Apple Podcasts Was Never Built For Podcasts

**Kevin Rose** (0:00)
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**Kevin Ben Smith** (0:27)
We were more like the naïve startup founders, this confidence in a way, but I think a more educated person probably would have said like don't do it.

**Kevin Rose** (0:38)
It's been close to 20 years now that I've been listening to podcasts, and I've largely been using the standard players, Apple player, Overcast for a while, there was Pocket Casts, but a couple of years ago, I made the leap to Snipd.

**Kevin Ben Smith** (0:51)
Podcast apps or spoken audio apps in general might be audio book players, anything in that direction, they basically repurpose the music players.

**Kevin Rose** (1:00)
Today, we're talking to Kevin Smith, who's the CEO and founder of Snipd. Snipd is the most advanced AI podcast app.

**Kevin Ben Smith** (1:07)
We are actually the only podcast app in the world that has this information. YouTube doesn't have them, Spotify doesn't have it, Apple doesn't have it.

**Kevin Rose** (1:16)
AI understands all of the content inside of the podcast, the books that are being talked about, the guests, the best links, articles and products that are being talked about, and you can with a single tap save any of this as a Snip.

**Kevin Ben Smith** (1:29)
And before we launched, we thought it's going to be very difficult to get people to create Snips, and it will be super easy for people to get people to listen, consume the Snips. Basically, what happened was the exact opposite.

**Kevin Rose** (1:42)
So Kevin is actually doing something that I love, which is a founder solving their own problems. For him, he was commuting every single day on a bike and heard about these great books and articles and things that were being mentioned, but he had no way to stop, write them down or take notes. So with Snipd, it's a single tap and automatically bookmarks this and syndicates it out anywhere and everywhere that you want all through AI. So let's talk to Kevin and get into it.
Kevin, thank you for joining me.

**Kevin Ben Smith** (2:09)
Thanks for having me, Kevin.

**Kevin Rose** (2:11)
You were one of the first people that I connected with that was at the intersection of AI media that was doing something there. Very early on, when did Snipd start? When was it an idea?

**Kevin Ben Smith** (2:26)
I think it started five years ago already.
Yeah. So for me, like the whole starting point, there's a technical side to it in my personal user journey.

**Kevin Rose** (2:37)
Yeah.

**Kevin Ben Smith** (2:39)
Where do you want to start?

**Kevin Rose** (2:40)
Let's start with the aha moment for you. There's so many podcast players out there.

**Kevin Ben Smith** (2:47)
Yeah.

**Kevin Rose** (2:47)
Apple is dominating the market still today. What got in your head where you're like, you know what I should do? I should make a podcast player.

**Kevin Ben Smith** (2:54)
Yeah. So really the moment was in 2016, I had just joined an early stage tech startup in Zurich, Switzerland, and it was my very first experience at a startup. So I had no idea how startups work at all. So what the founder did is he recommended this podcast to me called How to Start a Startup.
By Sam Altman back when he was at Y Combinator. And here I was in Zurich, Switzerland, on the other side of the planet of where the epicenter of startups is, that is San Francisco.
Every morning, I'm riding my bike to work, and I'm listening to this podcast getting the best advice from some of the greatest entrepreneurs that we've seen. Like people like Peter Thiel, Dustin Moskovitz, Paul Graham. People that if you would want to get their advice, you would have to move to the other side of the planet, get into the right room with them, get their attention, and then hopefully, you get some advice from them.

**Kevin Rose** (3:56)
Next to impossible.

**Kevin Ben Smith** (3:57)
Yeah.
And I'm doing all of this while not even losing time because I'm going to ride my bike to work anyway.
So this was the moment when I realized like, oh my God, podcast is such an incredible, valuable source of knowledge that you're not getting anywhere else in this shape or form. But I then also started to encounter all of these problems. You're riding your bike, you get this amazing insight from Paul Graham, and you're like, oh my God, I need to remember that. Yeah. So what do you do? You get off your bike, you take out your wallet, pause the podcast, open up the notes app, write it down. All of this goes on for a couple of minutes, and you're like, okay, I'm good. Get back on your bike, keep riding. I was like, oh, that's another great insight.