I began working on Listen Notes full-time in September 2017. As I write this, it is the 3-year anniversary! Initially, Listen Notes was a very simple, single-page web app, which allowed you to search podcast episodes. This screenshot displays the very first version of Listen Notes in 2017.
Initially I built Listen Notes for myself, because I couldn’t find the right tool to fit my podcast listening needs. I dislike the idea of subscribing to podcasts, because there are just too many podcasts that exist. It’s not worth listening to every single episode of most podcasts merely to find the portions of interest. I needed a tool to help me find individual episodes across all podcasts in the world.
Fast forward three years, and as you can see, Listen Notes has evolved a lot. It’s way more than a podcast search engine web app now.
So what exactly is Listen Notes?
Essentially, Listen Notes is an independent and huge podcast database that has three UIs (User Interfaces) to access massive amounts of podcast data:
The first UI is the website ListenNotes.com. That’s where you can search podcasts and episodes, create playlists with Listen Later and clips with Listen Clips. Or, discover interesting niche podcasts in various ways. The website is for most human users to use via a web browser.
Search podcast episodes on listennotes.com
The second user interface is Listen API, which can be integrated into an app or a website to programmatically access the podcast database. This enables a lot of interesting use cases. It is poised to accelerate the innovation of the podcast industry long term. This UI is for developers or companies to use via computer code.
Use Listen API to search podcasts
The third user interface is the spreadsheet (e.g., Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets…), SQL, or other database interface. Anyone can export podcast metadata in the CSV or SQLite format. This UI is primarily for white collar professionals who are comfortable with the spreadsheet or SQL.
Explore podcast data in SQLite
Listen Notes is an independent podcast database, not affiliated with any big companies, such as Apple, Google, Spotify, or Amazon. Those huge firms may have different motivations for creating podcast-related apps / websites and are unable to serve certain use cases well.
They primarily focus on “app” experience. That’s why their websites push you to download their apps. This can be very annoying if your goal is to quickly find a few podcasts. It’s also crazy-making if you’re using a desktop computer to research certain topics, and you’re constantly led to download an app.
Products that are deemed low-priority to big companies can easily be shut down, thanks to reorganizations, layoffs, and goal shifts. Check out the Google Graveyard to witness all the Big G products that have died.
How does Listen Notes make money?
We make money via the above three UIs:
1. On the website, we run a few ads and hide some advanced features behind the paywall (Premium Membership).
2. We provide a paid plan for the podcast API.
3. And we charge a fee for each podcast metadata export.
From our data, 99.9% of Listen Notes website visitors have never seen the paywall or any money or business related pages. Far fewer than 0.1% of our website visitors actually paid us any money at all.
Why does Listen Notes need to make money?
It may not be obvious to everyone (especially kids), but we human beings (especially adults) need to make money to survive in this world.
Many people would be surprised to learn that there are real human beings behind Listen Notes, which is both an online service and a real company. This is totally understandable. Even though we are in the 21st century now, most people don’t place any value on intangible things. An image, website, or software in general is an intangible thing. We can’t touch a piece of software or hold it in our hands. Thus, it’s hard to imagine how it is built and why it has any monetary value.
In fact, running a relatively popular online service like Listen Notes is not cheap. Us human beings behind Listen Notes need money to survive. And we need to pay for servers and other costs to keep the website up and running 24/7.
A good thought exercise would be: Why does Google, a seemingly simple website, need to employ 120,000 full-time employees around the world?
Why does Uber, a tiny app (smaller than your thumb!) on your phone screen, have around 30,000 full-time employees?
If each employee costs $200,000 - $300,000 on average annually (including all taxes, perks, and benefits), you can calculate how much the company needs to spend on human resources alone!
Basically, we could run Listen Notes in two ways:
1. Make Listen Notes completely free for everyone. This would leave very limited ways to generate revenue (e.g., ads). Eventually, we’d run out of money and shut down Listen Notes as an online service and a company. If you’ve used Listen Notes, do you want Listen Notes to shut down? We've already seen some other podcast search engine services and companies disappear, e.g., Audiosear.ch, FluidDATA.
2. Charge 0.1% of all Listen Notes website visitors, and make Listen Notes free for the other 99.9%. Under that business model, we can run Listen Notes sustainably. We can continue to improve Listen Notes long term while keeping it up and running to serve more and more people in the world.
I don’t know how you feel, but personally I prefer the second method. Yes, it’s not ideal. Spending money is bad. Free is good. People love free things. However, this allows Listen Notes to remain free for almost everyone!
Many folks assume all information on the Internet should be free (how about this or this?). Well, when we find a way to run Listen Notes at $0.00, we’ll be more than happy to provide Listen Notes as a 100% free online service. Free means we need to discover how to make human operators of Listen Notes survive without worrying about money. We would need to avoid server fees and other infrastructure costs. If you know the answer, please let us know :)
Until that sweet day, we have to live in this imperfect virtual world created by us.
