Better Product LAUNCH: Podchaser

Episode Transcription

Christian:

Welcome to this episode of Better Product LAUNCH, where we're sitting down with a founder to give you an inside look into their new product launch.

Anna:

Today, we're talking to Cole Raven, co-founder of Podchaser, where they're building the destination for podcast discovery, ratings, reviews, creator credits, playlist, and search. Cole, awesome to have you on the show today.

Cole Raven:

Great to be here.

Anna:

To start, tell us about Podchaser.

Cole Raven:

Podchaser, the best way to describe it is an IMDb or a Rotten Tomatoes for the podcast world in the same way that you can search for and discover data about your favorite TV shows or movies on these other platforms, or you can think of like Goodreads if you're searching for books or want to discover books. We're the podcast equivalent built on user-generated content. We have the ability for anybody to make an account and contribute through leaving ratings and reviews for their favorite shows or building lists. That could be a list about anything that they can give a title and a description and help other people to discover content as well as we have a whole data side of the business where we collect data on credits for podcasts, which means who the host is, who the producers are, the editors, profile for all of the guests that have been on a show, so that you can discover podcast content through people and not just by subscribing to a podcast.

If you want to follow say, Conan O'Brien, you'll not only get updates about Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend, his podcast, but if he's a guest on any other podcast, then you can be notified about that as well. Those might be shows that you don't already subscribe to and it's a new way of thinking about discovery. The best way to think about it is like an equivalent of those other services, but specifically geared toward podcast discovery.

Christian:

How did it get started?

Cole Raven:

It got started on Reddit. One of our other co-founders, Bradley, I had originally introduced him to podcast. This was back in, I don't know, 2014, 2015. We were listening to things like the Tim Ferriss Show and one of the questions that he asked me at the time was, "There are so many episodes of these podcasts. There are hundreds and where do you start because it's so hard to know which episodes are good, which episodes are bad. Sometimes you listen to one. You spend two hours listening to a podcast episode and you're like, "That was not worth two hours of my time." Where are the ratings and reviews? Where is the listener feedback on this content?" And the answer was, "It didn't exist." The original idea sparked from episode level, curation and discovery, and feedback from listeners. He posted on Reddit and asked the podcast community.

There's a huge, thriving podcast community on Reddit so he asked the community, "Does an IMDb for podcast exist? Where can I go use it?" And the community overwhelmingly was like, "It doesn't exist but we'd love to help you build it." That was actually how we formed the original team. That was how we met Ben, who lives in Melbourne, Australia, and his brother-in-law, Ryan, who's our designer and original front end developer. And never met them in person. We met on Reddit and it's been Zoom meetings ever since and we've been totally remote, but that's how it got started.

Christian:

And you did this before this was cool, starting in March with COVID. You guys just want to let people know this was a thing you were doing before we had to do things remote. And it's really fascinating too, because a lot of companies, a lot of products start with maybe a business idea in mind, and it's tied to a key problem that you're solving. It feels to me like Podchaser, it does seem that it started with a problem. You mentioned a few, but it almost seems more driven by a shared interest in something versus, "Oh, I see this massive business opportunity. Let's get a business plan together and then just digitize this." It almost seemed like, "Hey, there is nothing that does something like this and I really want it to come to life." Is that how you would categorize how it started, that it was less maybe business problem-oriented and more whatever the opposite of that is?

Cole Raven:

I wouldn't say that that's totally negative in my mind. I think that when we first had the idea and started building it, we didn't know what fundraising was. We didn't know what it meant to be a venture-backed company. And so, that was not our mindset at all. Our mindset was, "We think that we could build a thriving community in the same way that IMDb and Goodreads has and we know that they must make money because they exist and IMDb was acquired by Amazon. And so, there is a business opportunity here and we'll just figure it out. And if we can build the community, then we can hopefully mirror some of the things that they've done to make money and cross that bridge when we get there." It was always very community-minded first and building the things that we wanted to build and that the community asked us to build and not so much thinking about the business implications. It was just, "If we can grow this, then the money will figure itself out."

Christian:

This is the other thing that's fascinated me with Podchaser. I mean, yes, it's remote. You formed in the internet. You formed around this community. The other aspect, I think too, is that at least to my knowledge, I mean, you have great design talent and you're building some product talent. But in the very beginning, it feels very scrappy but when I looked at the way you were talking and the product itself, it just didn't look like other early stage, pre-revenue products that were out there. My question is for someone like yourself and the founding team that doesn't have a really versed history and product, I'd love to understand how you made product decisions early on. You mentioned taking things from the community. How did you actually establish what this thing was going to be in the beginning? How did you manage that amongst yourselves?

Cole Raven:

Well, first, all credit goes to Ryan, our designer, and one of our co-founders. He owned a design company before this. And so from the beginning, our designs were good so that helped a lot. Even if the product wasn't perfect, it at least looked pretty good. But I think that helped to give us some credibility, but we did very much from the beginning, build this based on what the community wanted and we did that through a lot of different ways. We continue to engage those online forums and ask questions like, "Okay, we launched this. What should we build next? Here are 10 things we're thinking about. What are the pros and cons of each? Can you give us your feedback? What would you use the most?" And so, we never really built anything just based purely on our own idea of what it should be.

For our first few hundred users, we would send them all an email and say, "Hey, would you be willing to answer this survey? Here's the things we're thinking about building." When I get surveys like that today from Google or these type of... I immediately archive it. It's not something that I'm going to take 15 or 20 minutes to do. But we had already established such a close relationship with the online communities that they knew who we were. When we emailed them, they knew, "Hey, this email's coming from Cole. I responded to one of his comments online yesterday. I know who this is, so I'm going to help out." We knew that they felt what they were contributing was actually going to influence the product and it did.

We would say, "We promised you the IMDb for podcasts. We have ratings and reviews. We still need to build creator profiles and credits and build that whole system. We still need user-generated lists. We still need to give you the ability to follow things so you can get updates." None of that existed in the beginning so we were trying to figure out how to prioritize that and what it should look like. I talked, even over the phone, with hundreds of podcasts creators in the beginning, but I scheduled time to talk with each of them and talk to them about their specific problems. And one overwhelming issue is just finding listeners. It's something that, every podcast wants more listeners, but there were a lot of other things as well that are just lacking support and just hearing them out and building that relationship got them just personally invested in the product, which really helped us.

But we knew that if we could get their buy-in, that would bring listeners because if the creators loved what we were doing, they would talk about it on their show. They would post Podchaser links on their social channels. And if we were building what they wanted us to build, then the listeners would come and the consumers would come after that. That's, I think, really what happened. Our first, I would say, growth success was just with creators. I would say even today, it's a third or maybe a fourth of all of our users on the website is just creators who are updating their pages and asking listeners to contribute. They're doing things like responding to reviews that have been left. Those are all features that we built just because of them.

Anna:

As the product has grown, are you staying in touch with the community? Are they still a big part of how you prioritize and what features you do or are you starting to move away at all from them?

Cole Raven:

I hate to say that we're moving away from them because I don't think we are, but we have other priorities too now. We've gone through two rounds of funding. We have to think about how we're going to make money. We have to think about churn and retention metrics and all these things that we're tracking on Amplitude and these other places. We have to continue to show that hockey stick growth so we have to think about how we can make that happen. But with that said, we still have a slack community, for example, that we formed and it has over a thousand people in it. And these are just over a thousand random Podchaser users and creators and listeners and fans and all sorts of people and they're the first people to know about anything that we're building or anything that we launch and those are the first people that we listen to.

And we're still actively involved in discord channels with podcast creators and all sorts of things, asking them, "Hey, what do you think about this before we do it," because the last thing we want to do is make them feel like they're ignored because they're still a vital part of the community and they're still the ones who are creating content and responding to reviews and that sort of thing. We have, I think, almost 15,000 podcast pages on Podchaser that have been claimed by their owners and those are big and small. But there are 1.4 million podcasts out there so we still have a long way to go in terms of just engaging that audience. We've started to think about how to make money. We've started to do that this year, but then we have a whole other half of our business that's still very focused on user growth and engaging that community.

Christian:

What I would love to talk about... Now this is a show about product, not necessarily investing, but the thing that I find really also compelling about your story is the pre-revenue of getting investment story. A lot of the discourse around startups, especially comes from the Bay Area, just build something that gets people to come and then monetize later. But in practice, that's really challenging and it's actually rare to get someone that's early on with some success like you have, where you're still trying to figure that out. I would love to hear your thoughts on this phase that you just have started going through, the decision to take on investment, and how you actually tell the story of what you're building when you're not using your typical ARR charts and month over month growth. How did you first start telling a compelling story to investors to get them to want to invest in and taking a chance on monetizing it?

Cole Raven:

That's a great question because I... And I'm very grateful for the investors that we have because it was a challenge finding them. We were pre-revenue. We're a team of ragtag, mid-Westerners that have not done this before that don't have product experience. And it's like, "Why trust us to build this thing?" And I think a lot of it was just built on the concept and the idea of this, but we did have early traction and early growth. We were able to show those hockey stick charts where we bootstrapped it for almost, I think it was a year before, even beginning to fundraise. We were able to show that rapid growth and we were able to show SEO growth.

People were starting to Google things and they were coming to Podchaser and I think that got investors excited because they believed in the idea. They were shocked to find out that nothing like it exists. When we talk about competitors, there still aren't any. They just saw that opportunity. I think that it took finding the right investors because I can't tell you how many times we were rejected because, "Oh, well, we only invest in companies that can show us this type of revenue growth or have this founding team that has credentials from whatever school or has previous exits or whatever." We don't fit any of those things. And so, in the first round it was all individual, so it was nothing institutional. And so, when we found those people, it was just all excitement around podcast discovery, knowing that the podcasting market was set to boom and it has now.

They weren't wrong about that and I think we're well positioned to be a part of that boom but it was just finding the right investors. Even going into our second round of funding, we've raised over $2 million now and in both rounds, it was all pre-revenue conversations. We could not show any significant revenue growth. We had some affiliate stuff going on, but it barely offsets our burn. It's more of a passive way to generate revenues. We did present ideas for how we could make money and a lot of it paralleled with IMDb and with Goodreads and with Rotten Tomatoes and how they make money today because one of our advisors was a very early employee at IMDb in the 90s, and he led their international growth and monetization strategies so we're able to really pick his brain about what IMDb did in the early days.

What was really exciting was that IMDb today, they still rake in money from advertising with movie releases and things like that, but a huge, significant chunk of their business is from IMDb Pro and that's something that every professional in that industry has a subscription to. We were thinking about what could be that equivalent for the podcast world. What is something that every creator and every professional would subscribe to if it existed? That was the pitch and that's what we're launching actually right now, next week. It's finally becoming a reality.

Christian:

Yeah, I don't know if it jinxes you if we just start talking about it in the past tense. What a great two months it's been since this has launched. There's something fascinating to me as a consumer what you said about IMDb because Anna and I were joking before we interviewed you, we were like, "IMDb, they must make money somehow." We had no idea. And I was like, "They must something off of the people that are in the movie business."

Cole Raven:

They're a billion dollar company.

Christian:

Really?

Cole Raven:

They make tons of money, yes.

Christian:

Well, I guess that ignorance on my part really is what's fascinating because I still go to IMDb today. I go there over Google when it comes to movies just because it's easier and now they integrate a little bit better with Google search the way Wikipedia does. But this whole idea that what you're monetizing almost can be hidden behind the scenes. It's almost like the Podchaser, what you've promised your community and what it is to maybe somebody like me and Anna may never change, but you could still make money off of going after something completely different and that's what fascinates me is that IMDb's the same way. The way they make money is not necessarily affecting the broad use of the passive consumers that are using it that drive traffic.

But I have to imagine that's a challenge for you in thinking about what markets are you going to go after. It seems like there's a lot of different opportunities. I'd love to learn more about that journey you've been on, that now you've got something people are coming to. How do you figure out, "We go after this market and try that one out, build a feature for them, or we have this feature, let's find a market." How are you managing that process?

Cole Raven:

What's fascinating is that IMDb, Wikipedia, they're very similar in a respect that 99 point something percent of their data is user-generated and it's always been user-generated and it continues to be, and it's just built on super fans. And it's people who... I mean, we have people on Podchaser who spend eight hours a day updating credits, adding ratings and reviews, building lists. And so, you're right. That aspect of what we do is not going to change much. we're going to continue to build cool stuff that we think will draw people to the website and build on top of that. But when thinking about revenue, it's been a huge learning experience for us because I've been shocked to hear about all of the different ways that IMDb and these other companies make money because at their core, they're a data business and there are many ways for a data business to make money.

One thing that scared us a bit in the beginning is that the film industry has so much money to spend on advertising to advertise a new film. They'll spend millions of dollars and a lot of that goes to companies like IMDb, to a new King Kong movie is released and you see King Kong busting out the middle of your screen when you pull up the website. And podcasting is getting there. It's now passing a billion dollar industry, but that's still potatoes compared to the film industry. We have to think about the other aspects of their business and one thing that a lot of people don't think about is data licensing. There are companies that license IMDb data for various purposes. We've thought about affiliate strategies. We thought about data licensing strategies and all of these things were part of the pitch.

And then we've thought about Podchaser Pro and what that could be. IMDb Pro, it's a way for people in the film industry to contact talent agents and get more details on an actor, and they have a whole job board behind the scenes system where people looking for producer roles and that sort of thing can connect with executives. Over the last year, we've experimented with these different avenues. We have the affiliate side. We have the data licensing side. But what I'm really excited about and what's what's coming right now is Podchaser Pro and it's very different from IMDb Pro but because we partner with so many hosting platforms, so many podcast apps, so many publishers, we're this agnostic third-party that everybody can be friends with and there are not many companies like that.

It's like you either have an inherent interest in the success of content or some other aspect, like you're selling gear or hosting services. You're always going to have that conflict. Whereas with Podchaser, I don't care what podcasts are popular. I don't care what gear people are using or what services they're using so we can partner with all of these different companies and because we do that, we've begun to collect a lot of interesting data that we can now reveal to customers through our API and through Podchaser Pro. We've started to work with universities, PR agencies, ad agencies, brands that are advertising on podcasts to help them discover new opportunities through this data. These apps pass back to us, listening metrics, and for that reason, we can give data on the popularity of any show in the podcasting world.

We can tell you about how many listeners it has. We can give you demographic information, things like sponsor history for the show, provide a topics analysis for the things that they discussed on the show. And this is really powerful for companies that you might hear advertising on podcasts today, companies like ZipRecruiter that are looking for new opportunities, advertise and where to find the right listener audience in the podcasting world because there's nowhere where you can go today to get an accurate gauge of how popular a podcast is. We're launching this new subscription service called Podchaser Pro that'll give these brands and agencies all of these new insights into this data, which is something that they've never had before and that Podchaser is completely, uniquely positioned to do.

I hate to say that we stumbled into this. We kind of did. This isn't something that was even really a part of our pitch to investors. It was more of, "If we build this, the money will come at that point." But now we're at a point where we've built it. We have a significant enough user base to where we get enough of our own data and we have enough of these integration partnerships to where we can build really cool products on top of it because of all of the unique data that we have.

Christian:

It hasn't escaped me that you can't really succeed at some of your ideas for the product without having the data, which means that you can't succeed without continuing to build up the database and to split some of your priorities to make sure that you're still driving traffic. Is that challenging to do now that you're splitting a little bit to focus on these features and still drive growth?

Cole Raven:

Now that we're at a point where we have to split priorities a little bit, we're thinking about things that we can build within Podchaser that contribute to the success of both sides of our business. When we think about our lists feature for example, you can build lists of podcasts. You can build lists of episodes. One thing that we'll add is the ability to build a list of creators of people. You can say, "Here's the list of NBA athletes," so then you can click on each one and listen to their podcast interviews. That's something that helps with our discovery. It helps with say, an influencer marketing company. If they want to identify people and how they're engaging with podcasts and trending in this world and how they're doing it, this is now a really great research tool for them on the Podchaser Pro side. It's through that data that we're getting from our users. There are ways that we have to think about how we build the product that will contribute to success for both.

Another big one is our API, which is also launching a little later in 2020. And we already have a lot of apps being built on top of our API, but we're expanding it so that with the success of this open API that podcasts apps are built on top of, we're building this really great open, free resource for them. The more apps that use it, the more data we can collect for the data side of our business. We're still building all of these really great, useful, free tools and as long as it also contributes to the data side of our business, then we'll continue to build it. That's how we think about it today. I wouldn't say that one side really inhibits the other. It just makes us think more critically about how they can pair well together to contribute to the success of both at the same time.

Anna:

I was going to ask what's next for Podchaser? I feel like you have spent this whole time talking about that, which is awesome, but I'm curious though, is there a next next? Is there something beyond the existing things that you're working on?

Cole Raven:

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of next nexts, and it's figuring out which next next to do next.

Anna:

Yeah. That old problem, yeah.

Cole Raven:

Yeah. I think this is an issue with every company that's building a product. It's like, "We have all these great ideas. Which one do we do first? How do we not build so many that our products just gets confusing and cluttered?" In some ways, we're thinking about taking a step backward and simplifying things. Now that we have all of these great features on Podchaser, the feedback that we've gotten is that it's really hard to understand how to use them all, all the different things that you can do with Podchaser. If I sit down with you on a 20 minute call, it's like I could probably show you things about how to use the website that you might've never stumbled on yourself that are really cool and useful. We've added all of these features. I think we probably experienced some future bloat at some point.

And so, now it's reining that in and really simplifying and refining the things that we know have been a success on the website and pointing our users in those directions to the places where we know if they engage with these features, that they're going to be long-term users on Podchaser. We have to take a step back and think more critically about that. But in terms of other things that we're excited about, Podchaser Pro is going to lead us down some really cool avenues. Now that we're revealing all of this data about podcasts, we're going to begin to explore things like media monitoring, because we're already doing language processing all of these shows. We have transcripts for all of these shows. It's like now we can do cool things. Anytime a brand is mentioned, or a person is mentioned on a podcast, we can notify you about that and say, "Hey, your brand was mentioned. Here's how many people it reached. Here's the type of audience it reached. Here's the sentiment around that," so then they can filter it to their crisis team or their marketing team to repurpose that content.

That gets to be really cool because, especially as the bigger brands, they're mentioned on podcasts all day, every day, but like which one do you pay attention to and which one matters? It's like, "Well, Joe Rogan just talked about Pepsi so maybe Pepsi should pay attention to that." But how are they ever going to know? That's something that we're excited about, but there's so many things. It's just a matter of, again, going back to figuring out what can contribute to the success of both sides of our business. And so, that's what we're doing.

Christian:

Well, you said it a few times. The data is driving it. It's always an interesting focus cause on the outside, it sounds very vague to say you're a data business, but you're data about podcasts. And as long as you continue to build the data set, as long as the things that you do are tied to that, it seems like it'll make sense.

Cole Raven:

Yeah. I think one thing that I maybe didn't talk about much, and it's something that we probably spent 25% of our time thinking about, is SEO. That's also very vital to the success of our business because we can't grow as a data company unless we have people coming to the website and finding us organically. And we're a Midwest company. Our mindset around money is not throw money at the problem like it might be with some coastal companies. It's more, "How can we figure out this in a way that's capital efficient?" And one way that we've done that is just through organic growth. We spend very little on marketing, like a couple of hundred dollars per month on marketing, and that's because we've spent so much time and attention just on making sure that people can find us organically if they're trying to discover podcast content. For our type of business, that's crucial.

Christian:

Thinking through the audience of being product people and understanding, for a product like this, what SEO does, how do you move it forward? The comment that you made, that you just spend a few hundred dollars because you were focusing in organic content, can you help break down maybe a little more specifically what that means in Podchaser's case?

Cole Raven:

It means a lot of things. The way that we've thought about our podcast's pages, for example. We've built those landing pages in a way where if somebody Googles a podcast and discovers a Podchaser page because Google has crawled and indexed to that, their experience when they click that link has to be what they expect. When you think about how you're building your product, that's very important because then that person that clicks on that link is going to stay on your website longer, more people are going to click that link, and that's how Google trusts you as a website. You have to build trust with Google to make SEO happen. That's one piece of it.

But another thing that we think a lot about is how we can leverage our users to build really interesting user-generated content that people will want to discover, so things like lists. If you Google, "Best episodes of Joe Rogan," or "Best episodes of My Favorite Murder," all these different podcasts, Podchaser will be one of the top three results and that's because we've structured these pages in a way where we've built the product just thinking about SEO. It's like, "Okay, we can build lists but if we build lists that users can leave notes on, well, now it's a lot of original content that Google's not going to find elsewhere, and they're going to want to surface that in search results because it's different than everything else out there." It's just very important to think about that when you're building your product and thinking about the experience that users will have when they click on your link from Google for the first time.

Christian:

If I understand correctly in what we're getting at for people thinking about a data-based business, a way to win is to... The API economy or connecting to these different pieces rather than building a product at the outset, these issues of SEO and organic growth, I think, are going to start coming to the fore and that's not an area where product people are necessarily great at understanding. What you're basically saying is, you can keep the costs down, at least in your market, because you're building more organic content. Part of your strategy for Podchaser is creating lists, creating profile pages, getting podcasts, driving all that traffic, building up more of these pages that then drives more traffic, which increases your Google ranking.

Cole Raven:

We even noticed that user-generated content performed so much better than when we tried to write articles and hire consultants that we would spend 500 bucks and say, "Hey, write an write an article about this so that we can hope it appears in Google." And that was okay, but it was 1/10th of the success of just empowering your users to create really cool content.

Christian:

I'm glad you brought that up. I think it's still a black box, stark art, whatever the right thing is, for a lot of non-marketers. It's good to hear that. Thanks again, Cole. Glad to finally get you on the show. This was fantastic.

Anna:

Man, that was so interesting.

Christian:

And you're saying, "Interesting," genuinely this time, not just as a word.

Anna:

I'm legit. That's a conversation I don't know that we've ever had and I think it's because it's such a pure B2C product. And you're right, it's a data-based product, literally built... I don't know that we have talked to anyone who set out to catalog because that was the first goal, was the cataloging of all the podcasts, all the creators, and tie those connections together, growing out of a user community and then it just got more functionality, more functionality, more functionality. It's solving a problem, but the problem was, "I need this information." It's solving an information problem with information. And so, I think it's just a different conversation than we've really ever had before.

Christian:

Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Gosh, it's been a while. It's been a while since we talked to Sara Mauskopf from Winnie. God, it feels like years ago, but it's very similar.

Anna:

I agree. That's the other thing that came to my mind when hearing him talk, that just, "I want to gather all that information. There's an avid community there. User-generated content." Yeah, you're right. There are a lot of parallels to what they're both doing.

Christian:

Yeah, and I think on Winnie, it was self-centered in a sense, that she was a mom looking for this stuff, but then expanded outside there. Obviously, very different business dealing with childcare and state laws and things like that, but I do remember their organic marketing approach of becoming the source to look for things and driving traffic that way we heard Cole talk about too. And you're right, we don't hear... I mean, outside of that, I think this is our first company that's like this. I think it's really important to get on there for what you just mentioned, that they're a data business, because I don't know, this could just be me, but my feeling was always dismissive of this whole idea that Silicon Valley companies just get users and worry about money later. And it was just this dismissive way that I think a lot of people looked at it.

And now when I look at it, I see so much more strategy involved in it, and maybe that's because like you said, ads have gotten more expensive and you can't just build something and then sell ads like you could years ago. But it feels like even though they didn't necessarily have say, Podchaser Pro completely outlined, like what's the vision for this product from the beginning, they did have some idea that something like that was going to come. And so, it seems even though they were just trying to drive traffic and build this directory for podcasts, they knew something was coming on the other end of it.

Anna:

Yeah, it's just like you said. I mean, even if they set out to build Podchaser Pro from the very beginning, they would have had to go back and build all this infrastructure first because Podchaser Pro wouldn't make sense without all of this.

Christian:

Yeah. I mean, I'm sure a lot of investors and people with more business background than us could really analyze the business model. But given that this is a product show, I do think one of the challenges that I thought was interesting to dig into on that was the way that he had to balance growth with experimenting with new features. I think that's a really tough challenge and we could have dug into a little bit more. But in the early stages, when they're just growing and not worrying about revenue, you can just prioritize how do we get more traffic, getting more content there? But then the second you take investment and be like, "Okay, you need to go figure out how to make money," you still have to continue driving traffic while also trying to experiment too and that's got to be a really big challenge.

Anna:

Yeah. I mean, that's a huge challenge and I think where he talked a bit about some of the outcome of that challenge is that now they have a product that is pretty complex and you can do a lot on it, but it's not super clear how to do all the really useful things. I think that's also probably a path to monetization is isolating value and isolating the things that that people want to use and they are using and are finding a lot of value in and that the company is finding a lot of value in too.

For example, the user user-generated lists. He's saying that it's total user-generated content. It does amazing on SEO. And so, that's something that people obviously find value in. They're finding business value in so it's something that we want to make sure people know how to do that and can consume that. I wonder if a feature... I don't want to say bloat. That's probably too strong of a word, but I can't think of a less stronger... Little bloat. I don't know. If future bloat has obscured clear path to monetization in some way.

Christian:

Right, or maybe it's just one of those things where, like an artist's canvas, you have to erase or paint over some things that didn't really work. Maybe it's just a series of small, little inklings that they did an experiment on but it didn't really work out so they shifted focus on something. Maybe at some point, there's this great Marie Kondo project they're going to have to go through and be like, "All right. We found our thing. We need to deal with all these straggler features that we built over the last couple of years." Maybe that'll happen.

Anna:

Talking about tying back to past episodes, I mean, I think we have that conversation with Upper Hand, I think, in our what, fourth episode, fifth episode or something. I mean, they were going through the products and just cleaning house and saying, "What's our value? What are we focusing on," and starting to sunset features. I think the metaphor was pulling stuff out of, or shoving stuff in the attic. They were shoving features in the attic and now it's time to confront the attic.

Christian:

Yeah, [inaudible 00:35:02]. That's a good memory. That was right. I definitely think that was what Myles Grote said. Well, and so the one thing I think we should make sure we hit on again for our audience is that this was B2C. And part of the reason we wanted Cole on was to demystify B2C a little bit, and I don't know, make it a little bit less scary. But I would really hope that people listening to this in a B2B world are inspired and think of other ways and we don't have time to get into all those. We need a whiteboard to brainstorm, but I hope you can hear this and find that even in a B2B space, especially with product-led growth just continuing to gain traction, that there are other ways to monetize. There's other creative ways out there to go find new audiences that are not just like, "Let's just build this feature and then see how many people use it and then see what to charge them." There's other ways to explore, more creative ways to explore what you're building, I think.

Anna:

Thanks for listening to the show this week. If you're looking for more resources on how to design, build, market and sell better products, then head over to betterproduct.community to join well, the community. And as always, we're curious, what does Better Product mean to you? Shoot us an email at podcast@innovatemap.com.