Sam Sethi’s Encouraging Outlook: TrueFans.fm and Podcasting 2.0 #01

All right, welcome everyone to Studio Fusion and we are welcoming Sam Sethi. It's so nice to meet you. I've heard such wonderful things about you.

Oh, thank you very much. Yeah, thank you for inviting me, Deborah.

And you met Michael just what was that, an hour ago? That's two hours ago. Wow, Time flat. Two years ago. And he said you were such a nice man. He likes you.

Thank you very much.

Sam, can you tell us a bit about yourself and for anyone that has not met you or doesn't know you so they can be introduced to you.

The short and crazy quick intro. Okay. 20 years in corporate.

So I was the marketing director at Microsoft Netscape product manager, ran Gateway computers online business, ran worldwide marketing for MicroStrategy and then sold five startups, started TechCrunch Europe and then. Oh, before that I was an army officer and then I got into podcasting, but I had my own radio station in between all that as well.

Wow, I'm still trying to digest. Okay, like bullet point. Wow. Wow. You've practiced that before, right? Because that all fit. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. That was so good.

That was so good. And Martin.

Yeah. I was thinking of taking a sip of tea here. So I'm a tea drinker foremost, first and foremost. And that's the hashtag on true fans.

Also when Sam and I, he, he said put some hashtag, what should I pick? And then put tea and host, I think and I, I joked about that.

I, I, I'm a so called listen to electronic music and in Swedish called sintere or synthesizer music.

But there it's an expression called OG like or original gangster like rappers and so on, talking about that and Mark Asquith of Captivate and other things and the British guy. And you are also British, you know, and I'm an Anglophile in spirit in a way.

So I've been around with podcasting since 2006 and enjoy this medium and how you could express yourself, freedom of expression, your message and so on. And blogger. And we met through the, you know, Twitter space or what do you call it nowadays? Xx. Yeah.

And you have had Twitter chats and, and we, yeah, back and forth. And also as a moderator for a small business service, you could say a community there. So yeah, where I'm coming from, I.

Think we met on a Twitter chat talking about tea, the red rose tea. I talked about all the different things with red rose. I could only drink red rose. None of this other Lipton stuff in the U.S. i had to get.

But although I can get Red rose, I think from the US Now. I don't have to go to Canada to get it, so that's nice.

So what are you drinking, Sam?

Oh, me nice glass of water, love. Yeah, it's before the red wine, so it's okay. I'm not. I'm not being, you know, overly healthy.

It's just the red wine will come out shortly, but not right now. Well, one of the things I didn't mention, Deborah, is I'm a wine importer as well.

Oh, all right. I need to talk to you offline on that one.

And when we will meet in England, hopefully in London. So when we talk about wine and drink wine and so on.

Excellent. We will do that, my friend.

And I will say that for the record, when I listen here for a little prep. And so I listened and logged in on Trufans and then I listened to Deborah's podcast. She had has plenty of them like me.

I say as a new media advisor, start with one, but I can't get enough. And you. I test and I, you know, do different things, but I listen to the one about Jaguars and then I listen on Real Diabetic or DiabeticReal.

It's called DiabeticReal. Actually both domains.

It took me because I knew for. For some. For some time. But to listen to that and how it was really. Yeah, it's important message.

And that's why I think podcasting is a good thing to do that to express yourself and your message and to get listeners and there, Sam, with your service, you could help both podcaster, content creators and everyone in between in the process here. And listeners, of course. And I almost say that when I know logged in. It is a bit of gamification also. Okay, how long have you been listen now?

Have I done these different things, tasks that I could do in order to get sets? I did a comment and whatnot. So I got really into it and sent you lots of emails.

You did?

So how could we, if we start in that way, how could we learn a new behavior and support yourself, fellow podcasters, content creators and also listeners. And spread the good word, Sam.

And maybe we could back up just a little bit and Sam, tell us about Trufans.

Yeah, that's better because I'm all into that now. So everyone should know about TrueFans.

Yes.

Yeah. So, okay, so true fans started off as a podcast platform and that was my goal about two years ago or less. Um, the idea was podcasting 2.0.

This new paradigm in podcasting was just evolving.

So what was Lovely about it was, I thought, okay, rather than just do POD News, which is what I do as well, with James Cridland, and talk about it, let's build it. Let's do it. Get your hands dirty. So True Fans was basically the idea of building a podcast platform and using some of these new features.

And these features are really what I call metadata, or they're known as tags. I call them features because that's really what they are. They don't affect the audio, but they help with three things.

Discovery, interactivity, and monetization. And they're the three drivers of really what podcasting 2.0's's about.

So an example may be adding a transcript or a chapter structure to your podcast. That's a way of discovery interactivity could be comments or likes, or they're also known as boosts.

And monetization is the mechanism of making fan to create a direct payments. And they can be done in multiple ways. And we might cover that later.

But True Fans basically is a podcasting 2.0 platform for creators to help them monetize their content. And then we branched out from podcasting into music, audiobooks, films, courses, events, blogging, ticketing, and merchandise.

So now it's really much more of a. I've termed them super apps just because they are a single function app. And that's what I'm focusing on in 2025.

My three key words that I want to use are content, communication, and community.

Wow. So you, like you said, you really got your hands dirty. You really got in there and. And built on.

Yeah, we. Look, there are many people who Talk about podcasting 2.0 who've never built a thing in their lives, and I find that very strange.

Not that they haven't got an opinion, but when you're actually having to build the complexity of what we've done, you need to understand it at a very deep level. And sometimes people look at it and go, oh, well, if you did X or Y and you go, well, there are reasons why that doesn't happen.

So, for example, let me give an example. Probably 12 months ago, the way to get a wallet, which is the way that you would make a payment from a CRE to a creator.

So as a fan to a creator, you would need your wallet and the creator would need their wallet. And it's a direct payment, peer to peer. That in itself sounds fantastic.

Not having to go through PayPal or any other third party, but the complexity of getting a wallet and filling your wallet with micro payments and understanding what a micropayment was. Was, let's be honest, it was like pushing a rock up a hill. You know, you could explain it to people, but they wouldn't understand it.

Now, cast your mind back to the early days of the web, right? And I was there, and we were having to explain what a browser was, what a URL was, what WWW meant, what HTTP meant.

No one wanted to understand those words. But now you can say those words to pretty much anybody and they all understand it.

So the vocabulary that we're going to have to learn going forward is it's a wallet. They are micro payments they call SATs, and you pay them peer to peer, and that will become second nature.

You'll be able to say, deborah, you know, I can ask you now for your email address and you'd rattle that off to me straight away, right?

But if I were in the early 90s, that was like, what?

Huh? Who at where and what and how and. Yeah, right. And so if I said to you, what's your wallet address? Or I said to Martin, what's your wallet address?

He could rattle it off. Martine@truefans.FM as an example, or martin@fountain.FM, or martin@getolby.com, right? They're all wallet addresses. They sound like email addresses.

And that's the nice thing about them. They are simple. But 12 months ago, that wasn't the case.

And what Podcasting 2.0 has been trying to do is make the idea of discovery, interactivity and monetization simpler for podcasters, because they're the big three problems that podcasters face. And the way that we've gone about doing that is by adding these extra tags or features.

The problem being that, of course, when you first build a new tag or feature, it's complex because it's new and it has to become simple. And one of my favorite expressions is complexity is failed simplicity. And that really is where we are today.

We are making things much, much more simple for the everyday user, to the extent now that when you join Trufans, you do one click Apple Pay to fill up your wallet.

So if you want to put $10 or 10, 10 krona or whatever it may be, you just fill it up with 10, 10 of your local currency, we convert that into micro payments for you, and then you can go and pay creators if you want, that way. So the whole model is becoming simpler. But yeah, True Fans is basically a platform for helping creators monetize all their content.

I've gotten into Bitcoin, but getting into. I remember when I was new to it and it's like, what? What is this? What is this? And they're like, they kind of treat it like, are you dumb? You know?

No, I'm just new. I need to take this step by step. And now it's. That was a while ago. So now it all makes sense.

But I'm trying to remember how that felt because there's other people out there who have not experienced it and they're at that point where this is still a new step. But true fans makes it so much easier.

Yes. Yeah. I mean, my goal was that you don't need to understand what a micropayment is or sat. Right. You shouldn't, unless you want to know about it.

Now, over Christmas we added a new feature. Martin's tried it recently, I think, where you can now hide the bitcoin micropayment and just all you see is your local currency.

So if you wanted for Deborah to see it in US dollars, I might see in pounds, Barton might see in Swedish krona. And you choose that in your user settings and then we will price everything in your local currency and therefore you know what you're dealing with.

Oh, I want to give $0.01 per minute, I want to give $0.10 for that comment. I want to give $1.

To support this podcast, we as true fans will then do all the complex exchange capabilities in the background to move the SATs from your wallet to the creator's wallet. Because if we don't use micropayment sats, we then have to go through a third party gateway to make the payment.

So we use that as the back end now to do the no fee transaction. Whereas at the front end the user is going, oh no, I know what a like is, I know what a comment is and I know what my currency is.

Okay, let's hide that complexity and then if you really want to be clever, go into your user settings, turn on sats, and suddenly everything becomes bitcoin again. But you don't need to see it.

And that's very good explanation, I think.

And also that will move this forward because now when I learned about the importance of blockchain and bitcoin and taking one bitcoin and divide it 100 million times and get one satoshi, the application, as you said, were different areas. Like Deborah's case as a musician, when I listen to Deborah's music together with Michael producing his own. Smooth. Yes, it's so good.

So I really want that she will get Michael lots of satoshis her way.

Hey, by the way, we were talking about this Last Saturday on the event with Ms. Ileane and Ms. Ileane is watching. Hi, Ms. Ileane, and thank you for saying hello.

Just wanted to shout out and also wanted to shout out for Charles was watching. Thanks, Charles, for watching. So just wanted to give a shout out to people watching and commenting.

Thank you, Deborah. That's something. As an example. So it's so many features out there, but you have co listening. Could you explain what that is?

That sounds really interesting in the future.

Yeah. So, Deborah, you may find that I'm one of these people who builds things daily, weekly, monthly. We build stuff so fast. And one of my.

One of the features we built before Christmas was called co Listen. And you don't have to be. Yeah.

So we're broadcasting live and anyone could watch this show and they could co watch fundamentally with anyone else live. But one of the things we wanted to do was have the ability for you and I and Martin to listen to the same show. It won't be a live show but.

But we might want to listen together live.

So what I think I saw that on True. I actually saw something that said co listening.

So what you do is you. You start a show and let's say we all follow each other because we have a social model, in truth.

And so I follow you, you follow me, I start a show and then you suddenly go to that show and suddenly my icon will appear in the user interface that says, oh, Sam's listening to this show as well. And it will tell you exactly what timestamp. And then what can happen is you can say, let's coordinate our time so you're listening together now.

And then you might want to leave a comment. So what you're fundamentally doing by CO listening is allowing the fans to create a sort of forum of communication with the people that they want.

So you don't see everybody who's listening to the show, you only see the people that you follow listening to the show. Because otherwise you might get, you know, spurious people that you don't have any connection with and you don't want to do that.

So you might have three or four people that you're co listening with and you can then go and leave a comment and those comments can have replies. So you and I and Martin might be going, I don't know what he's saying there. God, that's rubbish. Or that's brilliant or whatever. Right.

And we can have our own conversation now. The next stage of what we're going to is then going to have real time chat. So the idea is that you don't just leave a comment and reply to a comment.

But actually you have a very much a YouTube style real time chat. And so that's the next phase of what we're doing.

But yeah, co listen is just one of those features that we put in quickly and we'll refine it over the next few weeks.

I like that, I like that.

And I can relate to when you say you're always building something because a lot of times when I can't sleep for some reason in the middle of the night. So see, I think I'm on your time clock over in the uk, but I build things in the middle of the night.

I'm thinking, why am I not implementing these somewhere? I just build them for myself and, and do programming and stuff myself. How can we tell people? How can we get people more involved?

It's like now I'm anxious to see true fans move forward, but when I tell people who are not involved, like, I can't wake them up.

Yeah, I think true fans, where we are, it's probably about a month or two months away from where I really want it to be. Right where, where it will be where you'll start to see me really ramp up my marketing. So we're finishing off a whole bunch of things right now.

So one of the features we just finished off this week was the ability to support a podcast. Now think of Patreon. Think of Buy me a coffee and there is a tag called the funding tag, which is part of 2.0.

And you might have a URL link in your RSS feed to the fun in the funding tag that says click this button and go over to Patreon and pay me $5 a month or $10 a month. Right, whatever. Well, we built that feature now into Trufans completely so you don't have to leave the app anymore.

And so creators can turn that feature on in their dashboard and then their fans can support them with a monthly amount. It's very easy to pause that amount if you're a user.

What's different about what we've done though is that you, the fan can set a budget on how much you pay, so your monthly amount. But secondly, you pay nothing if the creator doesn't deliver you any new content.

So we think that, for example, you might be on Patreon or Buy me a coffee and you've got a five pound or a $10amount every month. And like, like all of us, we've got 50 or 60 subscriptions, you know, Netflix, Spotify, blah, blah, substack yeah, all of these subscription.

So we sometimes forget what we've got going out.

Well, what we decided to do, which is along the lines of what value for value is about, you know, you give me value, I'll give you value, is that we say, okay, I'm going to give you $3 a month. That's my budget. But only when you give me new content will some of that money be paid. So let's say a new episode is only valued at $1.

As an example, when that episode drops, I give you the $1, and then you drop another one, I give you one more dollar, I drop another one, I give you my third dollar, you drop another one, I pay you nothing. Because my budget was limited to three for this month.

So it's not a problem because other people may have $5 or $10 in their budget, and the crate is still delivering value. So the support function we've built is different to Patreon and buy me a coffee, because you only pay for what you receive. You don't pay for.

I love that.

Thank you.

I love that. Because that's, you know, when Paramount, like we.

We subscribed to Paramount to, you know, all these different streaming services, and when, you know, Hollywood had the strike. And I'm thinking each month that it went on, I mean, I think the people, I think the actors should be paid, the creators should be paid.

But I'm thinking we're paying money for these streaming services. And now I have watched all of the shows from the 90s, binge, watched them so many times, and I'm paying for content that's not new.

And I kept thinking I should just stop. But no, I just kept paying.

The other thing we delivered over Christmas, I was busy over Christmas was something called secure RSS. And this is a very critical thing for 2025. So RSS itself could be termed open RSS, because open I can create my RSS feed in any host.

I can then have that distributed to multiple apps.

And if you are technical enough, you can go and find the RSS feed, read the XML, find the enclosure, and there is your MP3 file, and you can just cut and paste that if you want, and then put that into another player and do what you want with it. Right? It's open. You can do what you like.

Right.

That's great. For us podcasters who, you know, are putting out content, we're not too worried about whether people pay for it. We would like you to pay.

So maybe you'll pay me some sats or some or local currency. But if you don't, you don't, Right? And that's where we are. The audiobook providers, musicians, film producers, people who produce courses.

The feedback we got last year was a look. It's lovely, this value for value model this, give me some money. If you can type model.

Tipping would be a bad word that Adam Curry wouldn't allow me to use, but tipping is what it is. And so when we go and talk to audiobook providers, they say, no, no, no, no, no.

We have a fixed cost for this book and it needs to be paid for, and you need to pay us first before you can actually access it. Okay, how can we do that? Well, with OpenRSS, we couldn't just deliver the book and then put a buy button, because guess what?

Clever people just go behind the scenes, grab the book, and then never pay.

So Secure RSS is a new feature that we've built, and what it allows you to do is see the book, see the chapters, see everything about the book, but when you try and play it, it won't play. So you click buy or rent, because you can rent a book or rent a film, and then you can pay it in micro payments or in fiat currency.

So your local currency, you choose how you want to pay. When that payment is confirmed, only then does the book become unencrypted, and therefore you can play it.

And so that's a step forward, we think, for 2025, to get more varied content. Yes, we'll do podcasts. Yes, we will do music. If you want to do it through the normal, just give me what you can model.

But we also find that company like Sony bmg, Warner Brothers, Pushkin Industries, Audible, all these companies that have books or films or music, they want confirmed payment. But we still want to use rss. So secure RSS is a great step forward to bring more content into the podcasting 2.0 community.

That's a great feature.

So how do you come up with all these things?

How do I come up with them? Yeah. Well, like Deborah, I don't sleep, clearly. No, I've had some very clear goals for many years on this. I Underlying everything.

My philosophy is everyone's time, Attention has value, and whether you're a creator or a listener. So one of the things that will blow most people's minds is I say podcast advertising is a scam.

It's basically people sell advertisers the idea that they have lots and lots of listeners, and then they pay for those listeners, which are generally measured by downloads, which we all know A download doesn't equal a listen. And then the advertiser then goes, well, how many people actually listen to my ad?

When they go, oh, we can't tell you because we haven't got the data or whatever. But the reality is nearly all of us as users will skip an ad when we can, right? We know that that's our, that's our default behavior.

If you can skip an ad because it's not relevant to you, why would you listen to it? Right? That's wasting my time and attention.

So the model that we've built that we will release very shortly and we're testing is where the user gets paid to listen to the ad. They get a split of the revenue. So as a creator, you will put an ad in your podcast and you get paid by the advertiser.

But with the use of micro payments, the listener also gets a split of that payment. And that means that you are valuing my time and attention to listen to the ad to stop me skipping. Now, it doesn't mean you don't have to.

That's. No, I just, that's a whole new. I'm like trying to wrap my head around that.

Well, the point is I, the advertiser needs to incentivize the listener to listen to the ad. And if you're not going to incentivize me, then why waste my time and attention?

And if the behavior is such that we all know that we skip ads because that's what we do on tv, on any mechanism we can, then what's the answer? Spotify is bringing out unskippable ads and that's going to annoy people. I believe the better model is to pay people.

Now what's the benefit to the advertiser? Well, the advertiser is not paying any more. The creator makes a few pennies less.

But let's not worry about we're talking 1 or 2%, we're not talking 50, 50. So the thing is that now the advertiser, when they say, who listened to my ad?

Well, Deborah started listening to the ad and she listened to 10% of the ad because we know when we stopped paying her. Martin listened to 50% of the ad because that's when he stopped listening and skipped forward.

Sam listened to 100% of the ad because we know that's how much we paid him. Because you know how much you paid each individual and you know at what point they stop listening.

You now know who's the person to send the follow up email to. Deborah listened to 10%, probably not worth sending the email because she's not interested in our product. Martin maybe he was 50.

50, but Sam, certainly. So we'll send Sam a follow up email. Hey, thanks for listening to that ad on the program tonight.

And by the way, here's a follow up that you might want to, you know, here's a discount code or whatever the old adage of I, you know, you know, I have my marketing, but I don't know how much of my marketing is wasted or spent. Now you get zero wastage because you only stream payments to listeners who are listening. And when they stop listening, you're not paying them.

So you're not wasting a single penny of your marketing budget. It's a real different way of thinking about it. But that's what we're about to bring out very shortly.

Wow, that's really innovative. And you're respecting the listeners. I like that. Rather than the, as you said, Spotify with the unskippable.

That's not really respecting the users at all. That's saying, we've got you in prison, we imprison you and you have to listen to our ads. And that's not respect.

No. And, and equally, Spotify aren't paying you to listen. Right. They're paying all the money to the creator.

And the crazy is going, oh, thank you very much, I'm keeping all that money to myself. But meanwhile, you as the listener have got, okay, let's listen to another Casper Mattress advert. How long's this going to be? Three minutes.

I'll go make a coffee. I can't skip it. I can't fast forward.

And I think people will either get to the point where they go, you know what, I'm just not going to use Spotify or Spotify will change and stop the skippable ads. We don't know which way it'll go, but I suspect they'll stop it because they'll lose customers who, I mean, somebody put.

They pay a subscription to Spotify and still the Joe Rogan show had an advert that was unskippable in the middle of it.

So they were paying for ad free content and paying a subscription for that ad free content and still getting an ad that they couldn't skip, let alone an ad they shouldn't have got in the first place.

That doesn't even make sense.

But that's what Spotify did, right? And anyway, that's them. But my goal very simply is, look, there are about five or six ways that fans can pay creators.

There are about four or five ways that creators can pay fans, which we haven't talked about, and they're now going to be new ways that advertiser can pay both creators and fans. So it's really simple. Fans can pay creators by streaming them stats to listen.

They can send them a super comment, as I'm now going to call it, rather than a boost, because we understand what a super chat is. And a super comment is is much more logical because it means I'm paying a micro payment with the comment. That's two ways I can support you.

That's another way I can pay in advance. I can buy or purchase the content or rent it. And in the same way, we've got a model where the creator pays the fan. So you go, why would I do that?

Let's say you've got a brand new podcast and hey, you're adding to the pool of podcasts, how do you get discovered? Or one way could be that you, as the creator, give a small micro payment in your trailer.

So I launch my trailer and I say, look, if you are willing to give me your time and attention for three minutes, I'll give you 30 sats or maybe 3p or 3 cents, right? The numbers aren't going to be massive, but it's just a gesture of value back to the fan.

Now the person goes, okay, I'll give you three minutes of my time. Go on, let's listen to your trailer. And I go, oh my God, Deborah, that's a brilliant trailer. Thanks, Martin.

Okay, now I click the button and subscribe or become a fan. And guess what? I go and tell my friends, I just listen to this really good new show that's launching. You should do it too.

So by the creator paying the fan or potential fan, they are getting the word of mouth that they may want. They also may be getting that person to subscribe.

And at the same time, they can set a budget so they're not going to blow millions and millions of pounds. They can say, look, I'm going to put 10,000 SATs, which is probably $100 in a budget, to launch my podcast.

And those people that are willing to give me three minutes of their time to listen to my trailer, maybe I'll convert some of those to be listeners in the future. So that's what we've done. And then of course, when Martin logged on to Trufans, we as Trufans gave him money as well.

We have a gamification engine built into Trufan. So the idea is that as you complete learning tasks like do your first comment, listen to your first episode, create your first playlist.

You get paid sats by true fans.

And then the last way that we pay fans is if you create a playlist, Deborah, and then Martin plays that playlist, while the creators of the episodes in your playlist will get paid. But also you, as the creator of the playlist for giving your time and attention, get a cut of that as well.

So again, multiple ways that we pay fans and fans pay creators and everyone makes money.

That sounds fun. I want to go hang out at.

So how do you make money, Sam? Then we take company.

Yeah, we take a 1% commission on everything. So whichever way it goes back and forth. So I think we are looking at a volume game. Right.

We don't want to do so if you go on to Patreon, I think it's 5, 8 and 12% depending on what tier you're on. If you go on to other platforms, let's say Apple, they'll take 30% of your cut.

We think 1% of all transactions is a fair cut and that we don't charge you to use the platform. So there's no pro version. There's no 5 99amonth to use Trufounds. There's none of that. We don't believe in that. We think that.

Come and join, play with our platform, learn how to use it. There's lots and lots of cool features. Some might be more advanced for people than others yet, and that's fine.

But you very quickly learn how to use Trufans. Yes, it's got some slight changes to other apps, but that's because we want to simplify it.

I think other apps talk in what I call geek speak for the want of, you know, if you know, you might join another app that says, load this wallet. Do your KYC now. Get your sats from Moonpay now. Start your Nostra account now. I even. I'm lost. I'm going, oh, my God. What?

You know, all I wanted to do was listen to a podcast. I didn't want to have to, you know, rub my head and scratch my belly at the same time and spin around360. So I think that's the problem.

When I said complexity is fail simplicity, I think a lot of the podcasting to do apps are failing to attract new users. As you said Deborah earlier. How do I get people to use these things? Because the, the words they're using are just too complex.

The way that we talk about it is too complex. And then when they physically get onto the platforms, it's just too complex.

So, you know, I'm betting the shirt and we've made it as simple as possible. And Martin can hopefully verify that we have.

Yeah. I'm saying, to joke with you, I'm sending the bug reports and getting paid for that also.

Yes, you. Oh, yes, we pay you. Yeah, we pay you when you send us a bug report. We pay you when you send us a new feature. You. You'll. It goes back to it.

Yet your time and attention has value. Stop giving it away. Mark Zuckerberg stole all of our time and attention, wrapped ads around our time and attention, and then made all his money.

How. How many users, active users, is this the Pareto principle and 80. 20. Again, do you need to get the traction and the ball rolling and support? Yeah.

So.

And how could we spread the good word?

Okay, so we've got about 20,000 users. As I said, we're not fully baked. I'm well aware that there's one big problem that we have, which is we're not a native app.

We're not an iOS or Android app. We are a web app, a universal app.

Web app, according to Adam Curry, or progressive web app.

Yeah. So to build as fast as we built, we had to build for the web. It meant that we were both, you know, Mac, Windows, Android, iOS available on.

Anywhere there's a browser. We were available. And that was critical to start with.

And it also meant when we add new features, we don't have to go to Apple and ask for permission to add the feature for an update to the app every time. It just slows down app development. So we can build, which is what we're doing now, finishing all the features off.

And then when we're completely happy that we've optimized the speed which we're working on, added the features we want in this version, then we'll build the native app. And that's coming out in February. So we'll have an iOS and Android app, but will also be on the web. And it's a Spotify feature, really.

It means being everywhere. And we'll be on Alexa, we'll be on Google Home, we'll be on the HomePod, we'll be in CarPlay, Android Auto. But, you know, that's the.

That's the big, big negative, Martin. If you're asking me, why haven't we got more users on the platform?

One, when you're building something new, I think people, yeah, they can see the warts and all when you're building, and it's hard Right. Because if you build at speed, you sometimes don't build a polish to every feature. So we have to go back and do that. So that's one thing.

The second one is people have been so Pavlovian trained by Apple. Oh, hey, what's your app called? It's called TrueFans. Well, okay, I'm gonna go to the App Store and see if I can find it. No, we're not in there.

Just go to Trufans FM and then click Add to home screen. Well, what are you talking about? Add to home screen? I don't know what you're talking about. Right. I'll go and use Fountain. I'll go and use podverse.

I'll go and use Apple or Spotify, because I know how to use those because they're in the App Store and that's the problem. We've so trained, or Apple have so trained users that we have to. It's one of those.

I tried not to join in their game, but if you can't beat them, you have to join them. And sadly, that's what we have to do.

But it's if. Maybe that's a private or personal security. How would you say it? But you will not have any issues like Patron had with the app and the.

Let's just say cut.

No, we.

So in that sense, Deborah Patreon suddenly, after they'd made $350 million from Patreon, the Apple suddenly woke up one day and went, ah, we can take 30% of that, can we? Thank you very much. Because they were an iOS app. And Patreon went, yeah, technically that's true. You can have 30% of it.

So they then told their customers that they had to charge 30% more to their users or fans if they wanted to break even to where they were before, or they would have 30% less money coming into them as an account, because Apple had demanded that 30%. Now we're too small to. Even if we were an iOS app and doing micropayments through the platforms to get Apple to worry.

But Spotify ourselves and others have got ways of doing so because we have a web app, we could do the transactions on the web, but then actually within the app itself, it's just micro payments going in the app. So we're not actually doing a transaction. And I think we can get around it that way. We'll see. Look, Apple, Apple.

I am afraid one of my requests to the DOJ in America was split Apple up. They're too big. They're too. They're too. They're actually a really bad company now.

No, I shouldn't say that too often, but Tim Cook is the Steve Ballmer of computing. He's missed every trick of new technology. Everything we have, the iPhone, the AirPods. Steve Jobs did those. Tim Cook Vision Pro is rubbish.

It's totally rubbish. The AirPods haven't evolved. The Apple car scrapped. Siri is a bunch of rubbish. They never evolved it after Steve Jobs died. And now what does Siri do?

Goes, hey, ChatGPT, can you help me? Oh, yeah, let me help you. Here's the answer. And then Siri gives me the answer. It's like, well, why don't I just go to ChatGPT?

Then why don't I go through Siri? So I'm afraid Apple has become a really poor company. It's the new IBM, it's the old Microsoft, whatever you want to call it.

They've failed to innovate. They're just a company that can't innovate anymore. I'm afraid I think the best thing for Apple would be to split. Same with Google.

Google can't innovate anymore. They're a company that has lost the plot. So I think both those companies should be broken up. But hey, that might not happen yet.

That's a good thought. I liked Google back in like 2010, 2011.

And then don't make evil or something like that.

Don't be evil. Here's a really good example of Google's madness, right? I mean, everyone knows about the Google graveyard.

How many products that we all try to use that they've just dumped, right? And we go, I really like Google RSS Reader. No, we're dumping that. I really like that. No, we're not having that anymore. And you go, why?

Why can't we help that? And then last year they came out with Notebook lm, which was, you know, a nice thing.

Take a document, put it into there, and guess what it throws out. A podcast or a listenable item, right?

And it was really good, except Google decided that another division of Google was going to produce the same product with another name that does exactly the same thing. And you go, who is running Google? Why don't you just slam some heads together?

Now they've got seven messenger apps, They've got, I don't know, four chat apps. They've got six. I mean, it's just crazy. It's like, we're gonna kill Google podcasts and we're gonna create YouTube podcasts.

You're the same company, which isn't A podcast or they're.

They're a video. They're not, but they're not.

But it's like you're the same company. Why don't. You know, it's like, I think Google, you know, split off Search, make one company, YouTube make another company.

Waymo, make another company, Gmail and Office make another. You know, it's ready to be broken up as well, because I don't think Google knows what it's doing anymore.

I genuinely think they are a rudderless company where some engineers in division X produce a product and some engineers in division Y produce the same product, but they don't talk. And then they both launch it to market. Go, have you seen our great. Oh, you've got one as well, have you? Oh, how did that happen? I don't know.

And then they'll kill it.

They have messenger programs. They should talk to each other.

Then they'll kill it a year later and then you'll go, oh, where's that gone now? I don't know. Okay, so I think Apple and Google. Yeah, they're two companies that I think are too old, too long in the tooth. Break them up. Time to die.

Yeah. One last question for you before we. We finalize.

What is the workflow that you recommend as far as creating a podcast episode, as far as where true fans fit? I mean, you create the, the episode where. Where would you do. You go to True fans right after you publish? I mean, what's your.

Yeah, so ignoring true fans for two seconds because that's. I have this thing called the five Ps of podcasting, which is pre production, production, post production, profit and promotion. Right.

And everything fits into one of those P's, I promise you. So, okay, pre production is finding your guests, doing your research, getting them lined up, all those things. Production is what we're doing now.

Post production is somebody's going to edit this in either Descript or wherever they're going to edit it. Then you've got to go and get all the clips and the promotion onto, you know, social media to tell the world about it.

And then you're hopefully going to profitize from it through dynamic ads, sponsorship, payments, streaming stats, whatever. That's the five P's.

Now if you've created a podcast and you've added it to your host, then that host will hopefully then push it out to all the end points, you know, true fans being one of them. And then, yes, go and have a look on Trufans. Now, once you've published your podcast, you can go and Claim it on Trufans now. Why would you bother?

Because you can then get all of the extra analytics that we've built, all of the extra functionality we've built. You can then. So there's a whole bunch of things we've done. It's not a secret. I've mentioned this before.

I expect that in 2025, trufans will become a host as well. We already support video uploading and playback where most hosts don't.

It's not a big leap of faith for us to actually then allow you to have direct Uploading of your MP3 and audio files as well and become totally, you know, a creator in Trufans from publishing your podcast, distributing it through Trufans, but having it in there and then, yeah, monetizing it in true fans as well. So I suspect, yeah, look, you know, it's. How fast can we run? But. But that is not a surprise. I think hosting is now a commodity.

I don't think it's a differentiator. I think anyone can be a host. It's not that expensive. You just have to understand the model.

What I do think hosts have to understand is what services they add as value add on top of hosting. And.

Right.

Those that don't add value will go, will die, and those that add value will stay. You know, I don't expect even if we turned on hosting tomorrow, the world and their dog will come to true fans to begin with.

You know, bus, browse, brilliant. You know, blueberries, great captivate. You know, they are great, great companies.

There's new kids on the block like podhome and RSS.com but there are older companies in the space who have failed to innovate for the last two or three years. Libsyn. Did I say that loud? Sorry. I mean, you know who.

That's good, because now maybe Rob and Elsie would have a comment on that in a future episode.

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I, you know, I think Libsyn is one of those companies that has failed to innovate. Right.

And, you know, we'll see what happens in 2025 to them.

I still have a podcast there. I don't know why, but I haven't been able to turn them off. But I still have one podcaster.

Maybe how they survive.

Because I saw that, for example, we have talked about podchaser that I really liked back in the day. But will you log in on podchaser every day?

You're 100% right. Anything we do is habit. You know, we talk about when should you Publish your podcast same time, same day, every week or every day.

Because, you know, we are creatures of habit, right? We go walking the dog at the same time, we go to the gym at the same time, we go to work at the same time, whatever it is.

And that's the time and attention we will give to our favorite podcast. And we probably only have five.

So if you don't publish on the day when I've got the time to listen to you, I then need to find someone else to listen to who then may be the replacement for you. So don't do it. Consistency is a critical to success within podcasting, I think.

You know, the other thing I'd say about it is, you know, at the end of the day, you just got to deliver, right. As a podcaster, consistently without it, I think you will lose your user base.

Yeah, good point. That reminds me, I need to go record a podcast.

Cool.

Another one.

So thanks. Anything that you want to end or add or say here. Sam, thanks again for coming on the show like this.

No pleasure. Look, I think 2025 is going to be a great year for podcasting. I think the Roganomics showed that podcasting has great power.

And now I think TV and radio money will move to a lot of podcasting. I think we'll see that. I think live like this, live podcasting is going to be much more prevalent.

I think radio stations are closing down in the uk, are going to move to live podcasting as a means of keeping going. So I think that's another big thing. And I think super apps, you know, Spotify is a super app.

I think YouTube, true fans, I think others will appear which do multiple things for the user. My. My big push. I suppose the last thing I'll say is my big push is that we are trying to create what are called creator portals. That's the end goal.

So you will have your own URL that is hiding the underlying TruFans URL for your podcast page. But on that page will be your podcast, your videos, your merchandise, your events, everything that you want there.

And as Martin said, we also have this gamification model, Deborah, So we will identify your most active fans based on what they do with your podcast. And then you end up having a superfan. And your superfan gets 1% of any revenue that you generate as well.

Wow. A lot to look forward to. Thank you so much, Sam, for coming on our show and for enlightening us.

You're very welcome.

I'm excited.

Good. Thank you.

All right, thanks all for tuning in. Thank you. Thank you for tuning in to Studio Fusion. And we will see you on the next episode.

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