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Earlier this year Dave Zohrob and Harish Agarwal launched Chartable, a website that helps podcasters see how they rank, pulling in all the data from the various players on the market.
After a podcaster signs up (for free) there’s a short, easy to understand, process to go through to connect the Chartable tracking code with your hosting company so the data can be pulled into your Chartable dashboard.
Before launching Chartable Zohrob was a Venture Hacker at AngelList, where he founded AngelList’s NYC office and grew the team from 2 to 16+ people. He co-founded two startups reaching millions of users on iOS and the web and was also an engineer at HOTorNOT and Microsoft. Harish Agarwal started his tech career as a co-founder and CTO of Octopart, an early YCombinator-backed company (W07) which was acquired by Altium in 2015. He was most recently at AngelList, where he led a team of five engineers and designers developing the talent marketplace.
We spoke to Dave this week about why he and Harish launched Chartable and why they decided to launch their own podcast this month.
PBJ: Give us the background on Chartable. Dave: Chartable is everything you need to know about your podcast, all in one place. We give podcasters all of their chart rankings, reviews, and ratings from iTunes and Spotify and elsewhere. We also let them sync up their downloads from their hosting provider. Everything we can possibly get our hands on and put it side by side. We started Chartable because we were doing a podcast ourselves, we are both programmers coming from the Web and making iPhone apps. It was surprising that all the kind of data we were used to seeing, all the decision-making stuff we would use when building a website or app, wasn’t available for a podcast. We were doing a show called Hacker Daily which was a techie show. We noticed listeners on Pocketcast were making up a larger and larger segment of our listeners and we couldn’t figure out why. It went up to about 30% of our listeners. If you look at the overall stats of Pocketcast it’s 1% of all listeners, which I thought was super weird. I ended up buying the app and downloading it. It turns out we were on a trending chart there. We thought wouldn’t it be great if we had known that beforehand to take more advantage of that.
PBJ: How did you put Chartable together? Dave: We’re programmers first. We had been working in tech start-ups for over 10 years. There’s a real parallel. I used to make iPhone apps 10 years ago and it was the same deal. You couldn’t find out if your app was charting on the store or whether it mattered or not for your downloads. It was the same thing in podcasting. There were a lot of companies that launched when the app store came out to solve that problem. We thought, why don’t we do the same thing for podcasts. It’s not rocket science. It is a lot of work in terms of the code. We started working on Chartable in June and got the first version working in a month. We went to Podcast Movement in Philadelphia at the end of July and that’s when we got our first users.
PBJ: Aside from Podcast Movement how are you getting the word out? Dave: There’s a lot of word of mouth, which is great. We also write our own blog post doing investigations of spam on the podcast charts. Every time we do one of those it gets a lot of traction, it’s mentioned in Podnews or Hotpod. We’ve also done a little bit of advertising in those newsletters. Ultimately we’re counting on the word of mouth. We’ve seen ourselves get mentioned in Reddit groups and FB groups.
PBJ: You guys just decided to launch your own podcast. Tell us about that?
Dave: We just launched Chartable radio and we’re taking a data-driven look at the podcast industry. We’re going to be interviewing podcasters of all types and hearing about how they grew their shows. We started the show because we wanted to get back into podcasting. Our first podcast was a tech news podcast that we did earlier in the year. We stopped because we were spending so much time building Chartable. We wanted to get back in the game. I think podcasting is totally fascinating. The wide variety of shows is fascinating. What happens under the hood in terms of the tech powering it all is crazy and amazing. We wanted to dig deeper into those things. We also wanted to be a podcast company that has a podcast. We want to make sure the software we build actually is awesome and provides value. We can’t know that unless we are using it ourselves.
PBJ: How are you making money with Chartable? Dave: Right now most of Chartable is free. Everything the average users will see is free. We do have some customers paying us for specific data requests. We want to get as many folks to use the software as possible. We have some ideas for things we could charge for in the future. For now we are happy to provide it for free.
PBJ: What is your overall opinion on the podcasting space today? Dave: It’s the most fascinating place. That’s why I’m spending so many hours of my days and years of my life working on it. There’s a renaissance of audio happening right now and it will only accelerate. Podcasts have been around forever but somehow in the last few years it keeps tilting towards more mainstream adoption. The shows are getting better. Everybody having better cell phones, data connections being able to listen to the shows is better. Awareness is growing. That’s compounding every year with more and more people listening.
[caption id=“attachment_450” align=“alignleft” width=“179”]
Chartable co-founder David Zohrob[/caption]
PBJ: What is it going to take to grow listeners? Dave: I’m optimistic about what Google is doing. The Android experience is not fantastic and Google’s first version of their Google podcast app is definitely a minimum viable podcast player. It doesn’t do much but it’s still good Google has them in there and that will hopefully be a default for Android users. It’s crazy that the iPhone drives so much listenership worldwide, especially given that Android is more popular outside the U.S. It will take a better experience on Android and awareness of podcasts in general. There’s a demographic issue where older listeners 55 and up are super unrepresented listening to podcasts. I can see a lot of reasons why. It’s hard to get into podcasting if you don’t know what you’re doing or not comfortable with your smartphone. I’m hoping that as an industry, with all the different efforts taking place – Apple is improving their app, Google is improving their app, Pocketcast is as well – that there will be more and different shows for people.
PBJ: Do you think there’s a discoverability issue? Dave: If you’ve ever tried to show an older person how to listen to a podcast there are basic challenges of usability that are more of a problem than discovering new shows. If somebody is already listening to podcasts and understands how that fits into their life, that’s awesome. It might be hard to find shows when you are on the go. I was on a road trip recently and I downloaded a couple of shows but wanted to find something else to binge while on the road. It turns out it’s hard from the Apple app. It’s not that great if you don’t already know what you’re looking for. The bigger problem is getting people into podcasting.
PBJ: How can people get in touch with you, listen to the show, and find out more about Chartable? Dave: You can find Chartable radio wherever you get your podcasts. You can find us at Chartable.com. If you want to get in touch, email us at help@chartable.com. Tweet us at @chartable.com and search your show at Chartable to see how many ratings and reviews you have. Find out if you are charting on the personal journals chart in Slovenia – you never know what kind of fans you have. We think it is awesome how many folks have already been using us. We look forward to helping podcasters as much as we can.
Listen to Chartable Radio HERE.