Smash Notes
Podcasts summarized.
Smash Notes has always been a way to more interesting content from podcasts without spending hours of time, and now you can learn more, even faster. The newly pre-launched home page is designed in the style of Hacker News and Indie Hackers, and is designed to bring up the most interesting segments from all the podcasts around the world. https://smashnotes.com
Submission of new segments to Smash is still manual to ensure quality, but you can always help your fellow friends and podcasters by upvoting their content and making it rise to the front.
This is a beta launch, so DM me your thoughts and ideas, and I'll add them to the new feed. Let's play together!
An article I wrote on using url tracking to grow your audience and know where they are coming from got posted to Hacker News yesterday by someone who found it useful, and the post was on the front page from 2pm to about midnight. Pretty awesome in my book!
In the span of that time, I got 1556 new visitors and 63 new newsletter subscribers. I think that 4% conversion is actually really good because I never asked for emails on the actual post, so whoever subscribed first had to click on the home page, explore, and only then give me their emails.
The moral of the story is that sharing useful content yields results. Here's to writing more useful content!
When you grow old enough, it's time to launch on Product Hunt and experience the love or wrath of the crowd. Now that I've had time to work on Smash Notes more/less full-time for two months, I've gathered enough user feedback to launch, for real this time.
Is the product perfect? Not even close, but it's good, it's functional, and without you and the other users it is not going to get 100x better. They often say you have to launch while it's still ugly, but in practice it's a lot harder to do. Who wants to launch something that's ugly?!
Smash Notes is now in a place where I am still embarrassed, about the design, the lack of features, the fact that you still have to apply to list your podcast on Smash Notes... But I am also happy and proud of where's gotten.
Huge thanks to Kevin for listing Smash Notes, and now, I'd love to know your thoughts. If this is your first time on Smash, tell me what you like, what you hate, and what you'd want to see more of. if this is not your first time, how has it changed since last time?
Help me make the best product that it can be. Can I count on you?
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Hey Kirill!
Super cool product which I think can be great for both producers and users. There are so many podcasts I simply don't even listen to anymore because I cant stand having to scroll through all the fluff to get to the 'real deal'. Well done, have of course given you an upvote as well!-
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Thank you very much ! This is such excellent feedback, and exactly what I like to hear. Cutting through all the noise and getting to the real deal in a podcast episode, that's what Smash Notes is all about. Looking forward to hearing how you use it!
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Hi Kirill - really interesting product, as an avid podcast listener I can definitely see myself using it - just subscribed to the newsletter!
I just threw you an upvote and followed you on PH - would love to hear how you went about getting @kevin to hunt your product if you’re willing to share.
Hope to see Smash Notes hit the front page, congrats man!
Evan
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Thanks Evan, appreciate it. As you get the newsletters and read the front page, would appreciate if you could send any feedback (good or bad!) my way. It's really important that I keep making this better every day!
As per Kevin, we have a friend in common who's introduced us a while ago. I showed Kevin my product and he really liked it. So far, from our communications I can tell Kevin is really kind, approachable, and helpful. Highly recommend!
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Thanks to couple of our users, Smash Notes now has a new feed that is designed for endless binging of new podcasts. Just put your headphones on, and keep on listening, or click around when something catches your eyes. Here, I wrote about it in more details.
Much thanks to Rosie for organizing this AMA. I had fun answering all the question. Turns out, AMAs are harder than it looks. On one hand, you want to give a long and detailed answer, on the other, you should answer everyone's questions. It's like writing multiple blog posts in parallel, under time constrains. Fun!
The thread is open, so if you have anything else you'd like to ask, I will come back and follow up. Thanks to everyone who's already participated!
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Thank you!
It always feels good to get a mention from an external website. BetaList is a great example of an Indie website that's focused on a singular mission and has grown to a point where everyone wants to be on it. Smash Notes was featured on Beta list and it feels good. Very glad for their service.
If you want a quick feed of snackable podcast bits in your feed, it is now available @SmashNotes. Each segment plays directly inside your browser, right on Twitter, here's a good example. As long as Smash is getting new notes added to it, you get an unlimited stream of new interesting content, forever!
This is one of those features that were available for months, literally. Here's the very first smash embed about Brave Care, dated June 12th. For some reason I'd never found time to expose it to the public, until some friends reminded me that it would be a great idea.
Hope you like it. Simply follow @SmashNotes and see for yourself, and of course, please let me know how it works for you!
<3
K
I haven't been paying much attention to Google Analytics to date, but to get a better understanding of what people like to read, where they come from, and how long they stay ...etc, I started looking a little deeper. Turns out, in the last 4 months since the start of the project, the site's seen 90k page views. Might be a good time to start selling ads?
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I had the same idea but the doubt that people would be interested in the same content in a different medium (from audio to text). How many summaries do you have? I counted 39 which means 2,300 views per episode. That would be impressive.
At the end of the day, doing always wins over thinking. Good job!
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Oh yeah, there are definitely more than 39 episodes covered, and the traffic isn't equal. Some get all the traffic, and some get just a few bites. I don't want to share which ones are popular yet, as I have a few things to test first.
Thanks for the encouragement! I'll keep doing more faster and see where it leads. I too find it much easier to test ideas rather then hypothesizing them.
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Congrats, awesome work 🙌
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Thanks! If there's anything you'd like to see on Smash, let me know.
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This comment was deleted 4 years ago
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You are right. The general trends is upwards, so every week there are more visitors than the week before it, but there were a few massive spikes which were generally outliers. I am generally trying not to worry about ads, or sponsorships, until there's enough constant and growing traffic where the ad money would be a big deal.
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As I was writing the update that Smash Notes was hitting 15k visitors, the traffic was already passing 20k mark. What in the world was going on? Turns out, the site got ranked by Google, and ranked it did very well. But was it useful?
This is the story of what happened, what you might expect from Google traffic, and whether or not it has any effect on the business.
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thanks for sharing, although it seems this was a complete accidental ranking and with such a bounce rate one no doubt it will be shortlived.
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I would definitely disagree that it's completely accidental. I've had several sites spike, and remain at a higher level of organic traffic indefinitely!
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Both. On one hand, it was accidental in a sense that among all the search terms I expected to see, this was not one of them. On the other, if you go to Google and search
site:smashnotes.comyou'd see there are >8K pages already indexed, and according to Webmaster console the number is actually >16K by now. So however accidental it was, there is a lot of content (not yet available from home page) that is getting search traffic.All-in-all I agree that 10% non-bounce rate is low, and from those the conversion is not very good, but eve n 1% of 100k visitors is 1k conversions, so thinking of the long-term gain, it's overall positive.
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Traffic is starting to pick up rather well. SmashNotes has gone from just over 1k visitors 3 months ago, to 15k this month, and the month's not even over yet!
I am pretty sure it's going to slow down, but I'll high-five myself while it lasts. Tons of interesting content in the pipeline and lots of discovery features to come should all help to keep the pace going.
Thank you for following along :)
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Nice one Kirill - Can you share what's working best for growth?
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The post is up. The crazy story of how Smash Notes became #5 on Google.
https://smashnotes.com/updates/people-are-searching-for-porno-and-landing-on-my-podcast-website-why-
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Thanks Kirill - enjoyed it. good write up
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In this particular case Google is working out rather well. I am not going to share too much detail yet (writing a post about it), but some podcast segments got picked up and ranked well on Google, driving thousands of visitors.
On one hand, these users are not converting very well to either the podcast or the newsletter. On the other, they are consuming exactly the content they came for, which is great in my opinion.
All said and done, this is a both a fluke, and a window into the opportunity.
Btw, the number is now 25K+
The traffic's been up-and-up non stop. I had to boost server capacity to accommodate.-
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cool drop me a line when the posts out. would like to read - harry@marketingexamples.com
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Hi Kirill, would you mind sharing how did you grow the number of visitors?
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Sure thing. See my response to Harry above.
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