Renee Wang - The Podcast Report

There's one user from Russia, she's visually impaired. She said to us, okay, the only way I can understand the world is using the audio. And I downloaded your app, but I found, like, there are some functions which called voiceover function didn't work out in your app. So I received that email. We prioritized this function. After three days, we respond back to say that, hi, could you please try again? We just add labels to all the buttons and the images. And then she responds. And she said, okay, it works now. And also she shared our apps to her, you know, visually impaired Gmail group. You are listening to the podcast report with Paul Colligan. Here's Paul. Here's Paul. Here's Paul.

Today's episode is an interview with Renee Wang from Castbox. Castbox is, for lack of a better term, yet another podcast directory or app. I've not been a big fan of those, and I originally declined the opportunity to do this interview. But what was interesting was she was still willing to come on board and answer the does the world need another podcast directory or app? Now, I wasn't mean, I wasn't confrontational. And a good chunk of this is still the regular promotional stuff. But it's an interesting look into what some of the opportunities are in the podcasting space. Now, when in the interview I mentioned that I thought she was from calling in from Beijing, she wasn't. She was calling in from the West Coast. Her Skype account did say Beijing on it. So that's where I made that assumption. Alexa and Google interrupt multiple times during that conversation. I forgot to turn them off while we did that. So that's kind of fun. It's a interview that's not necessarily for everyone. It's a little bit inside baseball. But for those of you who are looking at the larger industry as a whole, I think you will find it fascinating. But before we get to the interview with Renee, let's hit the tip of the day. It's a simple truth that deals with a lot of issues in life, not just podcasting. But the fact of the matter is this. It's always going to be easier to set up the audio correctly than it is going to be to fix it later. It is always going to be easier to get the lights right, get the camera put in the right place, get the production where you can get the best possible recording than it is to fix it later. Sometimes we have this image of, you know, that's been done by shows like 24 different movies that we've seen, where we can take something and fix it later. Well, we can't all the time and if we can, it takes a lot of work, a lot of effort. Usually a very high paid editor. It's always smarter to set everything up so that you do it right or you do it the best possible way. Then you can go in and edit it and fix it and upgrade it and change it later. If you do it sloppy at the beginning, the results and fixing it are only going to be sloppy as well. Set everything you do up for success and you'll have the best sounding and looking podcast possible. So I'm on the Skype phone with Renee Wong of Castbox. I was introduced to her through Jessica, who we've had on past episodes from Interview Connections. She helps Renee get gigs on podcasts. And Jessica came to me and said, let me get Renee on the show. And Renee, CEO of a company called Castbox, which is one of the seemingly 18 trillion podcast app podcast directories out there. And I told Jessica that I wasn't interested because it is one of the 18,000 or so out there. And what was interesting was Jessica pushed a little bit. Now that's definitely Jess. But she said, you know, Renee is up to the game. She's a smart cookie, Paul. You need to listen to her and you need to hear what she has to say. And I said, why going to do an episode where basically I'm going to ask the question, do we really need another aggregator? Do we really need another app? Does somebody really bringing somebody to the game or should we just settle down and stop trying to fix something that isn't necessarily broken? And she passed it back and Renee was up for the challenge. So I like a good challenge and that's what we're going to do on the episode. So welcome to the show, Renee.

Hi. Hi Paul. Thank you for having me here.

Thank you. So what's your history?

Yeah, actually my history is very simple. My major when I was in college is psychology. But I really like coding. So I learned code myself. I teach myself how to code. And then I joined Google and used to work for Google for more than four years and based in Beijing, Dublin and Japan and you know, helping developers, you know, all over the world to monetize their apps on a global scale. And I think two years ago, like at the end of like 2015 when I worked for Google Japan and I just have an idea, you know, to start up to do this startup. So that's why I quit my job at Google and go back to China, to Beijing and founded this startup and Myself used to coded the first version of Castbox and yeah, and then, you know, the team became bigger and we have more fundings and we have more users and until today.

Now what were you doing at Google before? What area at Google were you working with?

My job was account manager and I used to work for the department called OPG Online Partnership Group. Basically my job is helping developers from Asia, from emea European countries and also from other countries and have those developers to promote and monetize their app on global scale. When they want to launch their app in other countries, when they want to monetize their apps, they sometimes need my help to scale their business.

Gotcha. So you left Google working with app developers on an international level. And I think, and I've said on the show quite often that I'm still not satisfied with Google's offering in this space. So you leave with the desire of building an app. You do version one of the app, you code that yourself. That's very impressive. But then you started collecting funding. People started putting some real money into this. Chat about that for a second.

Yeah, actually at the very beginning, to be honest, there's no funding. I used to have a house in Beijing so there's no funding at the very beginning. So I sell my own house and using that money for the seed round. So it's really, really hard to get funding at the end of 2015 and even last year all the investors, they are looking for video things, they are looking for other industry more than audio. So actually the foundings, actually they just recently closed another B round fund and all the four round of fundings was closed during the past one year. Suddenly I mean, I think at the end of 2016 a lot of investors began to look for us because they began to think that audio will going to happen something in audio in this industry. So they want to be back on the audio because they can see the process of NLP natural language process. They can see the domination of Echo, Amazon Alexa and Google Home Google Assistant. And they really look, look high on the car connectivity because they believe that at the end of 2020 all the cars will have the ability to connect to Internet because of those three things. And they think, oh, there's a possibility for audio to boom, to become a real connection between people and the information. So that's why they are eagerly to find some, you know, spoken audio platform, especially you know, audio but not limited on music things. So that's why I think since the last, last year a lot of like investors began to proactively look for us. So until today we didn't actively, you know look for any investors. All those four round is you know, at the very beginning our investors you know look very good on this industry and to look very look fine. You know they are finding you know some people who are you know as a startup, you know with lower valuation but has better users, you know skills. So that's why they find us and we have a good conversation and we have big bad on the audio and we have a common sense on the future. So yeah, that's, that's why till today we close four rounds of investment during the only by year.

So it's not a I'm going to sell 1 billion copies of my app for 99 cents play. It's an NLP play interfacing sort of the Internet of things with the power of podcasting and someone that's kind of connecting all this stuff together in one place is that basically it?

Actually I think in both ways. I think of first as accountant providers who has ability to create really high quality content would be very high valued game lead panoply, they all raised a lot of money especially this year. So I think for content providers who has the ability to connect, who can organize those information, they are very important. So I think a lot of investors like straps they also invest game lead, they also think they are very important and there are some other investors they also looking for some kind of like technology, you know driven companies like us. So from my opinion of view, you know I think both sides are very important. Both the content creator side or the content aggregator or tech driven, you know, company side.

So where's the room for an app outside of the podcasts app or the A L E X A? I'm not going to say her name because she'll turn on and start talking during this. I should have turned her off before we started this or the Google home. I mean what is the play for something outside of the infrastructure that we might move into. Cortana really has nothing in the podcast space at all. Apple is including the app on all the phones and Google has put the app, you know, inside of Google Play Music. It's kind of hidden and it's kind of hard to access, but it's there. How does a third person come into the game?

A third party so far from my understanding, I mean let's keep it open. So my understanding if we look like long, long ago there is Yahoo which index which collect all those website but still there has an opportunity of Google who can understand the website better who can organize all those websites together, who index all the website with the ability to understand what the content, what the website are talking about. I think the same here. I understand there are a lot of big players who already organized has access to all those content and how the things we are doing differently is like we now try to understand all those audio, what they are saying. So we change all those audio into text and also adding time steps into those content and then reorganize and put those text, those scripts into our search engine. And so basically when people search specific keywords, they can jump into the exactly minute and second when the content providers talk about this content. So I think basically this is like the, I think there are still some room for us if we can highly leverage those technology has the ability to understand the audio better. So basically if you, you see our apps is different from as you said of other apps and the most differentiation of us is the ability to search inside the audio. And this is the thing we are highly put our big bet and prioritize in our team.

For those not familiar with Castbox, I'm going to explain a bit. The search feature is interesting because if you search search inside of most traditional apps, what you'll do is you'll get podcasts about that term and then usually you'll get episodes about that term. But what they've done at Castbox, or at least what they've they've attempted to do is, is you can type in a term and it will have, as she said, timestamps in episodes that talk about that term, even if the term isn't necessarily part of the title, the show notes, the, the tags or that type of thing. And so the idea is, if you wanted to see all the times the Keto Diet was mentioned across podcasts, it would be easy to find it in the podcast apps that were podcast episodes about the Keto Diet. But for a random podcaster who's dealing with it, if they happen to mention it, oh, I'm 14 days in on the Keto Diet. That's not going to show up in search anywhere but with Cathbox. And it almost becomes a, in theory at least, it almost becomes something like the old LexisNexis database and you'll be able to go across the entire industry. Is that a good description of what you're trying to do, Rene?

Yeah, exactly. So basically what we are trying to do is like audio is a Pandora box. You never know what is inside unless you listen to them. So we are trying to open the Pandora Box for audio try to make it easier for users to find the exact content they are looking for. Especially as you said, the Amazon Alexa, I try to name it and also Echo I also saw a lot of your content. I mean you have a lot of guidelines to podcasters how to put your content into Google Home, Google Assistant or Alexa or itunes. But still, if users didn't know about this channels from Word of Mouse or from social media, they can never access those content. But a lot of content are really great. So that's why I think if we can leverage technology to reorganize or reorganize those content and have ability for users to access those those content that would be, you know, I think that would be our contribution to those content providers. But again, as I said before, the first important content providers themselves, they are happy, they can monetize from their content. They have certain motivation to create great content. They come first and for us actually we come second to provide better services.

So how does someone get their content indexed by Castbox? Does that happen automatically? Is there a form they fill out?

Yeah, actually so far we not index all the content when we are trying to improve our algorithm. But ideally at the end of the day I think all the audio content, if they are open source, they are open like you doing a website said you are okay for Google search to scroll, you know, using a robotactic Txt and for us the same if the audio they are willing for us to help them to change to scripts, we are willing to. So nowadays we didn't transcribe all those content but the top audio but we will try to extend those functions to all the audio set are willing us to do this thing for them.

The concept is neat. Now there are some who have tried this, some of them have gone out of business. They didn't have the VC you've got and just today I know I'm chatting with you in Beijing so I'm not quite sure if you just woke up. I'm never good with time zones but Amazon just announced an S3 transcription service that's going to be using a bit of AI to take the transcription but then figure out punctuation, sentence structure, that kind of thing. So the industry is obviously building how will being the index serve and make the money back? For the money that's been invested and for the record, how much money has.

Been invested so far the Unless this round, the first three round, we have like $60 million into this round, this round we haven't appealed yet.

So 16 million so far.

Yeah.

That's not bad. Congratulations on that. How is the money going to be made back? Where's the 16 million going to be paid back to the investors?

Yeah, actually for those content there are several things we are doing now. First we are kind of like cooperating with some content producers and to co produce a lot of great high quality but original content. And for us we try to kind of provide this distribution channel distribution ability and the discovery ability. And for producers they are in take responsibility for creating those content and selling ads. So we are doing kind of revenue share on those things. This is first business model. The second business model there are several producers are looking for us to do the premium content on our platform and we will do revenue share because actually we have the users not only in us but globally. For example, now we are number one in Korea. So that's why a lot of Korean content providers, they are looking for us to selling their premium content on carsboss. So that would be another revenue income. So yeah, basically this will be the two business model. We will have a trial at the beginning of next year. And back to your question about where I am actually I'm now in our San Francisco office. We have a small office here with business development team and marketing team in the States. And to answer your question about the S3 and AWS, they are launching similar the transcript function and also Google, IBM, they are all doing their kind of text to speech or speech to text things. I think compared to them, I think we are more how to say that we are very focused on those things. For those Alexa things and Amazon, Polly and what they are doing is very fundamental, you know, TTS and STT things and but for us, you know, we are trying to leverage not only those transcript things but also try to understand, reorganize and doing the better algorithm search and especially on those podcast, you know, industry and for the niche market we want first, you know to, to make our room here and try to provide better services to those content providers. So I mean if for example, if you say okay, if like Google, they will focus all their efforts into this area, I don't think there will be any room for startups but as far as they are still, you know, a small team or like a function who is doing this, this kind of thing, I think there will be still some opportunities or differentiation, position, differentiate positions for startup to survive and to grow.

So the world needs another aggregator, not because, and this is your opinion, obviously it needs another aggregator not because the existing ones aren't meeting the needs. They're looking to fulfill. But what you bring to the game of the premium content interface and both, you know, all the players in that space are pretty bad right now. The whole premium content via podcast is yet to be busted open world. So I think that's an interesting one. And then to become sort of the Google Yahoo is interesting. Yahoo. Everybody was really happy with Yahoo until Google came and suddenly search got real and you're attempting to sort of bring the same thing to the space is an interesting play. So it's not to compete with the podcast app in iOS 11. It's to compete with how people think about podcasting three, four years down the run. Is that basically it?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Again, as I think, I think it's very important for content providers for them to make their users audience growth. So what we are trying to do is really helping them to grow their audience to better monetize their content. And as I said those premium content why this business model came it's very simple because we just like as I said we go to number one number, you know the first place on Korean market. So there are several Korean content providers look for us and to asking if they can sell their specific vertical or niche content, niche industry content in our platform. And we are very open. So as a startup we, you know, we are very flexible. So we kind of create those premium models for those career content providers. So in this way they are premium content and they can monetize their content on our platform, you know, as earlier as January next next year, basically this coming soon. So that's as was what I said. I mean as a startup compared to the big players you just mentioned, we are very flexible and we're trying to understand the opportunities. We're to understand the pain point of the content providers. We're trying to understand how as a, you know, as a player how we can provide better services. And we have very humble and open mind to try to make sure all the people in the industry, you know, they are kind of growth in their own and in this way it's only we can grow as well.

So if a content developer or a content owner or someone looking to premium or any of these things, if they wanted to get a hold of you or the right person in the organization, what would they do?

Yeah, actually so far we have like a business development team in US and also in Korea because they are now our two main major countries. So basically they just look for those people and they can have really deep conversations and to understand their needs and to also to understand how much Engineer efforts, they need to provide more, better or to fit their needs. And if it works, we will try to prioritize those user behaviors, those needs from those content providers into our product roadmap. So this is like the, basically the way how we try to work with those content providers.

Yeah, okay. And they should just head out to Castbox fm, hit the contact button and go from there.

Yeah, we have a contact there. So we have biz at Castbox FM as a contact information under our website.

Okay.

And basically. And basically, actually personally I watch that email every day to see if there's anything we can look better. And actually this is one way how we try to improve ourselves as you know, to provide better services to content providers. I mean at the other hand to users, it's also very important. So basically, as you may say, our apps, it only has over 1 years old, but if you see how many versions we upgrade, basically, I think last year we upgraded three times a week on Google Play and this year at least one or two times a week on Google Play. Because every day I personally watch all the users feedback. Actually nowadays we have more than 100, sometimes two or 300 users email every day to, to go into our contact email or support email. So basically today I watch them every day and every single email try to understand the user's behaviors. Users need I take an example so you can better understand that, you know, how, how we position ourselves. There's one user from Russia, she is, you know, she is kind of like visually impaired. So she said to us, oh hi, I'm blind and I cannot see anything. The only way I can understand the world is using the audio. And I downloaded your app. But I found like there are some functions which called a voiceover function and some voiceover function didn't work out in your app because some pictures or some buttons, they didn't have the labels to mention what is inside. So I received that email and I think during the coming three days we prioritized this function and all the engineers and operations team and we try to add labels on the 50 million pictures inside our content. So that's why after three days we respond back to say that hi, could you please try again. We just add labels to all the buttons and the images. So and then she responds and she said okay, it works now. And also she shared our apps to her, you know, visually impaired Gmail group. So basically I think this is like the way how we do things. I understand there are a lot of like apps there and we understand that, you know, for Users, they already has a lot of options. But what we trying to do is that we really want to as a startup, we are really flexible and we're really moving fast. We really try to understand the users needs and to understand if our current engineering ability can fit their needs and try to provide a better user experience. So basically if you see our apps written on Google play are all 4.6 and if you see every single user not today, but maybe like all the user feedback, if they leave the comment three days or two days before we have users to feedback on their comments. So even today we have, I think we have two apps on Google Play with 10 million users. Even today we have feedback on every single user's feedback.

Oh great. Very cool. Well, I'll tell you in the big frustration for podcasters not being able to have impact on the podcast app from itunes and definitely the one from Google as well. So listening to the bass is certainly a way to grow. Well, thank you for coming on the show. And you know, it's, it's, it's an interesting play we're in, you know, and in some ways it seems like some of these are desperate plays. Sometimes it seems like these are strategic, sometimes it seems obvious, sometimes you got to wonder. But I appreciate you coming on the show and playing a bit, you know, defensive to that question I think that you're offering is at least, you know, not we're doing better. We try harder. You are bringing some things to the table that are interesting. It's gonna be fun to watch. Any last comments before we close up?

Yeah, I think like as the last I want really thank you. Thank you for hosting me because you are very, you know, you know, well honored in this industry. A lot of my team members, they say they have watched your speech or like and my personal experience listen to all your interviews this year. So I already learned a lot from you. So I really appreciate the opportunity you gave me to have a conversation with you. And also it's really good to hear how you respond to our questions or our answers. So it also for us, another motivation or inspired.

Well, great. Well, this is going to be episode. Looking at the notes here, this could be episode 133 of the podcast report. And so if anybody wants to make a comment and continue this conversation, the podcastreport.com 133 will get you there. And of course Castbox FM will get you in contacts with them. Thank you so much, Renee.

Thank you. Thank you for your time.

So that was Renee and that was Castbox. I played with Castbox a little bit before I did the interview. Really nothing pulled me to it later. I do think the integration of voice, I do think the search capabilities that come from AI and that kind of stuff is the future of what we've got. But when you look at people like Apple and you look at people who have, you know, such space ahead of the game, it's going to be really hard for them to play. The money that she has collected is definitely impressive, but there have not always been the most intelligent and the most smartest money in this space. I don't know how I feel necessarily about the entire process or if Castbox is going to be a key player in the future, but nonetheless, I wanted to make this interview available to you. Thank you so much for listening. We love the social interaction here at The Podcast Report ThePodcastReport.com Facebook ThePodcastReport.com Twitter The PodcastReport.com InsertSocialPlatform of your choice. We'd love to hear from you. Love to give you the chance to interact with other listeners of the show. Another thing we'd love to have you do is simply subscribe to the show if you know what that means.

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