383: Repositioning Podscan: From Monitoring to Data Platform

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. Before we get to my latest positioning efforts, a word from paddle.com, the merchant of record and sponsor of this episode. So I've been using Paddle for everything really related to making money with my recent businesses, and they do more so that I have to do less. And in fact, they believe that the world needs more, and that's m o r, merchant of record, and I very much agree. And I also really enjoy a nice, nerdy wordplay. They deal with sales taxes for me and deal with invoices, credit card charges, fraud, that kind of stuff. So I can focus on my own business. I get more of my time back and they handle more of the behind the scenes complexity than I ever could. So, yeah, you probably should check out paddle.com to learn more. Coming out of micro conf, I've gained some clarity about something that I've been feeling for a while. I talked about it last week in the hotel room as I recorded last week's podcast episode, but I've had some time mostly because right after that I went to the reception and talked to so many people and then talked to more people and then on the plane ride back home I thought a lot about that stuff and then came to a certain conclusion. I think it's time to reposition PodScan. And I have to shift away from this initial stuff that I build it as. It was kind of Google alerts for podcasts. That was the initial idea, alerting and monitoring. Those were the main features cause they probably were also the easiest ones to build initially to validate it. And I have to move away from this a little bit because I have to move more decisively towards what is already the state of the platform, comprehensive podcast database. I have to embrace that what it is over what it was built to initially do. This is not just a cosmetic change. It's a genuine pivot really in focus, my focus and the product's functionality that aligns better with how people actually are using the product and kind of also aiming at who I want to use the product more out of the things that I see people do with it. Over the last couple of months, I've watched how customers have interacted with the platform. The most telling indicator for me is the API usage because I built this whole platform as an API first product. Everything the platform does in the interface, if you click around and do stuff can be done automatically as an API call, as an automated feature. And more and more customers are quite intensively using the API to access the data that PodScan offers, which at this point is tracking 3.6 ish million podcasts with a lot of metadata about who's on the show, who's hosting the show, where the show is hosted, …