So, it’s been a while since I sat down to give an update. We have been plugging away to make this, once glimmer of an idea, come into reality. When we sat down in the beginning of December to work on PodClear, we thought it would be a small side project to work on a couple days a week, and might be something that would help out a small handful of podcasters. Things moved along a little faster than expected, and here we are 2 months later with a functional beta and over a thousand amazing podcasters signed up to give it a shot. We have been working at a feverish pace to get this out to all of you, respond to questions, iron out bugs and engage with the community as much as possible. We have learned so much from our beta users about additional important features, general preferences when it comes to audio and editing, how many interviews are actually taking place out there, and much more. We have spent hours each day thinking about and overcoming technical hurdles as well as dreaming up new ways to best engage with and help the podcasting community thrive.
The past two weeks have been a whirlwind of excitement and exhaustion. With a small team who also work full time (or more than full time) jobs, we have to occasionally be reminded to pace ourselves. When we began live call beta testing we were immediately met with an incredible amount of positive energy as well as a long list of bugs to fix, new features to build, and questions to answer. We are endlessly grateful to have been met with enthusiasm, patience, and support across the board as we build this software. We are consistently motivated by all the podcasters we have been lucky enough to connect with, and the love they have for sharing their content, improving and engaging the community, and giving great feedback about what they need, in an industry we feel has been greatly underserved in terms of attention and tools. We can’t express how cool it has been to work with the community to build this product and to solve a long standing frustration.
We have also been overwhelmed by the support we have received from the “startup community” and podcasters who have been kind enough to recognize us in their shows within the last few weeks. We were featured on BetaList and stayed on the “trending startups page” for a few days running. It was fun to have this coincide with our first beta calls as it really helped us ride this wave of excitement and show us there were more people interested than we originally anticipated. About one week later we launched on Product Hunt and had another boost of great feedback (and e-mails). We have been really impressed with the support from both BetaList and Product Hunt and absolutely recommend checking them out if you are interested to see great curated lists of tools and services people are working hard to create. We would also like to thank Ed Brophy, Elsie Escobar, Josh Muccio, and the Yoko Co. Podcast for featuring PodClear in recent episodes. We are excited to be guests on several other upcoming PodCasts as well. I will include links at the bottom of the page so you can check out the other cool things all these folks are up to!
I’m sure many of you are sitting there wondering “so…when can I ACTUALLY start using PodClear?” Our first course of action is to get approved by the app store and wrap our application in such a way that all of our beta testers won’t need to continually download new versions of PodClear, but will instead be able to receive those updates automatically as we work to stabilize and add features. Keep an eye on your inbox as we move forward and keep sending ideas our way. Thanks for all of your support, we are excited to make this happen!
Links:
http://edbrophy.com/
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/she-podcasts/id891885238?mt=2
https://dailyhunt.co/
http://www.yokoco.com/category/podcast/