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fredrivett
Hey all,

Super excited (and only a tad nervous) to announce our new podcast, Hit Reply

Hit Reply is a new show that gives you an inside view on what it's like to start a startup.

We will be sharing the lessons we've learnt going from 5 years of working on side projects, with ZERO launches as a result, to now having launched 9 separate side projects in the past 2 years.

Having now learnt how to launch (and written a book about it: http://learningtolaunch.co/), we're now focussed on starting an actual, bootstrapped startup.

The podcast will be charting that journey.

Nice and short, with the episodes under 20 minutes.

We'd love to hear your thoughts, just Hit Reply and let us know :)

p.s. We send a small weekly email with each episode every Tuesday, you can sign up on our site if interested: https://hitreply.co/

giarc
Under 20 minutes is awesome. Sometimes podcasts are way too long. 20 minutes forces you to just talk about the most important things.
fredrivett
Agreed giarc! Our favourite podcasts are short and to the point, we think this works best for everyone :)
user202020
Really looking forward to this! Happy to have found it from the start!
cushychicken
Related: if anyone hasn't listened to the first season of Gimlet's "Startup" yet, it's excellent. Former host of NPR's "Planet Money" records all the hard parts of starting his own podcast production company.

https://gimletmedia.com/episode/1-how-not-to-pitch-a-billion...

I liked season one more than season two because I felt that the Dating Ring founders were a little more guarded about their vulnerabilities and shortcomings, whereas Alex laid it all on the line. (YMMV on this opinion.)

fredrivett
Totally agree CC. That is probably my all time favourite podcast, just ahead of Serial, and Justin Jacksons MegaMaker

https://serialpodcast.org/season-one http://megamaker.co/

cushychicken
Never heard of MegaMaker. I'll check that out. Thanks for the tip.
stevenwiles
Holy crap! you and cc are like my internet heroes! its so awesome seeing both of you in the same place! I love you guys!!
haraball
Season one and two were great! Too bad the third season got swamped in commercials and irrelevant stories. Wish I could pay to avoid the insane amounts of commercials that makes many promising podcasts unlistenable!
magic_beans
Season three was my favorite of all the seasons!

I thought it was much more interesting to learn about non-tech small businesses.

cushychicken
Hm, haven't gotten to the third season yet. Been too swamped with extracurriculars to sit and listen to a podcast. :)
shostack
Haven't you heard? Podcasts are the next big thing in digital advertising.

Expect all your favorites to get cluttered up in the near future to the level their audience will tolerate.

zapt02
Would love to subscribe but it's not showing up in Pocket Casts... Where can I find the RSS feed?
fredrivett
Hey Zapt02.

Great to hear you want to subscribe! We literally launched yesterday and haven't got it out there on the different platforms yet.

There are two options here:

1. We send out a really small, simple weekly email with the podcast episode in. You can subscribe on the homepage: http://hitreply.co/

2. We're on Soundcloud, so you can follow us there: https://soundcloud.com/hitreply/episode-0-yet-another-startu...

3. We're on Twitter and will announce when we've got the platforms (itunes, overcast, etc.) up and running. http://twitter.com/hitreplypod

renolc
An RSS feed will "get it out there on different platforms" for you. You won't have to do anything else, except submit that feed to the different aggregators (iTunes being the largest).

I'm glad SoundCloud at least seems to generate a feed, because the content sounds interesting. But if I were forced to use SoundCloud themselves, I would never actually be able to listen to your podcast. I don't want to install another app, and listening through a mobile browser sounds like a nightmare. Emails are also a no go, because this is a solved problem. There are apps and ecosystems already built around subscribing and listening to podcasts. Having yours outside of that ecosystem is a hinderance to adoption.

EDIT: And PocketCasts seems to be rejecting the SoundCloud generated RSS. So I guess I'll have to wait for a real one before I can subscribe.

fredrivett
Thanks renolc, appreciate the advice here. Honestly as we only launched yesterday I hadn't gotten round to submitting to the platforms just yet. I only posted on here on a whim, I didn't expect to be towards the top of the homepage!

I'll be making submission to platforms a top priority. If I can be of any help in notifying you when thats ready let me know (we'll obviously tell our email list, at which point anyone could unsubscribe).

csharp
Just start by create an RSS feed, that should only take a few hours. It is so much more universally friendly anyway.
pluma
You can actually get RSS feeds from SoundCloud for podcasts, but it's a bit tricky. Luckily someone made a website for that:

http://getrssfeed.com/

EDIT: It also works for podcasts from iTunes -- extremely useful if like me you're not using Apple products but still want access to podcasts published via iTunes.

fredrivett
Oh this is awesome, thanks pluma!

Here's our RSS feed from that:

http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:245437295...

renolc
Just a heads up, but that feed doesn't seem to work. It only has the channel metadata and no items, meaning your actual episodes are not listed or accessible.
fredrivett
Dang, thanks for the heads up :(

Hmm I need to dig into this. I'll take a look

fredrivett
Ok just fixed this, you have to tell soundcloud you want the items in the RSS feed. Strange. RSS feed should now work:

http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:245437295...

zapt02
Thanks it works. I also submitted it to Pocket Cast via http://www.pocketcasts.com/submit

As a side note, getting it on iTunes will also auto-submit it to most popular podcast apps, so if you do one thing that should be it.

fredrivett
Perfect, thanks for sorting that Zapt. Sorting out iTunes in the next 24 hours :)
swanson
I'm in the same boat -- happy to sub and give it a listen, but needs to be coming up in PocketCasts search. Not interested in changing my podcast workflow or signing up for emails at this point, sorry.

Maybe a lesson for a future episode about having all the ducks in a row before the marketing push :)

fredrivett
Yep, a lesson for sure! Honestly we just had an emphasis on getting the ball rolling and working it out as we go, rather than trying to get our ducks in a line first.

I think that approach is a good baseline, emphasis on shipping, but it would have been good to have everything sorted now. In hindsight seeing this on the homepage of HN, yes I would have sorted things first! :)

zapt02
You can actually load in a RSS feed into Pocket Cast by searching for the RSS URL (that's why I asked for it). I submitted it to be indexed in Pocket Cast, so it should appear within 24h.
_raoulcousins
Please, can podcast creators set up an RSS feed when they release their initial episode? And not the RSS feed through Soundcloud, that's just enough effort to get to and copy into my podcatcher that I'm not going to do it. I subscribe to tons of podcasts and will give anything a shot if I can subscribe in the few seconds it takes to do it directly through a podcatcher.
fredrivett
Hey you're right Raoul. We missed a trick here, but honestly didn't expect to be up here on the homepage here just yet!

Next biggest priority is to sort this out. In the meantime, here's our Soundcloud RSS.

http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:245437295...

desireco42
I listen through PocketCasts, you really need to get this to show there.
desireco42
For your info, I have like 60-70 podcasts there, imagine if I have them all bookmarked somewhere and I go to different bookmark to check whether there are new episodes... Not happening :)