Neil Mody is CEO and Co-Founder of Headliner — this interview has been lightly edited for style and readability
Neil Mody: Headliner is a platform that helps podcasters grow their podcast. We have a variety of tools and solutions that help podcasters find and grow audience across the web. We’re most known for our first tool which takes audio and converts it into video for audiograms, but we’ve got a bunch of other solutions that really help grow podcasts. That has been the focus over the last few years.
Sam Sethi: How are you helping podcasters grow when it comes to video?
NM: We’ve always thought that podcasting’s biggest issue is that it’s not present where people are. It’s an island on the internet that you have to travel to to consume. Now, when you’re on that island most people love it - but getting to that island is a journey: so what we’ve always said is we need to bring podcasts to where people are.
So the first tool that helps get audio out to social media is audiograms, which helped them get their audio to YouTube. Then we did full-length videos: we were YouTube’s main partner in getting YouTube originally into podcasting, and a big publisher of getting audio out to YouTube. The third was getting audio out across the web in a product called Disco and so when you’re reading an article on the web you would see recommendations of your podcasts, and that’s grown as well. And then the ad side of that product, called Podcast Promo, allows podcasters to pay to market their podcasts across sites across the web and that’s really where the growth has been.
We see video as really an evolution. We’ve always thought it’s a great platform and a place to grow, and we’ve now focused on video across all our tools. Every single piece and product of Headliner now supports video. So you will see that in everything I mentioned, not only can you make your audiograms on Make, you can also make all these video clips. For a creator that has to make marketing materials from audio and video, we think we’re the best tool in the market and we’re excited to offer it for free as part of our eighth birthday. We’ve heard from many creators that the big issue with video is cost. We didn’t want to add yet another cost or hike our fees. We’re lucky to be a profitable and growing startup so we didn’t need to: and we want to get on this video wave and meet creators where they are, which I think everyone appreciates at this point.
SS: Why did you start Headliner? I mean we’re talking eight years ago - why did you start it?
NM: It actually got birthed out of a company we had started called SpareMin, which was a micro podcasting app back when that was talked about. That gained some momentum, but what we realized is audio was a second class citizen on the internet. You could not post an audio file to Instagram. You could not post an audio file to most social platforms. Or YouTube. And so we made this way to convert, and over time we realized this is actually more valuable. So we pivoted the company all around it. Now we’re looking forward to doing that for video clips too. You know there’s a bunch of tools out there but no one who’s struck the right balance of price, functionality, and really honed in on the podcaster use cases. So we’re looking forward to doing that.
SS: What are the plans for Headliner going forward?
NM: Podcast Promo and Disco have been the large part of our growth over the last few years. At the end of COVID when we saw audio decreasing in terms of its creation rate, we thought we needed to build something more than just audiograms. We bet on this product that really no one had in the market, which was very similar to our previous company before all this, which was getting content out across the web on articles. And that took a little while to get going, but it’s now grown into a a very large part of our business and Podcast Promo is part of that.
So if you have a podcast and you want to market it, we think we could be the best tool for marketing, and with attribution and the tools we’ve built we think we could be the best advertising platform for all of podcasting.We’re excited for where that goes, and what I’m super excited for is across the board everything’s now supporting video and video podcasting.
SS: When’s enough for Neil Mody? When would you want to exit from Headliner?
NM: We’ve had interest many times as you can probably imagine. We’re lucky enough that we had an exit behind us, and my thought is exits are thought of as positive in the community but actually as a second time entrepreneur, exit in some ways is a failure.
We built this company to be the biggest platform for getting your audience out there across the web. I would argue that more people have discovered podcasts via Headliner than almost any other platform including Apple, Spotify etc - that’s the power of social and YouTube. But if only 500 million are listening to podcasts, we’re still doing something wrong. YouTube was a big reason I think we can hit a billion users. But there’s eight billion people on the planet. Podcasts should be hitting four or five billion people. We think we have a good chance to try to get more users, whether it be independently or with another entity that sees it the same way.
We like what we’re doing, it’s hard to complain when you’re a profitable growing startup. I miss the days of everyone wanting to be a podcaster for sure. We were growing even faster then. But the last few years has picked up dramatically. I’m excited for video podcasting, given video’s been our thing since we’ve started.
Thanks for having me on.