My quick thoughts on a VC case: it's a $100M revenue company at ~500k sales / year. There's apparently 144M podcast listeners in the US, so you need 0.34% of that population to purchase your product each year. That may be an aggressive assumption, but investors also may think 'podcasts are a huge and growing market, even if this idea isn't the one that works out, there's a lot of potential in the "podcast creation" space'
At $175 for one podcast, I guess that's a pretty health number even if you mostly have people ordering them as birthday presents and for family reunions.
That's right. We are seeing that an event like an anniversary, birthday, reunion, starting the school year, is a reliable trigger into that first episode for a family or friend group, and then that group creates additional episodes organically from there.
I'll also say that (and this is off in the future), that we hope to bring this per episode price point down as we streamline ops. We really want our service to be accessible to all. Not there yet.
Thanks for support! To your question: The core interview itself will remain consistent, but we do see opportunities around streamlining the match of the interviewer to the interview guest, scheduling, providing a rock solid remote recording set up for interviewers, and the edit.
Nice analysis! I should also share that since launching in June, we've felt fortunate to serve customers across five continents. We'll definitely focus on the US as our initial market, but it's been exciting to see the potential appetite internationally.
I also like to think about podcasting as the "modern" medium for oral history and story creation. At its core, we think about Artifact as a service that makes it easier to go deep - and it just so happens that this podcast interview setting seems to be a good way to do that.