Supercast - Add a paid membership to your podcast

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 😢

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.

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?

The first thing I've seen in a long time that's actually exciting. Great work @awilkinson and team! PS we want to beta test for the relaunch of our podcast, Stacking the Bricks. 😎

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.

Wow! I think Supercast just answered my (and many other podcasters') monetization dilemma: how to generate and measure subscription revenue quickly, easily and securely. Can't wait to try it out!

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.

This is a game changer! I've been running my podcast for a while now but have struggled to build reoccurring revenue into my offering because the existing tools out there just don't work well enough together and it has a ton of friction for my listeners. Supercast solves all these headaches in a super elegant way - I'm stoked to try this out and start building that sweet MRR!

Is there pricing information available?

Cool stuff! Great to see more folks in the space - podcasting needs a podcasting business model with aligned incentives with listeners. We started http://glow.fm out of the Acquired podcast, and have had overwhelming success with our subscription-only "Limited Partner" program. It now generates as much revenue as our sponsorships do. For anyone thinking about adding subscription revenue to their podcast, you should! I'm happy to chat about what worked well for us (and all of the other podcasters now monetizing nicely on Glow). [Full disclosure - I'm now a Glow investor too :)]