If you’ve ever been on a long car ride and wished you’d bought a book on tape or downloaded podcasts in advance, then you’ll get what Knomad has to offer.
The startup has been building a social podcast app over the last three months at The Startup Factory in Durham, and ExitEvent filmed co-founder Alex Carter’s pitch before a crowd of 100 investors, mentors and past TSF graduates Wednesday, May 28th. It’s the first of four pitch videos we’ll be sharing over the next several days.
And below the video, check out our before and after recap of the new business.
The back story
Alex Carter and Michael Crouch have been friends since childhood and attend N.C. State together. Last year, Carter had a consulting job at Deloitte in Atlanta and Crouch graduated from the Berkeley School of Law. But they both had a different calling—making it easier to find the best and most personally relevant of 90,000 podcast shows around the Internet and to increase the percentage of people who listen to podcasts above the current rate of 5 percent. Carter quit his consulting job and Crouch decided not to pursue a career in law.
The pre-TSF plan
The two joined together to create a platform similar to Spotify but for spoken word, that allowed users to easily search for podcasts relevant to them, create playlists and share them with their friends. The pair hoped to test a prototype with 100 beta users. Here’s our original story.
How TSF helped
Over the past three months, the men have catalogued over 700 shows and 110,000 episodes, and designed Knomad to be a personalized and social experience. They launched a private beta.
What’s next
Knomad believes it will be the first social podcast app in the App Store later this summer, and will be available to users free to drive quick and viral adoption. Knomad also will expand the podcast index to over 3,000 shows and 500,000 episodes by year’s end.
For a full recap of this week’s TSF Showcase, check out our story here!
