Product Launch #3: The Podcast Creative
The Podcast Creative (CLOSED)
The Podcast Creative is a subscription-based, productized-service for podcast post-production (wow there's a lot of hyphenation in that sentence).
The idea being that clients can just focus on recording and creating their content then completely hand off the work to get it production ready for publishing.
This isn't a brand new product, I built the site about three years ago one weekend when the inspiration hit to start a side-gig in audio.
I was able to quickly launch by using WordPress, which was nice, but because of using WP, I've been pretty limited on optimization and was a bit of backend/admin overkill for what I was needing.
Focusing on the site rebuild for product #3 gave me the time to fully rebuild the site using Nuxt/Vue and make it static generated and focus on optimization and a cleaner design.
The Problem
I created TPC a few years back after realizing how most podcasts could benefit from better post-production. With my background in audio engineering, I couldn’t help but hear the audio mistakes and think of all the improvements that could be made.
I decided to build a quick site over the weekend and see if it got any traciton. It was a slow growth over the last few years, but it's now a consisttent amount of side-income.
The last couple years though I've been meaning to get the site rebuilt. Mainly because the original was built on WordPress, which is great for launching quick ideas, but I no longer use it anymore in the day to day.
Also, despite all the different optimization techniques for WordPress sites, they're never going to be as fast as a static HTML site.
The Solution
So I decided to rebuild it using my current favorite content-based JAM stack: Vue/Nuxt, Netlify, Contentful, Stripe.
This also gave me a chance to redo the design to be more clean and minimal (shout out to Refactoring UI).
Monetization
Productized Service
Monitization comes from the monthly subscription packages that clients sign up for. The subscription-based productized service has been a nice fit for predictable income and planning out work needed each month.
We have three pricing packages. All include audio post-produciton, with the other two including show notes, and show notes/transcriptions/publishing.
Online Course
I also have an online course for DIY podcasters to create and launch their podcast website on WordPress.
There wasn't much traction with the course launch, but it was interesting to make it and I might revist it at sometime in the future.
Stack
- Vue/Nuxt
- Netlify
- Contentful CMS
- Stripe
Launch Fails
This launch had some major fails.
Fail 1 🤦
I completely forgot about my MX records when switching hosting, so my emails went out into oblivion for about 3 days.
Fail 2 🤦
I didn't set up redirects correctly for the existing blog posts. This was a major bummer because a few of my posts rank as #1 or #2 in Google search.
About three days after the launch somone emailed me asking if I could re-add the post because they use it for reference. I checked my links list and realized I had completely botched the redirects. Then checked Google search console and saw the massive drop in rankings and search interaction.
Fail 3 🤦
Single episode payments gateway was broken. Yeah, the most important part - accepting payments - was down.
Lessons learned
- Better QA - or maybe more like "any level of QA at all would have helped"
- Stuff will go wrong, but it's not the end of the world.