This is an archived page from 2018. Find out more
If not, consider giving Synth a go. It’s a new app that allows you to easily record promos for your show and push them out on social media.
Social media is the number one way podcasters, with limited advertising and marketing dollars, are promoting their shows. At least that’s what the podcasters we interview tell us. The Synth app is free, and after testing it ourselves we can tell you it’s easy to use.
Brian Lamb, who’s background is in technology, created the product which debuted in July of 2018. Synth is a follow-up – or evolution – to a previous educational tech product called Recap, a video discussion tool for education. That product had several million users in classrooms. Lamb tells PBJ he started to discover there was a preference to use audio over video. “Video provokes anxiety of being on camera and gets in the way of communicating. We started to focus more on audio and relaunching a platform in the podcasting space.”
We reached out to Lamb to get more details.
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Synth creator Brian Lamb[/caption]
PBJ: What is a synth? Brian: It’s a 256-second recording. We call it a digital byte. There are 256 numbers in a byte. You can think of it as an audiogram where you can record and add transcriptions. It has a dynamic animation associated with it. It makes it very easy and approachable to start recording audio and sharing it in a couple different ways both privately or publicly.
PBJ: What makes it different from me turning on the recorder on my iPhone? Brian: It automatically plugs into a distribution system. There are feeds and galleries that you can publish to for people to discover what you have. It has some different interactive elements, like it automatically generates the transcription for playback as well as fun animation. It differentiates from the on-phone experience by those main details.
PBJ: Who do you think would use this? Brian: We already have quite a bit of traction in the education space given where our company started. The approachability of it has really caught on. Our ambition will be to take it beyond the education market. We have a range of podcasters testing it out as a platform for either generating original content or bringing existing content into using it like Audiogram or Headliner might be used.
PBJ: Why should our audience give Synth a try? Brian: Today they can go in and author a long-format podcast in Synth soundbytes. They can create back-to-back Synths in what we call podcasts, and create long-form listening. Each individual Synth is searchable and discoverable by its title and its transcription. It makes finding that content or soundbytes within it more easy for audiences. What we have coming in January – and this is one of the areas where we are defining the edges of the product – is a smart importation tool. You can take an existing podcast, push it into Synth, have it automatically create individual Synths – say, 10, 20, 30 of them in one podcast. It will transcribe each of them and make each segment of the podcast discoverable inside the Synth or shareable outside in social media. That’s what I’m really excited about for the podcast community. Now you can leverage each podcaster’s existing library of content and make it far more discoverable at every segment
PBJ: So, in a way, you are helping podcasters with discoverablilty. Brian: Yes. Say there is a 3-minute segment we have defined in our importation tool, they can post that to Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and have the dynamic playback that looks a lot like what Audiogram or Headliner has with the dynamic transcription and animations. This is something that is far more discoverable than traditional podcasts. What’s cool about our stuff, in comparison to Audiogram or Headliner, is we’re going to do your entire podcast that way. If you have 20 Synths at the end of that, you could, over the course of a week, post a different segment twice a day throughout the week. You could have different segments get discovered through your whole podcast.
PBJ: This is only in beta right now? Brian: It is beta and you can use it right now. I’m of the philosophy that beta should be open. We’re open about the fact that we’re iterating and refining some of the different aspects of the platform. There will be several iterations of it after January. We’re openly exploring what’s useful in the space and getting feedback along the way. Our general approach is to be in beta probably until the middle of next year where we will look to develop the business aspect of what this platform can be. Our goal is to give monetization tools to podcasters, like subscriptions or ad products, that go along with the general platform we’ve built. It will stay a free tool for them through that time period.
PBJ: If people want to check out Synth, the first thing they should do is what? Brian: They go to the website gosynth.com or download the app. Either one is a great entry point. You can sign up by logging in with Twitter, which makes it easy. In about 30 seconds you can create your first synth.
PBJ: How are you making money? Brian: Right now we don’t. We have the benefit of a parent company that can feed-fund this effort which allows us to explore what’s useful in this space and iterate on that openly until we reach a point where we can make money from that platform. Whether that comes before of after we spin out the business depends on a few variables.
PBJ: What sparked this idea that the podcasting space needs this? Brian: If you go back to where we started, the traction we had in the education market was promoting either student of teacher voices, meaning empowering them in or beyond classrooms. Our focus from the beginning was to make using and producing audio more approachable to people, to bring more voice and empower them. We evolved our way into the podcast space and started to get to know the challenges podcasters have in monetizing their content. We’re going to try to tackle all those things together in one clear platform. Our start was around trying to empower people by making it easier to share their voice. That’s been our core premise from the start.
Check out the product HERE.