408: The Podscan Ideas Vault: Engineering as Marketing

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. Today, I'll be talking about a successful marketing project within my own software business that turned out to be so successful that it spawned a business built on top of that business. And when this episode is released, it'll be one day since the platform has been live. So I'll be sharing the most raw and most timely insight into what happened right now, what the story is, how it happened, and how I went about building this particular project. This episode is sponsored by paddle.com, my merchant of record payment provider of choice, who's been helping me focus on PodScan and the project that I'll be sharing with you today from day one. They're taking care of all the things related to money so that founders like you and me can focus on the things that only we can build. Paddle handles the rest, sales tax, credit cards failing, all of that, they take care of it. I highly recommend looking into it, so please check out paddle.com. The thing I built is called the PodScan ideas newsletter, and on top of that newsletter now sits the PodScan ideas vault, which is a platform that tracks, scores, ranks and analyzes all kinds of business ideas that it pulls from the full transcripts of fresh episodes in real time of around 500 podcasts of all kinds mainly focused on the entrepreneurial, business, finance, philosophy and science shows out there. Now, I know it's not a novel idea to extract information from other media, right? The whole idea of travel guides or rewatch podcasts for that matter, I watch and listen to quite a few of those, is pretty much an indicator that there is value just from extracting things from existing content created by other people. But PodScan in particular has been extremely well set up to extract information from a whole industry's worth of insights and content in a very very easy way. And I'm just gonna share how all of this came to be. Because I have several customers on podscan.fm that have lists of podcasts set up with a webhook. Whenever a new episode comes out for any of these shows it sends the full info about this episode to their servers and they send it through a lot of cleaning up. Right? They take the full transcript that I provide with every single show, they analyze it, have an AI summarize it, and do a lot of stuff with it, different things for different people. And then they generate some kind of content from this data and send that out or make it available to their customers. Imagine I have a couple of people just taking podcasts and summarizing them and turning that into a newsletter. It's really as simple as that for some. But there's one really interesting one. I have a particular customer that works in the medical field. He's a doctor who summarizes very …