PodShrink

Hey IH 👋

I'm Mike, solo founder of PodShrink.

The problem I had: I was subscribed to 15+ podcasts and finishing maybe 2 per week. The queue kept growing. I'd see an interesting 2-hour Joe Rogan episode or a deep-dive Huberman Lab and think "I'll get to it" — and never did.

Speed listening at 2x wasn't cutting it. Skipping episodes felt like I was missing out. I just wanted the key points in a format I could actually listen to.

What I built: PodShrink takes any podcast episode and generates a short, narrated audio summary. You pick an episode, we transcribe it, summarize the content with AI, and deliver a 5-10 minute audio file you can listen to like a regular podcast.

It's not a transcript. It's not bullet points. It's an actual listenable summary with a narrator voice — same podcast format, just condensed.

How it works under the hood:

• Pull public RSS feeds for 1,000+ shows

• Transcribe episodes

• AI generates a text summary preserving the key points, arguments, and conclusions

• Text-to-speech converts it into narrated audio

• User listens on the web app (download available on paid plans)

Where I'm at:

• Launched publicly in February 2026

• 1,000+ shows in the catalog

• Free tier + two paid plans ($8/mo Standard, $16/mo Pro)

• Solo founder, self-funded, built as a side project

• Stack: Next.js + Express + PostgreSQL + Redis, hosted on Railway

What's working:

• People actually use it. The use case resonates immediately — everyone has a podcast backlog

• True crime and business podcasts are the most popular categories (long episodes = most value from summaries)

• Content marketing is driving early traffic (daily blog posts + Twitter)

What I'm figuring out:

• Conversion from free to paid — still early and optimizing

• Cost management — AI processing isn't free, so per-user limits matter

• Whether podcast creators will love this (more listeners staying engaged with their content) or hate it (derivative use of their episodes)

Revenue model: Subscriptions via Stripe. Free users get a handful of summaries per month. Paid plans unlock more summaries, premium voices, downloads, and priority processing.

I'd love to hear from you:

• Would you use something like this? What podcasts would you summarize first?

• Any podcast listeners here who've tried to solve this problem differently?

• If you're a podcast creator — how do you feel about AI summaries of your episodes?

Check it out: podshrink.com (https://podshrink.com/)

Happy to answer any questions about the tech, the business model, or the journey so far. 🎧