The Official Listen Notes Blog

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A note to indie hackers: Professionalism is not optional

March 7, 2026 · Call for professionalism among new entrepreneurs.

Sharding Web Traffic with Subdomains to Better Leverage Cloudflare CDN and WAF

Sharding Web Traffic with Subdomains to Better Leverage Cloudflare CDN and WAF

Dec. 10, 2025 · Listen Notes shards traffic by subdomain to apply smarter Cloudflare caching and WAF rules, improving performance and security with fewer trade-offs.

Tech & Non-Tech Stacks to Run Listen Notes (2025)

Tech & Non-Tech Stacks to Run Listen Notes (2025)

Feb. 18, 2025 · How we run Listen Notes?

Use BetterStack to Replace PagerDuty, Datadog, and Atlassian Statuspage—and Cut Costs by 90%

Use BetterStack to Replace PagerDuty, Datadog, and Atlassian Statuspage—and Cut Costs by 90%

Feb. 6, 2025 · Listen Notes replaced Datadog, PagerDuty, and Statuspage with BetterStack, significantly cutting costs while retaining monitoring, alerting, and public status pages.

Notebook LM: A threat to the Podcasting World

Notebook LM: A threat to the Podcasting World

Oct. 7, 2024 · Bad for Listeners. Bad for Podcast Creators. Bad for Advertisers. Bad for Hosting Platforms.

Why Podcasts Are My New Wikipedia —the Perfect Informal Learning Resource

Why Podcasts Are My New Wikipedia —the Perfect Informal Learning Resource

Jan. 11, 2024 · In this article, I explain why podcasts replaced a lot of my Wikipedia usage for informal learning. I also talk about how I listen to five-plus hours of podcasts every day!

How to build a ChatGPT plugin: A case study using PodcastAPI.com and serverless Cloudflare Pages for AI-powered podcast discovery

How to build a ChatGPT plugin: A case study using PodcastAPI.com and serverless Cloudflare Pages for AI-powered podcast discovery

June 20, 2023 · We'll use the Listen Notes ChatGPT plugin as a case study to illuminate the process of creating a ChatGPT plugin.

A practical way to upgrade Postgres major versions with near-zero downtime

A practical way to upgrade Postgres major versions with near-zero downtime

Aug. 15, 2022 · During two major Postgres upgrades, we experienced zero downtime for “read” operations, and less than 1 minute downtime for “write” operations.

How do people use Listen Notes?

How do people use Listen Notes?

July 4, 2022 · I’ve got a bunch of emails from Listen Notes users. Now I have a better understanding what people use Listen Notes for.

Instead of Monthly Billing, a Daily Alternative for SaaS

Instead of Monthly Billing, a Daily Alternative for SaaS

June 24, 2022 · Our website, Listen Notes (the best podcast search engine), provides daily billing for our Premium Membership customers.

How I accidentally built a Podcast API business

How I accidentally built a Podcast API business

Dec. 20, 2021 · In this article, I’ll share with you the journey of building this API business, the technology behind it, and hopefully you can learn one thing or two and build your own API business in the future.

How to evaluate a 3rd party RESTful API?

How to evaluate a 3rd party RESTful API?

Nov. 26, 2021 · 1, To build or to buy? 2, Can this API provide features you need? 3, Is this API both stable and scalable? 4, How easily can you talk to a real human employee of the API vendor?

What is Listen Notes? Why does Listen Notes need to make money?

What is Listen Notes? Why does Listen Notes need to make money?

Oct. 2, 2020 · Essentially, Listen Notes is an independent podcast database that has three UIs (User Interface) to access the data.

Numbers of tech companies when they were small

Numbers of tech companies when they were small

May 8, 2020 · This is a blog post that I wish it existed when I started my startup journey. I like collecting numbers (e.g., website traffic, domain name price, revenue…) of tech companies when they were small.

Listen Notes for Chrome

Listen Notes for Chrome

Dec. 1, 2019 · We just launched a Chrome extension! You can search podcasts / episodes right from your Chrome browser without opening ListenNotes.com.

Introducing Llamacorn!!!

Introducing Llamacorn!!!

Sept. 21, 2019 · I went to Peru last month and saw Llama… After I came back, I decided to make Llama the mascot of Listen Notes.

Some API improvements

Some API improvements

May 20, 2019 · Better documentation. Better performance. Bigger thumbnail images.

How to submit a new podcast to Listen Notes database

How to submit a new podcast to Listen Notes database

April 9, 2019 · If you are a podcaster or you are a podcast hosting service, you may want to submit new podcasts to Listen Notes database.

Listen API v2: simple pricing & same endpoints

Listen API v2: simple pricing & same endpoints

March 27, 2019 · We just launched a new(-ish) version of Listen API. We call it “Listen API v2”.

Good enough engineering to start an Internet company

Good enough engineering to start an Internet company

March 11, 2019 · I gave a guest lecture in an undergraduate software engineering class (CSCE431) at Texas A&M University a few days ago. Now I’ve turned this lecture into a blog post here, and hopefully some people on the Internet will find this useful.

Listen Explorer: Get similar podcasts

Listen Explorer: Get similar podcasts

Jan. 22, 2019 · The idea is simple: You pick a few podcasts, and you’ll get recommendations for similar podcasts.

Listen Real-Time: Like Google Analytics Real-Time, but for podcast episodes

Listen Real-Time: Like Google Analytics Real-Time, but for podcast episodes

Dec. 30, 2018 · Everyone’s saying “podcast discovery is broken”. Okay, here’s another way to discover podcasts — Check out what other people are listening to right now.

Just Listen™: A simple podcast app for the 99%

Just Listen™: A simple podcast app for the 99%

Dec. 20, 2018 · A very simple & very opinionated podcast app from Listen Notes: Just Listen™!!

Why a standalone podcast search engine website?

Why a standalone podcast search engine website?

June 29, 2018 · Why Listen Notes is a podcast search engine website? Not an app? Not a podcast player?

Why Listen Notes doesn’t allow users to review podcasts?

Why Listen Notes doesn’t allow users to review podcasts?

May 14, 2018 · There are ideas that sound wonderful, on paper. Allowing users to review podcasts is such an idea.

Postmortem on Apr 22, 2018 outage

Postmortem on Apr 22, 2018 outage

April 26, 2018 · On Apr 22, 2018, Listen Notes website was down for ~4 hours and I lost 10 hours production data. This is the biggest outage since I launched Listen Notes as a side project last year.

The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company

The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company

Jan. 24, 2018 · The tech stack of Listen Notes, the best podcast search engine and database.

My Y Combinator interview experience (W18)

My Y Combinator interview experience (W18)

Jan. 12, 2018 · I want to be transparent on the process of building Listen Notes, as a product and as a company. If eventually I declare failure of this startup thing, these written documents may still benefit people who come from Google search :)

Listen Later ™ is like Instapaper or Pocket, but for podcasts!

Listen Later ™ is like Instapaper or Pocket, but for podcasts!

Dec. 19, 2017 · I just built a simple feature, called Listen Later. You can tell what it is from the name :) Yes, it’s like “Watch Later” on YouTube or “Read Later” on Pocket.

Migrating Listen Notes servers to AWS

Migrating Listen Notes servers to AWS

Oct. 28, 2017 · Well, Listen Notes was a side project of mine. I run all my side projects on Digital Ocean, because it’s cheap & convenient to set up. I decided to migrate the whole backend infrastructure to AWS.

Podcast in 2017 is just like Web in 1997

Podcast in 2017 is just like Web in 1997

Oct. 9, 2017 · Podcast in 2017 & web in 1997 are similar in three aspects: number of users, ad spendings, and contents.

How to use Listen Notes from Chrome address bar?

How to use Listen Notes from Chrome address bar?

Oct. 3, 2017 · Click “Add” in the “Other search engines” section. Fill these three things.

Listen Notes 2.0: laying the foundation of future fast iteration

Listen Notes 2.0: laying the foundation of future fast iteration

Sept. 27, 2017 · Last week was the first time that I got a chance to work on my projects full-time. It was a very productive week. So, here comes Listen Notes 2.0.

What’s next for Listen Notes?

What’s next for Listen Notes?

Sept. 20, 2017 · The very first official Listen Notes blog post! We used to have a mini-roadmap :)

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