Alitu and The Podcast Host Have a New Home

A decade and a half. Sheesh. That's how long I've been at this podcasting caper…

What a 15 years though! I'm so ridiculously lucky to have spent it in what's got to be one of the most creative, generous, downright human industries going. So, I want to start with a thank you. To everyone who's been part of this ride - every reader, listener, viewer, customer, student, chat partner, and email exchange. You've made it a proper joy!

It started, like it does for a lot of folk, with listening.

I stumbled onto my first shows a few years after podcasting launched. Boagworld and Internet Business Mastery really stick in my mind, because they pretty much cracked open my brain to a whole new way of thinking about work, and about building something of your own.

Later, the creative side sucked me in even more. Audio drama, storytelling, the sheer range of what people were doing with a microphone and a bit (or a lot!) of imagination. It started with We're Alive, Aftermath and Edict Zero, and moved on to the Bright Sessions, Girl in Space, Limetown, Tin Can, A Scottish Podcast, and so many more!

Early in that journey, and inspiring a lot of it, was my first chance encounter with Matthew in Birmingham, at UKPOD14, (thanks, Izabela and Mike! 🙏). Somehow, that meeting and the support that came from it gave me the confidence to start an actual company around my 4-year-old hobby blog, thePodcastHost.com.

I had started The Podcast Host as an actual hosting company. I hosted a few dozen shows through 2010 to about 2014, but (stupidly..? 😆) gave that up just to write about the medium instead.

Through the 2nd half of the 2010s we threw ourselves at it. Education, coaching, teaching. Hundreds of articles, courses, and workshops, and I went to every event I could possibly get myself to.

Podcast Movement and Podfest were the big ones for our industry. But I also went to Social Media Marketing World, Inbound, Problogger and more. Then, more recently, The Podcast Show in London.

I met so many brilliant, outrageously passionate people along the way, and every one of those conversations was just another tick in the box that this industry is something special.

The Podcast Host grew (to my constant disbelief 😅) into one of the most-read podcasting education sites on the planet. At one point, we were reaching 2 million visitors every year, all just trying to figure out how to start and grow a show!

It was so much fun talking to those folks, finding out their struggles, their pain points, their aspirations. Every blog post, episode and video we made was inspired by a comment or a question thrown at us by one of our amazing audience.

But one question always rose above the rest, over, and over, and over again:

How do I edit my podcast?

Or more specifically, "How do I make it easier?" "How do I make it take less time?!" "How do I actually get this damn thing published, week in, week out, without taking over my life?" 😂

It's become easier over the years thanks to software designed just for podcasters. But it's still one of the hardest parts of podcasting. It stops people from starting. It makes people quit.

That's where the idea for Alitu came from...

When we started, the only podcasting option was traditional audio engineering DAWs. So, what if we made something just for podcasters?

Another chance meeting - this time a great young dev called Bran in Aberdeen - gave me the opportunity to turn that into something real.

So we went out and started building it to solve that one specific, painful problem. To take editing, to automate as much of it as we could, and to help with the rest.

Then, as the years went on, we grew the team, and we added more.

Audio cleanup. Call recording. Episode building. Hosting. Transcripts.

Bit by bit, we tried to take every awkward, intimidating step in the process and just... make it easy.

The goal was always the same: get more voices out into the world, with less friction. Since then, we've helped tens of thousands of people do exactly that.

It makes me grin to think about it. I'm genuinely, properly proud of what we all built as a team.

What's Changing?

So, the news. A couple of months ago, Alitu and The Podcast Host were acquired by Rocketable, a software company backed by Y Combinator.

The transition is now complete, and both products are in their hands.

Our team has been part of that transition, too, of course. A part of our team have stayed on to work alongside the Rocketable team for a stretch to help things land, but, sadly, some redundancies were necessary as part of joining a new company. That was the most difficult part of the process by a long, long way, and was really hard to go through. We had such a brilliant group of people, so I just know we'll see some amazing things from them in the months and years to come.

Why now, after all this time?

One part is that the podcasting tools space has shifted massively over the last few years. Competition's ramped up, AI has rewritten what's possible practically overnight, and I started to think that sustaining and growing what we had built needed a new level of investment and infrastructure.

So, raise funding again? Try to continue it alone with what we already have? Or look around to see if we could work with someone new?

In amongst that, Rocketable reached out to us by chance, and we started having a conversation. If we were going to pass on the baton, then finding the right home for our content, our product, and for our audience who use both was the priority. I'm confident Rocketable is that home.

Rocketable are leaning heavily into the approach of using AI to empower software products. That might raise an eyebrow or two in our community, which, quite rightly, puts a huge amount of value on the human side of what we do.

So it's worth being clear about what this actually means in practice. It certainly doesn’t mean thousands of auto-produced AI slop episodes, as we’ve seen from some new companies in our industry.

Instead, it means empowering us perfectly imperfect humans to create more easily, with higher quality, more quickly.  The product roadmap, the commitment to podcasters, the focus on making podcasting accessible to anyone who's got something to say. All of that stays.

Worth bringing in Alan, the CEO of Rocketable, to tell you more about this himself. Here's a bit about their plans and what it means for Alitu. 

Hi! I'm Alan Wells, Alitu's new general manager and the founder of Rocketable.

My personal connection with podcasting goes back more than 20 years. Always an Apple maniac when I was growing up, my iPod was my most treasured possession. I remember the days when listening to a podcast meant manually downloading an MP3 file from a website (thanks Audible!) or figuring out how to capture a streaming file (I see you, fellow RealAudio users!) and transcoding it so I could listen on my iPod.

Working at Apple Retail in 2003, I had the good fortune to be attending a training program at Apple HQ in Cupertino on the day the iTunes Music Store was first announced. While it would still be a few more years before downloading a podcast became as easy as downloading a song on iTunes, that inflection point in the distribution of audio content still stands out in my mind.

Fast forward a few decades, and it's incredible to see what the podcasting industry has become. For me personally, podcasts are the main way that I listen to news, learn new things, and hear different perspectives. Overcast tells me I listened to 259 hours of podcasts last year, with more than 150 in my feed (might be time to prune a few of those).

With this history in mind, perhaps it's not surprising that when Colin and I first met and started talking about the future of Alitu & The Podcast Host, the chance to contribute to the industry was immediately exciting to me. I believe that podcasts are, and will continue to be, one of the most important parts of modern media and culture, and I'm looking forward to playing a part in that future.

To address the concerns that often come with a change in ownership, here's what Alitu customers can expect from us going forward:

Continued investment in the Alitu product. We have major new features on the way (video editing is now available for beta testing - contact us through the support chat if you'd like to join the beta test group).

Faster resolution of customer support issues. Already in the first 6 weeks of Rocketable's ownership of Alitu, the time to resolve a support issue has decreased by 40%. 

Increased focus on product reliability and faster response to feature requests and customer feedback. We're investing heavily in better quality assurance procedures and faster feedback loops so that we can accelerate the pace of product improvements while also improving reliability and stability.

On the surface, the plans above might seem inconsistent with an AI-assisted operating strategy. But for me, these are the tangible results that we're committed to delivering with Rocketable's vision for what AI makes possible when thoughtfully applied: best-in-class operations, product quality, and great customer experience (not AI slop).

If you have questions or concerns about Alitu's transition to Rocketable, feel free to reach out to us through the in-app chat.

A Big Thanks. Again!

Not to get too soppy, but I've been working on this a long time, I can’t help it. I’ve loved every minute of that time! Well, alright, almost every minute... There were plenty of late-night editing sessions, software glitch missions, and “what if…” 3 am wakeups that I could probably have done without 😆

But building something that's helped people share their voice with the world has been the most rewarding work of my life. And this group of people, this podcasting community, is full of the most supportive, creative, generous folk I've ever had the pleasure of working with.

I’ve got friends here, now, that I’m sure I’ll know for life. 

And our team... I can’t imagine working with another group like this as long as I live. Thanks to all of you who wrote with us, recorded with us, coded with us, designed with us, marketed with us, taught with us, had fun with us all. The best group of folks a guy could ever have the privilege of building something with. Thankyou 🙏 

For what’s next, I don't plan to leave this glorious world that is podcasting 😆 But I’m not sure at this stage what comes next. Always open to ideas, so please do reach out. And I’ll still see you all at the Podcast Show in London in May!

In the meantime, if you've got questions about the transition itself, the Rocketable team is ready to help. Pop them a message on the Alitu in-app chat.

Thank you all for fifteen brilliant years. Here’s to the humble podcast 🍻