Sam Sethi: 0:12

Hello and a welcome back to Podnews Weekly. I'm joined by very good friend of the show. His name's Alban Brooke. He's head of marketing for Buzzsprout. Alban. Hello, how are you?

Alban Brooke: 0:20

I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me.

Sam Sethi: 0:22

Oh, it's always our pleasure. Now, Alban, you're on the show because you've got a new product out. Tell me more.

Alban Brooke: 0:27

We just launched Buzzsprout for Android. We launched Buzzsprout for iOS a few months ago, and as soon as it came out, we got hard to work on Buzzsprout for Android. I guess we'd started a bit earlier, but we wanted it to have a native experience. You know, all the native Android functionality, not just be like a reskin of an iOS app. And so we worked with a team that really understood Android, and now we have a really cool Android app lots of podcasters are on Android. I'm excited for them to have the same experience that our iOS customers have been using this whole time.

Sam Sethi: 1:01

now let's go back to so feature parity. So remind us what features the iOS and Android app have then.

Alban Brooke: 1:08

So the apps we launched to be the best companion you could get for your podcast. The way we thought about it was so many podcasters. Podcasting isn't their day job, so they're not at their computer all day and we want you to be able to release your episode where it's still best to create it, which is on your computer. But now you have this companion app, so you can check stats, you can get real time notifications, you're able to share directly from the app, and then you're able to effortlessly manage your podcast. So change a title, publish an episode, update a link, fan mail now works in there. You can manage your pod role, tons of little things, but those are kind of the main categories.

Sam Sethi: 1:48

Yeah, and I found it really useful. I remember when you first launched the iOS app and we found Mail and it was over a weekend that I got it and then we started to get ping and it was like suddenly all these phone mails would come through and they are little dopamine hits are great. Again, just getting a notification saying that James is finished uploading the episode and the transcripts just finished. So as a podcast creator, those little steps on the notification post-production are always good to know as well with both of the apps. I guess you want now a little bit of time to bed down. You've had some great reviews from ratings on them. They're having you.

Alban Brooke: 2:23

The iOS app. The reception has been exceptional. It's been downloaded over 20,000 times hundreds of ratings, I think over 504.9 stars out of five. And lots of people are discovering new ways that it's simplifying their podcasting workflow. And so what I heard a lot and I really had hoped that this was going to be the case but didn't actually have the evidence that it would, is people saying, I feel more confident now publishing my episode because a lot of podcasters, we feel this like perfectionism. We want it to be a perfect episode and so we double, triple check everything and then we publish it because we're always so afraid of a typo. But now when you've got your phone with you, you don't have to log in on your work computer and do anything you just see, Oh, there was a typo or I did leave a link out of the show notes. You just go at it. There's been a times now for our show where I publish a podcast and Kevin goes, I don't really like that title. And he goes, and he just changes it or we publish it. We go, Oh, we should add a link there, and we go in, added in. It makes it so, so easy for us just to make those quick changes. So that's one of the things that I've loved seeing people do and we actually are seeing show up in the reviews.

Sam Sethi: 3:40

I want to ask a question. I think I was going to ask Kevin, but the Android app wasn't out at the time. What was the internal thinking that you must have all gone through about will create native apps? Or we could have just done a progressive web app straight into a browser. It would have been day one cross-platform, probably cheaper to produce because you've only got one code base. Why did you think that having a native app on both platforms was the better option?

Alban Brooke: 4:10

There's a lot of times where something is technically possible and yet it is still not super user friendly. And so making native apps, one feels a little bit better the actual experience of using the app. But then that's where people are looking. They go, Oh, I know, I want the app, it's in the App Store, it's in the Google Play store. And so it's very easy for people to go download the apps and start using them right away in the future. When progressive Web apps are ubiquitous and more companies are using them, I'm sure that will be a huge cost savings for lots of companies. But you push a little bit uphill. And so this is our way of giving our customers the best experience we can, and we'll take it on the other side. We'll do a little bit more work on the Android code base on the iOS Code base to make that happen.

Sam Sethi: 5:00

Now, the other thing that you guys have been working on is some new podcast. You obviously have Buzzcocks, which is your main podcast, but you've got a new one out as well. What's that one?

Alban Brooke: 5:08

We just launched a podcast called Bus Brought Weekly. We've done a weekly newsletter I think we sent to every Tuesday for, I don't know, six or seven years. And at some point I think I was listening to Pod News weekly review or maybe James's daily podcast where he read his newsletter and I went, You know, why don't we do this for our shows? And so we started recording that newsletter and producing it as a podcast. And it's wonderful because we've already done all the hard work. The hard work is picking the stories, is writing, the newsletter is thinking about what do we really want to communicate to the Indy podcast or to the bus group podcaster? And so we put all that together and now it takes us about an hour to go from, okay, the newsletters done to the episode is published. Today is the second episode. You can download it in your podcasting app and listen along with the Buzz Proud newsletter.

Sam Sethi: 6:05

Now here's producing this for you. I mean, it's not you and it's not Kevin. So who's working on it?

Alban Brooke: 6:09

Well, Jordan is the podcast producer for Bus for us, so this is now the third active show she has. We do bus cast. We're doing bus weekly and we also have a show that's about how bus Route does customer support. So that's called Happy to Help. It's not podcasting specific. So if you are a customer support team or you're just helping customers, you want your team to lead with empathy to understand the customer. Priscilla, who leads our customer success team, does that podcast and definitely check it out. But those are the three shows Jordan does. And the host of Bus for our weekly is Meghan. And so Meghan writes our newsletter, and so we're leaning a little bit more into having some more personality in some of the podcasts. We don't want it to all just be Kevin and I am Buzz cast. So now we're having a bit more people involved in creating The show's cool now.

Sam Sethi: 7:04

I it was it was a year ago and it could be two years ago. You did your acting audition in US cast. You were doing a Christmas special, if I remember rightly, albeit where you dressed up and you did a whole thing, a sketch.

Alban Brooke: 7:19

On the bus about how to be a podcast guest video.

Sam Sethi: 7:23

Yeah. Now we were hopeful that there was going to be more of those coming along. We thought there was going to be a full series. This was going to be the new career head of marketing and a.k.a. actor on the side. But we didn't see anymore what happened.

Alban Brooke: 7:38

I mean, we had a ton of fun doing it. It video is just another beast. I mean, we've talked about this in regards to video podcasts, but when you want to shoot on set and you want to plan out props and all of the visuals that go into it, you can do really creative and fun things with video. But the amount of work that goes into it is just is a order of magnitude more. It's ten times more work. And so we had a ton of fun, but I think those will end up being few and far between rather than the norm. We're podcasting company because we love podcasting and part of what we love is we can go from idea to something that's published in an hour rather than going from idea to something that is published in 6 to 8 weeks.

Sam Sethi: 8:24

So we can now officially knock on the Head podcast as a video podcast. Can we?

Alban Brooke: 8:29

We, we actually did one or two. I want to say the beginning of COVID because we were using Riverside. We recorded the video, we just uploaded it and I'm pretty sure the only comments we got were Albert looks so angry because I wasn't really, you know, faking the smiles for the camera, just being a normal podcaster, staring at my notes, thinking about what I was going to say. So there's just more that goes into video. You know, you're getting dressed up. You might even put on some makeup. You might present yourself differently. You're cutting. So there, it's out there. We've got one or two. But those might be the only ones for a long time.

Sam Sethi: 9:06

Spotify two weeks ago enable podcasters to manually upload. You've got YouTube. People are talking about, Oh no, you must also put your podcast onto YouTube. And I've heard from buzz casts where buzz sprouts opinions. It's not going to be doing it. But do you have any sympathy for people who still want to do video as well? Do you think? Never say never, I guess. But do you think that video is never going to come to bus cast?

Alban Brooke: 9:40

Well, video is wonderful and it has downsides. So what are the positives? I mean, if you can get on YouTube, which has an incredible network of listeners and creators and advertisers, I mean, YouTube's wonderful for that. If you can get really good video content, well, now you can start monetizing it. You can start getting tons of listeners almost, you know, many if you look at the very top shows, I'd bet something like 60, 70% of the top shows in the world. Podcasts also have a video component out there. So there are tons of value. The downside is that it's another level of work to get this and put it together. And what we started seeing was we went from a world where people said, Oh, I do podcasts and eventually maybe I aspire to do video. We started having a lot of people show up and they'd say, Yeah, I'm doing video, I'm doing audio, I'm doing shorts, I'm doing blog and newsletter. And they would maybe release two episodes and they would pod fade. They'd be done. And, you know, we just started advising people, you pick one thing and that's what you should do and it's totally fine if it's not podcasting, but trying to take on everything when you also have a full time job is the best way to kill any of those things from ever happening or at least being sustainable. So what we started advising people was, let's start with one and if you're on bus problem, often that's going to be with just an audio podcast. And now we see Spotify, we see YouTube starting to lean more into video, which I think is really nice for the people who say, I want to add that video component. So for the very biggest shows, the shows with teams or the creators who have a knack for video already, then that's a really nice place for them to level up to.

Sam Sethi: 11:33

you've had now for a while. Have you seen a rapid adoption of usage? Have you got plans to make enhancements to it? What's the planning around? I

Alban Brooke: 11:45

We

Sam Sethi: 11:45

mean.

Alban Brooke: 11:46

have made enhancements, so we've changed some things with how you edit the transcripts. We've added social sharing. So that we can write tweets, we can help write blog posts. We want to create that social content for your podcast. I mean, it's something we're really interested in. Co-host Day is now over a year old and we want to keep improving every part of us. Overall. I do think that there is a lot of AI hype right now, which you kind of need the AI hype to get everybody to start building the real use cases. people are suggesting lots of ideas that I'm not 100% sure are useful for the podcaster. And so the way that we built co-host was here's some real definitive pain points. You know, I do not like finding my chapter spots when I'm creating the episode. I know that they're out there, but I don't know the exact time stamp. It's nice for it to find it. I don't love transcribing. It's great that it can find it. I don't like coming up with catchy titles and descriptions. It's wonderful that co-host day. I can write those for me. So as we discover new use cases specifically because we are using bus every week and we're noticing this is a place for AI, I think we'll implement it, but I don't want to end up putting the cart before the horse and saying, Oh, I could do this. Let's start trying to force its way into my podcasting workflow.

Sam Sethi: 13:11

last question. I know podcast movements coming up middle of August in Washington. Buzz Brown, I assume, will be there. Is the whole team going because you weren't at the one in L.A. so can we expect to see you all this year?

Alban Brooke: 13:24

Well, I was there in L.A., but just be we sometimes we're the ones out in L.A., which are a little bit smaller and mostly are more industry focused. We were sending smaller teams, but I think it'll probably be three or four of us will go up to DC this year. I am super excited. Podcast Movement Largest podcasting conference in the world, recently had a friend from law school reach out and said, Hey, I want to get into podcasting and he now works in DC. So it's like, Oh, good for you. You got to come over and check out this incredible conference and it's just a wonderful time. You know, podcasters love to talk and we all have something in common that we love audio, we love creating and everyone's unique because they're creating shows about something totally different. And so you meet tons of interesting people and it is really one of the best parts of my job.

Sam Sethi: 14:15

When you be presenting at the event.

Alban Brooke: 14:17

I think Tom has a couple talks. I sometimes will pitch them, sometimes they're accepted, sometimes they're not. So we will see.

Sam Sethi: 14:25

Brennan open broke head of marketing at Bass. Thank you so much.

Alban Brooke: 14:28

Thank you for having me.