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Supercast — Add a paid membership to your podcast
Supercast gives podcasters everything they need to sell subscription content to their listeners and build sweet, sweet recurring revenue without disrupting their ad-supported public feed.
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Glad you're building this. The podcast marketing, while relatively tiny compared to radio, is rapidly growing. We need more tools like this to support creators.
@rrhoover totally! Any suggestions for what you'd like to see from a podcaster's POV?
@aidanhornsby the big thing that every podcaster wants: distribution
There are very few options available, even for paid acquisition.
Thanks for hunting, @hnshah!
Excited to finally share Supercast with everyone. In a nutshell: it's everything a podcaster needs to switch from an ad supported model to listener supported subscription model. It lets you go from reading MeUndies ads to sweet, sweet independence and recurring revenue.
If you're curious about the story of how we accidentally started it, check out my blog post about how Sirius is savagely ripping off Howard Stern: https://medium.com/@awilkinson/h...
Poor guy is only making $90mm per year, when he should be making $228mm 😢
@hnshah @awilkinson as a trial, Tim Ferriss experimented with turning off ads and converting to a subscription model with exclusive content, AMAs for his paying listeners, etc. After a month, he sent an email explaining how the experiment worked and turned ads back on. This might be good for some additional revenue on the side for some podcasters though.
@hnshah @awilkinson @shahalica hey Ali! Tim's experiment was definitely interesting, and the data he shared fascinating. We feel he's a bit of an outlier, though — as he said, his audience has a *strong* preference for his ads. We've not found most podcast audiences to share that love!
As you hinted at, though, the two models don't need to be mutually exclusive: Supercast is perfect for podcasters who hate managing and reading ads, but it's also great for anyone who wants to offer their listeners a private, ad-free feed (and maybe throw In a few AMA or bonus episodes, too).
@hnshah @awilkinson @shahalica @aidanhornsby I think a key difference with Tim was that his audience wants product recommendations from him so the ads are not as abrasive as other podcasts.
@hnshah @shahalica I feel like Tim did it really oddly. He charged 3-6x the average and offered nothing in return (other podcasters do exclusive episodes, AMAs etc). I think he missed a huge opportunity.
It's like me starting a pizza restaurant that sells $25 slices. Nobody comes and I assume nobody likes pizza.
Hey folks! 👋
I wanted to give a little more background on why we built Supercast:
In our work helping podcasters at DoubleUp, we kept seeing content creators monetizing via subscription running into the same headaches:
1. Membership setups built from pieces that worked (sometimes), but didn't scale well, or always play nice together (there's a lot of places WordPress x membership plug-ins x a PayPal account x MailChimp can break)
2. Insanely high-friction onboarding for listeners to actually enjoy the content: No one wants to juggle copy-and-pasting a custom RSS link from email to their favourite podcast app (only some of which support private feeds, and few make them easy to add manually), or download new apps not designed for podcasts (Patreon, I'm looking at you)
2. No content analytics on private feeds(!). They had no idea how many people (or who) were actively listening, or who was sticking around.
3. Limited/no analytics on their subscription business metrics (total + recurring revenue, churn, LTV, etc) meant they were often flying blind and couldn't accurately predict or plan for growth.
4. Occasionally, listeners would share their subscriber RSS feed and other people would pirate it, racking up massive bandwidth bills for the podcaster.
5. No ability to target and easily send emails to their most engaged podcast listeners (let alone even thinki about any kind of re-activation/retention campaigns for those who had stopped listening).
We're huge podcast nerds with backgrounds in product, so we knew all of these problems can be solved with software. But, we saw that product just didn't exist yet.
So, we ended up building Supercast, with the help of some our friends in podcasting. We already have some big updates planned for analytics, powerful email integrations, and a couple of features to help podcasters create content. What other features would you like to see?
Hey guys, looks great and love the idea. But I have a question, how do you differentiate from someone like Patreon ?
@avery_schrader hey Avery! Thanks for the support. Patreon is a great platform for content creators generally, but it wasn't built with podcasters in mind.
Broadly speaking, it visibly sits in the middle of the creator <> fan relationship. For example, to support a creator on Patreon subscribers need to have a Patreon account. Not ideal for podcasters who want to actually own the relationship with their audience. We designed Supercast to get out of the way and help podcasters own that relationship directly (listeners don't need to sign up for an account that's visibly attached to a third-party platform).
Patreon also don't make it easy for subscribers to add your custom feed to their podcast app, for example: We've found that asking listeners to copy and paste an RSS URL from their email client to their favourite podcast app (hardly any of which make it easy or intuitive to actually subscribe to a custom feed) is so high friction most people just don't bother.
Supercast also offers far richer analytics designed specifically for podcasters.
We've included a comparison with Patreon on our site, more here: https://www.supercast.com/#why-s...
Awesome! and your caption says it all, love it!.
Just curious, How do you guys track fraud feed shares? If you are creating a unique feed link per purchase, then automatically limiting the number of downloads per link per period, and requiring their purchase key to listen further would reduce the fraud significantly I guess, than just alerting them.
The relationship between host and listener is a bit personal (unlike SaaS products) in some categories and reaching them about fraud when they just shared with a friend, seems not so great. But yeah, I believe its still in a good direction for enabling subscription model for podcasting.
@sravang Great question!
As you mentioned, we create a unique feed link per purchase. From there, we track multiple things including how many times an individual feed is downloaded, how many times each episode is downloaded, and how many IP addresses are used in all of these.
If you download 100 episodes on 5 IP addresses we’re not going to create an alert, but let's say you download 100 episodes on 100 IP addresses, we will send the podcast creator a usage alert and they can decide to ignore/suspend your feed.
@sravang totally agree with your point about the personal relationship and being cautious around fraud communications. We're focused on giving the podcaster the quickest heads up and as much context as possible about any feed abuse scenarios, so they can choose how to approach that communication with their member(s), as much as we are on enabling automated notifications and campaigns.
I signed up, but haven't gotten any email or anything yet, what is the standard time to be able to set up and start going?
@mastemine hey Logan, we'll get your account set up and get back to you shortly!
Cool stuff! Great to see more folks in the space - podcasting needs a podcasting business model with aligned incentives with listeners.
We started http://glow.fm out of the Acquired podcast, and have had overwhelming success with our subscription-only "Limited Partner" program. It now generates as much revenue as our sponsorships do.
For anyone thinking about adding subscription revenue to their podcast, you should! I'm happy to chat about what worked well for us (and all of the other podcasters now monetizing nicely on Glow). [Full disclosure - I'm now a Glow investor too :)]
@gilbert Ben, thanks for taking the time to check us out and support! It's great to hear that the subscription model works so well. We're big fans of your podcast!
This is really fascinating.
Podcasts have had too few ways to monetize. This is in contrast with China, where the podcast market is much larger--and advertising is a smaller share of its cash.
A lack of data is also a big challenge. The big podcast apps so far don't give a ton of data, though Spotify is a competitor here.
Very cool. Thanks for hunting, @hnshah!
@hnshah @ejzim yeah, the Chinese market is fascinating. Loved this video from Connie Chan @ a16z on that topic: https://a16z.com/2018/12/05/conn...
If you didn't see it, I think you'll find it super interesting.
The first thing I've seen in a long time that's actually exciting. Great work @awilkinson and team! PS we want to beta test for the relaunch of our podcast, Stacking the Bricks. 😎
thanks Amy, glad you love it! Please shoot an email to hello at supercast.com and we'll get you rolling!
This is a game changer!
I've been running my podcast for a while now but have struggled to build reoccurring revenue into my offering because the existing tools out there just don't work well enough together and it has a ton of friction for my listeners.
Supercast solves all these headaches in a super elegant way - I'm stoked to try this out and start building that sweet MRR!
@hkimia Thanks for the support! We're excited to see how Supercast can help you and your podcast.
This sounds awesome. I've supported podcasts on Patreon in the past, but always found it difficult to add their private feeds to my podcast app (sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't). I ended up not staying up to date on a few of them, but kept supporting the creators anyway. This looks like an awesome solution to that headache, and I can't wait to try it out on my own podcast as well!
Congrats @awilkinson, @aidanhornsby and team
Amazing team behind a trending opportunity for the future of audio. There's definitely a groundswell behind empowering the creator economy IE Shopify, Patreon, Etsy, SubStack etc. Love the vertical focus on this and marketing launch so far (pick a fight, community-first approach). Excited to see where you take this!
Wow! I think Supercast just answered my (and many other podcasters') monetization dilemma: how to generate and measure subscription revenue quickly, easily and securely. Can't wait to try it out!
Congrats on the launch, very cool! We’re in the middle of working on an open standard for improving the UX around access-controlled podcasts from any app , and it looks like Supercast would definitely benefit from https://www.producthunt.com/post.... I would love to hear your thoughts / get you involved in writing a final spec over at https://github.com/podpass/spec
Great to see the podcast space finally getting an upgrade. With so much great content being produced you think someone would have done this sooner.
Nice work to the Supercast team! Product looks great. Can't wait to see how it goes with the Meet The Mentor Podcast.
This looks super promising. It’s amazing that in 2019 podcasters’ revenue models are still basically limited to 1950’s style radio ads & maybe Patreon to some extent.
Supercast looks to legitimately disrupt a marketing channel that’s long been overlooked. Great job guys!
Well done 🤙🏻 Medium article was so good I had to share it with my favorite podcasters. Taking notes for my future product launches 🚀
Great product! The similarities between SaaS and subscription podcasting provide lots of opportunities for podcasters to monetize... IF they can figure out how to set up/test/maintain revenue models and properly integrate them with their stack. Love how this app has abstracted this allowing podcasters to focus on what they do best: producing content.
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