How is Timber doing?
We're following a pattern established by Elon Musk
Hi there! I’m older than last time we talked. Happy belated birthday to me (yesterday)! Today an update on our company in the spirit of building in public and having you along in the passenger seat in this #vanlife of podcasting publications.
How’s The Edit?
A couple months ago, I got some nice feedback from writing a vulnerable email that our feedback service wasn’t working. In the spirit of that note here’s what’s happening now.
Marketing The Edit is still not really working even though I’ve systematized it by first promoting tools for growing your audience and improving your podcast so that people can get to know us a little bit before they commit to hanging out with us on Discord.
We’ve grown to 16 participants, and they all love it. So we still have no plans of giving up.
We’ve also started to forge partnerships with companies we love like LWC and AIRMedia, and hopefully a few others soon. I think if potential members hear about us from companies they already trust, it will help.
How’s the hosting service?
All along, Timber has been building a hosting service, and I’ve been publicly saying we’re almost done since December 2020. I learned that move from Elon Musk. Internally we had set a deadline of October 6th (my birthday) to start our beta, and we missed it (but just barely).
It’s now looking like October 18th will be the new date. I’m going to go to San Diego next week to try to store up some sunlight for the fast-approaching Colorado winter, and when I come back, I’ll open the doors up.
We need 50 real podcasts on the platform that are being sent to Spotify in order to get access to their private API for collecting analytics. Without this access we will be at a severe disadvantage to other podcast hosts in terms of the analytics we show. So, the first 50 people on the platform that submit their shows to Spotify will get free podcast hosting for a year. That is a good deal for a feature gap that we should be able to close within a couple months if people join quickly.
Here’s what will be great about Timber hosting from day 1:
Lighting fast podcast importing. We created the Ferrari of pulling in your episodes. You should try it sometime even if you don’t plan to host with Timber. All your episodes get vacuumed in at once.
Super intuitive episode management. Episodes can be drafts, scheduled, unscheduled, rescheduled, published, updated, unpublished, deleted. That’s a lot to get right. We spent the time on it.
Extremely nice analytics. In our blended view of episodes and analytics, you won’t have to jump from page to page to see how episodes are performing.
Here’s who should join the beta:
Experienced podcasters that take the craft seriously
People who will report any issues and feedback to us
Podcasters that are ready to grow with us
Here’s who we’re not ready to serve:
Brand new podcasters
Shows with over 100 episodes (there’s just a bit of pagination and search work that we still need to do)
Shows that need to publish straight from their host to Youtube
Shows that need dynamic ad insertion (we’ll get there)
Shows that use their host’s website creator. We don’t believe podcasts hosting platforms should be making your website.
It’s right around the corner from being real!
If you want to be one of the first 50 beta users, please sign up here.
What about the publication?
The publication is cruising along. I still love commissioning and editing pieces for it. We’re running at a rate of about 2 per month. It’s expensive for us to do much more than that because we pay fifty cents to a dollar per word. I’m planning on sending out a new pitch call just after we get the hosting beta kicked off.
Let’s talk about friends
Last year, we published a wonderful profile of Juleyka Lantigua-Williams by Joshua Dudley. And since then, she’s gone nowhere but up. Her company LWC is consistently mentioned in top podcast lists, and her quotes grace the best of podcast media.
When we recently asked her if we could partner to help get the word out about The Edit, she said, in return, she just wanted us to help publicize The Podcasting, Seriously Awards Fund.
Consider it done, Juleyka! We also made a small donation to the fund.
LWC Studios launched the The Podcasting, Seriously Awards Fund to support independent BIPOC, Queer and Trans audio producers in submitting their work to media/journalism awards.
Basically they pay the submission fees (which, before I started Timber, I didn’t even imagine that you would have to pay to win an award, but that’s another story) for these indie podcasters.
Here’s the site with details https://www.podcastingseriously.com/fund. If you’ve got some extra money, and especially if you’re in a position of privilege, get on it. I’m certain the donation we made will not be our last.
Thanks for taking the time to read!
—Jon Christensen