Why we didn't build Podcastr to compete with Spotify for Podcasters

The distribution trap everyone falls into

Here's what Spotify for Podcasters does well: it's a distribution hub. Upload your episodes, add cover art, write a description, and Spotify pushes it out to Apple Podcasts and Google. Clean. Free. It works.

But that's also all it does. Distribution is the last five per cent of podcast production. What about the first 95 per cent? Recording without echo or dropping frames when your guest's internet hiccups. Transcribing your rambling 90-minute conversation into something coherent. Actually writing show notes instead of leaving them blank. Generating clips that don't make you look like you've lost your train of thought.

When we started building Podcastr three years ago, we weren't thinking about competing with Spotify. We were thinking about what happened in the 47 minutes before someone even opens Spotify for Podcasters. We watched solo creators and small teams waste hours every week shuffling files, copy-pasting guest bios, re-typing the same information into multiple systems. The frustration was real. The cost was real, too. Most creators we talked to were paying £100 or more per month across five or six separate subscriptions.

What changes when creation and distribution live in the same place

When we built local and remote multi-track recording directly into Podcastr, we weren't trying to replace Riverside. We were asking: why should you record in one app, download files, upload them somewhere else, edit them, export them again, and then finally plug them into your distribution tool? Every handoff is a friction point. Every friction point is time you're not creating.

The same logic drove the teleprompter feature. I remember sitting with a creator who kept losing her place during guest interviews because she was reading notes from a separate browser tab. She'd apologise, restart, waste tape. So we built the teleprompter directly into RecordView. Your notes live where your recording happens. One window. One context.

Auto-generated show notes sit in the same ecosystem. Once Whisper transcribes your episode, the system pulls out key moments and structures them. You edit them if you want. Then those same notes become your RSS feed description when you publish to Spotify, Apple, and Google. No copying. No reformatting. One source of truth.

Spotify for Podcasters assumes your episode is already finished when you get there. Podcastr assumes you're starting from scratch.

The NFC Guest Passport moment

We shipped the NFC Guest Passport feature in Pro because we were tired of hearing the same complaint: guests send their bio, you paste it into show notes, you manually add their socials, someone makes a typo, the links break. Or you forget to ask for their LinkedIn. Or you spell their company name wrong.

With NFC, a guest taps their phone to yours before you record. Their name, bio, social links, and headshot populate automatically into your show notes template. It's available instantly when you publish. No manual data entry. No forgotten details.

This is what Spotify for Podcasters can't offer, because Spotify for Podcasters lives at the end of your workflow, not the beginning. They see distribution as the problem to solve. We see the entire production pipeline as the problem.

What about teams? What about growing?

Spotify for Podcasters works fine if you're solo. It falls apart if you're trying to scale. We've got customers running branded podcast networks for agencies now, and they were using Spotify for Podcasters plus Slack plus Google Sheets to manage multiple shows, assign episodes, track who's done what.

In Studio tier, you get team management built in. Assign roles, manage multiple branded shows from one dashboard, white-label the platform if you're an agency running shows for clients. Spotify for Podcasters isn't built for that. It's built for one person, one show.

That's not a criticism. It's just a different design choice. We decided early on that if we were going to replace four or five fragmented tools, we had to cover the entire spectrum: solo creators doing it all themselves, small teams collaborating in real time, and agencies managing dozens of shows for clients.

The free tier isn't a loss leader

We offer three free episodes because we wanted people to actually experience what unified creation feels like. Not a limited watermarked video. Not a 30 second demo. Three full episodes: local recording, Whisper transcription, auto-generated show notes, RSS publishing to all three major platforms. Free.

Why? Because once someone records episode one, transcribes it, sees their show notes appear automatically, and watches their episode land on Spotify and Apple within minutes of hitting publish, they understand the value. They don't need us to convince them. They've felt the difference.

Spotify for Podcasters can't offer that because their product value doesn't kick in until you've already recorded and edited elsewhere. There's nothing to experience until you're done with the hard part.