Hey everyone, thanks for checking out my new project! My name is Dan, and I’m the creator of Clipps. I wanted to take a moment to provide some history on why I decided to build this site, and hopefully convince you to sign-up once I’ve got it launched.
A couple of months ago while I was on vacation in Australia, I had a few days to myself and was wandering around Sydney. As the good introverted millennial that I am, I made sure that my Bluetooth headphones were always charged up and in my ears so I didn’t look so much like the lost, confused American that I was. After listening to every song and podcast I could think of, I was left searching the internet for something interesting to consume. This is when I got fed up with the ancient world that podcasting technology is stuck in.
Let’s rewind for a second… My first experience with podcasts, as with most technologies, was very early on. You see, I’ve always been the kind of person that some would consider an “early adopter”. It was my senior year of high school in 2004 when the first podcasts started popping up on mine and my friend’s iPods, and we immediately began brainstorming what topics our talk radio show would cover. Shortly after those same friends settled on the topic of professional wrestling, a topic that didn’t happen to interest me at all. And that was the last time I thought about podcasts (along with most of the world) until 2014.
In October 2014, the investigative podcast Serial was released by WBEZ radio out of Chicago, and some people would say, the future of podcasting was changed forever. Today, asking someone what podcasts they listen to is about as common as asking them if they watched the news last night. And this turned out to be the major motivating factor behind my initial development of Clipps.
Right before my previously mentioned trip to Australia, a bunch of co-workers and I were sitting around a conference room table waiting for a meeting to start. During that awkward moment of silence that a room full of software engineers always manages to create, one of my co-workers randomly blurts out, “Anyone listen to any interesting podcasts lately?”. The room immediately filled with back and forth conversation as lists of show names and episode guests filled the air. Sure it probably helped that most of us shared interests around nerdy gadgets, and video games, but this level of excited conversation over shows we all happened to independently discovered was surprising. There was only one problem…
About 10 minutes after walking out of our hour long meeting, I completely forgot every show title that was discussed. Sure I could message each co-worker and ask them to remind me the name of that guy who appeared on that one show, but I started to realize that the fractured world of podcasts was sort of a mess.
Ok, I think we’re ready to fast forward back to the streets of Sydney, Australia. I’m two weeks removed from this lively discussion about great podcast episodes, I’m actively looking for something to listen to, and here I am, content-less. This is when I did what every good software engineer does when they have a problem. I walked down the street to a coffee shop, I ordered myself a latte, and I sat down and started coding.
At the time, as with most of my ideas, I had huge dreams for what Clipps was one day going to become. After returning home from my trip, that first version of the product quickly got slimmed down to an MVP version, and again like most of my ideas, I actually got confused about what I was actually building. Sure I wanted something to get out to users quickly, but the perfectionist in me was never going to release this piece of garbage to an actual user. I continued cutting out features until eventually I had something that made sense as a product.
So here we are, ready to launch a very basic version of what I hope will eventually become the vision I dreamt up in that coffee shop, halfway across the world. Over the next couple of months, I will work on rolling out additional features, and maybe together we can fix even a small segment of this messy world of podcasting.