3 Things: Podcast Network for Foreign Tech, Astrology Marketplace, Future for Non-Exercise Goals

Happy Sunday and welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotions so can use your help)! This past week marked another trip around the sun for me and also my last week as a San Francisco resident after 11 years!! Don’t worry, I didn’t go far… just across the bay to Oakland :) I’ve also been thinking a lot about:

• Podcast Network for Foreign Tech

• Astrology Marketplace

• Future for Non-Exercise Goals

1. Podcast Network for Foreign Tech

The past few years have seen an absolute explosion of podcasts with over 2 million individual shows and 48 million episodes available today. The challenge with that much content becomes growth and monetization. If a show gets only 3k downloads, it’s already in the top 1% of all podcasts and significantly fewer are able to monetize (typically a pod needs a minimum 10k downloads per episode). The shows that break out and start to grow often get gobbled up by the growing number of podcast networks which provide shared resources to produce, grow, and monetize the shows across their network. Most podcast networks follow some kind of theme like Earwolf (comedy), Vox (news), Crooked Media (politics), and TWiT (tech). They are able to both cross promote shows among the network to help them grow and also hire ad sales teams to find sponsors and create ads for each show. By bundling the shows together, it’s easy to hit impressive download numbers and since the networks follow a theme, typically the listener demographic is consistent across shows which makes it easier to both cross-promote and convince advertisers to purchase sponsorships.

I listen to ton of US tech focused podcasts and I’m always trying to learn about tech trends and hot companies in markets like China, India, and LATAM, but haven’t found a ton of high quality, English language resources. I recently discovered the Techbuzz China podcast which is a perfect example of what I had been looking for covering the China market. I’d imagine there are either similar podcasts that already exist, or the ability to easily find people to host them for different markets. A network could focus on aggregating (or creating from scratch) English language tech podcasts covering each of the most interesting foreign markets. The target audience would be tech workers, investors/finance professionals, and entrepreneurs who garner top dollar from advertisers and would likely have an interest in multiple markets, so using the podcasts in the network for cross-promotion could help the shows quickly climb the charts. Given the global nature of the content, it could also open up the door for multinational or foreign brands who want to advertise to US consumers to get in front of a highly relevant and affluent audience.

2. Astrology Marketplace

Did you know that over 70 million Americans, or 25% of the entire population, check their horoscopes on a daily basis 🤯 The history of astrology (the belief that celestial observations correspond or cause terrestrial events and human behavior) goes all the way back to 3000 BC in Mesopotamia where it was used to predict the seasons and also seen as communication from the gods. For millennia, astrology was seen as a scholarly pursuit and helped shape astronomy, alchemy, meteorology, and even medicine. The Babylonians are credited with creating the zodiac which are 12 equal sections that make up the 360 degree orbit the earth takes around the sun. Each section has a constellation and matching zodiac sign that had appeared in the sky at that time of year (though they no longer actually align). Over the course of history, different astrological traditions developed in Hellenistic Egypt, Greece, Rome, India, the Arab world, China, and Mesoamerica.

Astrology became popular in the US following World War I and continued to gain interest throughout the 20th century. More recently, horoscopes, tarot cards, crystals, and other forms of astrological readings have gained a tremendous level of adoption among Millennials and Gen Z, in part as a way to deal with unprecedented anxiety, societal pressure, and a way of finding meaning amidst massive uncertainty. Tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are eyeing this opportunity with companies like Co-Star and Sanctuary raising millions of dollars and seeing meteoric rises over the past 2 years. Allegedly, Co-Star has over 20M downloads and already has 137k reviews on the iOS App Store and 42k on Android. These apps are solely focused on personalized horoscopes which is only one slice of the market. Additionally, apps like Hey Hero enable spirituality influencers to monetize via short, personalized videos to their fans. The other niche within this larger category that has gained some heat is crystals, which have been popularized by many celebrities and influencers. Given the demand and interest in these different spaces, there is an opportunity to create a marketplace that brings together all different apps, products, services, and creators into one central place where everyone from the spirituality-curious to the astrology-obsessed could all find what they are looking for. The marketplace could monetize via lead gen/affiliate programs like Credit Karma and the marketplaces that are trying to aggregate alternative assets or NFTs, and over time could develop and sell their own products as well as drive traffic to existing companies.

3. Future for Non-Exercise Goals

Future (fka Future Fit) is a company that provides personalized one-on-one digital training with fitness coaches who create custom workouts for you to do at home or at a gym that are delivered to you via an app. They also send you an Apple watch which collects training data and sends it back to your coach. Your coach will check in on you after workouts to both hold you accountable and modify future workouts. The subscription costs $150/month and that doesn’t include access to a gym or equipment, nor does it include synchronous training sessions. What clients pay for is the accountability partner making them get off the couch, feel guilty about skipping a workout, or continue to push themselves to do more and try harder. While in reality, the workouts are highly templatized and easily modified to fit individual needs/preferences, it feels like a personal trainer is making each just for you. While different surveys have slightly different rankings, most often the #1 self-improvement goal that people cite each year is getting more fit/healthy or losing weight, so it’s no wonder that users are flocking to Future and claiming that it actually works to foster sustained behavior change.

Going down the list, there are close followers behind getting fit that top the charts of people’s top self-improvement or personal development goals. They include: finding purpose, acquiring new professional skills, improving personal relationships, challenging yourself, and developing more self-esteem. The idea is to take the concept of Future and apply it to these top non-exercise related personal development goals. You get matched 1:1 with a coach who works with you to identify your goals, creates a personalized plan, and sends frequent messages checking in and holding you accountable. Essentially it’s a democratized, mostly-asynchronous life or professional coach that can scale. For some goals, there can easily be software that can track progress and send back to the coach acting just as the Apple Watch does for Future. The price point would be similar as well, which ensures that customers have skin in the game, but is significantly more approachable than an actual coach. I believe Future coaches can handle upwards of 50 clients at one time so by shifting the majority of the work to app-based programs, each coach can handle many more customers than usual which makes the economics of a business like this quite enticing.

That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, reply to this email or find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please subscribe and share with a friend or two!

~ Elaine