Kirill Zubovsky

A big as YouTube. In 10 years, every day you'll open Smash Notes and you'll check what is new from your favorite podcasters, and your followers. Then, instead of listening to 20 hours of podcasts, you will get the gist in just a few minutes.

Why is every highlight on Smash Notes structured as a question?

First of all, if a question could be asked about a podcast segment, that means someone out there is looking for it, and by providing an answer you are adding value to that person.

Second, each segment on Smash Notes is a stand-alone piece of content that can be indexed and searched for on Google. This gives a podcast tremendous distribution power, many-times beyond traditional podcast players.

The best time to create Smash Notes for your episode is immediately after your episode is published. As a podcast author, you probably know exactly what was the most interesting about your show, and now you can highlight the best bits right away.

Before YouTube, videos had to be downloaded and consumed in big monolithic blocks, but now, pretty much every bit of video content is available in short snippets.

In the same way, every podcast on Smash Notes is chunked, divided in section, with immediately playable audio for each individual section.

Each section is usually a question that was asked on the episode, something that provides immediate value to the listeners.

For podcasters, Smash Notes is a tool to sliced their episodes into little bits that could be interesting to different audiences and then share it with people in both audio and text.

For listeners, its way to experience a lot of different podcasts at the same time without spending hours on end during it.

Being married to your co-founder could be pretty beneficial as no one else around you would support and encourage you as much as they will.

Marketplace business model demands a cheap, repeatable process, where anyone in the marketplace is able to provide more or less equal value, and no supplier has significant power to sway the customers their way. High end labor on the other hand requires one-on-one attention, and customizations.

As a result, marketplaces focus on repeatable volume, charging a small fee of a very large number of transactions.

Meanwhile a custom design agency charges a premium, works with only a few customers, but delivers high quality work.

If the product is something people actually want, they would be willing to pay you for it, sight unseen. Putting up a paywall is a great test to verify whether your product is actually needed.

When Scoutzie team first wanted to experiment with a paid service, Kirill was really unsure if it would work. Meanwhile, Jennifer put up a splash page and asked for money.

Lo and behold, someone paid $5,000 within a day. They sent money before they had any assurances that the product would work because the service was in such demand.

Raise all the money you can get. You never know what happens tomorrow. When your company is early, it's a dark horse, but once you get some traction, there are actual numbers to evaluate, and those numbers might not look so hot. It's better to have more money, even with extra dilution, than to run out of money and to shut down.

Team Scoutzie met with Anthony Armendariz early on in their respective careers, and quickly became friends. At some point, one of the leads acquired through Scoutzie hired Anthony to work on a longer project. In order to take on the new workload, Anthony partnered up with his designer wife Nataly, and from there, Funsize was born.

Before Scoutzie had an upload button, Kirill Zubovsky emailed about 500 designers, said he was building a showcase for mobile design, and asked them to join. A couple of hundred said yes. Designers sent zip files by email and he loaded the files into the database by hand. The bet was mobile, when few designers would touch phones and the web still felt like the safe skill. One designer wrote that Twitter was full of Scoutzie, that he and his wife did only mobile work, and that the portfolios were strong and international, just as Dribbble was starting to show phone design. Zubovsky recruited the users, and saw the demand, before Scoutzie could accept the files on its own.

Automating your work could be helpful if you do it right, and extremely distracting and time consuming if you do not.

Simply automating everything will be taxing on the team and potentially useless for the business. What you want to do instead is to automate from underneath yourself, one bit at a time.

Keep doing what you are normally doing and keep the business going, don't commit to any large changes. But at the same time, start removing pieces of manual work, replacing them with automation, one bit at a time.

This way you can both, automate your work in the long-run, and not miss out on current business by doing too much, too soon.

With Smash Notes, you can repurpose old podcast episodes into new sharable content. Make a few snippets and share them individually, or create highlights for the entire episodes and turn it into an insightful blog post.

Once you turn monolithic audio into moldable text, opportunities to share this text are unbound!

Every Smash Notes segment is a searchable bit, which means an hour long podcast can now be split into dozens individuals searchable queries. For example, you can now find answers to questions like: Why is it important to pay attention to mental health, or How much does a billion dollars change your life?

Previously all this information was hidden deep inside a long audio, and only searchable through transcripts, available to those willing to invest the time. With Smash Notes, you can now find thousands of qu

All the notes are backed up by the original podcast audio. Whenever a Smash Notes looks interesting, you can click to play the audio where the note came from. This way not only can you get relevant and concise information fast, all of the knowledge is backed up by a credible source.

Simply login and find your favorite podcast in search, and start making notes. Eventually, there will be premium paid features for the podcasters to subscribe to, but right now the service is free to use for anyone who would like to help and extend the human knowledge with all the interesting bits hidden inside podcast audio.

Andreessen Horowitz released a report saying there are 700,000 podcasts available and counting. That's roughly 80-years worth of audio. There is lot of work to be done to ensure that all that knowledge is unlocked and available to the world.

Google a lot. Professional developers spend half of their day on Google and Stack Overflow, looking for the same answers they've looked for before. All the answers are already freely available online, but you have to learn enough about code to know what to look for, and how to find it.

At one point after college, Kirill moved to Seattle to get time on his own, without any distractions, to learn how to code. He learned through books, blogs, and just writing a lot of code. At one point, he rented a desk from TeachStreet , a local startup. Whenever he'd run into technical issue, he would ask their lead engineer and get help, which was incredibly useful to resolve issues quickly.

Roberto Gibbons Gomez of The Expeditioners told Geek at Sea that his family lives in a one-bedroom condo in Whistler, which surprises people. For them it is a castle. They had been living in an Airstream and in tents, so they do not need much room. A home, he said, is what you do in the space, not how big it is. The one-bedroom was also the practical choice: staying there covered the rent on a three-bedroom somewhere else. Host Kirill Zubovsky recorded the conversation in that condo and called it one of the happier homes he knew.

Jonathan Sposato told Geek at Sea he bristles at lining up his son Holden's first job, then first and last month's rent, then a down payment. He knows houses cost more than they did in 1989, and he does not look down on parents who give that help. For Holden he wants the satisfaction of having earned it himself, which is what Sposato means by the American Dream. Host Kirill Zubovsky said that after college he moved to Seattle to start a company rather than take a stopgap job at Starbucks, and that he can also see why a parent would help buy a house.