all right. Thank you so much. For 20 into forward Thinking Founders, this is the podcast will be highlight. Undiscovered talent. We're scanning. Why Combinator, Pioneer Product Hunt Twitter, Indie hackers, all these different networks to find really interesting founders and interesting projects and start ups. And we feature them on the podcast before you've probably heard it, any of them and that what's great about this is you get to follow along on the return as they become more and more successful and say I knew them when? So thank you so much opportunity in the foreword Thinking Founders and Let's get into our next founder You haven't heard of. But you will. All right, housing going, everyone.

Welcome to another episode of forward thinking Founders would be talk to founders about their companies, their visions for the future And have the two collide today. I'm very excited to be talking to you, Curiel Dubovsky, who is the creator of Smash notes. Welcome to the show. How's it going? Thanks, Mads. Going great. Thank you for inviting me. Yeah. Thanks for coming on. You are building one of the coolest tools I've seen in the podcasting world in quite some time. Please tell everyone what's MASH notes is Smash Notes

is a tool four podcast for podcasters to basically sliced their episodes into little bits that could be interesting to different audiences and then share it with people in both audio and text and for listeners, its way to experience a lot of different podcasts at the same time without spending hours on end during it. So you can come to smash notes and you can find something new every day, something you from different podcasts and you can read it and listening to it right there without, you know, spending hours until you find interesting segments because those segments already created

for you, so to give listeners in example, Um, so right now well, actually let you explain the home page, so I'm on the homemade right now. It's brilliant, but can you please describe if someone goes to smash knows dot com? What are they gonna see? What's the for what? You know, what does it look like? I think what you've built, there's not gonna be a clear picture, and someone's have it because he built something new. So can you describe what, what what it looks like for sure so And

we talked about this with you before a house Mash notes, is so mewing front in a sense that it's it's clear it's hard to write. Wrap your hand head around this, but you go to smashing us. Right now you will find podcasts that were recently at it. Um, do the system. So, for example, I'm looking at now and we'll see one title. Where do the dollar bills come from? Right? So somebody did a podcast talking about dollar bills, and presumably you and I don't know much about dollar bills, so we can quickly find out something interesting. Like the fact that its own, the mill that creates paper for dollar bills is has been owned by the same family for multiple generations,

or that a dollar bill is not actually paper. But it's more like a T shirt because it's fabric and you can scroll down and confined things from different um, John Rhys, right, business, tech technology, or maybe science and medicine. Entrepreneurship in marketing, confined whatever resonates with you at the time, the most. So, for example, one of the pockets on the list is from novel. It's called happiness is peace and motion. He where he talks about what stresses and how to attain peace in life. It's a very simple bits, but you can come to smash knows and and learn something like that every day.

And one thing I want to add on is everything. If you go to smash notes dot com, by the way, amazing domain. You everything is kind of chunked up by question. So, you know, I'm looking at court. You know, this is a podcast that the Indian actress podcast Corton Allen s. No, it's the record at it. Podcasts. And this is Courtney Allen on growing downloads and community through storytelling in podcasting. And I can see every question that was asked in that podcast. And if I click on one of those questions, it will take me to the audio snippet of that question.

That is genius. How do you get this? I How do you It's not about how you got this idea, but how did you come up with this approach? In a world where a lot of people are trying to solve this problem and build the YouTube for audio snippets, I personally think you've done it. So how How would you think about how do you come up with this approach?

Honestly, A lot of trial and arrow. I sort of had this vision in mind when I started smash notes, but it took a little bit of experimentation to figure out exactly how it's going to work. And, um, because if you look at the current podcasting tools, a lot of them would taken audio and create a little video out of it. But that video would end up being lost on social media. So you create this bit once shared and it disappears. And I wanted something that would be permitted and something that would leverage your existing work. So I think is a podcast of your time is limited and you don't want to create a lot of different pieces off. Um, no shareable content, but smashing. This allows you to do it all in one place. And so once you've done it, once it lives on forever

and tell me a little bit about it, what it's like for a for a podcaster at the moment, and then maybe once once the product is is a little later stage like a podcasters listening. How does it work on that side? How can they get you know their their podcast on the front page or on the platform? And how old do you think this kind of will? Actually, I'll stop there. Like if a podcast was listening. How can they get involved with, like getting their stuff on here,

right? So right now is by invitation only. So you should. If you want to get your podcast on smash notes, you should reach out to somebody who's already gotten their podcasting smash notes or you can email me my first name, adds MASH notes dot com or feedback at Smash knows dot com. Both will go to me and tell me about your podcasts and what you think it should be on smash notes. And then I'll set you up with an account, which allows you to go in your podcast and basically annotated just the way you see it on smash notes and for reference. You know, people who listening, they should click in through to each episode because the front page creates those little audio summary so you can listen through. If you go to an actual episode just cooking a title of each episode. You'll be able to see that episode its entire transcript, and know these annotations can a side by side with the transcript so you can also read through the whole thing. So if you're a podcaster, you'll see that and you'll be able to just click and right what's important about each segment in your podcast.

And this works really great. If you've just recorded an episode or, you know, if it's still fresh in your mind, you can jump in and just quickly annotate What key pieces off, you know, information you still remember and publish it. And this way people can usually consume it. And and the best part here's we may record, you know, 30 minutes, 60 minutes with you, and not all of it is going to be interesting to everyone at the same time. But segmenting your podcasts like this and highlighting what's important allows you to share these bits with different audiences. So if we talk about smash Nastase podcasting tool right now, we can share with somebody. But if we talk about raising venture funds, we can talk about that and share it with somebody else.

stand it well, something else that e kind of want to hear about is you made this decision to give every single I don't know if the word is snippet, but every like snippet or question from a podcast, its own page. So I'm on smash notes right now, and I in the question, who makes paper for the U. S. Dollar and I can play the audio, and I'm now able to take the your l share this on Twitter or Facebook, and they go straight to this specific question. Is there a reason why you made that? Why you wanted every single question or snippet tohave That's own page or it's on a higher level. How have you thought about distribution? First matched minutes, right? And you hit the nail on the head

because every segment or highlight call it whatever you like. But it's It's structured as a question, because I think when something answers a question, it means it's meaningful to somebody. If we rent for five minutes on audio, that's not necessarily meaningful. It might be entertaining, but it's not meaningful. But if throughout our conversation we can actually answer somebody's question, that piece of information becomes the relevant, meaningful and timely to somebody who has that question so much like, You know, you'll go on core and you'll find an answer to something or Wikipedia. I think I want people to come to smash notes and find those answers to. So if you go, a lot of podcasts there right now are around entrepreneurship and startups and technology. But if you look for certain topics on that,

then you know you'll find people who are successful entrepreneurs, for example, talking about their experiences talking about mental health and fundraising stuff like that. And you can find those questions that you probably have and find the answers. Read the answers. And here those entrepreneurs talk about it. And to me, that's such an important part of discovery that not only can you find the information, you can actually hear the subject matter expert talk about it, right? So it's it's instant validation that it's not just some content on some Balog written by somebody. It's this particular person that you know and respect, and, you know you value their advice. Now you get this content from them, and so that's Ah,

that's why it's structured his questions, but in terms of discovery, same idea that I want you to come to smash knows. But if you're not on smash notes and you say on Google or being or wherever I still want you to find this content, I wanted to be part of your discovery, right? So this way, if you're a podcaster, you can distribute your stuff to Smash knows. But it will also show up on Google, and it was literally not available before before you would record one podcast. You put some show knows that maybe explain what's in it, and that's it. And now you can take one episode and break it down. And 10 2030 different pieces where each piece is stand alone Page is a standalone highlight, and the is in its its own way of getting traction to your podcast.

Yeah, it's ah, you know, as you can tell, as the people listening Comptel, you know, I'm a huge fan of this as a podcaster. I feel like I understand that I understand. I understand that angle that's mash notes is taking the Emmett's extremely Spartan. Also, the name is very sparking something a little bit about the name. Also, if you have a story around how you got the domain, it's a killer domain. Like we love to hear Weiss passionate. I appreciate it, but you know, there's

a lot less genius in this than it appears. And ah, the domain. I actually originally bought it for something else. And, um, it forgot exactly when. But a few years ago, I wanted I want it like an interactive list off tasks to share with my wife. And there was, you know, that that was the idea of for Original Smash knows, like, how can we all take notes and see what we need to do? And by the time I actually get around to build that application, there was already way too many no taking, um,

aps out there. So I missed the boat and decided not to work on it. But I still like the domain. And when smash notes in its original and you know its original version came about, I had a completely different name. I don't even remember what it was for. I think for version 0.1 and that that was a little name off the version, dear points. Where is everyone? I just put her on some random domain and emailed to friends and said, Don't worry about the name. Just come try this And then over time I started talking about the name, the name and what it meant. And we tried a few different domains, like my friends would actually email me with ideas, and eventually none of those resonated with me.

But I remembered I had the smash knows domain, and the more I thought about it was just like, Yeah, you know, Not only are we smashing together notes like textural notes but also audio notes like notes in the musical sense and have made perfect sense to too cold the smash notes. So that's, uh, that's how it became smash notes.

And what does the future look like for smash notes? If you have toe, tell me the vision that you have for what you're working on, you know, 10 years from now, what is smash notes look like? And how they could it get what will be, who will serve with love, to hear the ignition, the vision? I mean,

how big could get? I think his biggest YouTube because what YouTube did is they took very lengthy heart to consume video and turn it into something fun and short and exciting. And that's what I'm trying to do with smash notes for audio. Basically, turn it around to a place where we can consume this little bids out of something long and, you know, challenging. And, uh, in 10 years, I think every day you'll open smash notes and you'll check what what else is new? Their You know, what's what's new from your friends? What's new from the podcast you follow. But it's not going to be like 20 hours of podcasts that you need to get through in the next 30 minute. Drive it. Just be key segments that you can pick from and then decide which one of those who might be listening to in your drive.

So I really wanted to be a your your daily experience. And then besides that, you know, it will distribute Teoh. I mean, it already does. You saw you saw some previews, right? But it ready goes to Twitter, but really will go to Twitter and Slack and Alexa, and maybe like your daily companion with this exciting new information

and it's a very exciting future. You're painting the fact that this could get us because YouTube and who knows even bigger, you know, pod caster on the rise. We'll see what happens. Is there anything that the forward thinking Founders community can do it to help you? Or do you even ask it all for the community that someone listening might be able to help out with? I think my

asked a simple come sign up and let me find awesome podcast for you. But then, as you experience it, send your feedback and I don't mean just, you know, tell me that you like it Like actually tell me anything that comes to your mind. Tell me, you tell me what you want more off, what works and what doesn't because to build anything, you really just need honest feedback that helps you figure out what your users want. So obviously more users help. But then also users who are willing to share and really help me hone in on the best details for them. But otherwise just, you know, come to smash knows, create an account and yell at me daily. Let me know what I can give you more off,

and I'll figure out how to make that happen, because I think it should be a community experience where I create. I mean, I have a vision of what I want to exist. But I also want to make sure that people consuming this get the most out of it as well. And if you know a podcaster that you know your favorite podcaster that you want to see notes for let them know.

All right. Well, you all now have a task. Teoh, find your favorite podcaster. I know you have more than one. I know I'm obviously a top, but whoever else feel free to let them know about smash notes Thank you so much for coming onto the show. I'm really saying about your building on what you could do to the podcast industry and beyond. So best of luck. Moving forward and looking for the staying in touch.

Thanks, Matt. And I'm stoked to see more of your shows. Notes on smash notes.

Okay. Thank you, everyone, for tuning into that episode, I hope you really enjoyed it. And luckily, there's another one coming up real soon. But before then, I have a couple things to tell you first. If you're listening to this and you think you're working on something, who are you? Think you're smart? Hit me up on Twitter. I am at Matt Underscore Sherman. And that is Matt with one t. So hit me up, Shoot me a GM,

and I'm happy to check out what you're working on and maybe we can get you on the part of. But at the very least, I'm happy TV feedback on your product or project or start up. Lastly, if you can please rate this podcast in the iTunes stores, that would be awesome. I'm trying to get up in the rankings and more people discover these awesome founders. And the only way to do that or one of the ways to do that is growing with making. So if you like what you're listening Teoh, please just go onto the 18 story, give it five stars, or for you know, or three. I'm not gonna tell you what to give. We'll just tell whatever I deserve. You should read that with that. I'm signing off. See you next time.