Roxcodes is the founder of Flightcast, a new video-first podcast hosting company. — this interview has been lightly edited for style and readability
See the Flightcast launch press release. This interview was taken from this week’s Podnews Weekly Review: you can hear the episode here.
Roxcodes: Flightcast, the video-first podcast hosting and growth platform, does a whole lot of things, but it mainly lets you publish video and audio everywhere. So that’s video to YouTube and Spotify, audio to Apple and everywhere else. It makes clips for you out of your videos. It creates a whole clips channel that lets you test different moments. There’s a whole buttload of AI and a whole buttload of analytics in there. So it’s got pretty much all the stats from every platform as deep as they go, and AI to sit with you and analyze those stats and really help you understand what’s working for you and what’s not - what’s growing your show and what’s a waste of time.
Sam Sethi: Why video not audio - why would you say we were going to do video hosting first? Because everyone else is a predominantly audio hosting company.
Rox: That was definitely part of the reason. I think a lot of the success of DOAC came from the video side, and the audio side still does great, but video is where they saw their growth. And I worked with Steve when I was doing my thumbnail test tool. He was a very early customer, so we worked closely together, and I got to see their whole operation. And my takeaway was, well, this is kind of annoying - this looks really not fun to do, leaving computers on overnight, giant files and everything. So I said, well, surely we can we can do better than this, and probably we can do a whole growth platform, because I imagine a lot of people who are doing this audio stuff and are starting to do video probably don’t understand video that well because there’s algorithms and all these things. So we can kill two birds with one stone: let’s do the publishing and let’s do the analytics, and I bet you we can really start to solve “what’s working?” as a question.
SS: You have gott an API from Spotify to directly publish video to them, which nobody else has. How did that come about?
Rox: I don’t know how much I’m allowed to talk about that stuff.
SS: No one’s listening. Just say what you like.
Rox: Trust me, they are listening - Spotify will hear it! We chatted with Spotify and we’ve been working closely with them to get this over the line. So it’s all using official methods: it was just a lot of conversations, and they’ve been very kind.
SS: You have AI with your analytics. How people might use AI on Flightcast to help them with their analytics?
Rox: So the biggest thing that we have is this really large AI assistant that can query into all of your analytics. So you can ask very arbitrary questions about not just your YouTube data, not just your Spotify data, but pretty much everything. So you can ask which episode had the most listens in the first three hours and 12 minutes, what topics do the best for me in the first 48 hours on YouTube… but you can go deeper. Which episodes had listeners that have listened more than three times on average? All of that analysis. That was really kind of the magnum opus of what I wanted to do. Because to some extent, I’ve always wanted to build an AI YouTube consultant, I suppose. Because a lot of YouTube consulting is when you’ve you know spent years listening to him talk, you get a handful of the things and you say, All right, this is just math. I could just do this math and give good insights. So I’m hopeful to really bring that across through this.
SS: What AI are you using? Can you reveal?
Rox: All of them. It’s genuinely all of them. It depends on the function.
SS: We’re both in a WhatsApp group which has got a lot of hosts in there as well. And I’ve seen some of the commentary back. There’s been a lot of positive commentary from some of your early beta testers saying we’ve been able to this one-click distribute everywhere model. What did you learn through the beta-testing process?
Rox: That’s a good question. I think a lot of people would underestimate how complex the thing is. A lot of people would be like, ah, just upload. But there’s a million little things that get weird when you start to go to many platforms at once, a lot of generalizations that have to be made. And you know, like we were talking about before we even started, UX is just so massive. Like UX is is half of it. And so that was also part of the reason I decided to do these onboarding calls of the first few hundred customers is to just say, hey, let’s make sure that you get it. And then if you have questions, then I can plug those into the tutorial or to the guidance or whatever, so that the next person just gets it.
SS: Now, one of the things that Diary of a CEO does is they have this very clever panel for clip analysis. So from what I understood, they’ve got a panel of people who listen or watch the video, and at some point where they find it interesting, they hit the space bar, and the team then at Diary of a CEO do is then aggregate that histogram into an aggregated view of what was interesting, and then that’s where they generate the clips.
Now, from what I’ve seen of the product feature function for Flightcast, that’s one of the features that you’ve built in. Is that directly something that you took from the Diary of a CEO team, I guess?
Rox: Well, a fun story. The sort of like pre-visualization tool where you send people an early edit is a different thing, but was actually the first thing I built with Steve when we were theorizing ideas. So yeah, we built that as an internal tool. And I said to Steve, let’s start these as internal tools, and then if they look good, we can upgrade them. And it ended up being that Flightcast itself felt a lot more compelling than this early thing. Because I thought the early thing was like, that’s a really, really premium concept. You have to have enough fans to send it to early. How do you handle content security? There’s a lot of complexity there versus publishing analytics and AI.
The AI clip tool that we have in Flightcast is unrelated to that sort of like pre-watch tool that we made. The AI clip tool that we made will AI generate clips. It makes a separate YouTube channel for this, and then uploads clips one or two or three a day and just lets them run in the YouTube algorithm. And the basic premise is an AI clip isn’t that great. So most people don’t want to post on their main channel, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t learn from them. So if you’re posting 30 or 100 of them a month on a blank channel you don’t care about, and one of them gets 10,000, 50,000 views, you say, Hey, okay, that’s something, right? I’m gonna take that, I’m gonna go edit that down, I’m gonna put that on my main channel, and you sort of get this like pre-validated content, right?
So a lot of the real dream for Flightcast in my soul is it’s an experimentation platform, and we’re taking the steps now to start to get to that layer of it, but we had to really start as video, then move to growth, and then finally hit this like experimentation as the method of growth. So that’s the first of many steps towards experimentation.
SS: You’ve also offered a migration capability. Was that an easy thing to do?
Rox: No, it took forever. I would say genuinely one of my engineers has spent in the entirety of Flightcast probably 70% of his time on it. We worked really, really, really hard on that. I think migration is the biggest hold off - the scariest thing. It’s not just the audio file, it’s ‘how much of my data can I bring with me?’ I have some aggregated download counts, but Flightcast tries to be really, really granular with as much of the data as we can. So getting as much granular data as we can is the best.
SS: Is there a wait list? And what is the plan for opening up?
Rox: There’s no wait list any more. I think I accidentally left it up for like the first 20 minutes, which was funny because I had the time zones wrong when the Podnews announcement went out. I was in the shower and I went, oh my god, and I ran out of the shower and really quickly updated it! That’s not a joke. It really happened. It was brutal. I hate time zones.
You can go in, and you can sign up now. We’re working on making it a little bit easier to explore and poke around and get a better idea of what the whole platform does. Because it does a lot. And and I think the toughest thing that we pushed up against with this launch was the word hosting platform being not entirely perfect. Because it’s really a growth platform, like it’s there to help you grow and understand. And it happens to be a hosting platform that does these other things because that’s the best way to make a growth platform. And so I want to give people the opportunity to dig in a little more.
SS: Thank you very much, Rox.
Rox: I appreciate it so much, man. Thank you so much for having me, dude. This is a goddamn pleasure. It’s such an honor to be on this show. I’ve been listening for a year and a half. I can’t believe I’m here. Thank you, man.