🌎 The App that Turns the World into Personalized Podcasts

Presented by Captivate

🐾 Meet Lulu, Sam’s Podcast Companion

When Lulu’s not too busy judging the first draft of Sam’s episodes, she prefers to curl up and soak in some rays from the nearest window. She’s about four years old, adopted from a farm in Minnesota along with her brother Pogi, and is a top-notch podcast editor. “When she’s not trying to lull me into an afternoon nap, she’s a great source of emotional support,” Sam says of her sassy feline friend. “But she also isn’t shy about letting me know when the edit is complete and it's time for belly rubs.”

Sam is the host and producer of Harvard Thinking, a podcast where experts from around Harvard University come together to discuss the latest news and research.

📸 Do you have a pet who’s also your podcast companion? Reply to this email with a photo and a bit about them (and your podcast) for a chance to be featured in a future issue.

🎙️ Signal Flow: Podcast Wisdom from Industry Pros

Industry game changers and valiant minds from creative professions share their wisdom, adversities, and paths to innovation.

Founded in 2018 by Emmy-nominated TV producer and development executive Kelly Garner, Treefort Media is an award-winning podcast company specializing in premium audio that leverages the latest in technology and pushes the boundaries of traditional storytelling. Since launching,Treefort has partnered with some of the biggest players in the audio space including Audible, Spotify, iHeartMedia and Amazon’s Wondery; and In 2023, Garner and Treefort co-founder, Lisa Ammerman, were named among the 40 Most Powerful People in Podcasting by The Hollywood Reporter. In 2024, Treefort launched the revolutionary mobile app, Storyrabbit—an immersive audio experience that guides curious minds on a never-ending storytelling journey to discover the magic around them.

I founded Treefort Media about six and a half years ago, and part of the inspiration for it was when I was a network executive at Universal. At the time, we were optioning podcasts as a source of IP to potentially turn into TV shows. I had been a fan of podcasts since the early days, but I never realized there could be a business behind it. Our studio optioned Homecoming—a brilliant scripted series that blew my mind the first time I listened to it. And then brought in Julia Roberts, and ended up selling the show to Amazon, and they bought two seasons of the show based on a podcast. And I thought, wow, there’s really something here.

Firstly, creatively, I just love what kind of potential audio has. In TV, it feels we're always retreading the same narratives and redoing what had been done. With audio, it felt like there’s just so much blue sky.

The first show that put Treefort on the map was a true crime series called Fatal Voyage: The Mysterious Death of Natalie Wood. We did that with Us Weekly, and it became a hit within three days of launch, which was a huge relief, because I had no fucking idea what I was doing, was just rolling up my sleeves and learning how to make podcasts. After three or four months, we’d gotten over 20 million listeners on it.

Granted, this was like the second quarter of 2018, so there were probably 3 million less podcasts competing for ears at that point. So, there was an easier path to get it out in front of people. And it didn't hurt that we had Us Weekly posting about it. Every Friday, we'd have a new episode and there would be an article that would post on their digital platforms. That helped drive traffic.

It's really challenging to get those kind of numbers now. And the idea of a hit depends on the category, depends on the audience. The idea that “it has to get 20 million or 50 million listeners or else it's not a hit” I think is false, because there are so many other smarter ways to monetize podcasts now with having different communities around them. The Patreons and subscriptions of the world, I think, have allowed a lot of podcasts that don't reach that kind of height to still have a positive business model behind them.

The through line from Treefort to Storyrabbit is storytelling. The challenge we’ve had all along is that great storytelling often takes a fairly long time to produce, even if it's a daily show, it takes a lot of resources to turn that around. And so scaling that up has been one of those existential challenges of, we've got all these tools, we've got all these great ideas, but it just takes a while.

Every startup, every tech product that comes out, the good ones are often trying to solve a problem. The initial problem that I identified, and this was years ago, is that it's actually very hard to learn about the world around you by listening to audio stories. I think of the experience of going to a museum and taking an audio tour—if you're lucky enough for it to be a halfway decent audio tour—then the coverage is limited. Maybe only 1% of everything in the museum has audio stories relating to it. Why isn't everything covered?

Once I fixated on that, I started thinking, “Wait a minute, this doesn't just have to be in museums.” The entire world is filled with stories and data. Maybe there's a way to extract that and have a hyper-personalized lens into the world. That was the jumping-off point of Storyrabbit. Then the question was: Could this even be done?

 (continued below)

January is the hardest time to start a podcast. 

It’s the most oversaturated period of the year for new creators, so it’s harder to get discovered and easier to fail. 

Don’t wait! Get free access to Captivate’s hosting, growth, and monetization tools until March 2025 if you sign up now!

……………………..

The idea came last summer. I was doing a lot of a lot of travel. My wife is an artist, and just walking around Pisa, a few blocks from the leaning tower. We took a seat on a bench. The bench was by a river, and it had a unique feel. And I thought, “What’s happened here before? There must be a story about this.” And so I sat there for 10-15 minutes Googling and trying to figure out what the significance of this specific place was. After doing that and figuring out this bench was somewhere this Countess used to spend a lot of time looking out over the city and drawing and sketching—I wondered if there was a way to pull that story out and make it into a short podcast. 

Storyrabbit is your personalized audio tour guide for the world. Right now, we've got about 15 different categories, ranging from art, architecture, music, sports, history, paranormal. We also have a really great kids’ version. What I find interesting, my kid might find utterly boring and vice versa. And so we're trying to give users the ability to pick the content they want to hear.

One of the other super exciting things about Storyrabbit is we’re working with a number of experts, personalities, influencers, and one of the folks is the host of Killer Psyche. Her name is Candice DeLong, she's one of our premium personalities. It’s bananas that we're able to make an incredibly realistic voice clone, and we built an entire persona based on her real life, who she is, where she came from. She's a former FBI criminal profiler. She's one of the first women in the FBI. She's a psychiatric nurse, and her whole lens into the world is trying to figure out why people commit crimes. So we built a story filter using all of those attributes, so Candice can tell you about true crime stories, maybe in your neighborhood or in the places that you frequent. In the early testing of the app, one of the folks in the office was like, “Okay, this is cool. It works well in America, but like, what about off-the-beaten-path kind of places?”

So we just went to some suburb of Nairobi, Kenya, randomly, just put a point on the map. Went there, searched for rabbit holes, which are the points of interest you can click on and hear a story. As it turned out, there was an incredibly dark story about someone who had been arrested because their warehouse, which was supposed to be filled with landscaping supplies, was actually filled with dead bodies.

The other really cool thing is at the end of each story, you can go deeper down that rabbit hole. So it doesn't just stop at that first one-minute story. You can keep going deeper and deeper and deeper and go down story threads that might eventually lead you somewhere completely different.

It's a really cool way to find new stories. It's always giving you something interesting and unexpected to chew on.

The only limit is how much time you have on your hands to sit down and listen. The stories are not pre-recorded. They're not pre-banked. The magic is really coming from this technology that we've developed alongside our partners at Younite. There are a few other apps out there in the audio space taking the traditional way. Hats off to traditional production techniques. But the only possible way to cover the entire world is to take advantage of some of these tools that are coming online.

At the end of the day, the human curation of Storyrabbit is critically, critically important. For each guide, we have a hyper-detailed story algorithm specific to each category that is essentially the roadmap for the storytelling. It’s defining the kind of format, the length, the details we want to include, the POV, the perspective. That’s taken a lot of time to figure out and crack, but once we cracked it, then it unlocked all of this value around us.

🎧 Podcast of the Week: Missing in Hush Town

Jennifer Wix and her 2-year-old daughter, Adrianna, were allegedly last seen in 2004 at a local gas station in the historic Tennessee town of Cross Plains. Working alongside Jennifer's sister, Casey, Missing in Hush Town deep-dives to uncover small-town hush-hush secrets and expose the gatekeepers of justice.

Small towns talk—and we're listening.

🥾 Further Exploration

Pro Storytelling Tip: How to Cut the BS

Whether you’re editing a tense documentary or an informative investment podcast, correcting your story to rinse out each trace of dullness is a major step toward hooking your viewer on every word. Here are a few tips I’ve stumbled over while plowing the fields of editing.

ICYMI:

🤔 Hans Zimmer, Zelda, and Dallas Taylor walk into a bar

🤐 Sharing Your Secrets with the World

🎧 Rob Rosenthal on Good Storytelling