34 minutes into interviewing ab, among the other things, the story of
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It is so wildly frustrating. I remember when Anchor launched and I was like, this doesn’t make any fucking sense. UGC audio doesn’t make any fucking sense. Why is everyone buzzing over this bullshit. But they were able to raise $M’s and VCs were kissing their ass. SV is so fucked
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They had acquisition offers without real PMF. You see this shit happen over and over in SV
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Minute 41, now has gotten to where Spotify makes the offer and agrees to sell. Totally glosses overall the interesting stuff like:
-how many users
-how much listening was happening (downloads)
-how much revenue
-how much money left
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There is no fucking way anchor was cash flow positive much less worthy of $15M investment. They pivoted from ugc to more different ugc to a slightly more modern libsyn. Even if they were picking up a majority of new podcast hosting, they most certainly weren’t getting most DLs
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Meaning they were winning the game of capturing the hosting of the least valuable podcasts on the market, going head to head with a super unsexy podcast hosting company; their TAM was whatever libsyn left on the table or lost to them
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Gonna pause for now and listen more but holy shit this makes me so mad
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Re Spotify focusing on content acq (exclusivity) and then creator tools, “Instagram and tiktok focused on creator tools first so there’s actually a lot of precedent for Spotify to do that”
The fuck!? Podcasts had already existed for 10+ years
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Also it’s such a stupid stupid strategy to take. “You’ll win podcasts if you just make it easier to create them”!?
Winning podcasts is consumer side. Demand side. ie the listening experience. ie personalized discovery and lowering friction for “what do I listen to now?”
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“our mission at anchor was to democratize audio (podcasts) and make it so anyone could record their voice and make a living off their art”. First of all, anyone already could do that (sure some extra friction) but they had to make *good* audio worth listening to
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That’s the hard part, not the fucking tools to record yourself (lol). That, as many things with podcasts, is a downstream optimization, not the bottleneck/wedge.
From my 2018 medium post and I’m sure many tweets long before that:
medium.com/@AlexCartaz/tw
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Re: the future of podcasts : “aren’t we nearing the point of content saturation? Isn’t there already too much to listen to?”
There isn’t some content cap for the medium. Did ppl just stop making content bc lots of content already exists in any other medium? No
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More content is good for the medium, and reinforces that discovery, not content creator, is the major bottleneck to unlocking all the potential in the podcast ecosystem. It’s making the dumb pipes smart and making it effortless for ppl to find stuff they really like listening to
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Audiences can always grow, NPS can always go up, CPMs can always go up, etc
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loves to make this claim that podcasts are facing existential threat and that soon video will eat podcasts
It’s just not true. Sure if video works for your podcast (and it doesn’t for all) invest in multichannel if you wan
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But the only reason podcasts have turtled along for 16 years or however long is bc their primary demand *is not a visual use case*. If FB competes for your 6 hours of daily leisure time, Netflix w sleep, etc. podcasts are uniquely off limits
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And that is because you can only listen will eyes busy mind free. Tasks like driving, cooking, cleaning, walking, running, working out, etc
Content can have many distribution channels but this remains true and until those use cases go away video will not eat podcasts
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like how much of Cartoon Avatars is consumed audio vs video?
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: ‘the future is video and YT and Spotify will be duking it out. I think Apple has pretty much left this scene”
Apple is still where the most podcast listening happens, for starters
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I think Apple’s position is incredibly flawed. Historically podcasts were never truly prioritized and consumer sw isn’t apple’s core competency. Also they have no way that I can see to solve personalized discovery (neither does Spotify tho).
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Not long after Spotify acquired Anchor (I was contracting for apple podcasts working out of their SF office when this happened) Apple acquired scout.fm (since made public)
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They expanded the number of product managers working on Apple Podcasts from 1 (in name only) to many (6-8). Scout fm’s whole thing has been AI/ML discovery. They never achieved it (no PMF whatsoever) but it appeared this was the premise for the acq (my conjecture)
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So apple definitely invested millions more into podcasts in reaction to Spotify but their app is nearly unchanged and still terrible. I wouldn’t say they’ve left the space tho; they are more in it than they ever were, which is just with tepid enthusiasm
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Oh here we go, now they’ve gotten to Clubhouse. Spotify acquired locker room (green room) not bc they thought live audio would work but bc if they were wrong and it did, they needed a horse in the race
Failing up must be so fucking nice 🤦♂️
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To be fair here, this is orders of magnitude better than twitter trying to acquire clubhouse for $4B and then a16z convincing its founders not to sell
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on the creator economy ‘the thinking was everyone could make a living off their art and that just wasn’t true. We saw this at anchor. 99% of creators don’t make any money or make v v little money.”
See anchor had the most new show creations and the least val marketshare
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I do like this though from : ‘I’m not sure if trying to increase the margins of the top 1% of creators who are already doing well is what we should be focusing on. I’m actually more interested in creativity and the supply and demand of everyone else”
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I wanna be clear here that I don’t dislike either Logan or Michael. But I’m very knowledgeable and opinionated ab podcasts and I don’t like when takes get airtime that are just plain wrong. And I also hate how much of the money that is spent on unlocking the potential of podcasts
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a noble and value and good proposition that many listeners, podcasters, and businesses could benefit from, is wasted on ppl who quite literally don’t know what the fuck they are doing
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