We're joined today by a new person to the show
for us. His name is George Lejnine. He is the
CEO and founder of PodAnalyst. George, hello.
How are you? Pretty good. George, now, I read
a really interesting review about your product,
both in PodNews Daily, but also in the podcast
TechStack. Now, it really piqued my interest
because there are many analytic... platforms
out there that look at how your podcast does,
but yours is slightly different. So you're not
focused on downloads. Tell me more about PodAnalyst.
Yeah, it's a new analytics platform, like you
said, and we're following the ethos that Bumper
and Dan Meisner have established of, you know,
the famous article that they wrote, The Death
of the Download. Back in the day, we had the
hit counter of the internet on your eBay page.
And that was considered sophisticated technology.
But now that Apple and Spotify and YouTube are
offering far greater telemetry, I think from
the perspective of how am I performing, you really
should just be looking at that. Downloads should
be just an assist, really, for covering the overcasts
and the podcast addicts out there that don't
share telemetry yet. But John Spurlock has that
project going on, but I'm not going to hold my
breath for it. smaller podcasts to implement
anything to the degree that Apple and Spotify
have done. The idea is that you use pod analysts
to get first party data back from your Apple
account and your Spotify account. And later on,
we will have a version that gets the YouTube
data as well. So they're the big three players
in the market. We understand when you get the
data back into pod analysts. First of all, is
it you accessing your own Spotify for creators
and your Apple? create a dashboard, pulling in
the data. Is that how you do it? Or is there
a more automated way? Yeah. So the general onboarding
process from the perspective of the podcaster,
they go into Apple podcasts and to Spotify for
creators, and they simply invite our special
email address as if you're literally inviting
us for the analyst role, which allows us to read
your data. And we have some automation set up
to be able to pull in your data really quickly.
So once I get the data back into my pod analyst
dashboard, again, what is it that I get to see?
What's the critical things that you've done that
are uniquely different from what everyone else
has done? So I think everyone has to have kind
of some table stakes measurements, which is unique
listeners. That's the big one. Listening hours
or whatever variation of that terminology you
want to call it. And of course you get plays
and followers if you still care about that metric.
But the big thing that we are really focusing
in on is your listener retention functions. We
have a really interesting user interface to basically
show you all of your episodes that you have done.
And quickly at a glance, you can start seeing
outliers beyond just like, oh, this episode had
1 ,000 listens. This episode had 700. What happened
here? When you're looking at 100 episodes, you
might get lost. And so we use a lot of color
to... kind of visually represent how you're doing
in terms of cool things. Like someone creates
a promo episode saying like, Hey, you know, vote
for us in some award show. And it's interesting.
We saw they got like one fourth of the amount
of starting listeners, but their retention was
almost perfect. So everyone who was listening
with either washing their dishes and just couldn't
press skip on the episode, or these are your
super fans, but like, that's the kind of stuff
that you just. wouldn't even be able to do by
looking at Apple or Spotify. They provide you
this data. It's putting it together that is the
real value in using Pod Analyst. So when you
say putting it all together, so what would I
do with the data that you've given me? How would
I improve my podcast? So that's the interesting
thing. We don't want to go down this... AI route,
because quite frankly, I don't see it working
really well right now. I'm not going to speak
for the future. But this is kind of the thing
that I was talking with you before the show about
the difference between, say, a bumper and a pod
analyst. You need to come in and still apply
some analytical thinking. We're going to give
you all the data and present it to you in a very
visually appealing way. You need to look at the
numbers. Like we're saying, hey, this episode
performed incredibly poorly. Why? Well, you need
to go look at it and you can click into an episode
and go into your retention curves and see, hey,
we had 50 % of people drop off because they heard
your pre -roll and they're not interested. That's
a very common effect. Or why did people just
straight up leave halfway through the show? Like,
was the content I was doing poor? We provide
you. the ways to see that. But you, at the end
of the day, still have to make that interpretation.
Okay. So I get to see the histogram of how my
episode has flowed. I can then make subjective
changes to my next episode based on that. Oh,
okay. Lots of people fell off at 60 minutes.
My show's one hour 80. Clearly no one's listening.
Let's shorten the show or that topic about a
new... product didn't really strike with anybody.
So maybe I've got to be careful of what topics
I use. Okay. So that's how you're looking at
doing it. Now it's currently in beta from what
I understand. So it's free for everyone still
to use. And there is a version that you say that's
going to be free for life, but there is two price
points. What are they? Oh, so, so the two price
points is one is free. One is $49 a month. Right.
Again, what would I get for my extra $49 then?
So I like to think of it as, If you're on the
free forever, the way we measure it is we say
you can add all of your podcasts. So there's
no limitation on that. What we do is we say,
okay, across your podcasts in the last 30 days,
how many unique listeners did you have? If you
had less than a thousand, we consider you a free
forever user. You get basically almost the entire
tool set. You miss out on some of the team planning
type stuff, you know, bringing your whole team
with you. In the future, there's going to be
some tools to see at a network level, how your
whole network is performing. But those are really
not tools. If you're running five shows and you
get 200 listeners each per month, that's not
relevant to what you need as a podcaster at that
point in your growth. On the other hand, if you
have millions of downloads, sure, 50 bucks a
month for the premium plan and you get everything.
Plus you get better support directly from me.
You recently released a new version. That's still
in beta, I assume, so you're not actually a release
yet. So 2026 is coming up. What are you planning
on bringing to the platform? When do you think
it will be a full release one candidate? And
what else do you think you want to do in 2026?
Yeah, so we're getting closer and closer to that
finish line. And when I say we, I do want to
mention this is a team of one. So I am the founder.
I'm also the developer. I'm also the support.
But also I want to shout out to Jim Serico. He
is my advisor. He's formerly of Cadence 13. Great
guy, really helpful. So going back in terms of
2026, January is probably where we want to cut
it and say, hey, we're delivering you value.
You know, from the hobbyist to the professional,
there's something here that is now worth it.
And we're already seeing this where I think it's
something like 25 to 45 % of our weekly active
users are just coming back. There's a certain
proportion that. in a surprisingly large amount
that comes back literally every single day. I'm
looking at these people logging in and you can
start seeing some patterns. But the big thing
that I want to bring to 2026, which I have hinted
on LinkedIn in comments and stuff, is to be able
to share your podcast measurement information.
And I want to really caveat this up front. We
are not in the business of selling your data.
If you don't want to have this feature, it is
an opt -in. You have to explicitly state that
you want to share your data. You want to provide
as a granular of capabilities to this, going
all the way from, hey, I want to invite my advertising
partner. We've been doing this forever. You know,
say like an acquired in JP Morgan. Let's give
Jamie Dimon a permanent access to this whole
platform. Let him see what's going on. Or, hey,
we're working with HelloFresh. we're going to
do these next three episodes, show them these
three. They don't need to see everything else.
Maybe we'll show them a few previous episodes.
Like this is how we normally perform so they
can set a good return on ad spend metric for
themselves. And going all the way to, hey, I
want to, you know, when Spotify said, hey, we're
going to share your numbers. And if you were
in the club of awesome, I want people to know
how I'm doing. Then we want to offer, hey, here's
your public information. And the huge advantage
for podcasters and advertisers here is, as a
podcaster, you're probably used to, hey, I'm
Sam from Sam's awesome ad agency. Please invite
me to Apple. Please invite me to Spotify. Let's
hope that there's no technical issues. That's
just a huge waste of time. One login, one invite.
For the advertisers, no login at all, just to
type in a code or something like that. Just really
simplifies the whole process. Let's just go back
a little bit about George. So you've been in
a developer mode for quite a while now. One of
your first products you sold to a company called
Radio .co in Manchester. What was that product?
It was an iOS app called Pocket Streamer. It's
still in the App Store. And basically what it
lets you do is if you have a Shoutcast compatible
radio station or you're a Radio .co customer,
you could go live directly from your iPhone.
There's an awesome YouTube demo that they've
done where they went out to do an interview in
some area of London and, you know, they just
brought a microphone, walked around. So that
was kind of culmination for me having worked
at Live 365 previously. And another product that
you built was PodcastDB. What was that one? So
PodcastDB was basically, think of like, the closest
competitors I would say is Listen Notes and Podchaser.
So kind of a Zoom info for podcasters is the
best. easy description. And that one has been
sold and has just recently been sold again to
some company in Dubai of all places. Now with
this one, I mean, what is your exit strategy?
It sounds like you're going to build a really
cool analytics platform with a big three, eventually
Spotify, Apple, and YouTube data. It does feel
like it's one of those products that would live
within another product as well. As in, I can
imagine a hosting company saying, yeah, we want
this because this adds super quick value. It
could be an Aqua higher stroke product purchase.
Is that your thought process or is it too soon?
You're just building a product. I would say it's
probably too soon. I've definitely, it's definitely
gone through my mind about what this could turn
into. I don't think Daniel Ek from Spotify is
going to be writing me an email anytime soon
for an acquisition, given that he already has
half of the data, but maybe he's interested in
the other half. And, you know, I'm open to that
conversation. But no, it's actually an interesting
question. Working with hosting companies, I've
heard so many people mention that to me. I would
love to do that. If Buzzsprout, I believe they're
one of your sponsors. I love their show, Buzzcast.
Listen every single Friday. I listen to this
show every single Friday too. But, you know,
it would be awesome to work with them. I think
it would just be a very awkward conversation
with Apple and Spotify of like, hey, so we have
100 ,000 logins that we need to handle. Like,
what do we do at that point? I think it's more
of a logistics problem rather than a technical
problem. But it would be an awesome thing. So
just to put this out there, the reason that we're
even offering the free forever plan is because
we want to encourage the whole industry to adopt
that downloads are the new metric. And no one
else is offering a free plan for anything right
now. I'll call out my competitors and my friends
here. So we've got obviously Bumper. We've got
listener .com. We've got podstock .io. They're
all on the same mission. Hey, downloads is the
new thing that we need to be doing. I'm going
to come in and say, hey, I'll take one for the
team. I'll offer a free plan because this is
what we need to be doing as an industry. You
say downloads. I'm still not a believer that
downloads is the metric. I'm a believer that
listen time is the metric. It's still early in
the morning here in California. I meant unique
listeners, episode consumption. I totally threw
you for a quick one there. Here's the thing.
We don't even measure right now. We would like
to add support for a few of the big hosting companies
because we shouldn't throw away downloads because
depending on your show, for example, Accidental
Tech, they constantly say, hey, a huge portion
of our listeners come from Overcast because obviously
that same show is creating that podcast app,
Marco Arment. For them, downloads might actually
make sense to analyze. But for the majority of
shows, we have all the telemetry that we really
need. to make at least a directionally correct,
if not a perfect representation of your show
from the data that Apple and Spotify provide
you. I think downloads are a good indicator.
They are a metric. I think it's really interesting
with a platform like yours is that people can
see their conversion rate from... I don't know,
let's say 4 ,000 downloads to 600 plays. That
again is a good metric to understand. Why am
I getting all these downloads, but people aren't
auto converting into playing? That's another
metric to look at. I think something that has
been on the mind, you know, the uncomfortable
question of like me as a podcaster, right? Let's
just pretend I've been working with Nike and
we told them, hey, we have 50 ,000 downloads.
They cut us a check every month. They have a
fairly consistent. Return on investment, return
on ad spend, however you want to call it. And
we have a George Nike 50 coupon code. And so
they can track where it's coming from. And I
think what's interesting to kind of look at here
is, well, if you were getting 50 ,000 downloads,
but you're actually getting 10 ,000 unique listeners
and 10 ,000 of them actually listen to that ad,
nothing changes fundamentally for Nike because
they put in, say, $100 and they generate $300.
That doesn't change. But now what you can say
is, hey, we can now assign actual dollar values
to listeners rather than back in the day where
it's like, hey, maybe someone went crazy and
started doing fake downloads to your show. Your
hands might be clean, but you don't know that.
We need to rip off the Band -Aid, have everyone
establish a new baseline, and work with that
because the new baseline, which is unique listeners
and retention, consumption of the content, what
portion was consumed. should be the thing that
we're looking at. Now, one of the other challenges
that I've seen is currently AI bots are all over
the place consuming content. We did some analytic
reviews recently and we were seeing Claude and
OpenAI and the Facebook bot and the Google bot.
And they're not just downloads. They're actually
listen bots as well. They are actually playing
the content and consuming the actual podcast.
How are you dealing with that, both in the download
number, but also more importantly in the unique
plays and the listen retention time? Because
what you don't want to be doing is conflating
the listen time number with bot listens. So the
good thing is, if you're using Apple or Spotify,
I really hope that Claude is not smart enough
to be able to access iPhone apps. We are seeing
the bots actually. I mean, it might not be iOS,
but web -based access. Web -based is, again,
going back to the download numbers. So with Apple
and Spotify, you can actually even see this in
your iPhone. You can go to the podcast app and
tell Apple to reset my identifier. And then that
way you get de -linked or you're now being tracked
as a new listener. But I think in terms of the
amount of listener fraud. And the whole bot activity,
I think, as far as Spotify and Apple is concerned,
we're talking about getting that data from Apple
and Spotify, not from your hosting provider saying
Apple and Spotify, because I can lie about my
user agent too. I can be on my Android phone
and tell you that I'm listening from Apple Podcasts.
It's very, very trivial. This is not trivial
to break. So I think this is the world that we're
in. I think I agree with our interview that we
did with Dan Meisner and this interview here,
that this is the new metric. We've been banging
this drum now for a couple of years, and it looks
like the tools are now appearing. We still have
the ultimate problem, which is I like the big
number of the download, and I don't like the
small number of the unique listeners. That's
the problem. If you want a pat on your back,
then go look at your download numbers. But let's
just say your value of creating a podcast is
to spread the message, not to generate advertiser
interests, then you shouldn't be looking at the
download number. You should be looking at your
actual consumption because at that point, you're
just lying to yourself. You can still use Pod
Analyst and keep selling to Nike with your downloads
because now what you can do is you can look at
your content, see that, hey, that pre -roll that
we do, we lose 40 % of our listeners every single
time. People are not even getting to the content.
We can see this. The data is there. Spotify and
Apple and YouTube are telling us that. Let's
go one episode without a pre -roll. Or maybe
we do a cold open. We do 30 seconds, and then
we throw in, I guess, not technically a pre -roll
at that point, but not a mid -roll either. See
how that impacts it. Because let's just say a
friend told me to listen to this podcast, and
I'm listening to... the 50th Geico ad this week.
If I'm in a bad mood, I might just not listen
to it. And maybe this podcast could have become
the one that I listened to for the next decade.
So you want to improve your content. Why wouldn't
you want to do that? George, if I want to get
onto the beta and onto testing Pod Analyst, where
would I go? Podanalyst .com. Just click any of
the buttons that say start free forever. Right
now, everybody, it doesn't matter the size of
your podcast, how many podcasts you have, you
can join. 24 hours after you sign up, your data
will start appearing there. And then somewhere
in January, probably, we're going to switch over
to paid subscription. But as I said, the free
forever, let's push the industry forward. Let's
encourage everybody to adopt this metric. And
I'd love to see people start using once the share
feature comes out to see more public, large podcasts
come out and say, hey, this is actually how numbers
really look. Because I think that's the other
thing. Get everybody comfortable. Hey. 10 million
downloads, 1 million listeners. Same return on
ad spend. But now you have that precision and
you can see it. George, congratulations. Thanks
for coming on the show. Happy Christmas to you.
Thank you. Happy New Year. You too. And good
luck with the release candidate in January. Absolutely.
Thank you so much.