Say Hello To The New Buzzsprout Home Dashboard!

We’re thrilled to introduce the brand-new Buzzsprout Home Dashboard! After 15 years of landing on the familiar Episodes screen, it’s time for a big upgrade. We’ll dive into how our native apps inspired this new experience and what the Home Dashboard brings to the table for all Buzzsprout users. From instant access to recent episodes and new pacing charts to curated resources to help you grow as a podcaster, this dashboard is designed to make daily podcasting easier. 

Share your thoughts on these updates through the fan mail link!

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro: World Series
• 2:04 New Home Dashboard

Transcript

Kevin: 0:00

So what happened? At what point yesterday did you decide I'm going to go to a World Series game?

Alban: 0:04

About 15 minutes before the very final moment you could make it.

Jordan: 0:08

Oh my.

Alban: 0:10

So, 12: 30, I'm wrapping something up, I'm getting ready to go to lunch and I just look and I'm like, oh, how have ticket prices gone? A bunch of my family's going to the game and I'm like, whoa, tickets gotten a lot cheaper in the last few hours. Oh, there's actually like a single seat three rows in front of my family. What? And it's gone down in price.

Kevin: 0:29

Is this because most people were thinking maybe there's not going to be a game five? You think that was the game that I went to.

Alban: 0:35

Yeah, I went to game five, the final game actually.

Kevin: 0:37

But you did this on Tuesday afternoon, right.

Jordan: 0:44

No I decided yesterday on Wednesday Are you serious?

Kevin: 0:45

I thought you decided on Tuesday before Tuesday's game.

Jordan: 0:47

Wait, wait. So you decided yesterday, and then you took off.

Alban: 0:51

So there's a game at eight o'clock, at 1230. I looked and was like, man, tickets are going down in price. And I remember Kevin going to the Taylor Swift concert like last minute and I'm like, yeah, but you couldn't get to New York in time for that. And I look there's a direct flight out of Jacksonville in like two hours and 15 minutes. And I know from a bunch of times two hours from my house to the gate is doable. And I ran downstairs to my wife I was like would you want to go to the Yankees game, like tonight. She's like, no, that sounds terrible.

Kevin: 1:23

You knew that answer before you asked. Yeah, just asking helps.

Alban: 1:31

the next question, which is do you mind if I go? The same piece of it, the oh, this is last minute, makes no sense to do. It makes it about twice as fun for me and five times more anxiety inducing for my wife. Yeah, so I ran upstairs, I grabbed my computer, I grabbed a toothbrush, one clean shirt and I ran out of the house, flew to New York, went directly to the game, got there by seven. Game starts at eight. Perfect. Got soaked with beer every time that there was a home run.

Alban: 1:58

Oh my gosh and I flew back here we go.

Kevin: 2:10

Okay, it is time to do another QuickCast, One topic. We want to go a little deep, but we don't want to go too much past 10, 15 minutes, and today we have a good one. We just rolled out a brand new page you land on once you log into Buzzsprout. You call it home or dashboard. It's brand new page you land on once you log into Buzzsprout. You call it home or dashboard. It's brand new, and we have not changed this page significantly in the entire 15 years of Buzzsprout. Yeah, entire 15 years of Buzzsprout. You log in, you land on your episodes page. Now, starting yesterday, you log in and you land on a brand new like home dashboard screen.

Jordan: 2:39

Yeah, it's really exciting, and we also have a new chart that is on the dashboard screen, so it's not just like a new landing page, it's also like a little something extra in there too.

Alban: 2:50

Yeah, the chart is a Kevin special. Kevin's been saying we need to have this chart for a long time and I feel like there's always been pushback. And then Kevin's like, all right, fine, we need to do a homepage, like a dashboard, and everyone's like great idea. And he goes and one of the nice to haves would be this brand new chart. And I was like there's no way. Kevin just got that through and then, lo and behold, a few weeks later it was done. It's like when legislation is trying to like pass a bill and they slip it into another thing. Kevin's pork barrel additions himself to his own bill.

Kevin: 3:24

Yeah, this was born out of some of the ideas that we had when we were building the native apps for iOS and Android, and we really felt like that had a different use case. Like, when you launch the Buzzsprout app on a mobile device, you're doing it for a different reason than when you're logging in on a desktop computer. Typically, if you're logging in desktop computer, one of the most common things you're going to be doing is uploading a new episode, making, like more significant changes. It just lends itself to bigger things, like you might want to start a whole new episode or whatever. You log in on a mobile device, it's very different. Now you're kind of checking on the state of your podcast. I want to see how are my like, how are my downloads doing today? How are my episodes doing against each other? Are there any new? Like Buzzsprout resources I want to check out Stuff like that and so it made us think, like, in order to provide the best experience for that platform, we wanted to come up with some new ideas, and so we've talked about that.

Kevin: 4:14

When we launched those mobile apps, what we didn't expect is that a lot of those experiences that we came up with, we're like they actually could work really well in desktop as well. How do we bring them to the desktop experience but make them feel at home in both places? So, like we don't want to compromise what we're doing on mobile, but if we bring some of that mobile stuff to the desktop, it would look a little bit different, it would feel a little bit different and there might be some different charts and graphs that we want to have too. So, like you said, yeah, I was very excited about this idea of a pacing chart where you can look at your most recent episode against, like the previous three or four that you've done, and for two reasons.

Kevin: 4:49

One, we're always trying new ways to promote our shows and to grow our audience and to reach more people. Every podcaster is typically trying to do that, and so you want to see if, as you're running experiments, is there an easy way in like a graphical view to see if anything I did worked. Also, sometimes something that you did might have a negative effect, and you might want to see that as well. Like if you typically get 100 downloads in the first two or three days of publishing a podcast episode, but for some reason, this most recent one is only getting 20 or 30, you might want to be aware of that as well. Oh, I forgot to put it on my Twitter account, like I always do, or I forgot to promote it in my Facebook group, or I forgot to do something.

Alban: 5:25

So, yeah, I love the pacing chart because at any given day you can get a good feel for how is this performing compared to my old episodes, and that's why we know we've really liked these charts, that we've had the past like here's how the episodes performed during the first 30 days, the first seven days. But sometimes when you're at like day five, you're like I think this is going to pass the seven day mark. You know, break the record for all my episodes. But I'm not sure you might be kind of like trying to draw this graph in your mind, like is it going to make it past it? Well, now you can just look at this graph and see, oh wow, I can see our latest episode of the previous handful. And see, oh wow, I can see our latest episode of the previous handful. It is performing the best.

Jordan: 6:05

Yeah.

Alban: 6:06

It's right, along with our very best performing episode. We're going to promote it again soon, so we're hoping it will get another bump and you can just see the effects of all of your the marketing that you've been doing. This is a small piece of what's happening on, I guess, our home dashboard. We've got your episodes, like we've always had, but now we have quick links so you can jump into those and promote them. You can see the episode pacing. You've got achievements and all of the progress. We've got resources. We're pulling together a lot of different things into this homepage so that people can take action on their podcast and kind of make progress continually, every day, come in, see something and take the next steps for their show.

Jordan: 6:50

Yeah, that was one of my favorite things when we introduced the native app for iOS and Android was the achievements being on that kind of like home screen dashboard. It's just it's so fun to see those little confetti things and like track your progress. So it's nice to have it on the website too, because I mean it was you could get it. But I think, yeah, you had to kind of go around about way of looking at your achievements and stuff, and that's such a fun thing for people to track and keep tabs on, and so it's nice that it's just front and center now, because it is one of our fan favorites.

Kevin: 7:23

Yeah, I never liked that you had to go all the way to stats first and then achievements.

Jordan: 7:27

Yeah.

Kevin: 7:28

It just it feels like I don't know a path that brings you through a place that I don't think people should be clicking into every single day.

Jordan: 7:34

Yeah, cause you have the stats. Yeah, we've had a little talk about that.

Kevin: 7:39

Yeah, I don't love forcing people through stats every single day.

Kevin: 7:41

But, you might want to check out how you're doing on your achievement. Especially if you're getting close to, like, the next achievement and you like sharing them on your social and stuff and celebrating those milestones in your podcasting journey, it makes sense to have them bring them a little bit more front and center. So I was excited that we're able to do that. There's a couple other changes that got introduced at the same time. Yeah, one is this new allowance page. So everyone who's on a paid plan for Buzzsprout has an allowance, a certain duration of hours, that you can upload new every month. That's how we differentiate our plans, of course. So now you'll see, like, how many hours you have remaining right on the home screen, and if you click on that, it brings you to this whole page that's dedicated to breaking out your allowance, which is really nice, because in the past we tried to capture all of that allowance information just right on the episode screen and there wasn't a ton of real estate to really do that well. And so now, by just representing, here's where you are in your allowance. If you want more detail, you can click on it and you can get to the allowance page where you see the full detail. It's just much more digestible of exactly where you are, how many episodes have you uploaded, how much time has each one pulled from your allowance, when exactly your cycle renews like how many days it's counting down, and it tells you the exact date and the exact time that your allowance is gonna renew. So I know that this is gonna be helpful for so many people who run up close to or they bump right up against their allowance every month and they wanna know, like hey, do I need to publish in the next day or two days, or when is my allowance for new, how many episodes have I done and how long was each one? And so it makes all of that crystal clear. And the other page that has been updated now with this new update is the episodes page.

Kevin: 9:15

So, because this page used to do double duty, it used to be the landing page when you logged in and it was also kind of your episodes home. It showed all your episodes. Now it just does single duty and that is better. It's a very nice, clean list of all of your episodes in chronological order, and we've added a great little search bar at the top so that you can quickly search and find the episode you're looking for. So, like all the time I'm trying to think of, I don't know, we'll bump into somebody at a conference or someone who might be asking about something that we've covered on Buzzcast and I want to share that episode with them, or whatever and it's. I'm always scrolling through the list and this solves that problem. Now I can just search by title, if I know it, or the description, or if I know a certain guest was on it. You can search by any of those things, find the episodes you're looking for and then quickly take action on those episodes. So that's a great enhancement as well.

Jordan: 10:03

And we had introduced that in the website redesign, but now it's on the actual, like podcast dashboard, right. And so I was pleasantly surprised to get some messages from podcasters where the first thing they said was like, oh my gosh, we have episode search. Yes, they were so excited and it's such a small thing, like it's not the big thing, like we have this shiny new homepage that just is gorgeous. And everyone's like, oh my gosh, we have search. It's just so funny.

Alban: 10:35

I think that's a really good reminder that sometimes we can be in our own heads about all the work we put into things and then really it's when are we solving specific problems that people have? That's what's going to make a big impact for them, at least that they'll notice immediately. So if it's somebody who's like, oh, I do have this problem of I have a massive back catalog and my website doesn't have search, and now I have search and everyone can go find the back catalog episodes, they're really excited because they knew about this specific problem and now it's being solved. The hope is that things like episode pacing these are problems they didn't know they had.

Alban: 11:11

Now we are helping them improve their podcast because now they look at it and go oh, I can identify that this episode is doing significantly better or significantly worse or just something's different than in the previous episodes. And it's all displaying data that you had already, but in a new way. And by displaying in a new way we hopefully are surfacing insights, like you've done. Promotions that have worked out well. The guest is really resonating with your audience. It's getting shared. You know, you're seeing, oh, there's something different, so that you can either replicate or cease the experiment that you tried. That maybe is not working.

Jordan: 11:49

Yeah.

Kevin: 11:51

And there's a lot of other magic that's going into this homepage as well, and if you've been with Buzzsprout for a while which probably most people who are listening to this podcast have been you might not see all of that, but this page and the old episodes page was functionality we had to bring over, of course, which is if you're a brand new podcaster, this page needs to help you get started with your podcast, and, of course, which is if you're a brand new podcaster, this page needs to help you get started with your podcast, and so that's a really big part of this page that we don't get to see, because we've been, you know what episode are we on 100 and something 139.5.

Kevin: 12:19

139. Our account is 139. But if you set up a brand new podcast and you're starting from scratch, you have zero episodes. This page kind of morphs and takes on the role of podcast you know, mentor and guide and helps you get started with your podcast. So everything from how do you write a good podcast description to how do you get your artwork uploaded and all that kind of stuff. Or if you are moving from another host into Buzzsprout, it says things like we've imported all of your old episodes and we've imported your artwork, so check that over. And then you want to upgrade your account to a paid account and then brick copy over the rest of your episodes and check all your listings and all that kind of stuff. So it actually does quite a lot but depending on the state of your podcast, it morphs very nicely.

Jordan: 12:58

Well, if you're logging in today and you see that new home dashboard, if you have any feedback or any thoughts or just want to tell us how awesome it looks, go ahead and send us a text using the fan mail link in the episode description. Until next week, keep podcasting.