Alpha Barry did what most entrepreneurs do when they're lost at how to start a business: listen to the popular Gimlet Media podcast "Startup," a serialized show about how Gimlet Media started.
That's when Barry had the idea for his own startup: Lysna, an aggregated platform of community podcast recommendations. So like Reddit, but if Reddit was just the /r/podcasts thread.
"There's also a level of engagement that comes with (the Reddit website design), and it creates a feedback loop on what people actually think about the content, and it's a good way to create quality assurance on the website," Barry told DC Inno. "That was the idea behind it."
Lysna is pretty much as new as can be, launching Jan. 8 and with about 150 users already before any major marketing push. It's designed in the same vein as Reddit, with recommendations sorted by the day they were posted and community users can either up-vote or down-vote the content based on their unique tastes.
But Barry said he and his co-founder Sahnun Mohammud have plans to take the platform to a mobile app designed to function in the same way YouTube works—creators have a platform to distribute their content on and listeners are able to up-vote or down-vote and share content through the platform.
"A lot of competitors are building podcast players, but I think the bigger opportunity in podcasting is owning both sides of the marketplace, as in creators and listeners," Barry said.
Since the company is new, they're not garnering revenue yet, but in the future, Barry said they've been playing with the idea of building an advertising placement product for podcasters or even hardware like Apple's Airpods but for podcast listeners.
"I don't want to be one of those startups that's like 'Ads!'" he said. "That's only scalable if you're a company like Google or Facebook."
What Barry and Mohammud are going after makes sense for the climate of podcasting. According to The Pew Research Center's 2016 State of the News Media report, podcast listenership has been steadily growing since 2013. In 2016, about 21 percent of people said they had listened to a podcast in the last month, compared to 13 percent in 2013. And with legacy media groups such as The New York Times, WBUR and The Wall Street Journal jumping into the field, it's getting tougher to find new shows.
That's where Lysna hopes to come in. Most of their users are podcasters, and Barry said he says that a lot of them use the platform to sort through all of the options for content to listen to and draw inspiration from. But, it's important to note, he's still trying to figure it all out.
"You underestimate how much nothing happens unless you do something at the early stage," Barry said. "Essentially no one cares what you're trying to do unless you put the initial energy into building your product."
Image used via CC BY-SA 2.0 — credit Tatsuhiko Miyagawa
