We turned 4 today! What a journey from manually written newsletter to AI-enabled tech company! Check out what we've accomplished in the past years: https://www.podsnacks.org/
“A startup is a marathon, not a sprint.“ I’ve been aware of that saying long before PodSnacks, Inc. was even an idea. It’s a phrase Samuel Ian Rosen frequently quoted. However, you only truly understand the phrase when you are in the middle of trying to build a business yourself. During the daily rollercoaster of emotions, small wins, seemingly disastrous failures, it is hard to focus on the long term. It’s a wild ride, for sure, but heck does it feel incredible to reach major milestones that once appeared so far away. Today we celebrate one of said milestones as PodSnacks, Inc. is turning 4 years old! PodSnacks, Inc. was born on 11/11/20 in the middle of a COVID-19 travel related quarantine. My initial idea of restarting my blog by summarizing podcasts and solving one of my personal pain points, turned into setting up a newsletter on Substack, just hours later (props to very entrepreneurial Samuel Ian Rosen). After subscribing my family and close friends, I published my first PodSnacks, covering a health podcast, the same night. Fast forward to seemingly endless hours of manually summarizing hundreds of podcast episodes, spending days and nights on individual outreach to grow the newsletter to over 4,000 subscribers, celebrating first premium subscribers and ad placements, expanding the sector coverage, and struggling with scaling, the vision of PodSnacks, Inc. that once seemed almost impossible to achieve, has come to life. Today, PodSnacks, Inc. is fully automated, allowing users to subscribe to any existing podcast, delivering AI-generated bite-sized summaries to their inboxes whenever a new episode drops. It still feels magical whenever I see a new PodSnacks email pop up in my inbox! We have built playlists for topics like climate, or US politics, enabled premium subscriptions that let users choose their PodSnacks email frequency (single episode emails vs daily digests), created a tool for ad placements and for podcast hosts to engage with and grow their audiences. We're now sending over 50,000 emails per month - all customized and written by AI. In the daily hustle of still growing PodSnacks’ subscriber base, acquiring advertisers, and working on many more features and tools, it’s sometimes easy to forget where we started and how far we’ve already come. I can’t help but wonder where we’ll be on 11/11 four years from now.