Here’s the secret hack that enabled us to distribute millions of podcasts to Apple without writing a single line of code during the early days of Anchor (and before we sold to Spotify).
Back in 2018, there was a ton of demand for people using Anchor wanting to publish podcasts to places like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc.
The problem was that most of these platforms, especially Apple — which was the market leader at the time — had no API for submitting podcasts programmatically.
This was a major constraint on the overall quantity of podcasts that could be delivered to the platform, especially for a platform like Anchor that was exploding and growing the market through our mobile app. It was also constraining the size of the podcasting industry.
With only a few months of runway left before we were out of business, we had an idea: what if we used humans to distribute the podcasts by hand instead of building technology?
And so, we tried it. We hired college students to stay by their computers and await the moment a user wanted to distribute a podcast. Once that happened, they manually created an RSS feed and hand submitted them to Apple Podcasts (and other platforms) through their Podcasts Connect portal.
It was a perfect use case for the “do things that don’t scale mantra." No bigger company would ever think to do something so absurd. And it was a completely dumb, non-innovative solution, so most startups wouldn’t consider it either.
But it worked. At its peak, we had hundreds of people submitting podcasts on any given day. Within months, we became the biggest podcasting platform in the world… by a lot. And not too long after, we were acquired by Spotify.