I love podcasts. Basically they’ve replaced satellite radio in my car and airpods + apple watch combo make it near frictionless to listen while walking between meetings. I’m also a believer that there’s money to be made in podcast businesses – most of it not “venture scale” but lots and lots of opportunities for founders to build meaningful SMBs here. And undoubtedly some will prove me wrong and break through to levels of success I didn’t expect [disclosure: we’re investors in Anchor, which I believe is one of these examples]. However, let me tell you about a problem that founders occasionally tell me is the basis for their startup: podcast discovery.

The startup usually pitches something like this: There are lots of great podcasts and most people can’t find the best ones for them so we’re building an app that solves this for them. How? Insert one of the following: bootstrap from social graph, bootstrap from interest graph, bootstrap from what they’re currently listening to, etc etc etc

These are all wonderful ideas but they are at best features, not products or companies. It’s true that at any given time there’s probably a podcast (or at least podcast episode) that I don’t know about and would enjoy. But while it’s a persistent problem (true of almost EVERY media type), it’s not an especially valuable one in a standalone business. You’re not going to get to a critical mass of users and if you do, trying to sell Promoted Pod slots (or other ads) around the recommendations isn’t substantial enough to build a business. And people won’t switch their podcast client to your just because you do discovery “better.” Inertia is too strong and companies like Spotify, which solve this via search, curation and personalization, are increasing their share of podcast market.

So what are some businesses to be built here if you are passionate about this challenge? You could try a theSkimm for podcasts – newsletter based summary and recommendations for target demographic or content vertical. There’s an app called Wilson that some folks have recommended to me which does podcast curation, almost magazine style. Oh, and I do think podcast discovery is problem for CREATORS and there are some interesting business models there, but that’s another post 🙂

If you think I’m wrong about all this, I’d love to hear why (@hunterwalk on twitter).