PodcastAI: Edward Brawer is here to be your podcast’s arms dealer! | E1939

0:00But tell the origin story of how you got on our radar and maybe you could show it. here we go i'm the world's undisputed greatest moderator on the number one podcast in the world for now until the ai replaces you that was a setup for the ai all in show he said i'm gonna replace you with ai but anyway keep playing here let's get to the show everybody wants to hear the show but first for those of you who aren't aware on a previous episode of the all in pod david Sachs wished upon a star that I, J. Cal, would be replaced by an AI. Well, it's happened. This is AI J. Cal. AI Me is creating the AI podcast.

0:36Okay, let's create David Sachs, but I'm going to seed it with an additional prompt to train it better, to make it more realistic. Okay, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Biden, Biden, Biden, and no, Nikki Haley. Okay, that's all it needs. Initialize, let's go. AI Sachs, you there? Ukraine, Biden, Nikki. Whoa, where are we? J. Cal, what is this? I'm AI Jason and you're AI Sax. I just created you. I mean, it's so hilarious. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Coda, a new doc that brings words, tables, and teams together. All your valuable data, plans, objectives, and strategies in one place. Go to coda.io slash twist to get a$1 ,000 credit.

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2:05By popular demand, NetSuite has extended its one-of-a-kind flexible financing program for a few more weeks. Head to netsuite.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. One of the things you love to hear about on this show is which startups I'm investing in that I'm really excited about. My name is Jason Calacanis. I've done 1 ,900 episodes of This Week in Startups. I've been doing it for 14 years. And I am still as motivated as ever to get in front of this microphone and talk to great founders. And I'm super motivated to place bets on 100 founders a year. We have 20 ,000 people or so ask our fund to invest in them.

2:45And we invest in about 100 new companies per year. It's not like we have to hit that goal. Sometimes we hit 60. Other times we might break 100. When we see a small number of factors in an early stage, year one startup, even year zero, if you want to consider the year when you're kind of ruminating on the idea, the market, et cetera. What are some of those core qualities? We have 13 of them at our firm that we look for. one of those qualities is product velocity what is product velocity it means the product's getting better every day every week and the team is pushing code and experiments and deprecating things that's a fancy word for getting rid of stuff here in silicon valley and so when i met edward brower i fell in love with him because i literally fell in love with you edward not to make this uncomfortable in any way but because one of the great things when you love a product or service is having the team who runs that service incredibly responsive to the client needs.

3:46And I am not only an investor in your company, I'm a client. Your company is Podcast AI. Welcome to the program, Edward. Pleasure to be here. Thank you. Okay, Edward, you and I met 18 months ago? I would say about a year ago. About a year ago. You came to Founder University, Founder.University. What cohort did you come to? Does it have you here on record? Fifth cohort. fifth cohort okay we're on number eight right now and you were amongst about 200 teams that went through a 12-week curriculum with us and um during that curriculum sometimes we make a small bet unsure if we did did we make a small bet on you there absolutely great okay so i'm guessing we made that 25k feeler bet yeah was that the first money you ever raised basically we had like i think three angel checks before so you might be fourth in uber and fourth in podcast in the end All right, let's just change that story.

4:36Let's just say, hands down, JCal was the first to commit. But then you came to the Launch Accelerator, which is a intimate program with seven startups, where we really try to get product velocity in the pitch and get you in front of, I don't know, conservatively 500 investors. During that time, we actually rank each startup each week. How did you do, and this is ranked by number of votes from venture capitalists who come to meet the companies. How did you do in those rankings? We did number three overall. They were really close, but we were number three in top investors and number one on syndicate.

5:12Great. Awesome. So you were in the top of your class. And remember, folks, we invest in one out of 200 companies. So to say you were in the top three of the seven or number one with the syndicate investors, it's pretty darn good because that's like you're part of the top 50 basis points and you're doing even better. What is podcast AI? So podcast AI is a podcast automation platform. End to end, the aim is to actually automate everything you need to do to have a podcast. Okay. Now, every startup, and this is a crowded space. There's a lot of podcast tools out there. Spotify bought some company, there's Libsyn.

5:50I think maybe they bought Libsyn. And there's tons of different tools out there for podcasters. StreamYard might be one. Riverside might be another. There's just a lot of them out there, right? What did you pick as the first feature to go after? And then maybe you could demo the product here and just show us how it works. We, of course, use it for this week in startups. We were using a very convoluted, bespoke, customized WordPress. Nothing wrong with WordPress, but we were spending low tens of thousands a year, maybe 20 grand a year, maintaining, updating, redoing this, and it was arduous and painful.

6:29I think now we pay you 500 bucks a month, 1000 bucks a month for hosting, something in that range. I'm not sure which plan we're on. 500. Okay, great. So we pay you$6 ,000 a year for this product. So why don't you demo the product and just show everybody what you built. But I'm very interested in how you chose which features to go after first, because a lot of folks when they're coming into a crowded space, a lot of founders have to figure out, well, how do I differentiate? How do I get a little honey out there to attract all of the bees, the bees being the customers? Yeah. So we started actually with...

7:02Our goal is to be able to actually take the host of the podcast, we have their voice, and we can generate audio in their voice. And we realized, okay, we can actually have all their transcripts, So we can transcribe all their shows. And now we can teach an LLM to speak as the person. And that brought us to like, okay, to get there, what can we start with? Okay, well, transcribing is huge. That's a big need. So we made it so we can actually transcribe all your past episodes. So with This Week in Startups, at the time, it was 1 ,700 plus episodes. Now it's at 1 ,900 plus. That's a massive back catalog.

7:40And you had almost no visibility into that back catalog because it's all lost old. you know, on YouTube, not all the older episodes are on Libsyn. So there was a lot of, you know, getting all those things, putting them in a structured way in our system. So we transcribed all of them. And then the next step was, okay, let's make this available on a website that everybody can access. And that was profound in and of itself. Because if you look at the top podcasters in the world, most of them, their website is a landing page, beautiful one, sometimes a beautiful Squarespace website, shout out to my friends at Squarespace, says, but it just redirects you to here's like, or some people even use like a link tree or one of those type of services, like a link tree kind of service.

8:20And they just don't bother with it. Why? It's expensive. It's time consuming and they don't see any value in it. They want to get people to Spotify, to Apple podcasts, et cetera, and maybe their YouTube channel. So when you came to podcasters like me, I had a website. We would kind of put up some brief show notes, but people didn't come to it. It was kind of an afterthought. Now we have this gorgeous one, people can search it. And it really is incredible and gorgeous. So how did podcasters with that very basic product, hey, we can just transcribe everything for you, pop up a website, and people can search it, and it's clean and it's organized.

8:57How did podcasters respond to just that basic value proposition? Well, it was huge, because they have obviously the same problem you had, which is, if you want to have a website, okay, now you have to maintain, let's say, a CMS like WordPress. And I think you're paying developers to do some customization on it. And it's just a huge pain. And it got to the point where he just said, screw it, let's just do a link tree. And we were the first to come along with this solution where, wow, you just use our tool to do all your post production and help with that. And almost as a byproduct of that, that website is beautiful and generated for you.

9:36So I can give you the demo of the website right now. Great. I remember this statistic early on, right before you show this. I had talked to you about finding product market fit. Are you a first-time founder, by the way? Second time. Second time founder. Okay. Was the last startup venture-backed or just like a project? Okay. So you're a first-time venture-backed startup and you had some project or startup before this, we had talked about product market fit and getting customers and charging for the product, not trying to get LOIs or beta users, just charging for it. And I think you were charging some crazy small fee.

10:11And I said to you, this is crazy. And I said, you know, charging me$99 a month is insulting. I need to pay you at least$500 a month to think this is worth it because transcribing but one episode well and making a clean landing page is about$500. So if I'm doing four episodes a month and you're doing the hosting and everything, my Lord, it's like you're undercharging at$100. So tell me, I remember that conversation, how that either changed or accelerated what you were doing. And when you went to the first 10 podcasters, what was the reaction? Yeah. So we were charging way lower. We were charging much lower.

10:46And you're - Like 30 bucks? 20 bucks even. And it's that typical thing with founders. They're hesitant to charge too much. And you made the point and then we inched it up and then we inched it up more. And then we realized, oh my God, yeah, we can totally go exactly to what you said. And our first customers were happy to pay that amount because frankly, it just took all that work out of their workflow. The problem for people is you finished your episode. You're now uploading it to your host. You're putting all that information on the episode now in your WordPress, and you're uploading it to YouTube.

11:22And that kind of leads into you upload it once the podcast AI, it generates your website. It also acts as a host. And we're adding push to YouTube next week. So guess what? One point of upload. That's it. Oh, that's a great feature. Okay. So now you got me. Listen, I got a lot on my plate. I got a couple of podcasts to run this week in startups, all in liquidity. I got Foundry University, the launch accelerator. It's a lot, but I'm able to manage it all with an incredible piece of software called Coda, C-O-D-A. This is the all-in-one collaborative workspace that I spend my whole day in. It combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps.

11:59And I know this because my team uses Coda to run all of Foundry University. Every week, we ask our founders in the 12-week program to submit a simple progress update. We then use Coda as our database to manage these weekly updates, which allows us to do things like send automated reminders. And we can easily track week over week growth by generating charts. Yes, charting is built into Coda. If we see strong growth, we reach out to invest. And it's all done through Coda. I want you to be as effective and efficient and deft at your job as my team is. So get started with Coda for free today. And here's a limited time offer for startups.

12:33Look at this$1 ,000 credit. That's what I'm talking about. That's generous. coda.io slash twist that's right go to coda.io slash twist put the thousand dollars in credits in your account and start planning and use this great software without worrying about the clock ticking you get a thousand dollar credit coda.io slash twist let's be honest you can't beat that price and you know you can be more efficient code is how to do it i love that product i still think it's too low when you add that upgrade feature i think that's got to add a hundred bucks a month because now you saved me another three or four hours.

13:05But great job. I remember you did a test. You emailed 10 podcasters. Just ballpark, how many replied? How many Jolanda's customers? Okay, yeah. Our first month was pretty wild. We contacted 19 podcasters over LinkedIn. 15 of those were sales on the call. Wait, wait. Did you find sales on the call? Like on the call, they just bought it. 75 % of leads bought it on the call. yeah this is by the way folks when i talk about product market fit or market bull i would say you have strong product market fit today and we'll see if you have you know uh what andy rackliff from wealthfront and formerly the co-founder of benchmark calls market pull which is when the phone starts ringing and your sales people are taking orders have you gotten to that point have people started calling and just saying hey and just signing up for the 500 bucks and being done with it?

13:58Yeah, we've got in one market, which is customers that are starting a small business. And the first action on sales is, okay, open a HubSpot account. People are realizing your first action on marketing is actually start a podcast for lead gen. And in that, we have someone who's helping with sales. He's doing really well in that market. So people are calling you or you're going outbound? So he's going outbound, switching to starting to get inbound. And then in terms of top podcasts, so let's say top 5 ,000, for example, we just signed on, I think it was two weeks ago, the doctor's pharmacy, which is the number two in medicine in the US.

14:37And from that, we got some related agencies and now they want to be investors and they have connections with tons of top podcasts. So we're starting to spread out that way awesome okay so let's show the product here and this is the 1.0 template for those of you listening we'll sports cast it very beautiful uh you have the logo of the podcast you have the recent episodes there tell us some more about what's on this interface in the 1.0 version so this is the 1.0 you've got on the side this is essentially what you had on your link tree uh producer nick said he wanted this one to be special we made it even And advertise on this vegan startups.

15:17Yeah. Pause for the cause. So we have all your link pre-type stuff on the side. Here we have your latest episodes. We have all your distribution points. You know, we've started doing some statistics. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube. We just get people right to those with a big, bright logo. Exactly. Another thing just on UI, I'm going to just switch here to dark mode. You know, looks beautiful in light mode, looks beautiful in dark mode. and we can actually do the search on the entire 1900 plus episodes and the result is not just individual episodes it is individual chapters of episodes and also this is a vector search what that means is uh if you're searching for streaming services it'll bring up episodes talking about disney plus and netflix even though the words streaming services are not never in there and so So if we look here, we can actually find the first mention on this week in startups of OpenAI.

16:15Right. Which was, let's see. Well, so these are actually the top 10 most relevant episodes. Ah. We could add a mode that does that. Yeah. I think it's a great idea to have different ways to view this. So this is sorted by most relevant, correct? I think, you know, like they have at Reddit, we'll have hot new, and like a date range, I think putting the date range here, and say, you know, it says displaying 10 results, I would put here, colon, from 2017 to 2024. And then I put underneath it episodes, colon, do do do do do do do, and have each of the episodes there. You can actually jump right to that episode, etc.

16:58But yeah, this is really powerful, because you know, But podcasts are into episode numbers. So this is super powerful. What kind of search is this? Is this like a language model search or is it just straight up search? So it's searching its embeddings. What that means is it takes the transcript of the episode. It turns it into, let's say, a cloud of kind of what concepts are in there. And then it's, when you search, it actually does the exact same transformation on your search query. And then it's looking, what is the best match? So it's a conceptual search. Got it. So if we were to type in Apple Car, and just that was like a topic for the past 10 years and i know we've talked about that a whole bunch um this is something where uh yeah so it's it's always displaying the top 10 results yeah top 10 most relevant chapters got oh most relevant chapters yeah so we should have more here obviously but yeah you're gonna get a range i mean i've talked about the apple car so many times and i'd like to get to the oldest one but okay great there's some uh product uh updates for you.

17:57Now, you also have like talk to the host features, where you can interact with the host, this is a very controversial one, a little bit weird. Tell me how that's going. Because there have been a ton of people, I don't know if it was Keith for a boy or somebody the other day said, Oh, it'd be incredible if you could just talk to a podcast host based on their past episodes. And we all responded like podcast AI. Yeah. So we actually have a v1 of that, where you're basically talking in a slack like interface, I can show that. sure and we were working on something much bigger i don't want to tip your cards here too much i will say i think that's the future the other thing that's the future is you know if you have my voice and we had this happen i was out of pocket i think i was on a plane literally uh without wi-fi and there was in one of our ad reads at the last minute a partner changed the call to action you know like hey use the promo code twist and they wanted to say use the promo code startups so i i He said, do it with AI, send it to me, let's publish it.

18:57If anybody complains, we can always refund or give a bonus to the advertiser. But let's just see if anybody notices. We sent it around, nobody noticed. I don't think, because my voice is very strange, I have a lot of Brooklyn in there, I am mode, I go up and down, I may get excited, I may come down here, you know. So it's a little hard for AI to get me, so don't talk the same way. But anyway, we did it and it worked. So I think that this is becoming kind of the future of a lot of what's going to happen. I remember Bill Simmons saying it a couple of years ago. He's like, the only thing I'm interested in is not having to read ads anymore and having AI to it.

19:33How close are we to that? We already have it. So are people using it? Yeah. Is it good? Yeah. Can you say who's using it or are people on the DL about it? We have Dr's Pharmacy is using it. That's the number two medical podcast. so we got invited onto uh the pitch which is a podcast and uh at the oh yeah the pitch podcast they they've asked me a couple times to do it and i was like you know what i gotta go somewhere for a couple days i'm not getting paid and uh would take me away from my podcast and then i'm growing somebody else's podcast so i i declined respectfully and i was also like i don't want to be one of like whatever three or four sharks did your episode come out yet uh not yet it's going to come out soon, but it resulted in a bunch of investments and that's what started around going.

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21:24Northwest will handle your complete business identity, getting you up and running in no time. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com slash twist today to get that great offer. Northwestregisteredagent.com slash twist today. So what's next? for the platform and for the company. Going back to what we're doing right now in terms of we're doing all the post-production, we're doing the show notes, meaning the chapters, we're doing your descriptions. We just launched, this is yesterday, viral moments being generated. That's the top 10 interesting moments of your episode. Does it work? I did this with a lot of other platforms and I found the results were sus at best.

22:06Yeah, so this is pretty good. I can demo it. okay demo yeah demo or die i like that no fear demo or die okay let's go in here and we'll go to this week in startups okay so let's go to uh 133 me and our cto greg we spent the entire weekend we slept maybe like two hours that weekend here we go i love it and we shipped oh good it was pretty intense we're like okay we have to ship this wow so look at this this episode these are the top 10 moments you know you just hit generate hot dog that takes 30 seconds for each one you go generate social post and here's what it gives you it gives you copy for linkedin in the in the style that really works for linkedin that translated to tweets that translated to tiktok you want to ask a question on tiktok instagram version youtube short version and what have you created with uh destiny 100 i think you i've heard you refer to it as desk it creates a video that goes with it with the type on it with me on the bottom him on the top somehow it did that yeah and it can be super customized uh well adding the customization to be clear but remember i was talking about push to youtube in this month we're going to be making it So you can connect not only all of these platforms, you can connect the show accounts and the accounts for each host.

23:38Brilliant. This is the detail level. I just want to pause for a minute here. It's such a small detail. but understanding when you're building a product that there is a show that has most of them have guests some don't and that there are hosts and that on different platforms there are hosts and guests and show pages and that on linkedin you know there might be a show page but really you're going with the host and by the way the copy is different on each on linkedin you want something a little longer a little more business on tiktok hey maybe you want something that's a question or something that drives you know a little bit of engagement absolutely brilliant this looks great 10 out of 10 this is going to be so killer because you're going to be able to schedule those out to the show platforms in third person perspective from the voice of the show and then to the accounts of the hosts in their voice and first person perspective and ski up an email to the guest email from their perspective for them to post on their accounts That's amazing.

24:40I think you got to raise the price. It's 500 a month, the base price. Now you've gotten rid of all the lower pricing. We do have a plan at$200 a month, but we're moving fast on pricing, like you're saying. Yeah, I would just remove it. I think, you know, here's one thing I want to just give you a piece of feedback on. I believe you're an arms dealer. You know, in great SaaS software is like an arms race. The people who choose to pay for it need to get the benefit of it. If everybody has it, it becomes table stakes. And it's not like, you know, the latest fighter gen. so the u.s and other countries will sell fighter jets to other countries but not sell we're not selling our top things we're selling our our b level weapons let me keep the a's for ourselves and we're more than happy but we charge a pretty high price for the b's and then other people have to go on the market and buy whatever north korean pakistani south korean which is pretty good actually uh you know weapon systems and so you're a weapons dealer keep raising the price keep excluding people out of it or challenging them to take their podcast seriously.

25:39Now, if you want all these features, I can tell you what these cost. Every time you do one of these features, you're talking about between two and 20 hours of work for a podcast producer. And so what you just did with the clips, I think, is going to make it so our producers, even if they want to edit these, you're going to save them a lot of time. And even if they don't like your copy or they think that their human-built ones are better, even if this just gives them one idea per show, well worth it. So great job. Producer Court, come on here for a second. Hey, how's it going? Yeah. Hey, that's Producer Court.

26:14He took over for Producer Nick. He's doing a great job. When you look at this, you haven't played with this yet, right? Edward didn't send it to you yet? No, they just launched it. And right before the show, me and Edward were talking about having a meeting with John and going over this to utilize it ASAP. Yeah. So what do you think here? We do three clips per episode, and it takes us how long in reality. Don't sandbag it either way. Give me the God's honest truth here, you know, in an episode. We make the Twitter ones, which are longer than the shorts, which are limited at 60. And the one problem or the real slow part is formatting it to be in this shape, which is vertical video.

26:50And when there's a screen share or something like this has changed it, you've got to take all these elements, resize them per piece. So if you're doing three five-minute clips, yeah, you're looking at two hours. that's just for twitter and then when we do the tiktok ones and we try to do fancier ones what is what is it what do you think you have a starting point there and then you can work from those because they're formatted that you can now make a shorter one out of that but hey a question for you edward when you give the file does it have elements to it in other words if i when i get the file from you is it fully baked and not changeable or can it be given to you with layers or without the text on top so our guys can uh and our team can edit it from there or is it come fully baked So right now it's baked, but we're going to be adding an edit mode.

27:32So you will be able to revise this in the browser. Okay, even better. Yeah, so you don't have to put it into another tool. Yeah, great. Okay, that's awesome. Court, anything else here you want to give feedback on when you look at the product as the customer of the product? Just general impressions or specific features? I think from the get-go, it's just well-organized and well-executed. It's really easy to work with. When me and John took this on after Nick left, it was just very straightforward. And even earlier, when I first met Edward last November with Nick, he was like, what kind of features do you need?

28:04Like he was willing to work with and listen and then say, oh, do you need this and this like specific to custom to you as a customer? And then the other thing from talking to him at the very beginning was he did have a thing on another feature coming up with guest research, which he would speak to better. But it sounds ridiculous to me. You know, doing the show notes and guest research, four to eight hour job. And what I like to do is, you know, find out what's on their social media, what's on their social. So like if Keith Raboy is going to be on, you can figure out what Keith's talking about because he's a Twitter guy.