Should I build this?

[dustball]

There isn't a full podcast-in-a-box solution that I can find. Many of them are focused on recording, or hosting, but none do a Good job of combining them the way YouTube does with videos, or even Tumblr for that matter.

http://complete.audio is the landing page.

Looked at podbean, tryca.st and others.

[cocktailpeanuts]

The answer to this is always yes. Unless it takes months to build an MVP.

By building one you'll gain a lot of insights 99% of the population don't have, so it's a win win situation.

Don't ask for permission

[Alex3917 → cocktailpeanuts]

I don't agree. Spend a week coming up with 100 other ideas first, and then get feedback on the most promising ones.

Then do the best one. It might still fail, and if it does you'll still learn a lot, but you won't be wasting months or years when you could have chosen something more promising from the beginning.

(And that's not a criticism of this specific business idea.)

[cocktailpeanuts → Alex3917]

I agree about coming up with 100 ideas first and picking one from them, but disagree with how you should get feedback from others on whether you should start or not.

You really don't know if your idea is "promising" or not until you actually start executing. A lot of startups started with mediocre ideas or even a good idea with small ambition but ended up realizing there's something big in there.

Uber didn't start out thinking "Yeah we're totally going to disrupt how humans move around". They started out as a limo service. When Snapchat first launched nobody cared. Pinterest was in hungry mode for a quite a while before it found its audience. But only because it was so hard when they succeeded it meant a lot.

If you keep asking others for "promising" ideas, you'll probably end up with the most obvious idea. You should work on something that excites you the most.

[siquick → Alex3917]

Alternatively, solve your own problems first and you'll make your own life better and potentially others (i.e. your users) too.

[brianwawok → siquick]

I never liked this approach. I am a dev. If all I did was solve my own problems all I would write is developer tools. Which is about the worst market to sell in. Many problems out there that aren't my own.

[scawf → brianwawok]

You are also a human. You may be a father, a driver, a shopper, ... Most widely spread projects are not about jobs.

[brianwawok → scawf]

Sure, but think about b2b. An example problem is software for a port-a-potty business. I doubt many people that run a port-a-potty business are as good of software developers as I am. If everyone just scratches their own itch, who would write software for port-a-potty businesses? Do they just not get software?

Maybe a little bit of a stupid example, but there are many unsexy b2b software opportunities out there. There is no need for it to be an itch for someone to come in and make a lot of money making their life better.

If you can scratch your own itch and make something awesome, great! If not, it doesn't really matter as long as you scratch someone's itch.

In my opinion - The top reason to pick a product is where can you provide the most value. If you can solve your own problem of unorganized MP3 files but there is no value (i.e. no one will pay you $20 for it) - then don't do it. If you can solve something unsexy (i.e. save a port-a-potty company $2,000 a month), you can very likely make real money on it.

[bsvalley]

I read your message and looked at your landing page... I still don't have a clue about what you're trying to accomplish.

Are you building a search engine for podcasts?

[detaro]

What complication of the current process would your product solve? I'm not all that familiar with the typical podcast workflow, but to me it seems the connection between recording/editing and publishing is just "upload an audio file", which doesn't seem like a big issue, so there is probably more to what you are planning integration-wise?

[dustball → detaro]

What problem are you trying to solve?

Let novice users (or even lazy pros) create a professional quality podcast without needing extra software or hosting.

Re: upload an audio file

Soundcloud built their business around doing just this, albeit for a different market. They do support Podcasts but you can tell from the interface it is meant for music primarily.

[tedyoung → dustball]

I'm not saying there's not a market here -- I'd like to hear more details (especially as someone starting a podcast).

Your landing page doesn't provide any information, and I'm still unclear what the specific pains you're solving are?

There's already several podcast-specific hosting companies (libsyn, blubrry, acast, buzzsprout), so what are you adding?

There's the RSS feed management and submitting to iTunes (most of the above have that).

On the audio creation part, there's Auphonic (automatic leveling and some mixing) and not much else (that I'm aware of) that's automated.

From my point of view, editing, transcribing, splicing ads, chapter-marking, compiling show notes, etc., are all manual processes right now, so automating or streamlining them would be great.

Something on the ads/sponsor side of things would be valuable: Google had tried doing this for radio spots back in the mid 2000's, but it flopped (not enough good inventory, among other things). I think with podcasts, there's a market that could be created.

[atmosx]

What about Spreaker[1] ? Supports recording, hosting, publishing and searching. Has mobile application to accompany the app and it's been around more than 2 years.

[1] http://www.spreaker.com/

[dragonbonheur]

Twitcasting does that, but go ahead if you can do it better.