Podcast App · B2C · podcast player app
Size your market from the old medium's ad spend and subscribers needed
Math showed a $100M/year business needed only millions of subscribers
Unknownfinancingmarket-selection
What they did
Top-down: US broadcast radio ad revenue (~$10-13B) times the talk-radio share of listening (~25%), which is comparable to podcasts, gives billions a year locked in an untargeted legacy medium. Bottom-up (what YC cared about more, 'Netflix of podcasts'): how many subscribers are needed for a $100M/year business, which came to a few million. Repeated the exercise for the sleep market.
What happened
The bottom-up math added up; guest says the YC interview was not mainly about market size.
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · VC Funding vs. Bootstrapping for Subscription Apps — Martín Siniawski, Podcast App“So with that, you could already see like, hey, there's multiple billions, right, a year that are spent on ad revenue for talk radio.”
“So in that case, it was more like a bottoms up approach, kind of saying, okay, how many subscribers would we need for this to be like a $100 million a year type of business? And the math added up, just in the sense that it was maybe like millions of subscribers.”
Related topics
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More from this episode
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- Streema: Grow a website from long-tail Google searches when you have no budgetBecame the channel that worked; took years to kick in
- Podcast App: Switch from ads to a subscription you actually promoteCompany grew 3-4x; subscriptions now most revenue, ~130K paid subscribers
- Podcast App: Name your app after what people search for: 'The Podcast App'Cohost calls it the perfect search name; no numbers given
- Rest: Promote your new sleep app to your podcast users at night
- Rest: Notice people use your app to fall asleep, then build a sleep appRest launched; no results yet
- Podcast App: Try your own shows, curated playlists and a WhatsApp listening clubDidn't pan out as a growth leap
- RevenueCat: Email batchmates, then install your SDK in their app yourself at a coffee shopLanded early customers like Podcast App; no numbers
- Podcast App: After a YC rejection, raise from insiders, get traction, and reapplyGot into YC a year later; raised only ~$1.5M in total
- Luminary: Raise $100M and launch a paid app with 50 exclusive podcastsNever managed to scale
- Elevate: Email your previous app's users when you launch a new oneA small but meaningful early boost, per the cohost