Swell — News Radio Rebooted

@guygal - yeah, I realize the audio quality wasn't great. I purchased a new mic and will be doing post-production correction in the next one (recording Monday!).

Surprised Swell hasn't been posted already. I'm a big podcast nut and regular Umano user (h/t @tokudu & @ianmendiola). I like Swell's direction but as I've told @semil, I'm not sure the "pandora for radio" approach is the best way to discover this type of content. Unlike music, it takes too long to recognize if the podcast/radio show is worth listening to. That said, I haven't used Swell in ~3 months so it's time I give it another chance. :)

@guygal - love the thoughtful feedback! Would love to hear your thoughts on the first PHR over here after your lovely shower. :)

Pandora for talk radio. It learns what you like, and plays more of this. Perfect for mornings and cleaning.

@rrhoover - seeing that I listen to a lot of podcasts in the shower, audio quality is 51% of the experience. PH1 was hard to hear. Did you record in a large room? Format and content was fun, looking forward to the next one.

@rrhoover, I share your sentiment and perspective. Also a podcast nut so Swell's value prop had me 'over the moon', but to your point, it was too time consuming to identify shows worth listening to. When I did find something worthwhile, I would add it to my native podcast roll, which effectively made me spend less time in Swell. We have a finite amount of time to listen to things, so once those slots are filled up (especially with shows that publish frequently) there isn't a constant need to re-engage Swell... When it works, it may actually be working itself out of daily active users. I would position Swell as THE replacement for the native podcast app, effectively copying over all of the native app subscriptions to Swell in the onboarding. This would give Swell more daily utility, which in my case, would capture my daily podcast consumption time while layering in discovery and social features to increase my consumption and session time. iOS native podcast app is pretty sucky, but that is where my podcast library subscriptions exist. Swell has an opportunity to 100x improve on that product. Only two native apps have yet to be displaced, podcasts and game center. Here's hoping Swell delivers on the promise of their product. TMI, planning to listen to PH #1 in the shower tomorrow.

I am over the moon about Swell. One of my daily apps. So much so that I invested in it.

saturday night on product hunt!