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.

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?

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.

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