A fellow Pownce user in the wild! Incredible to think that was 10 years ago. I feel like that app was years ahead of its time — the casual immediacy of Twitter without the character limits, the ease of sharing media like an internet-wide HipChat or Slack, topics like Reddit. Selfishly, I always hoped Leah would stop working at Dropbox and start another company :-)
If only they told you their exact business model in every interview. Maybe this will help though:
Our initial direction wasn’t the direction we ended up going in.
I was interested in building tools for podcasters. Then when
we started to talking to podcasters we realized that podcasters
just want listeners and data about those listeners. Just providing good tools
didn’t really solve that problem. So we shifted focus to work on
the user app first.
IIRC, she also wrote quite a bit on using Django. I learned quite a bit about the ins-and-outs of Django because of her writings. Glad she has had a good career.
I've been using their beta app for the past week and love it. I have already added several podcasts that hadn't previously been on my radar, via their discovery tools. Cool to read the founder stories.
It's crazy how many things we use today were inspired by something Leah did. She also seems like a pretty cool person from the stories I've heard. Hope this becomes her first massive success.
16 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 51.5 ms ] threadThe embedding stuff (oEmbed?) was pretty great too. I wish it was used by more people.