817072103426) saying I was looking to be a guest on podcasts. I'm fortunate enough to have a number of podcast hosts in my Twitter followers, and a few reached out to arrange an appearance.

I took advantage of the recently created Podcasts group on Indie Hackers and followed up with a post there (https://www.indiehackers.com/post/let-me-be-your-guest-8fe09d1fe7), making the same offer. Finally I jumped at the chance to appear on the Indie Hackers podcast once again, have been on originally 2 years ago. Courtland made a post asking if anyone was free for an interview one weekend, and I offered to be a guest to talk about my progress with Pod Hunt.

I've scheduled 9 podcast appearances now, I've recorded 4 already and 2 have been published.

https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/121-quick-chat-with-mubashar-iqbal
https://smashnotes.com/p/smash-notes/e/special-interview-with-mubashar-iqbal-product-hunt-make-of-the-year-for-2016-and-founder-of-pod-hunt-will-robots-take-my-job-plus-80-other-projects

Early indications are that this will be a very affective way to promote Pod Hunt in the short term.

As well as the direct traffic of the podcast appearance I am hoping that the links from the podcast show notes will help with the SEO ranking for Pod Hunt. Long term I feel that will be best source of traffic for Pod Hunt, but as with all good things, that takes time!

Update on all the stats I've been tracking:

📄 Pageviews 40,970

🏠 Visitors 9,511

🙍‍♀️ Users 617

🐦 Followers 452

📼 Episodes 614

✉️ Subscribers 297

💵 Revenue (supporters) $370 ($30.83 MRR)

Pod Hunt: https://podhunt.app

This week the 500th user joined Pod Hunt to submit, vote and comment on podcasts.

Although I’ve had projects that received a lot more visitors this early (5 weeks since soft launch), Pod Hunt is the quickest to get to 500 users.

Pod Hunt uses Twitter for login, this is both good and bad.

Good because login/signup is very quick and easy for users, just a couple of clicks and they are done. No complicated forms to fill out or email address to verify before they are able to fully interact with the website.

It can also be bad because people worry about giving access to their account to other people. To help mitigate that worry, I made sure to only request the minimum read only access Twitter offers. Pod Hunt can't access any private information, and can't post anything on users behalf. Since I never intended to do those things it seemed like the obvious thing todo.

It is tempting to ask for more permissions than you need now because you may need them later, but I prefer to optimize for right now, unless I'm 100% sure I will need that in the future. In that case you also need to be clear with users why you are requesting permissions you don't appear to need based for the features you have.

Also, in the past I've tried to follow the practice of hiding features that visitors can't access, but not here.

For example, you need to be a logged in, authorized user to submit an episode. In the past I would have hidden the "Submit episode" button, because why show a visitor something they can't do.

However, how does a user know they can submit an episode if there isn't a button? 🔎 Yes you could replace the button with a signup call to action, but the call to action to submit an episode is so much stronger, that I think that encouraged more people to signup.

It's also very tempting to do things for your users early on. When people reached out about submitting their episodes, in the past I would have been tempted (I still was) to submit the episode for them.

I wanted to get content on the site, I wanted the first user interaction with Pod Hunt to be positive, but since login/signup was so easy here I encouraged people to submit the episodes themselves.

I see submitting episodes a core feature of Pod Hunt, and wanted as many people as possible to go thru the process to give me feedback. What was easy, what was hard, and what needed to be make clearer (thanks for the feedback everyone!)

Very happy to get to 500 users, and looking forward to getting the next 500.

Update on all the stats I've been tracking:

📄 Pageviews 31,926

🏠 Visitors 7,926

🙍‍♀️ Users 502

🐦 Followers 366

📼 Episodes 416

✉️ Subscribers 274

💵 Revenue (supporters) $345

If you haven't signed up, now is a great time...get me to 1000 users even quicker! 😀

https://podhunt.app

Although I hadn't planned to monetize Pod Hunt right away, I wanted to test if people would be willing to support the service before I invested a large amount of time into building it.

Before officially launching Pod Hunt I offered podcast hosts the ability to become a supporter for a small annual fee.

Being a supporter, enhanced the podcast profile, and displayed a supporter badge where ever the podcast was displayed. Not a large feature list, but enough to match the price.

Since this was a test, I decided to take a no-code approach. I created a subscription on Gumroad and linked to it from a page on the website. Whenever a new supporter signups up, I get an email.

I then update the podcast record in the website database to flag them as a supporter. All every manual, but it meant I was able to launch the feature in 1 night, and given the volume it's perfectly manageable.

All supporters signup for an annual subscription, so I'm dividing the revenue by 12 to get the MRR.

The Gumroad dashboard reports total revenue of $270, which equates to $22.50/m.

Although the package was aimed at supporters, a couple of users have subscribed because they like what Pod Hunt is doing!

Checkout the supporters:
https://podhunt.app/supporters

#nocode #gumroad

Today marks the one month anniversary of Pod Hunt (podhunt.app).

I'm very happy with what I've been able to develop, as well as the response to Pod Hunt.

Since the official launch last week, I've been focused crafting the roadmap for next 3-6 months of Pod Hunt.

The immediate focus (based on user feedback) is providing an episode preview.

I've been testing a few different ways to do this, and am conducting a Twitter poll (https://twitter.com/podhuntapp/status/1165635716392595456) to get more user feedback.

Since Pod Hunt passed some important milestones this weekend, I thought it would be a good time to share some more updated metrics.

📄 Pageviews 21,090
🏠 Visitors 5,397
🙍‍♀️ Users 414
🐦 Followers 282
📼 Episodes 284
✉️ Subscribers 224
💵 Revenue (supporters) $220

🚀 On Tuesday I launched Pod Hunt on Product Hunt. Things went better than I could have hoped for.

I had planned to wake up early and scheduled the hunt for 6am (est), I don't like to schedule posts to appear for when I'm not going to be around to respond to comments to share the page on social media.

⏰ I ended up not being able to sleep, so I worked on some last minute features instead 😀 I chatted with the PH team and they moved up the schedule, and it appeared on the homepage around 3:45am (est).

It had a little catching up todo, as there were some products already close to 50 votes. Slowly but surely Pod Hunt moved up the homepage, and by 8am it was in #1. It stayed there for the rest of the day.

Being around to share the page, really helps to get early traction. I had scheduled an email to go out around 9am to the newsletter and ship subscribers. Support from the subscribers made sure we'd stay #1.

Since we made it to the top 5, Pod Hunt would be included in the newsletter the next day. If we rank in the top hunts of the week, we'll be included in the weekly newsletter on Monday. Not sure if we'll make that yet, but keeping the fingers crossed!

Below are the stats thru the end of Thursday:

📄 Pageviews
17,107 +9,751 +132%

🏠 Visitors
4,364 +2,630 +152%

🙍‍♀️ Users
387 +176 +83%

🐦 Followers
264 +64 +32%

📼 Episodes
256 +58 +29%

✉️ Subscribers
187 +120 +180%

💵 Revenue (supporters)
$195 +94 +93%

(The changes displayed, are based on the pre-launch numbers I posted previously.)

I don't typically launch sites on Tuesday. That is the domain of well funded startups, and unicorns to announce new products. Pod Hunt felt different than other products and so I decided Tuesday was the right day, and ended up beating some well funded competition.

As I was setting up for the launch, I found out that I’d been selected to interview to possibly join Weekend Build program by Weekend Fund. They had received over 650 applications, so I sure the competition was very stiff.

Pod Hunt is still less than one month old, all things considered a very good launch, and a rewarding 28 days (no 🧟‍♂️ here).

After 30 days of building it's time to officially launch Pod Hunt, on Product Hunt off course:

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/pod-hunt

I know 30 days seems short, but as someone who typically launches in days (if not hours), this has been a slow and deliberate process.

I talked with a lot of users after the soft launch, 2 weeks ago, and tried to address the concerns they raised.

Pod Hunt is effectively a 2 sided market, and I wanted to make sure it worked for both the people creating podcasts and those listening to them.

I wanted to share some prelaunch statistics, so we have something to compare to later!

📄 Pageviews: 7,356
🏠 Visitors: 1,734
🙍‍♀️ Users: 211
🐦 Followers: 200
📼 Episodes: 198
✉️ Subscribers: 67

A new number to start tracking...

💵 Revenue: $101

Excited to see how the launch goes today!

Thanks to everyone for the support and helping me to get this far!

Updating my weekly metrics and noticed that Pod Hunt passed 5000 page views in total on Sunday.

Full stats:

📄 Pageviews: 5,081

🏠 Visitors: 1,284

🙍‍♀️ Users: 165

🐦 Followers: 164

📼 Episodes: 129

✉️ Subscribers: 58

The bulk of the traffic is coming from podcast hosts submitting their episode to Pod Hunt and then sharing the link on social media. I think that means Pod Hunt is "going viral" 🤣

Started seeing the first trickle of traffic coming from SEO, mostly people search for "PodHunt", where the website is ranking 3rd in the results. Made it to the first page for "Pod Hunt".

Almost ready for the official launch that will be coming next week!