Introducing Buzzsprout for iOS!

Join us as we unveil the long-awaited Buzzsprout iOS app that's set to revolutionize your podcasting workflow! We deep dive into everything you want to know, from why we decided now was the time to make an app, to what features we love about it, and ideas for future implementations.

Then, we've got a story that’ll make you think twice about where to host your podcast. In a candid discussion on the pitfalls and triumphs of podcast hosting, we empathize with Spotify's recent hiccups and offer our own insights on maintaining a podcaster-focused service. Also on the docket is a lesson in brand protection, born from a trademark tussle within our own community.

View the discussion thread on Twitter!

📣 Sound-Off Question: How are you using snapcasts? We'd love to see what you're doing! To have your response featured on our next episode, send us a text at 855-951-4230!

Links mentioned in this episode:

Introducing Buzzsprout for iOS!

• Buzzsprout on the App Store
• Join the Android wait list
• Podnews Weekly Review Interview

Spotify for Podcasters Deletes Successful Podcast

Podcaster Wins Trademark Dispute

Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro: This is the Show
• 0:38 Introducing Buzzsprout for iOS!
• 32:20 Spotify Deletes Successful Podcast
• 46:13 Podcaster Wins Trademark Dispute
• 54:23 Sound-Off!
• 1:07:00 Post Show: Donut Throwing

Transcript

Alban: 0:01

OK, do that. Do that she is doing it right now. I love that. This is one of my things. It's like we we're doing this show and this starts to the show and I'm like, yeah, that's a good topic, bring that up in the show. This is the show. This is the show.

Kevin: 0:15

You got headphones on. You're sitting in front of a microphone. We're talking to each other.

Alban: 0:19

We don't know. How do I know? We don't do any other thing.

Kevin: 0:22

There's no other meeting that we have on every two week basis. That is anything like this. You should never be confused when you're in this environment. You're looking at Riverside, you're looking at Jordan and I. You have headphones on your front of a microphone. That's the show, bro.

Jordan: 0:41

Welcome back to Buzzcast podcast about all things podcasting from the people at Buzzsprout. I'm your host, Jordan, and joining me, as always, are my co-hosts, Alban and Kevin. Hey, guys. Hey Jordan.

Jordan: 0:52

It's been a big week for us because we have just released Buzzsprout for iOS, and this is one of those projects that is just so fun and exciting that you just want to go and tell everyone you know that you're working on something like super awesome, and so I, for one, am really relieved that we finally pushed out this app and it's out in the world and it's getting lots of downloads, and this is very exciting.

Kevin: 1:16

Yeah, I feel the same way. I mean, this was a project that spanned many work cycles for us and some people who know us well have noticed I've heard from, like Dave Jones has mentioned a few times. Like I know you're working on something because we haven't seen any updates in a while, which means you're cooking something up.

Kevin: 1:34

But, yeah, haven't told anybody. We've kept it completely private. We did give early access to a few Buzzsprout customers who we met in Orlando at the end of January who were at PodFest. It weren't really beta testers because things were pretty buttoned up at that point. We'd done a lot of internal testing and felt pretty good about it, but we didn't have every feature that we wanted in the app for launch in there yet and so we just called it early access. But outside of that group of about 50 or so, maybe 60 people, no one else thought Buzzsproutt knew about it. So I kind of feel like it's like an Apple moment for us, like we worked on something for six, seven months and kept the secret.

Jordan: 2:11

We got to get a video of your keynote speech, like in your turtleneck and Levi's.

Alban: 2:19

It's pretty bold of Dave Jones to say I know you're building something big because you haven't released something in a while. Imagine how much that backfires if we weren't building something big Right. It was really like no dude, we totally broke like massive systems. We've just been fighting fires this whole time. Yeah.

Kevin: 2:38

No, he said things at Buzzsprout have been quiet, which leads me to believe you guys are cooking something up.

Kevin: 2:43

And so, yeah, I confirmed we were working on something. I told him that at the time, but I was like nothing of super interest to him, like it doesn't touch the podcasting 2.0 space very much right now, but we've got some really cool ideas, yeah. So I mean we should get into it. But that's one of the things that's most exciting to us about this is it represents a new platform for us. So there's a whole new set of opportunities that are available, and so we had a set of features that we really wanted to focus on to bring this to market, and so we're going to talk about those in a second. But a big thing that shouldn't be overlooked is that it also just opens up a whole new world of possibilities to us now that we have access to Buzzsprout in a very convenient way, always with you on the go, and it's in this little mobile computer that has a whole bunch of functionality that isn't as available as convenient necessarily on a laptop or on a desktop computer.

Alban: 3:34

Kevin's really leaning into the turtleneck moment right now.

Jordan: 3:37

Yes.

Kevin: 3:38

That's right. We think you're really going to love it. I know I just listened to the Podn ews Weekly Review. Albin, you did an excellent job of representing Buzzsprout on the Pod News Weekly Review this week, so if anybody is listening to the show and doesn't listen to that, please go over and listen. We sponsor that show and Sam and James do a great job every week. Albin just did an interview with them, and why don't you highlight some of that interview here? Because you're talking about the same stuff that we want to talk about.

Alban: 4:05

I haven't actually listened to it yet, so glad to hear it's out. I'll tell you the same thing. We haven't worked on this app for quite a while, and Buzzsprout is almost as old as the App Store.

Jordan: 4:16

Whoa, isn't that wild.

Alban: 4:18

You started working on Buzzsprout a few months before Apple launched the App Store. So this whole time, 15 years, we've been saying we're not really thinking an app is the right way to go. We're not thinking the app is the right way to go. And eventually, in the last few years, we went. You know, it'd be really nice to have an app for that, it'd be really nice to have an app for that. And I thought of four reasons and, kevin, you tell me if there's more than these, but four reasons why it really made sense. And at some point we hit a critical mass of reasons. So now's the time to go ahead and invest in it.

Alban: 4:53

What are phones really good at? They're good at notifications. We send a lot of these email notifications, but sometimes those can take a little while for you to check your email, find it, then go back and get to your computer. It's much nicer to get real-time notifications on your phone. Whenever you're doing quick check-ins on your stats or you want to celebrate the moment you cross over to a new stat threshold, you get an achievement that's better on a phone Quick changes to your episodes, fixing a typo, maybe updating, adding a link, that effortless management and then sharing Everybody. When we share, almost always we're actually sharing from a computer to a phone to share then somewhere else. And when we have something in an app, you can take a screenshot of your stats or you can share your visual soundbite or you can share a link, and it's so much easier because that's where we're used to sharing. So those are the four that jumped out to me, as these are the reasons why we need to have an app, and I guess we can dive into any of those.

Kevin: 5:55

Yeah, our default answer for a long time, when people would reach out to us and say where is the Buzzsprout app? Why doesn't Buzzsprout have an app, our default answer has been well, what would you do? What would you want the app to do if you had one? And we weren't being snarky with that response. We were asking ourselves the same question and we hadn't come up with a compelling enough reason to make the investment, not just from a company perspective, but also from, like, a customer perspective. Like, if you download an app, you want it to be useful, you want it to be something that you're drawn to, you want to be making up space on your phone, not just storage space, but like screen real estate and stuff and if you go through the trouble of installing it and keeping it on your phone, it should be something that you use at least once a week, hopefully even more than that. Right, I mean, we all have apps that just sit on page three, four, five, six, because we don't clean them up. But, yeah, but we don't want to be part of the clutter on your phone. We want to be part of the useful apps that sit on your phone. So what was?

Kevin: 6:50

We've been trying for years to build this thesis around what would a compelling app be for a podcast hosting Service? And so we've collected a lot of that feedback from people and some people gave us really good information that helped inform the decision making process that we're going into. And we've been, you know, just continuing to come back to it, the idea, work cycle after work cycle after work cycle and, as Alban said, we've just been building these lists and scratching stuff off and adding stuff and finally, about seven months ago or so, we got the team together and we said, okay, here's where we're at. Do we feel like this could be a compelling enough reason for us to do it now? Like, is it time to go for, is it time to build this? If you were a podcast customer and this was the feature set that was available at launch for this app, would you install it? Would you turn notifications on it? This was the set of notifications that we were sending. What is missing from this list? That would make it compelling?

Kevin: 7:44

And we finalized that and we all felt good about it, stacked hands and decided to go for it, and it's been, I mean, I think, after. So I've been using it on my phone for about three months now, from a very broken early version to a really highly polished finished version now, and I do feel like we accomplished what we're setting out to do, which is, once you use this for like a week or two, we want people to like be in the position of I can't imagine running my podcast without this. Now, you know we're not trying to be a game changer or whatever, but if you download it and you install it and then like whenever you think of something that you want to check on your podcast or a quick change you want to make to your podcast, or, like Alban said, you just got an achievement or there's a new ad opportunity that just popped up and you want to approve it, being able to just quickly do that is so convenient that for me the change happened very quickly of saying, like I can't imagine what life was like before that, like I don't want to go back to that anymore. Of oh, something just happened to my podcast and now I can't take an action on it, I can't look at it, I can't do anything until I have a laptop in front of me or until I sit down at my desk and I'm at my desktop. No, you can do that really conveniently from your phone.

Kevin: 8:56

Now, all that to say, we have had a really great mobile experience for ages, for years, but there's something different about being able to just load up a native app and that app experience. That, at least for me, it just feels like I can take quick action on it and I'm willing to. As opposed to, I want to open up mobile Safari type in Buzzsprout. com. Hopefully my login information is saved in there. Login. It's a good mobile responsive site. It works well. But I don't know, apps are just a little bit more fun, a little bit more convenient, a little bit more polished, and so that experience just feels great to me.

Jordan: 9:28

That's one of the things that gets brought up a lot when people use the app is just how it looks, so different from what they're used to in our mobile site, and also just the way that we have set up the dashboard on the app. We spent so much time drilling down into what is essential that the podcasters are going to need and also I know just from looking at the conversations between the designers and developers and stuff like that there was so much thought that was put into how something responds when you tap it and there's just like these little things that are just so beautiful and delightful in this app, and so I don't know like how long they've just spent on just thinking about these little things that just make the app feel so good to use and there's just so much thought that's put into that.

Alban: 10:20

I think that this is a great example of you know what Cameron's been able to bring to the team. Yeah, because this is the first thing where he got to work on it from the very beginning to where it is now, and so he worked with Dave, he worked with Kevin, he worked with the tech team on what should this look like? It's a bit more like first principles thinking of what needs to be on these pages, rather than inheriting all of the design language that we had on the website, and so it was a nice way for us to have like a fresh look at what should be on the page. When you open the first time, you know what should be available.

Alban: 10:56

When you first click into an episode, what's the first thing you'd want to be able to see? And so I think, whenever people say, wow, this looks very different. Yeah, it should look a bit different because it's a different way of thinking about it. Yeah, and I also want to highlight Kevin you used to talk about eight months ago. We hit like a thesis of why we would have an app. The other big unlock was finding Dylan.

Kevin: 11:18

Yeah, well, I mean that that happened shortly after, but that was step one. Like we did not have in-house expertise to build native applications for iOS or Android at the time, so making this commitment as a company meant that we had to build out our team.

Alban: 11:34

It's one of those things that if you don't have the right people, it's very, very difficult to get excited about it. The idea of there's a lot of these companies that are like I mean, I got them in my Twitter DMs all the time. They'd be like, hey, I build an iOS app for you and you're like, no, this is we could have an app, but it would cause us a lot more headaches than it would make us happier. So you really have to make sure you find, like, the right people to work on it, and it's really been like a pleasure working with Dylan for the last eight months.

Kevin: 12:05

Yeah, dylan's been a great addition to our team. It's probably worth talking about a little bit Like. This is a full commitment from Buzzsprout to be able to support this new platform, this new mobile platform, so native apps on iOS and Android. Like Alban said, there are probably app experiences that you had. That service that you use launches an app and it does, you know, a B and C day one and then it just does A B and C day two and three and four and forever more. It very rarely gets updates. It's very buggy. That's not what we were looking to do at all. That's why we struggled over this decision.

Kevin: 12:38

So much is because it's a. When we go in on something, you know we want to do it right. We want to make a full commitment to it. So that's what the version one of our app represents. It represents us coming to these platforms trying to put our best foot forward for a version one, but it's also a full commitment. So we've already launched I don't know what you call it like an update. I guess a minor bug update yesterday pushed that to the app store.

Kevin: 13:01

The team is prepping release two or three now. I guess we're on version three, which is going to go out later today. So we're all in and everything that you do or you can do on desktop is not available in the app today and I can't commit that it ever will be. But anything that we feel like we can provide just as good of an experience through mobile that you can on desktop, we're going to bring that over, and anything new that would be a better experience on mobile, that's definitely going to come over and it might actually start on mobile first. So, like you'll see some of that in version one of the app that we have today, like we have this home screen that gives you like, how many downloads do you have today? In real time, as we could get the stats like, how many downloads do you have today?

Kevin: 13:47

That's not something that we provide on desktop, but you know, looking at the data and how often people log into their Buzzsprout accounts, most people are not logging into their Buzzsprout accounts every single day, again, because the way that you did it up until last week was you had to be in front of a computer to do it. So most people would check once or twice a week, and then, of course, they log in on the day that they're going to publish, and then that's a totally different workflow. They're not necessarily checking stats or looking to make a quick correction. They're going to do this job of uploading a new episode. But, on the mobile app experience, it's very reasonable expectation that everyone fire up that app at least once a day just to see what's going on with their podcast.

Kevin: 14:25

And so what makes it compelling to fire up your app every day? Well, how's my podcast doing today? Like, again, it's just a new mindset of real time things. Also, like how the pages interact with each other, is something that took a lot of consideration, like how do we transition from one page to the next? How do you quickly, you know, do a deep jump into something, make a quick change and then get right back to the homepage and where you're at, and so it is a new experience. We tried to keep it super simple, because everything that we do at Buzzsprout, we want it to be really easy to use, really user friendly, and make your life better, not just another tool that you know you'll like. You have to learn how to use. It shouldn't be a headache. It should be a delightful experience right from the beginning.

Jordan: 15:02

Yeah, speaking of which, one of the questions that has come up, and I think that we have anchored to think for this, is does that mean I can record into Buzzsprout right now and edit my podcast and publish from there?

Alban: 15:14

Yeah, the answer is no, and actually the answer for anger is no as well.

Alban: 15:18

Spotify for podcasters has taken out a Lot of those editing features exactly I think it kind of goes back to what Kevin was saying about there's things that are done better on a computer and there's things that are done better in native apps.

Alban: 15:31

There's things are better done at browsers, and Sometimes the worst thing you can do is try to put an experience into a phone or into a browser it wasn't supposed to be there, that the tech isn't there yet, and you make something really painful for the user, because then they feel like, oh, I should be able to get a great recording on my phone, but until the noise cancellation Technology is there, until the connectivity technologies there, until, like, all that's ready and Buttoned up, perfect, it is really really painful, and and so, yeah, I think that the reason that a lot of people move off of Spotify for podcasters after a time is because it's not the best experience to edit a podcast on your phone in that way. Kudos to them for pushing it forward and saying, hey, we're gonna go as far as we can, but it's not to the level where at least I get excited like I would actually want to use that experience, you know, and much more. Rather pull it over to my computer and use some software that was actually made for editing a podcast.

Jordan: 16:36

Well, there are some apps that do really well at audio editing or video editing. You know, like Cap cut or something like that. It's doable on your phone.

Kevin: 16:43

I know podcasters that do that on their phone, but like we're not Competing with them, like that's not the business that we're in, yeah, and our belief as of right now is still that, like long-form audio content, it's really hard to get a great product out of like a mobile recording still. So there are ways to do this. For sure you can hook up like external microphones, you can design an interface. That's still a little bit, you know, more complicated than we'd like it to be to be able to edit long-form stuff. But that's kind of our position on it right now. I don't think it'll be that way forever, like we're doing things on our phone that we couldn't even imagine just five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago we didn't even have these things. So, like things are evolving quickly, we will get to a point optimistic at some point where recording long-form audio will be simple on your phone. We just don't think it's there yet. But here's the thing is, like now we have the platform to do it. When we're ready, when we feel like, oh, we've figured out a way that this is now viable to get a good product out at the end, a good end product that you can deliver to your Audience, and you can do that on your phone, the platform is now in place. Now All we have to do is build that piece, and so I think that's a really exciting position to be in, that we can be very responsive as new technologies emerge. We know how this new platform available to us.

Kevin: 17:58

So, like Alban said, we might have ideas that come up in the future that were like where's the best way to do that? Well, the best way to do that is still on desktop, but that, as of like two weeks ago, that was our only option. Now we have this option of oh, here's a really cool idea. We'd love to bring this to podcasting. What would be the best way to do that? And Alban might say, like I would love to do that right on my phone, like I would think that would be the first place I would go to try to do that would be a phone. Now we have the platform to be able to launch it there first and launch it in a really excellent way.

Kevin: 18:24

So let me circle back to the first point that you talked about. Alban was notifications, and I want to talk about this just for a second, because I feel like a lot of people are Like notification overload. When I install an app and it asked me permissions to give, like can we, you know, will you accept push notifications from this app, like everyone's like, no, no, I get too many. I don't want any notifications.

Alban: 18:45

That's definitely my experience. Is that my default is oh heck, no, there's no.

Kevin: 18:52

Right. I just want anybody's listening this to understand that we are at the same way. Like Alban said, oh heck, no Like. I say no like by default. Almost everything. Jordan feels the same way.

Kevin: 19:03

Everyone on our team has the same like kind of response when we were talking about notifications and we're building this app, and so I would encourage you, I would beg of you, say yes when you install the buzz sprout app, because we were super intentional of saying what are high value Notifications that we can deliver that would be meaningful to our customers, and then anything that's not high value, anything that feels like, oh, the benefit to that notification is for buzz sprout, it's not for the customer We've said no to, and so we're really only delivering notifications that are like high value to you as a podcaster, relevant to your podcast, and things that we think that you would want to know when they happen in a timely manner. So with your episode is processed. When you receive a certain achievement, if you're in the ads program, you get a new ad opportunity. There's not many of them. Your weekly report that you get weekly like. You don't have to check your email for that anymore, you can see that right inside your app.

Kevin: 19:58

There's not many and they are Designed with this intent of they have to be high value to the actual podcaster before we said yes to them. So if you're like me and Albin and Jordan and your default when you install app is just no, no, no, no, I give it a try for buzz sprout, like that's just my plea to you, say yes If after a week, if you're like, ah, Kevin, he's a liar, these are annoying, they're not high value to me. You can always turn them off and then hit the text number in the show notes and tell me you're, you're wrong, this is not high value. Um, we've tried as best as possible to make them high value, so I think you like them.

Jordan: 20:31

Yeah, if you don't like getting two notifications a week.

Alban: 20:38

This is what happens Every time when we find these new channels that Everybody uses and everybody enjoys. You happen with email. When we realized everyone checks all their email the marketers we're like oh what, if we start sending a lot of emails, then people will read our stuff all the time. And then people stopped checking email all the time. And so now what does every website do? It's like get 10% off if you put in your email. We're like I'm not gonna check that anyway, and it's like but also your cell phone number, because we're gonna text you. You're like ah great, because now they're flooding the texts and notifications. Facebook and ESPN, I feel like, are the two that were the worst.

Kevin: 21:17

Oh yes, pn lights you up. Anything that happens in sports, there's a notification for it but it's worse than just Sending you the notification.

Alban: 21:25

They intentionally format them so that the critical information is just off screen and you're like, oh my gosh, a player for my favorite team was just had a serious injury I think that's injury, who is it? And you click it and then you're reading the article and you're going, oh, I would never have clicked this if I didn't know who it was, because that's a notification for ESPN to trick you into their app. But that's just marketers using this channel because they know right now it's unpolluted. And then they pollute it because they say, oh, if we're gonna get them into our app, and then people end up just turning them off. Yeah, and this keeps happening, it over and over.

Alban: 22:04

And our commitment is we will send Notifications for you. We will not send notifications for us. It's not a trick to get you into the app, it's to let you know. Hey, I know you were waiting for us to process your episode. We're done. Hey, weekly report is done, so you can see how your podcast performed this week. That's it. All the notification information is on the screen. You can just swipe to say no, thanks, we're not gonna trick you to click into it when you really didn't need to and we're not gonna start adding these like I will promise. This is a full-on promise. We will not ever send a 50% off today. We will never send the 50% off today if you upgrade to Buzzsprout Pro. We're never gonna send that notification.

Kevin: 22:46

You have Albin's word on that, yep, so now he's gonna have a great idea for a 50% off promo for Black Friday or something he's like.

Kevin: 22:54

All right, one other thing I think we talked about a bunch of stuff the app does and let's let's talk. One more thing that we won't do and we don't do right now is, like when you turn on notifications, you will not get an anxiety badge on your Buzzsprout icon, so that little red circle with a number in it that keeps going up. You will not get that, and so if you just get notifications and you dismiss them, you don't click on them or whatever, you're not gonna go like look at your Buzzsprout app and have a look at red one on it, or red two or three or four, or like everyone's email, it's like red 999. They're terrible, they're just anxiety badges and they don't make your life any better, and we're not gonna do that, and so, at least for now, we have no compelling reasons to do it. So if we, if we find out that oh, there is a compelling reason, customers really want this and this would be really beneficial. But I don't know that. I have an app outside of maybe the messages app, like text messages.

Alban: 23:48

I don't know that there's an app that I want those red badges on that is actually the only app that I have them for, really, yeah, I turn them off for everything, because all it is is it's like oh my gosh, I've got to click this and you click it, and it's like somebody I knew in high school commented on a photo Like I did not need to know that right.

Kevin: 24:07

I did not need that three hours of anxiety in my life that there's something red Alerting on my phone because someone liked my high school photo. I mean, from our perspective, I think I think we've hit all the high points. Jordan, I saw that you posted something in the Facebook group and asked anybody if they had any questions after downloading the app and installing it.

Jordan: 24:23

You we want to run through some of those questions now you know, I think that we actually answered a lot of these questions. So Matthew Crickler said can you have multiple podcasts from one dashboard? Yes, for sure.

Kevin: 24:34

So there's a little bit of Easter egg in the app. If you're right on the home screen of the app, you can tap on the title of your podcast, which sits right above your show art, and you can switch podcasts from there. That's the little power user tool secret. The more common way like the way that was designed to be able to switch is just go to the more section and you'll see the title of your show at the very top with a little like down carrot next to it. You tap that and you can switch podcasts from there. So two places to do it, one for power users. You know, kind of at the request of me Power user, yeah, power user me I really wanted to be able to do it right from the home screen and then also from the more section.

Alban: 25:12

All right, we got another question from Tom Rosie. Why is it so awesome? Did you cover it in awesome sauce? Are your developers just full of awesomeness? Yeah, tom Rosie must be related to Tom Rossi, co-founder of Buzzsprout. I don't know man. I think it's awesome. They are great. We love them all.

Jordan: 25:35

And we also got a question from Ann saying can you please incorporate transcription and AI generated show notes and chapters to your app? Would be the cherry on the top.

Kevin: 25:44

All right, oh, that's all there.

Jordan: 25:46

It is all there.

Kevin: 25:47

So I just think you just haven't found it yet. So if you click on an episode the episodes like tab at the bottom, and then tap into any one of your episodes that it's been run through Co host, ai, you will see a section that says co-host and we bring right to the forefront the social tweets, because tweets but you can use them on threads or whatever, because that's a great place just to share that stuff right from your phone. But you can also tap where it says co-host. It has that little arrow next to it. So just tap on co-host and you get your full. Everything that goes generated for your podcast. So you get your social posts, you get your chapter markers, you get your titles, your description. The blog post is there, yep, it's all there. And the transcript, of course, is available in its own little section that says transcript under your episodes.

Kevin: 26:30

So when I was listening to the pod news weekly review this morning, sam set the asked a question. Very inefficient way to ask a question on the show, sam is like by leaving it in your show. You should text us or write us. It's very hard for me to find it when I have to listen to your show to get your question. But he asked why did we decide to go iOS and Android native versus a PWA? So, for those that don't know, a PWA stands for progressive web app and it is basically a website that you load up in your mobile browser and then you can tap a little button at the bottom, you can save it to your home screen and then from that point forward, it very much acts just like any other native app on your phone. It has almost the same features and functionality available to you as like an app developer, that a normal app does, but it's web based. It doesn't have to go through like the app review stuff to get into the app store for iOS or the Android store the Google Play Store, I think they call it. So why did we decide to go one versus the other? And to add a little bit more background to this information, sam runs Truefans, an excellent podcast listening app, and Truefans is a PWA. It's a really great experience.

Kevin: 27:36

So for us, the decision came down to a couple things. One, for all intents and purposes, Buzzsprout has had a PWA for years and years and years. Our mobile site has worked very much like a PWA for a very long time. It's a great mobile experience. You can log in through mobile Safari. You can add it to your home screen. You'll get a little app icon. We've had that for a long time. We still have that. We're still committed to maintaining that and bringing more and more of the functionality in line with what we're offering on mobile. So you will have both options. So if you're anti-app store, anti-google Play Store, we're going to provide both solutions for you, maintain both, going forward for the foreseeable future. That's the plan.

Kevin: 28:17

There were some things that are specific to what we wanted to offer in a mobile experience that you can only get through building a native app and having some APIs and stuff available to you. Things like being able to access the camera if you wanted to take a picture of yourself and then use that as your host image on Buzzsprout. We can only do that really well if we're doing it through a native app. Can you do it in a PWA? I think you can, but it's limited by the permissions you have set in Safari. So you have to give Safari access to your camera for every website, not just this one PWA app, and so that doesn't feel good to a lot of people. So things like that. If we ever did any type of thing with recording or sound by editing and stuff like that, that stuff. We want to be able to have access to native APIs to be able to do that more friendly on the app, again using web technology. Is it possible? Yeah, but it's probably not going to give the exact experience that we would like to be able to provide. And then, lastly, customers all the time ask us one of the first things they do after signing up for Buzzsprout and getting that first episode up and going is they're like, hey, they'll write in support, they'll find us in our Facebook group. Hey, I searched the app store, I searched Google Play Store looking for the Buzzsprout app, and I can't find it.

Kevin: 29:24

And so just recognizing, as a business, that a lot of our customers are looking for us in these marketplaces and we're not there, we're not represented, was an important thing to us as a business.

Kevin: 29:34

And so a lot of people have a lot of problems with the way Apple runs their app stores, including the EU, right now. They just got fined $2 billion, and so we understand that. But just like we have personal issues with the way Spotify approaches podcasting and we choose not to put our app there, but we get it available for our customers because we know a lot of our customers are there and they get to make their own choice about where they put their podcasts. It's the same thing for us here. So while we might not love everything about the way Apple runs their app store, we might not love everything the way Android runs their app store. We might actually enjoy the open web more. The reality is, a lot of our customers are looking for us in these places and we want to be there. We want to be represented, we want to give them that option From my perspective, kevin.

Alban: 30:15

It's just the PWA world has been totally up in the air the last few months. You've got Apple fighting with the EU about the app store regulations, and then these progressive web apps are getting way more love and it looks like they're actually going to break through. And then Apple kind of like kneecapped them for a bit. Now maybe they're back, but maybe they're not, and there's something like this that's up in the air. It's really hard to get super excited about putting an eight-month investment behind it. Maybe in the future other podcast hosts or other companies could just say we're going to totally avoid the app route because we know PWAs are in a great spot, but I don't think they're in a great spot right now. The future could look very different depending on the way the EU, the way the Apple, the way that you and Android decide to take it. So I mean we'll be watching.

Kevin: 31:06

Yeah, it was kind of an 11th hour decision by Apple to put PWAs back into iOS 17.4. They had them out of the betas for a while because of some of the pushback they were getting from the EU, and so one of the ways that they were going to try to solve that issue was by not allowing PWAs to be installed in the EU. That would not be good for Buzzsprout, that wouldn't have been good for Truefans. Luckily, apple changed their position on that and put it back in in the final release candidate that they just released.

Kevin: 31:31

But from a business perspective, everyone thought, as of two or three months ago, pwas are perfectly safe. Apple can't take that out from under you. Well, it turns out that they can, and so it's a tough place to be in. You're going to play by somebody's rules, no matter what, because they make the devices that your software runs on. So that's kind of our position on it. It's how we landed there. Again, we are committed to maintaining the open web and being accessible there to PWAs, bringing more of the functionality that you get in the app, in line with what you get on the responsive site. And again, if you choose to install that as a PWA, you can still do that.

Jordan: 32:02

Well, if you want to download our iOS app, we will leave a link to the app store in the show notes, and if you're an Android user, no worries, we have an Android app on the way and you can also join the waiting list and I'll link to that in the show notes as well. So this is an interesting story that I saw in pod news this week. Kagan Kerry, who has been podcasting for two years. She has a podcast called Evolving Prisons and it's been up for an award. She has all these subscribers and her download numbers have just been growing. So she's experiencing a lot of success with her podcast.

Jordan: 32:42

But she is hosted on Spotify for Podcasters and Spotify's algorithm picked up that perhaps there was some fraudulent payment activity on her account. They sent her an email saying hey, we suspect this, and then promptly shut her podcast down, like, just took it off. Rss speed's gone, it's off of Spotify, apple, everywhere. And then they reviewed it after taking it down and said you know what? Actually, we review it. It's totally cool, we're going to put it back up. Kagan told pod news I've lost every single person that was following my podcast. I've lost all my paid subscribers. When they deleted my podcast, the system then refunded each of my subscribers and she had about four months of payments in her wallet that were also gone. So that was a painful story for a podcaster. It's really tough.

Kevin: 33:34

That is brutal. I want to say this that when you're operating at this scale of Spotify, I actually really feel for them. There We've gone through a lot of growing pains as we get bigger and bigger, and we're only in terms of the podcast we host. We're still maybe a 10th or a 15th the size of Spotify in terms of number of active podcasts that they're hosting. Maybe active is not right, but they have a lot of inactive shows, but they're big and so they have to have some systems in place to be able to detect fraud and protect customers from being scammed or signing up for something. That's really not what it seems to be. My heart goes out to Spotify in this case, because their system caught something it shouldn't have. Somebody paid the price for that. It sounds like they're trying to do everything they can to make that right.

Kevin: 34:23

I think it took this podcaster reaching out to the media, which was James Cridland, to actually get Spotify to pay attention to her. Yeah, that stinks. That's a bummer. That's the difference between working with a smaller, dedicated podcast host and working with somebody like Spotify. I think, when it comes down to the service, Not saying that could never happen to a customer on Buzzsp rout because it was a mistake, and mistakes can happen in any business, regardless of your size or scale. But at Buzzsp rout you wouldn't have to get the media involved before you'd get good customer service in return, and I think that would be true of any of our competitors as well. That is kind of what you're paying for. Is you're paying for a partner? When you use a small podcast host, a paid podcast host, our business and our customer is the person who's paying us. It's not us trying to figure out how to make money off of the content that you upload to be able to stay in business, which is what Spotify does. So Spotify is not really looking at this podcaster that lost all their stuff as their main customer normally and how they set up their business practices. But Buzzsp rout certainly is and, again, a lot of our competitors certainly are, and so the mistake is really painful and she should have gotten great customer service right off the bat. I think that's worth. Our plans start at $12 a month and go up to $24 a month.

Kevin: 35:39

I would think somebody who was in the position that she was in with her show starting to get some traction, starting to build some revenue with some subscribers and stuff. It just makes sense Just go to a paid podcasting host. If Buzzsp rout is not the right one for you, there are plenty of other good ones. But yeah, I think it's a good lesson for anybody who's in that position of this. And whether you're making money on it or not, if your show is important to you as soon as it crosses from. This is something I want to try and experiment with and see if I like it too. I actually do like it, and if I lost it, that would be really hurtful and painful to me. I don't want to risk it anymore. Sign up with somebody who you are their customer, who's incented to take care of you as a customer, versus whatever you upload them, figuring out how to make money off of that in your audience.

Alban: 36:22

I'd reiterate the bad guys in this story are not Spotify. It's the people who do all these charge backs, that do all these credit card scams, that require all these types of systems to even be built in the first place. I mean, for how small Buzz Brout is and how little we do with credit cards, you still see some pretty elaborate scams and it's surprising how much effort people will put into stealing 15 bucks and it's like if you put this much effort towards a job you'd be doing really well. And there's just so many of them out there that I know there's just a ton of, especially around credit card stuff. There's charge backs and there's scams. There's stolen cards that automated systems often get implemented and there's times where those algorithms they flag somebody's podcast, they flag something as suspicious and I think the mistake probably is deleting it without a person seeing it.

Jordan: 37:19

Yes.

Alban: 37:20

But yeah, it's really sad. I hope that she's able to get the podcast back with all the stats, the subscribers, the four months of withdrawals that she lost. That's really, really painful and it's no fun to feel like, oh great, in this middle of everything, it all got ripped out and, instead of creating great content, now I'm trying to rebuild the show that I've been working on for two years, so I really do wish for the best. I'm glad that Pod News ran the story, because I'm sure that will help get this rolling over on the Spotify side.

Kevin: 37:52

Yeah, I think it absolutely did help. I think it was from that point forward that Spotify really stepped up to the plate and gave her some great customer service. It was just unfortunate that James had to get involved before that started to happen.

Jordan: 38:02

Well, and that's the thing is, spotify does just rip the cord when their algorithm flags something. I mean I've had I have a very music-heavy podcast, right, and I've had episodes just taken down Spotify messages me and it's just like, oh, this goes against our content and trying to get that trying to appeal, that is such a headache that I've just been fine, whatever, that episode's just not going to be on there, even though I licensed the music you know what I mean.

Jordan: 38:30

It's just whatever. And it's so important to do a lot of research on podcast hosts. When you are starting a podcast and I think a lot of people just are like, oh, this is a free option and so I'm going to go with this, but Spotify has notoriously quiet support. It's just like emailing a void and it's kind of like do you want that? Like you said, Kevin, there's just so many more options. It's so important to really do your research before you go to a host.

Kevin: 38:59

Yeah, and I will say Spotify does not. This is not a negative on Spotify, it's just how they operate. But they won't work with us. So in the case that Jordan just mentioned, if you have a licensed music thing that you have the license for, but they still flag as copyrighted music, you work with them. You don't get any resolution. You email Buzzsprout support and when we email on your behalf, they will not talk with us. They'll say that we can only talk with the podcaster about their show and their content, and so there's really very little that you can do. And it is frustrating, but I get it. It's the scale that they operate at. Same thing happens on YouTube all the time. We are at the mercy sometimes because these platforms are huge. A lot of our listeners are there Like.

Kevin: 39:37

The good thing is that there are alternatives in podcasting. I love open podcasting. There are some great third party. We call them third party but, like their first party, they're awesome apps. We just talked about Truefans, awesome app, overcast. I use Cast-o-Matic and they have all these additional features.

Kevin: 39:52

Not to take anything away from Spotify, it's some people love it. It's fine, apple fine. But for the podcaster, they are in control of what is on their platform and what's not, and we have very limited ability to rectify that when things go wrong, and so, as much as you can, I would encourage your audience, let them know I am on these other platforms and you can talk about it too as a podcaster. Hey, just to let you know, on my last episode, spotify flagged it so it's not going to be available there, but if you want to hear it I love the episode I think you'd really enjoy it. There's all these other apps that you can get it on, and so use that power that you have with your audience to expose them to this wonderful world of podcasting and all the apps and openness that we have access to Is the difference between Spotify flagging it and YouTube flagging it.

Alban: 40:34

If YouTube flags your video as oh, we're confused, you've got to go back and forth with YouTube.

Kevin: 40:39

Yeah, there's no alternatives in the video space, really yeah.

Alban: 40:42

And YouTube. There's so many examples of somebody's account gets hacked and somebody puts a crypto scam on it, yeah, and YouTube rips the channel because they go this is a crypto scam, obviously. Well, the original creator then is stuff trying to reclaim their account and get it all, all the flags, taken off, or somebody claims it was copyright infringement and it kind of looks real, so it gets ripped. It's just so much harder when the only recourse you have is going back to the one company who controls it all. It's so much nicer in the podcasting space, where there's lots of alternatives and you're able to. If one company doesn't understand what's going on, then you're able to go somewhere else and work with them.

Kevin: 41:27

Yeah, this is actually a perfect segue into a clip I wanted to play on our podcast episode today. So this morning I was listening to the podcast weekly review. Just to set the clip up a little bit, and for those that don't know, a clip is when I take a portion of another podcast that I listen to and I play it in our podcast, and so I'm going to be doing that.

Kevin: 41:44

The Pod News Weekly Review this morning had a great soundbite that they took from Daniel Eck of Spotify, who was speaking about a ruling that was just handed down from the EU against Apple, and the case is involving Apple's like monopolization of the App Store right and the fact that they're not making it a fair and level playing field for people to be able to compete in there, and so Spotify was a big proponent of Apple being fined because Spotify has had a hard time being able to compete on a level playing field with Apple Music in the App Store and the iOS App Store, because Spotify, if they sell subscriptions to the App Store, has to pay a 30% tax to Apple for every subscription that they get, and their margins are so thin that that's not profitable for them, and so they would lose money on any subscription that they sold, and they can't raise their prices, because if they raise their prices then they're not competitive with Apple Music, which is like the same service, and so people just wouldn't buy it.

Alban: 42:39

Yeah, Apple's winning both ways. If you buy a Spotify subscription for 10 bucks, Apple gets $3. And Spotify gets the 7 and has to pay most of that out. If you buy the Apple Music one, Apple gets $10 and they have to pay out some of that. So, man yeah.

Kevin: 42:54

Good point, and so you can see Spotify's case here. It's a legitimate argument. The EU has agreed with them and they have imposed this $2 billion fine roughly on Apple. Of course, apple's fighting it. So I want to play a clip and it starts off with Daniel Eck talking about why this is important for the EU to be doing and why Apple shouldn't be abusing their monopolistic power and the control over the App Store. And then, after Daniel's done talking, you're going to hear James Cridland from Pod News Weekly Review kind of give his take about how this might be a little bit two-sided.

Daniel Ek: 43:25

The internet is at risk and, fundamentally and principally, we at Spotify believe an open internet is a much better internet, and so that's why we're fighting, because Apple has decided that they want to close down the internet and make it theirs, and they view every single person using an iPhone to be their user, and that they should be able to dictate what that user experience should be, rather than that the iOS platform is a platform that accesses the internet and that openness is good.

James Cridland: 43:54

So this is Daniel Eck, of course, the man who tried to take Spotify as being the only place where you could get podcasts. Openness is bad in that case. Spotify, of course, don't support any of the open podcasting 2.0 tags. They do their own things in terms of transcripts, they do their own things in terms of chapters. They do their own things in terms of lots of sense. But obviously, open internet is very important. When you're talking about Spotify versus Apple, I think it's a little bit dubious, to be honest.

Jordan: 44:23

James.

Alban: 44:25

Great points from both of them. I love Daniel's point the open internet is at risk and we should support it. And I love James's point is well taken and Spotify has not followed through on those principles over in the podcasting space, or at least they for a long time they did, and the open podcasting is different than the open internet, according to Daniel. I think actually Spotify is coming around a little bit. I think open podcasting is starting to get a little bit more of a foothold over on the Spotify side.

Kevin: 44:56

I mean maybe Just because they've taken exclusive shows now and have made them available on other platforms. I don't know that that is a fundamental core change in their values. As much as it is, the business model wasn't working.

Alban: 45:09

Yeah, 100%. But it's much easier to have strong principles when they also align with your financial interest, and I'm very thankful that their financial interests Hard to call it a principle, then that's a business model. Oh, I think most people are claiming these high principles all the time when it's really just their own financial interests at work, but it's I think it's really good for their financial interests to be aligned with what I think is the best for the web and I think, as far as Daniel's talking about it with app stores and the open web, it's a good point. I hope that that translates to more and more openness on the podcasting side, because that has not been there the last few years.

Kevin: 45:49

I agree, I agree and I really love that clip because James said this stuff, so I don't have to say it, so it's great, so I don't have to be the curmudgeon.

Jordan: 45:58

Yeah, you just get to sit back and relax and have a soda, I'll let James be the curmudgeon.

Kevin: 46:02

So if you want to hear more of that grumpy old guy who hates Spotify, tune in to the podcast weekly review proudly hosted by Budweb.

Jordan: 46:14

So this is a unique story in that it's kind of a follow up from something that I had seen back in January. So in Paw News I saw that James had linked to an Australian story about how last year a legal dispute between Rhondilyn Korolak and Kanna Campbell, who goes by the name of Sugar Mama, occurred because Kanna Campbell infringed on Korolak's trademark of her podcast name and just recently Korolak was awarded $114,000 to cover her legal costs and things like that. But it sounded so familiar to me and I was like I feel like I saw something about this in our Buzzsprout community group and so I went back and I found that Rhondilyn had actually posted in the Buzzsprout group about her podcast and she had like a win today and she was in a three year battle over this trademark and she said I finally proved trademark infringement. I'm in the process of getting any content still online removed.

Jordan: 47:24

And here's what she says. That's really cool is, whatever you do, do not let anyone steal your brand. And then try to bully and intimidate you. And then she says probably let me down because they were due by your inaccurate representations that she could use my trademark and she neglected to tell them. Ip Australia had told her it was the same or deceptively similar to mine, and that is how I came to be in the Buzzsprout community. I trust Buzzsprout to uphold the law, which I thought was nice.

Alban: 47:48

That is super nice Because, a former lawyer on the Buzzsprout team, I'm happy to hear that we uphold the law. I would say sometimes this stuff gets so confusing when so it sounds like it's two Australian podcasters. I don't know what the laws are in Australia Podbean, like Buzzsprout, is based in the US. I think they're at least incorporated in New York, so it's. It can be tough when people are sending you stuff from a totally different jurisdiction saying like here's the law. Yeah, it's easy to get some of that confused. I would say one of the things that just stuck out to me is like the both of these podcasts are called financial foreplay. That's obviously infringing on the trademark. I think the element of infringement that's useful for everyone to be cognizant of it's not registering it as much as not the ownership or the use.

Alban: 48:40

Like the most common thing where all this stuff focuses on is likelihood of confusion. So just ask yourself is it likely for somebody to be confused because they heard these two names? Would they think they're the same? I think one of the biggest cases on point here is like Apple computers and Apple records, and one point Apple records was like hey, you're confusing people with the same name and now you're doing some stuff with music. I think they sued them like three or four times over the years, and so it's a debate about are people going to be confused?

Alban: 49:12

I can tell you this if I listened to a podcast called financial foreplay from Australia and then I heard of somebody saying, oh, I'm listening to a podcast called financial foreplay with sugar mama, yeah, and it's also from Australia yeah, that's the same podcast in my mind, 100%. There's no way in my mind. I'm thinking those are different and I think that's just a very easy human level test. You don't have to use all the legal argument Just like ask yourself is it likely someone to get confused? And if the answer is yes, it's not a good brand for you anyway. So just move on and go and just create a new name. You don't have to get super legal about it. 100 and something, thousand Australian dollars, 114,000 Australian dollars I mean, that's like 20,000 American dollars or something. I don't know the conversion rate, but that's pretty it.

Kevin: 50:03

You don't know it, you shouldn't say it. It's about 75,000.

Alban: 50:06

Yeah, I'm just teasing the Australians. I always find these funny. You notice, the $114,000 is the legal fees, because the real winners here are the lawyers. If you're getting sued for trademark infringement, unless there's a real reason why you should be keeping it, you can just change the name and now drastically reduce your exposure. The problem was that they kept fighting it.

Kevin: 50:32

Yeah, so looking on the offender side, obviously not the person that started with that brand in the first place.

Alban: 50:38

Yeah, Of course, the person who has the brand and knows I'm going to win this case and get my fees paid for, keep going for it. But if you made a mistake, why is the whole world just like double and triple, downing to the tune of over $100,000? Yeah, just move on. Yeah.

Kevin: 50:59

I think that the takeaway here and kind of the feel good part of the story is that often times in our Facebook community we see people who say I'm thinking of starting a podcast, but there's already another podcast with this name. What should I do? And usually our advice, and mostly the advice of the community, is the same in that like, if it's already out there, just don't do it, just don't do it. I know that you come up with this name and you wake up in the middle of the night and you have this name and you're super in love with it and you're like, ah, it's the perfect name for my podcast. And then you go and search and there's other podcasts with the same name. Just don't do it, just let it go. So you just go and search for the same name until you've done the research and you find out that nothing else exists and it's like ongoing.

Kevin: 51:37

Now, like with Buzzcast, for example, there's another podcast called Buzzcast. When we came up with, hey, we want to do a show, we want to call it Buzzcast, we looked out there and there was another one called Buzzcast but it was like a dead show, like it would still exist on a few directories but they hadn't published episodes in years and years and years. I don't even there might have been like one episode in the feed or two, so they weren't active anymore. So we didn't feel like it was we were going to infringe on anybody. Because then another like there are other Buzzcasts now that are popped up. We've noticed them. You know we haven't taken any legal action because we don't feel like it's like hurting our brand and we don't think, like Albin said, like is there a high probability of confusion?

Kevin: 52:13

But what I like about this is this is the feel good. Part of it is that you can feel good as an independent podcaster that if you do establish a brand and you put a lot of work and energy and effort behind it, and then somebody comes in and tries to leverage that for their own gain this is a story of somebody who was in that position, and she was able to use the legal system to help her fight that battle and get them to stop doing it, and so congratulations to her. It's not easy Like she must have gone through I mean, she went through $75,000 US dollars anyway of legal fees to do it, not to mention how much time, effort and energy and lost sleep went into this battle for her, but in the end she prevailed. So congratulations, good work on you for protecting the brand that you worked so hard to build. I know that's an important thing to you, and so I'm really happy that you're able to protect it.

Jordan: 52:59

Yeah, and getting trademarked is not an easy thing to do. So I mean, if you do have like a podcast name or a brand name that you want to trademark, there's a lot of things to like consider with it. You know what countries do you trademark it? Honestly, with podcasting, probably the US is ideal just because there's so many podcasts here. I know that when I trademarked my podcast I was quoted $12,000 to trademark my podcast. It's a lot of money, right.

Alban: 53:29

It's a lot.

Jordan: 53:30

Yeah, that's crazy. Like I was just like okay, as a podcaster, I can't afford that. Like how can anyone afford to trademark for $12,000? What I wound up doing and you can look into this too if you're thinking about doing it I actually wound up going through the business law department of a local university and they actually would file the trademark for free. I just had to pay the filing fees, which was like I don't know, $450 or $490 or something like that.

Alban: 53:59

Yeah, that's a good tip. I think when I filed the trademark for Buzzsprout for the brand name, I went through LegalZoom, so I remember that being like a relatively easy process. I knew that it had been a long time since I'd done anything with trademarks and never was an expert at any point. So LegalZoom was really nice, did the hand-hold thing, and I don't remember that being very expensive either.

Jordan: 54:24

All right, it's time for Sound Off, the segment where you send in your responses to our podcasting questions. First off, we have a tweet from truemediasolutionsca. Loved your discussion around practicing safe socks and 13-hour movie marathons, Alban. I think that's a direct lead, yeah.

Alban: 54:45

Well, the Merino wool baby is going to make sure your feet don't blister and your runs are going to be a lot better, so I'm glad you enjoyed that.

Kevin: 54:53

You know I have a follow-up question about the socks, Alban, I think somehow the algorithms have now aligned me as a potential sock purchaser. There we go, and so I guess the microphones are listening to me. And so we were talking about socks last week. So now I'm on social media all last week and I'm looking at sock ads.

Kevin: 55:14

Eh like I'm used to the microphones listening. This isn't super shocking in and of itself. What is shocking is the number of companies now that are pushing alpaca socks so socks made from alpaca, like whatever wool or something and they're saying it's superior. The marketing says it's superior, yeah, yeah. So I want to know, like, how come, in all the research that you went through last week for hours on end, did you not talk at all about alpaca?

Alban: 55:40

I have no idea why alpaca never made it in. I have to go deeper into this, our recurring sock segment. We'll have to come back next week.

Kevin: 55:49

From what I know, alpaca wool is superior to merino wool From you seeing the ads on Facebook.

Alban: 55:55

Yes, yes.

Jordan: 55:57

Actually we have a follow up to the sock thing from 4894. You guys forgot to mention a key feature of darn tough socks they will replace any damaged sock for life. No questions asked. Oh what.

Kevin: 56:08

Yeah, how did you not mention that, Albin? Oh?

Alban: 56:11

are you kidding, all right? Well, they claimed that and I'm sure if you wear through a sock and it has a hole and you go and you carry this sock up to like USPS and you put it in a thing and you ship it to them, then they will send you a new pair of socks. There's no way you're actually going to do this, like one person's going to do this. The people who are like this is just a point of pride that they're like I got the socks back, but that's not how. What happens to socks? They rarely wear through. Mostly what happens to socks is they disappear. They go away somehow, they're in the dryer and then, all of a sudden, you have one sock and you used to have two socks, but you don't know where the other sock went.

Kevin: 56:52

Can you ship them one sock and say the other one went missing, and they'll ship you two socks.

Alban: 56:57

I seriously doubt you could send one sock in and say the other sock disappeared.

Kevin: 57:01

Oh well, here's the hack you cut your one sock in half and then mail it back two pieces of sock and say I need two fully functional socks back.

Alban: 57:10

So you cut enough holes out of like a bunch of socks that you stitch all the other ones together, you just have a Frankensock.

Alban: 57:18

We become the exact people who are in a Frankensock. We're becoming the same people that are causing Spotify all these issues by doing chargebacks and credit card scams. Because it's a $20 sock. It's an expensive pair of socks. Wait, one pair is $20? Yeah, maybe it's like 17. They're not cheap. They're so expensive. I also don't ever think I'm returning them. My experience is anytime people give you a guarantee, that's a nice marketing message there's no way it's ever going to get used. They're like five years from now, if this leaf blower breaks, we'll take care of you. It's like no, I'm never going to remember that. That's why I bought the leaf blower. I never kept the documentation for the leaf blower. I didn't sort it in my like oh, when did all of my warranties expire? None of that stuff happens. What happens is you buy it and you justify to yourself this will last me forever, and then you forget about it and then you probably lose the socks anyway.

Kevin: 58:16

I don't think you're in touch with the American people. Alban, I'm sorry, but when was the last time you went to Walmart and stood in the return line? Because there are people there with things that are six, seven years old, that are now defective, and they are demanding their refund.

Alban: 58:30

That is true. I've not gone back to the Walmart return line in a long time. I return a lot of things, but those things I return are like tags still on return. This thing broke in the first 30 days thing. I wore through a pair of socks from two years ago. I just don't see that clicking in my brain like got to go back and find those invoices and package this all up. Yeah.

Kevin: 58:52

But this is. I mean you're coming from a very sock privilege position. I mean, it's not everybody. You can afford $17 pairs of socks, so you need to check your sock privilege. Check your sock privilege at the door man. This is not the world we live in for everybody 100% privilege checked.

Alban: 59:11

I mean, I do agree. If you're buying $17 pairs of socks, yeah, it's a different world you're in. But I just don't ever see myself returning these.

Jordan: 59:20

All right, we're going to move on from socks. We have a response to Albin's question a couple of episodes ago about your podcasting keys to success. David from no Stroke Podcast, if we could get one hospital stroke support group to use our digital content to educate survivors and caregivers that have been impacted by stroke, then 2024 would have been deemed a success for us and PS. Icing on the cake, sprinkling a few dozen new show supporters using the sweet new support feature on Buzzsprout will make our podcast year a bit happier too.

Kevin: 59:53

Yes, that would be huge.

Jordan: 59:54

Absolutely.

Kevin: 59:56

That is exactly like. Those are the stories we love. I want to hear more of that. That was fantastic. Somebody who's podcasting and they're legitimately looking for, like one person, to be impacted by the stuff that they do Like that should be all of our goals.

Jordan: 1:00:06

Yeah, right.

Kevin: 1:00:07

It's so great they let go of all of the bailouts and the jail where it created the dogs in Hadid in the speeches. For that reason, I see their thoughts in material to be focused on. I know they will put something in the middle of all that stuff that they didn't do no-transcript stuff. Like you have content that you believe is valuable to them, that can make their lives better, that can help them after suffering some sort of medical setback or a health issue or something like that. Great work. Keep it up and keep sharing your stories, because we love it.

Alban: 1:00:23

Ashley, host of Get Out Alive an animal attack podcast. I would love to listen to this. My key to success for podcasting this year stick to our biweekly schedule and continue to have insightful guests. Growing our Patreon would, of course, be great too. I think if you save one person from an animal attack, that also would be a good key to success. Ashley, keep up the great work and keep up the biweekly schedule. That's phenomenal.

Jordan: 1:00:50

I like how both of those are just like. If we could get some listener support, that would be amazing. I think that a lot of podcasters feel that.

Alban: 1:00:58

I think just as soon as you see somebody is so, they enjoy your content so much that they're willing to put a few dollars behind it. This is the whole value for value model, Just when you know this has really hit a new point. Donate to your favorite podcasts.

Jordan: 1:01:11

Yeah, all right. My question for the last episode do you prefer your podcast to be extra long or broken up into smaller episodes? Matthias said for me, as a listener, I prefer one long episode, but as a podcaster it's a different story. One long episode is one download, and one long episode chopped up equals that many more downloads.

Kevin: 1:01:32

Yeah, yeah, a good point. If you monetize your podcast in that way, if that's an important thing to you, then yeah, you got to consider that for sure. Absolutely right on the one download versus multiple downloads. So good point. You skipped over the part of Matias's comment that said sorry, I can only remember two out of the three names of the hosts, so I mean obviously he was probably talking about Kevin and Jordan. The other host is Albin A-L-B-A-N. Not the most common name in the world, but yeah, that's his name. So Jordan, kevin and Albin. Thank you, kevin, I appreciate that.

Alban: 1:02:06

You're welcome as Stu's point. I get the split it up into multiple so that you can get the ad impressions. I still feel like if I have an hour long episode, you can still put in multiple mid-rolls into there. The ad load can be the same between four episodes or one. You just are going to have more ads throughout the content. So I still like keeping it as one. But maybe the alternative, I think, is what you suggested last time. Kevin put it out as a lot of small episodes to begin and then, after that season has concluded, go ahead and just put those all together and make one big mega episode and leave that in the back catalog.

Jordan: 1:02:49

So he actually posted this in our Facebook community group and a lot of the responses were actually similar to something that I've experienced, in that they put out like a part one and then the other parts don't perform as well. And I actually had the exact same thing happen. I did like the Wizard of Oz and it was like a three-part thing because the book is so freaking long and the difference, like the discrepancy and downloads between my part one and part two is something insane like 30,000 downloads different.

Jordan: 1:03:19

No one cares about part two, part three, and I've actually was thinking about my listening habits and I was like, yeah, if I see, like you know, such and such documentary part one, I actually will skip it for an opt for the episodes that do not have, like part one, part two next to them.

Alban: 1:03:36

I think that's because as soon as you have part two, part three of anything book series, movies, tv shows, podcasts that the only people who will ever listen to part two are people who already listened to part one. And so you're segmenting the audience and you see this, I think book series the most like even very popular book series. The first book gets the most reads and then it decreases over time. So I see the point there. It kind of segments into what Tate wrote us, Hi, Buzz cast. If an episode is longer than an hour, I generally pass. I prefer anything less than 45 minutes. If I leave an episode, for whatever reason, rarely do I go back to it. So I love the idea for Quick Cast. I have a storytelling podcast and have stories that are concise, less than three minutes long. These would be perfect for Quick Cast, which I'll randomly do as bonus between regular episodes. Thanks for the inspiration. As for the Snapcast idea, this is the same idea, just different branding. I don't think I want my episodes disappearing. Also, if they do disappear, will the stats associated with that particular episode vanish as well?

Alban: 1:04:41

I love this video that Kevin sent us a while ago. It's a guy who's dancing at like a music festival and it's this voiceover. That's like the leader is the first person who does something and they're inspirational, but they're just kind of like the nut in the beginning. They're out there on their own, but the first follower, the person who jumps up and starts dancing with them, that's the person who really starts the movement and it's a really funny video. If you haven't seen it, we should post it. But it goes from one guy goofy dancing by himself to hundreds of people dancing.

Jordan: 1:05:15

I'll link to it in the show now because it's worth it.

Alban: 1:05:18

But it's all about the first follower and Tate, I think you are the first follower of Quick Cast slash, fast Cast slash, snapcasts, this idea of a Quick podcast. So if you do one, send it to us, because we want to listen to it. I mean, this goes out to anybody. If you do this idea, we'd love to see how you're using it. You are our first followers.

Kevin: 1:05:39

Yeah, and how we're doing it right now so that your stats don't disappear, is like we had a Snapcast before last week's episode and I hope we have one before this episode. But what we're doing is we're just unpublishing it, so it's staying in our Buzzsprout account and all the stats are still there. We're just unpublishing it. We don't delete it. If you delete it, your stats would disappear along with the deletion, but instead you can unpublish it if you want to. Sounds like you don't want to, but for our third follower, if you want to unpublish, that would be the way to do it.

Kevin: 1:06:05

Kyle from the Parker Parley wrote in and said I don't care for the season of podcast. I feel, at least for my shows, the episodes are as long as they need to be. I don't put a time limit on it, but I also don't ramble on and I put something out that's to the point-ish. So thanks and go podcasting. Great feedback, kyle. Thank you, and that's the same advice that we give all the time that your episodes should be as long as they need to be and no longer.

Jordan: 1:06:28

Alban, do you have a question for our next episode?

Alban: 1:06:30

I'm reading Tate's response. I think I want to hear about your Quickcasts or your Snapcast or your Fastcasts. If you record a short podcast between bigger episodes, tell us how you're using it and maybe share us a link so we can go and check these out. So if you have any questions, choose the text Jordan. What's that number?

Jordan: 1:06:51

1-855-951-4230. And, as always, thanks for listening and keep podcasting. What's donut throwing?

Kevin: 1:07:06

Donut throwing. Well, it's something that's Golly, it's a lot.

James Cridland: 1:07:10

I didn't think that this was going to be a hard question.

Kevin: 1:07:13

This is not a hard question. Well, I was trying to figure out. Is it like its own event? Is it like a flash mob thing that happens? What? Yeah? So donut throwing is there's a. Whenever you have outdoor races, usually they run through neighborhoods and stuff and sometimes people will come outside of their homes gathering groups and they'll cheer racers on. Some of these fans think it's funny to offer the racers things that you probably wouldn't want in the middle of a run, like a donut or like a big hunk of bacon or a fireball shot or other weird things. That's like the last thing you want when you're in the middle of a run.

Alban: 1:07:54

But there are things that are really nice when you're watching a run. If you say they're watching a run to have a piece of bacon and a donut is kind of nice. If you're in the middle of a run and someone offers you like they did to Kevin on Saturday a shot of vodka, that's not what you want. Oh gosh, yeah I almost took it.

Jordan: 1:08:12

You almost did, oh no. And then?

Kevin: 1:08:14

I ran this race in Jacksonville it's like the big Jacksonville race and so we were like, hey, are you going to run? I'm going to run, yeah. So let's run together. So we ran together for the first part of it anyway, before Alban took off he's so fast Left me in the dust. But in the first half of that race we run together and there is what looked to be a water station and we were like a mile three. And so I'm like, oh, I can use some water. So I go over to take the water and as I'm getting ready to take the cup out of the person's hand, I hear Alban yell that's not water. I was like what? And I look over at the sign and they're like vodka shots.

Kevin: 1:08:46

I'm like oh gosh like that would have taken me out completely.

Jordan: 1:08:50

Can you imagine if you just like threw it back?

Kevin: 1:08:53

I was about to. I was very close.

Alban: 1:08:56

Kevin, I am running. I know Kevin isn't much of a drinker as it is, and the fact that he starts veering over this is a nine point three mile race and at mile three Kevin's veering over to the vodka stand. I'm like there's no way this is intentional. This is a joke. He's getting closer, that's not water. And he keeps going and I go back that's not water, kevin.

Kevin: 1:09:19

He's like oh, yeah, so Alban saved me from that. But then we take a few more turns through a few more neighborhoods and then we see a member of the Buzzsprout team, priscilla, is standing on the corner and she's next to some other people that we know and they're all hanging out and they're all cheering and we're like, oh fun. So we run over in their direction and they have a big box of donut holes that they're offering and throwing to people to see if they can catch them in their mouth. So Alban was ahead of me, which was the theme of the whole race. But Alban's ahead of me, so he goes first. And what happened? Alban?

Alban: 1:09:53

Actually our mutual friend Thomas, who is our pickleball partner on most Mondays when Kevin and I play Thomas, was there. He tossed a donut hole. It hit off my face. I did not catch it in my mouth. Later on he was like you know, most people just try to catch it with their hand and I was like, ah, kind of makes more sense. But I took the challenge and didn't make it.

Kevin: 1:10:17

So Alban runs by, I see the donut hole bounce off his face and he keeps going. I'm next and I run by. I'm like, and they're holding up donuts. I'm like I'm not interested in the donuts, I'm not opening my mouth and not putting up my hands up. I'm like no, no, no, no, no. And I run by and I probably get 10 or 15 yards down the road and I feel a donut hole peg me right in my left butt cheek, like a hard throw. I'm like who is the baseball pitcher who just winged that donut hole at me, thomas?

Kevin: 1:10:45

And after the race I get back to my car, get my phone, turn it on, check my messages, and Priscilla goes did you feel that donut hole hit you? I'm like, yeah, that certainly wasn't you. I go that wasn't you that threw it. And she goes yeah, I hit you in the back. I threw it. And I was like, no, it didn't hit me in the back, hit me in the butt, it was completely inappropriate. And it is the reason this is a HR report now, because you're a co-operator, and it's the reason that Alban beat me in the race, because I couldn't think about anything else for the whole rest of the race. Somebody peg me in the butt with a donut hole and you're cramping up. I probably have a mark.

Jordan: 1:11:21

Probably.

Kevin: 1:11:21

No, but that's donut throwing, it's all in good fun. It really is super fun and motivational and helped keep us going to have friends out there cheering us on as we ran on. So thanks for being there, priscilla, and thanks for throwing the donut. No heart feelings.