3 Things: Rise of Curators, Calendar OKR Tracker, and Better Audible

Happy Sunday! 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! This past week, I’ve been thinking a lot about:

• Rise of the Curator

• Calendar OKR/Goal Tracker

• Better Audible

1. Rise of the Curator

We have experienced a great unbundling of media over the last few years. What once was the domain of newspapers, radio stations, and production studios has shifted to individual newsletter writers, podcasters, YouTubers, and TikTokers. The democratization of content creation has led to a state of more content than ever before. There are 500 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, over 850,000 active podcasts, and more newsletters in my inbox than I could ever possibly read. Overall this is great for both creators and for their audiences but the more content that exists, the harder discovery becomes. One perfect example is a fantastic new podcast I discovered via a random recommendation on Twitter called Brought to You By. I would have never found this on my own and I immediately told my sisters who I thought would also enjoy it. They both binged the episodes and we are all now searching for similar podcasts.

I believe there will be a new class of creators who add value to the ecosystem solely by curating content. They will become influencers in their own right. People will follow them and consume what they curate. There will likely even be new platforms and destinations where curators post their lists and consumers can find curators to follow. While personalization and recommendation algorithms have come a long way, the vast majority of content (aside from TikTok) is still discovered via word-of-mouth. As good as Netflix is, I find 90+% of what I watch is driven directly by word-of-mouth recommendations from friends, family, or people I follow on social media. I’d gladly follow a few trusted curators and let them recommend which content I might like.

2. Calendar OKR/Goal Tracker

OKRs (objectives and key results) have become a ubiquitous framework for setting goals and measuring outcomes. Andy Grove is credited as the “father of OKRs” but John Doerr, who was a salesperson at Intel, popularized the framework when he introduced it to Google and it quickly took hold. Now there are dozens of products that help companies manage ORKs like Lattice, Workboard, Ally.io, and Koan. The challenge with these tools is that employees don’t like them and typically only use them at the beginning or end of a quarter when they are forced to update their goals and outcomes by their manager. While these tools are better than nothing, it’s pretty easy to set an objective at the beginning of the quarter and get sidetracked with other priorities only to realize at the end of the quarter that you didn’t come close to achieving the key results.

There are always more things to do than can possibly get done so it comes down to time prioritization and allocation. In a given week if I asked a group of employees the question “what percent of your time was spent on activities directly related to your OKRs” I doubt people would have a clear answer. Your calendar, however, is a place that both has access to this kind of information and is also a place that knowledge workers check multiple times a day. The idea is to create an extremely lightweight calendar add-on that integrates with your OKR tool and for each meeting or time block you check a box if it is directly related to one of your OKRs. At the end of the week, you get a personalized report that shows your time breakdown for that week and trends over time. Managers get an anonymized report aggregating how their team is spending their time. This gives both individuals and managers the ability to course correct early and make sure their goals will be achieved. Let’s say, for example, that 4 weeks into a quarter a manager sees that no one is spending any time on one of the 5 team OKRs. It could mean that there is no clear owner or that it’s not a good OKR. As opposed to just failing to meet the goal, the team can assign a person as the “directly responsible individual” or maybe decide that the goal shouldn’t be prioritized that quarter.

3. Better Audible

As previous writings on many audio topics may allude, I’m somewhat obsessed with everything audio. I’m a rabid consumer of podcasts and audiobooks but have a bone to pick with Audible. It’s a fascinating 25-year old company that started out making the first portable audio player called the Audible Player which had 4 megabytes of flash storage that could hold about 2 hours of audio. The first audiobook was actually created in 1932 by The American Foundation for the Blind who put recordings of books on vinyl records that could hold about 15 minutes of speech per side. The following year the Library of Congress began creating audiobooks starting with the classics.

After Audible launched their player in the late 90s they began buying up audio rights (likely for pennies on the dollar because authors and publishers didn’t value audio rights like they do now) from major publishers giving them nearly exclusive access to produce audiobook content. From 2003-2017 Audible also had an agreement with Apple to be the exclusive provider of audiobooks on the iTunes store; thus cementing Audible as nearly synonymous with “audiobooks”. As the consumption of audiobooks has risen (and Audible was purchased by Amazon in 2008) there became more pressure to loosen the stranglehold so Audible/Amazon launched the Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) in 2011 which is a marketplace connecting authors, agents, publishers, and other Rights Holders with narrators, engineers, recording studios, and producers to create audiobooks. While the intent here seems positive for the ecosystem, it ultimately funnels everything back to Audible.

I have a few issues with Audible. Mainly, I cannot stand the credit system and forced subscription. It makes no sense to me why I should pay the exact same price for a 42 hour audiobook as a 1.5 hour book. I recognize that text-based books are not priced based on length, but they are not all priced the same and it seems odd that audiobooks would take a different pricing strategy. I also do not want to be forced to get a new audiobook every month. Some months I might want 5, other times of year I might not want one for a few months. Even if I net out to 12 a year, I don’t want to have a company charge me every month and force me into a cadence of listening. Additionally, the quality of narration is highly variable. The speed, audio quality, and voice of narrator can greatly affect your experience and I wish there was more consistency within Audible.

With the rise of self-publishing and a larger interest in authors retaining audio rights, I see an opening for a new audiobook company to compete with Audible. They could partner with modern self-publishing platforms, enforce tighter quality controls, and create a more attractive business model for consumers. They could create audio content from Gumroad, online course platforms like Podia and Teachable, and other non-traditional sources. More and more platforms are turning text into content as we are seeing with The New York Times purchase of Audm, Substack offering audio versions of newsletters, and a handful of chrome extensions that will turn text on your screen into audio. A company can widen the definition of “audiobook” and potentially build a massive business riding the wave of audio. It seems Scribd is taking a crack here and I look forward to watching them grow.

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

~ Elaine