What's up everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com and you're listening to the

IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a ton of

money in the process. And on this show, I talked to these indie hackers to learn about the latest

ideas, opportunities and strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same. If you've been listening in and enjoying the show, do you me a favor, leave a quick rating for us on Apple Podcasts. In this episode, I sat down for a casual chat with Mubbuchar Iqbal. Mubbs is one of my buddies. He's been on the podcast before. He's probably the most prolific endie hacker that I know. He's got something like 100 side projects under his belt. And today we talked about the podcasting space. How much bigger can podcast get? Where are the opportunities for indie hackers to build cool stuff here? And what is Mubs himself working on? We're still like right at the beginning of this thing in terms of like podcasting. Yeah, I know it's been around since like, what, 2005, I think was the first podcast or whatever. So it's been like 15 years, but it feels like there's still like so much room for people to kind of really make a lot of money in this space and just for a lot of interesting things still to happen

I think especially from the content side like New York Times has been on a purchasing spree as well

where they've been acquiring podcasts as well so I think from the content side there's a

consolidation happening from the creation side you know there's been some acquisitions there, but I think they're just

like the number of like tools, ever side and stuff that are just like popping up to make

recording podcasts and video as well, like really easy as well. Right. And so yeah, so I think there's like

lots of different avenues in terms of the sort of industry isn't like just about making a simple here's a podcast and

here now you can listen to it but kind of as we talked about there's like podcast studios who

are kind of organizing around like a whole slew of different podcasts but then there's all these

tools that are right coming up as well and yeah it's just a really active and really interesting

space yeah so you're working on founder path right now you. You're full time on Founder Path. Yes. But being Mubs, obviously you've got a lot of other stuff going on on the side. And a lot of stuff we're working on is in the podcast space. So maybe we should start just by talking about what you're working on. Yeah. I know that you're working on pod hunt, which the last time you spoke about, I haven't checked out the website in maybe a few months, but I assume it's probably still the same. It's basically like product hunt for podcasts. So if you want to discover the best podcast episodes, you can go to Pod Hunt and it's like every week or every month, you take the best podcast episodes, everybody can upvote them, and then you can discover what you want to listen to. Yeah, it hasn't changed much because it doesn't really need to change much. Like there's not really too much functionality. I totally add there in terms of the core functionality of the sort of site itself. Yeah, it's just like you said, people come in, they sign up, they can submit episodes, they can, they can upvote episodes. And then we just have kind of like this daily either board of what people have upvoted and what people have submitted. Like I said, it's been around for about 14 months now. You know, I'm still the most active user on it, which is, I don't know if that's good or bad, but you know, it kind of is what it is. But yeah, but people are, I mean, like every week, you know, people are submitting their own episodes, people are submitting other people's episodes as well. So I feel like the traction is increasing, rather than decreasing, which I think is obviously a good sign. And so, yeah, so that's an interesting one, you know, it's an interesting one mostly because just like with product on, I don't really see like a clear path to like making lots of money with it. Because, you know, it's one of these interesting things that people would use if it's free, but I don't know that people would actually pay to kind of use it. Like if product and went to a fully paid model where people had to pay to these products on, I don't know that people would use it that much anymore. Yeah, it seems like one of these ideas where you probably just try to make it big. Yeah. And once it's bigger, you look for avenues to make money with it. And right now, you've got a cool kind of part of it, which is the newsletter. And it says, get the best new podcast delivered to your inbox weekly. I think the newsletter could be an interesting avenue because so many people are making money on newsletters nowadays. And even if people don't build a habit of showing up to podhunt.

Your website and, you know, habitually checking that every single week or every single day,

they do check their email every day. And if every day they're getting a list of the best

podcast to listen to, and it's pretty much like in the startup slash tech space, those are all the podcasts that seem to get uploaded to your site for the most part. I could see people paying and subscribe to that, especially if there's some editorial behind it where like maybe you or maybe you bring in someone who wants to start a newsletter and it can't really get off the ground, doesn't have an audience, but they can just come run your newsletter and it already has 600 subscribers. Maybe they do like a revenue share with you or something. So they're producing the content, editorializing it and you split it. I can think people paying for that aspect of it. I think every day would probably be a bit of a stretch, but I think once a week, I think would kind of work, especially if we're focusing in that kind of startup, kind of indie hack a scene, kind of that space. Just because I don't think there's that many podcasts coming out every day, that would kind of make it worthwhile. You basically have like one episode every day, which probably wouldn't be too interesting. But no, having like a kind of a recap of the episode in there so people can kind of know what's in there. But then also like look at the impact of like if, you know, if like, you know, we were just talking about the podcast industry. So if there was a podcast talking about the podcast industry, having some other information that somebody could kind of pull in, just kind of expand what's there as well. I think would be would be a really interesting thing as well. So I think that's absolutely something I've kind of considered.

You know, it's not something I can do with a full-time job as well. It's kind of not, it's not a full-time job, but it's, but it would be quite a lot of work, I think, to kind of kind of make something that really work. What's your goal with it? Like, what do you want to do with Bot Hunt? I built it mostly just because I like listening to podcast and it's a tool that I thought would be interesting. I use product on, obviously, I've

been using that for five years now. And so it's just one of one of these things that didn't exist that I

thought should exist. But yeah, I mean, I think longer term, my plan was always just to use it as kind of like

a honeypot to kind of attract other kind of avenues and making some money. So like build some

applications for either podcast listeners or for or for podcast hosts or for podcast studios or

...