It’s been a month since we shared the news with you all that we’d joined Automattic. It was amazing to see how many people reached out congratulating us, and to find out that most of you feel the way we do about it being a great home for Pocket Casts. We’ve also received a lot of questions around what our future plans are and how things will look going forward. We can’t answer all of those today, but in the spirit of working with a company that values openness we’d like to share more about what’s been going on here at Pocket Casts.
Joining a company with well over a thousand employees, spread around the world was quite intimidating at first. That feeling quickly faded away as we met more and more of the amazing people that work at Automattic. They were all so friendly, so welcoming and so excited about working along side us and building great things together. It’s unlike any other company I’ve ever worked at. The first few weeks involved introductions, reading lots of documentation and getting to know where we fit into it all. The highlight would have to be the two of us joining a Town Hall online meeting, with hundreds of faces around the world and introducing ourselves to everyone and answering all the questions they had.
But you’re not here for my “What It’s Like To Join Automattic Blog of Wonder”, you want to know about Pocket Casts and what’s in store! Well at the moment we’re scaling our team back up and we’ve begun work on some things we’ve wanted to do for a while. We’ve added some amazing people from Automattic to the team and we continue to look for more (check this page out if you want to come work with us). The very first two projects are already underway. First is improving podcast parsing speeds (how quickly you get new episodes after a podcast author publishes them). The second is localising our mobile apps into the top 12 languages you, our customers use. This second project is a great example of some of the things we’ll be able to do with our new scale here at Automattic. There’s an entire team that can help us translate our apps, and another team dedicated to making that process seamless and integrating it into our build & release processes. We can use this scale for more than just translation, so stay tuned for more on that front!
If you’re a podcast author, we have some great changes in the pipeline for you as well. Emmeline Berry will be re-joining the team as Content Curator and Podcaster Liaison starting next week. Once she’s settled back in, we’ll be reaching out to you to feature more of your amazing work and find ways we can help grow and build your audiences and take your content further. Podcasting is a wonderful open eco-system full of amazing stories, journalism and content that educates and delights our listeners. We think there’s more we can do on this front for our platform and for the entire industry as a whole.
That’s all for this update, but stay tuned to our blog (or Twitter if that’s more your thing) and we’ll keep you up to date as things progress.
Pocket Casts Blog 