Very few of us enjoy loud commutes; fewer still can manage the really quiet ones. As per the latest podcast study published by Edison research, above 33% of people in the US listen to podcasts while commuting through public transport, and around 52% while driving. More still, listen to a podcast when simply at home.
Podcasts are among the hottest marketing tools today, but more importantly, they’re gradually becoming a conventional part of people’s lives. The non-intrusive nature of these audio broadcasts has made them a popular choice among people, where as many as 6 out of 10 have affirmed to be listening to at least one podcast in their life. Carrying such a massive potential in terms of reach, it’s no wonder podcasts are forecasted to become an industry of USD 2.7 billion by the year 2025!
Podcasts and their related tools carry immense potential in the near future; therefore, it is indeed a wise decision to invest in one. Among all the podcast apps and tools out there, Podbean is counted among the most popular and full-featured ones. All the rich features of the app enable it to generate revenue from varied sources. But why Podbean is considered so different than so many of the other podcast mobile apps?
What is the Podbean App and What Sets it Apart?
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Podbean is one of the rare kinds of podcast apps that bring the world of listeners and creators together on the same platform. Primarily a podcast hosting solution, the app can also be used like any other podcast client by its listeners. Till now, more than 5.9 million podcasters have registered on the app for publishing, and it features almost all the popular podcast channels too. This unification of different podcasting services makes Podbean a great success in the industry, and the features that enable it to do so are-
Exceptional Podbean Mobile App Features
Easy Publication
The Podbean audio recorder is well-equipped with engaging features like sound effects, background music, tone modification, etc. Once you've recorded a module of your podcast, you can either save it on your account or even publish it from right there. The social media level of ease makes Podbean a popular choice among new podcasters.
Analytics
Analytics is among the most powerful tools Podbean offers with its hosting services. Podcasters can easily gain insights into download trends on their channel and gauge user behavior by reading their demographics reports. They can use these insights to create engaging content for their users and add personalization when addressing them.
Live Streaming
Like any reliable podcast hosting app, Podbean also offers live streaming features to its users. For live streaming sessions, podcasters can also add a remote co-host. Furthermore, when users live stream on their channel, they have the option to collect virtual gifts from their followers which can then be converted into US dollars for the user.
Monetization
Podbean offers multiple monetization options to its creative community. They can opt for podcast advertising and manage their ads through an in-built ads management platform. Podcasters can also monetize their content through premium and gated content or by adding their personal patron page on the profile.
Unlimited Hosting
For listeners, Podbean offers limitless storage for episode downloads. Similarly, for podcasters, it offers unlimited storage on recording time. There are many flat-rate and affordable plans that both listeners and podcasters can use to manage and extend their cloud storage through the app.
All Destination Distribution
When you publish a podcast via Podbean, you’re not limited to its sole distribution platform. The app can simultaneously distribute your content on all the popular podcast clients' apps, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, etc.
Domain Integration
Another great feature of Podbean is that it doesn't limit its podcasters to a white-labeled version of their brand presence. They can easily add their website on their profile page to keep up with their community of listeners.
Social Media Sharing
Podcasters can integrate their social media channels with their accounts. Once that’s done, whenever they publish a podcast, the same will automatically be shared with their followers on social media.
Email Integration
Podbean is integrated with Mailchimp services. So, when your subscribers share their email addresses with you, you can collect the data for yourself to send personalized content to your community.
More Exclusive Features for Brand Positioning
Now, if you only add the features that Podbean already offers to its users, you will have a hard time creating a distinguished image for your brand. To gain a competitive edge, you will need to add more features; solve problems that Podbean has yet not been able to.
Adding Contributors
You can choose to add the feature where users can add more contributors to their podcast, even when they're in the recording mode. They can also be provided with an option to play the existing voice notes from their library to facilitate real-time recording.
Transcripts Downloading
None of the popular podcast apps offer facilities for downloading transcripts. You can fill that gap by simply installing your app with natural language processing algorithms and then have the podcasters choose whether or not they want to share their transcripts with their users.
Better Monetization Strategies
The Podbean’s free version is monetizing its services via ads, a strategy that can prove fatal for a new brand name. Instead, you can focus on gating some of the premium features so that podcasters can pay when they grow big enough to need those specific features.
Sponsorship Reaches
When you're collecting all that data from various podcasters, you can choose to keep track of sponsorships. That way, you can add another revenue stream to your business by becoming a lucrative bridge between sponsors and podcasters, facilitating their communications.
Steps to Develop a Podcast Hosting App Like Podbean
1. Conduct an Extensive Market Research
Before you can build a podcast app, you must perform extensive research on the target market. Since the idea here is to create a podcast app like Podbean, it is vital to learn about all the different features the app offers and how it’s solving the problems for your target audience.
Usually, there are two kinds of podcast apps: one for listening like the Google Podcasts and the other for recording and publishing podcasts, like Anchor. Podbean blends the best features of both kinds of apps and creates an integrated platform that can be used by creators and listeners.
It is, therefore, understandable that the app will have far more features and can lead to a complex user interface. To avoid running that risk, you should study the user flow of the app. Furthermore, since you don’t want to create an exact replica of the Podbean, you should study its user reviews on App marketplaces to give your podcast app a competitive edge.
For example, the highly regarded app has recently received many reviews against intrusive ads on its free version. When you enter the market as a newcomer, such a monetization method can prove fatal for your user-base growth. Instead, strategize a better monetization plan for your podcast app.
2. Create a Monetization Model for Your App
By August 2021, about 96.9% of all Android mobile applications on PlayStore were available for free installation. It is evident that making your app free for installation is one of the best strategies for a new mobile app to penetrate a competitive market. Moreover, with so many podcast apps offering free services to the listeners, you can simply not expect them to pay you upfront for the same features. In the US, most listeners keep up with their favorite podcast stations via Spotify and Pandora. You can study their subscription model and then create one for your app with a competitive edge.
Though the competitive prices for the premium podcasts will help you increase your listener base, the real treasure sits with the rich features you can offer to make the job easy for the podcast creators. Many beginner podcasters tend to opt for free hosting services, so better features are the best means to monetize the hosting services of your podcast app.
The primary user interface in Podbean is for the listeners. It is only after visiting your profile tab that you will find the creator-centric features. This is in stark contrast with the other podcast publishing apps like Anchor, which foremost shows you the interface for publishers and have a lot more capabilities too.
Many of these advanced features can easily be built for your comprehensive podcast app, and you can gate some of them with a premium service wall. And then, of course, once you’ve established a good market position, you can start charging for hosting and distribution services.
3. Hire a Podcast Mobile App Development Team
Developing a podcast app like Podbean is not easy, even if you have good coding skills. The variety of features and their interrelationship begs for a team that can work on varied aspects of the app in the Agile fashion. Besides, you’re going to need a website too, to create a brand location on the web.
When you hire a development team to build a podcast app like Podbean, you can always focus on the big picture to make your app stand out. Generally, for a podcast app, you would require a team of-
Mobile App Developers
Web Developers
UI/UX Designers
Quality Analysts
Cloud Specialist
Project Manager
Here’s what you need to know about the workings from this team.
1. Mobile App Development
When you hire a mobile app developer for your podcast app, make sure that you know the preferences of your target users. You also need to understand the feasibility of the different features you want your app to have. Depending on them, you can decide whether you want to have a cross-platform podcast app or a native one.
For native apps, you will need different developers for Android and iOS users. At present, globally, the Android podcast users by far exceed the iOS ones. However, since the USA makes up for up to 46.9% of global podcast listeners and has more iOS users and Android, we cannot disregard the former.
Understanding your market and business goals this way can help you decide the technology stack for your app. For most podcast apps, native development tools like Swift, Java, Flutter, etc., will not be sufficient. You will need more advanced big data solutions to store and analyze all the podcasters’ and listeners’ data and use APIs to integrate them with the front-end interface of the app.
2. Web Development
If you only invest in podcast mobile app development, only those mobile users will know of your app who have installed it. The rest of the world will remain unaware of your brand losing out on multiple opportunities for your business. Therefore, you must publish a website as well, as the representation of the mobile app.
The website can be a simple CMS website, where you can upload and update content regularly. Or it can be a dynamic one with APIs to create podcasts and listen to some from the web itself. Again, here you can use Agile methodology to publish a static web presence early in time to garner more attention by the time your MVP is ready.
3. UI/UX Development
With so many podcast apps out there, you cannot afford to blend in with the crowd. And the best way to improve your visibility is by giving your users an unforgettable experience. Create an intuitive interface where users will have easy access to the features they require more often. Here you can learn a lesson or two from the Podbean itself.
The app provides all the features a podcaster can use on the same screen. They can record their voice, add effects, change the tone, and add background music simultaneously! One thing you can improve on this is the facility to add more people to contribute to it. Podcasts are rarely single-person sessions. More often than not, there will be one or two more people contributing to it, and the interface doesn’t support it in real-time.
Anchor, on the other hand, offers all the features that Podbean does, plus allows the users to add more contributors to it. The interface here is, however, a bit siloed. Therefore, your best bet would be to combine the best UX practices from both the apps and create a one-of-a-kind interface for your users to engage them better.
For listeners, you can simplify the discovery and subscription tabs by creating neat categories for both. This thing Podbean nails to the point. It features all the categories in the discovery tab, with the most popular stations stacked right under them. The topmost section also shows feature podcasts, followed by the most popular categories.
The discovery tab also doesn’t just feature the famous podcasts from around the world. It uses analytics to find what most people in the shared location of the user are listening to and then populate the categories with those channels. The tab keeps on updating its personalized view the more a user uses it. Presenting the stations that they would most likely be interested in analyzing their previous behavior with the app.
4. Quality Assurance
Having QAs in your podcast development team is essential, not just because they will ascertain the correct functioning of the entire app before release, but also because without them, you will have to spend far more time in the development phase than what’s required. Testers will evaluate the functioning of your app even when it’s still underway. Their doing so will ensure that no minor issue snowballs into major dependency flaws in the later stages of development. Their presence will also ascertain that the flow of the app matches your concept. From smooth functioning of the app to a flawless user experience, QAs presence is essential to expedite the realization of your podcast app idea.
5. Cloud Management
As mentioned above, when you’re developing a podcast app, even for either just listeners or creators, you will have to deal with a lot of data. Data that cannot be stored into traditional databases. And since your app will be fetching, storing, and distributing data all at the same speed, your Big Data infrastructure will need to be of even greater magnitude. You will be required to avail multiple clusters and configure them all as per the nature of data and its requirements. All this makes the role of cloud specialist indispensable. The technologies you should consider before hiring a cloud specialist are-
6. Project Management
With so many components at play, it can get confusing to map the app’s progress and align that with real-world objectives. Besides, when you’re working with an advanced methodology to build a complex podcast app, it can get tricky to decide which functions should get developed first to maintain an easy flow of dependency without refashioning the existing features. Hiring a project manager alongside the entire development team will keep you from fretting about such technical aspects of the project so that you can focus on the business ideas instead.
Conclusion
Developing an app as extensive as Podbean will require a lot of market research and even more investments in technologies. This is why it’s important to release an MVP version of your app at first, instead of waiting for the full-service deployment. This way, your app will have spent more time in the market to learn and grow from. This is why Agile methodology is suggested for the development of your Podbean clone app.
Also, it’s taken that such a complex app can only be built with the collective efforts of experienced specialists. Here, you will need the help of dedicated native developers, testers, project managers, front-end developers, and cloud specialists. With their specialized skills, you can add more exclusive features to your app to make it stand out from the competition.
Matellio, as a dedicated development partner of many industry leaders, can offer you all this at a surprisingly economical price model. Our skilled team will be able to build your podcast app in minimal time so that you can see your idea coming to fruition at the earliest. Not only that, our UX/UI maestro will ensure that your app is presented with a flawless interface to your users, so they spend more time on it, simplifying for you to add more features and grow your business with them.
We know investing in a podcast app is no run-of-the-mill task. You will need time to consider all the factors and then do some more research before finally concluding. But why don’t you do that with our experts’ consultation? Our business analysts would guide you through the entire process and even give you a free quote for your project. To get a call back from our experts, fill-up the form now!
