Show HN: Wave, a Reddit for podcasts | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Wave, a Reddit for podcasts

wavepodcasts.com

7 pointsniho13 comments

Hi everyone! The maker (and CEO) of Wave here. Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on the app.

We're a seed funded start-up from Stockholm, Sweden with a background from Spotify and Beats Music among other things. We have been working on this for almost a year now. Our goal is to make the podcast experience more social and build the best platform for discovery and listening possible. We have a ton of cool features lined up waiting to be released in the coming months. But we're starting small with a very focused and simple app.

Hey! I just downloaded your app and I love the design, I'm at work so I haven't had a chance to use it. I've recommended it to four other friends so hopefully we can get you some feedback.

One thing I've noticed immediately is that I can't import my podcasts from the podcast app... is this not a possibility?

Lovely! Thank you.

The ability to import podcasts from the apple app is coming in a future update. So stay tuned.

Okay, so far the feedback I've heard is as follows, everything in quotations is from a friend:

What we love:

-Love the way podcasts play and the little circle on the bottom right hand corner for play/pause -The flow of new podcasts for the week -The general layout -"I like the concept. The idea is great to see what new podcasts are there instead of just relying on iTunes top 10 list" -"I like that you can fast forward or rewind the podcast with your finger instead of that 10 sec but they have on podcast" -(Note: my friend preferred this, but I like the 10 second fwd/back)

What can use some improvement:

-"The app is very glitchy. I'm "following" you but you don't appear as one of my "friends" and I can't read what it says below your name (I'm assuming you connected through Twitter)" -"It would also be nice to have a page where you could see a list of everyone who is following you and who you are following" -"Also I can't go into your profile to see who you're following!" -(Likewise, I was not notified that my friend had started following me. I don't know where to find my friends?) -"I can't go into a podcast to see who liked it..." -I'm not sure if I just can't find it but I typically prefer to download podcasts in order to save on data. They help me get through my 3hr commute. -"I don't like how they make you sign up with connecting FB or Twitter No other option to just sign up independently of the other apps" (I agree with this)

Overall the consensus was that we can't wait to make this our number one podcasting app and are genuinely excited for how this all develops! I'm not sure if you've talked to the guys over at Gimlet about your app, or if they are hard to reach... I did notice you have Gimlet shows on the screens on your website, but you are both part of the podcast revolution.

My other two podcast friends are at a wedding for the weekend, but I will follow up with them when they get back.

Love your app!! It's like Instagram for Podcasts!

Thank you for the great and extensive feedback! We will make sure to fix as many of the things you mentioned as possible in the next minor update to the app. Most are actually usability problem. It is in fact possible to access followers and who's following and so on. It's just not immediately obvious how I guess. Downloads for offline listening is available if you long-press on a story in the feed and then tap "Download". Not very user friendly. We're working on a better solution.

We've actually reached out to Gimlet to get their thoughts on the app. But haven't heard back from them yet.

Anything we can do to help, you guys have a great product! I'll be sure to utilize the downloads- maybe one of those brief tutorials when you download the app (like on Snapchat when you first download) could help to explain app features like long-pressing.

I just tweeted Gimlet to see if it encourages a response, but I'm nobody special on Twitter so don't get your hopes up. ;)

Only targeting iPhone?

For now yes. We're a startup and thus have limited resources and need to focus our efforts. We are going to nail the user experience on iPhone before moving to other platforms.

It's a pretty big stretch to call your application a "Reddit for podcasts" when you only have an iOS application. The biggest part of Reddit is its web interface (and associated plugins), and your app doesn't attempt that.

The comparison with Reddit was mostly referring to the community curated feed of trending stories. I'm not sure what a Reddit plugin is (I'm not a regular Reddit user myself). But I agree with you that a big part of Reddit is the web interface and we are actually working on a web app to complement the mobile experience.

Why would you use something you don't use in your analogy?

Looks nice. I've been looking for a new podcast app for quite awhile since my old favorite was removed from the app store (acquired?).

How do you get content? do you have authors for permission or are you only hosting content that's free to distribute?

We crawl and index freely available RSS/Atom feeds that podcasters publish. Technically (and legally) it's not much different from how Google crawls your blog. We don't currently host any content ourselves. But have plans to introduce a caching and transcoding layer to be able to guarantee a consistent user experience and low latency streaming. Which is hard to do when you don't host the content yourself or have any control over the coding of the files that is streaming.

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