Supercast

Add a paid membership to your podcast

10 followers

Add a paid membership to your podcast

10 followers

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Podcasting Tools

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Membership software

Supercast gives podcasters everything they need to sell subscription content to their listeners and build sweet, sweet recurring revenue without disrupting their ad-supported public feed.

Launch tags:SaaS•Tech

Launch Team

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Mailman

Maker

Thanks for hunting, @hnshah! Excited to finally share Supercast with everyone. In a nutshell: it's everything a podcaster needs to switch from an ad supported model to listener supported subscription model. It lets you go from reading MeUndies ads to sweet, sweet independence and recurring revenue. If you're curious about the story of how we accidentally started it, check out my blog post about how Sirius is savagely ripping off Howard Stern: https://medium.com/@awilkinson/h... Poor guy is only making $90mm per year, when he should be making $228mm 😢

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7yr ago

TapeReal.com

@hnshah @awilkinson as a trial, Tim Ferriss experimented with turning off ads and converting to a subscription model with exclusive content, AMAs for his paying listeners, etc. After a month, he sent an email explaining how the experiment worked and turned ads back on. This might be good for some additional revenue on the side for some podcasters though.

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7yr ago

Toyo

Maker

@hnshah @awilkinson @shahalica hey Ali! Tim's experiment was definitely interesting, and the data he shared fascinating. We feel he's a bit of an outlier, though — as he said, his audience has a *strong* preference for his ads. We've not found most podcast audiences to share that love! As you hinted at, though, the two models don't need to be mutually exclusive: Supercast is perfect for podcasters who hate managing and reading ads, but it's also great for anyone who wants to offer their listeners a private, ad-free feed (and maybe throw In a few AMA or bonus episodes, too).

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7yr ago

@hnshah @awilkinson @shahalica @aidanhornsby I think a key difference with Tim was that his audience wants product recommendations from him so the ads are not as abrasive as other podcasts.

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7yr ago

Mailman

Maker

@hnshah @shahalica I feel like Tim did it really oddly. He charged 3-6x the average and offered nothing in return (other podcasters do exclusive episodes, AMAs etc). I think he missed a huge opportunity. It's like me starting a pizza restaurant that sells $25 slices. Nobody comes and I assume nobody likes pizza.

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7yr ago

Awesome! and your caption says it all, love it!. Just curious, How do you guys track fraud feed shares? If you are creating a unique feed link per purchase, then automatically limiting the number of downloads per link per period, and requiring their purchase key to listen further would reduce the fraud significantly I guess, than just alerting them. The relationship between host and listener is a bit personal (unlike SaaS products) in some categories and reaching them about fraud when they just shared with a friend, seems not so great. But yeah, I believe its still in a good direction for enabling subscription model for podcasting.

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7yr ago

Maker

@sravang Great question! As you mentioned, we create a unique feed link per purchase. From there, we track multiple things including how many times an individual feed is downloaded, how many times each episode is downloaded, and how many IP addresses are used in all of these. If you download 100 episodes on 5 IP addresses we’re not going to create an alert, but let's say you download 100 episodes on 100 IP addresses, we will send the podcast creator a usage alert and they can decide to ignore/suspend your feed.

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7yr ago

Toyo

Maker

@sravang totally agree with your point about the personal relationship and being cautious around fraud communications. We're focused on giving the podcaster the quickest heads up and as much context as possible about any feed abuse scenarios, so they can choose how to approach that communication with their member(s), as much as we are on enabling automated notifications and campaigns.

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7yr ago

Toyo

Maker

Hey folks! 👋 I wanted to give a little more background on why we built Supercast: In our work helping podcasters at DoubleUp, we kept seeing content creators monetizing via subscription running into the same headaches: 1. Membership setups built from pieces that worked (sometimes), but didn't scale well, or always play nice together (there's a lot of places WordPress x membership plug-ins x a PayPal account x MailChimp can break) 2. Insanely high-friction onboarding for listeners to actually enjoy the content: No one wants to juggle copy-and-pasting a custom RSS link from email to their favourite podcast app (only some of which support private feeds, and few make them easy to add manually), or download new apps not designed for podcasts (Patreon, I'm looking at you) 2. No content analytics on private feeds(!). They had no idea how many people (or who) were actively listening, or who was sticking around. 3. Limited/no analytics on their subscription business metrics (total + recurring revenue, churn, LTV, etc) meant they were often flying blind and couldn't accurately predict or plan for growth. 4. Occasionally, listeners would share their subscriber RSS feed and other people would pirate it, racking up massive bandwidth bills for the podcaster. 5. No ability to target and easily send emails to their most engaged podcast listeners (let alone even thinki about any kind of re-activation/retention campaigns for those who had stopped listening). We're huge podcast nerds with backgrounds in product, so we knew all of these problems can be solved with software. But, we saw that product just didn't exist yet. So, we ended up building Supercast, with the help of some our friends in podcasting. We already have some big updates planned for analytics, powerful email integrations, and a couple of features to help podcasters create content. What other features would you like to see?

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7yr ago

Crazy Egg

Hunter

This. Is. Awesome. An alternative to podcast advertising?! Count me in. This launch is especially important because of the rise of podcasts and the limited monetization options. Supercast has HUGE potential. If you're a podcaster, you must check it out.

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7yr ago

I signed up, but haven't gotten any email or anything yet, what is the standard time to be able to set up and start going?

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7yr ago

Toyo

Maker

@mastemine hey Logan, we'll get your account set up and get back to you shortly!

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7yr ago

Modash Influencer Search

Hey guys, looks great and love the idea. But I have a question, how do you differentiate from someone like Patreon ?

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7yr ago

Toyo

Maker

@avery_schrader hey Avery! Thanks for the support. Patreon is a great platform for content creators generally, but it wasn't built with podcasters in mind. Broadly speaking, it visibly sits in the middle of the creator <> fan relationship. For example, to support a creator on Patreon subscribers need to have a Patreon account. Not ideal for podcasters who want to actually own the relationship with their audience. We designed Supercast to get out of the way and help podcasters own that relationship directly (listeners don't need to sign up for an account that's visibly attached to a third-party platform). Patreon also don't make it easy for subscribers to add your custom feed to their podcast app, for example: We've found that asking listeners to copy and paste an RSS URL from their email client to their favourite podcast app (hardly any of which make it easy or intuitive to actually subscribe to a custom feed) is so high friction most people just don't bother. Supercast also offers far richer analytics designed specifically for podcasters. We've included a comparison with Patreon on our site, more here: https://www.supercast.com/#why-s...

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7yr ago

Product Hunt

Glad you're building this. The podcast marketing, while relatively tiny compared to radio, is rapidly growing. We need more tools like this to support creators.

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7yr ago

Toyo

Maker

@rrhoover totally! Any suggestions for what you'd like to see from a podcaster's POV?

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7yr ago

Product Hunt

@aidanhornsby the big thing that every podcaster wants: distribution There are very few options available, even for paid acquisition.

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7yr ago

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