An $11 app turned podcasts into a clip stream and got 1.1 million views
Built during jet lag in Paris, it skips full episodes and plays segments on a topic, one after another.
This Week in Startups · Jason turned $11 and one tweet into 1.1M views | E2311Jason Calacanis, the startup founder and investor, was jet lagged in Paris with his family when he started staring at his podcast app and wishing it worked differently.
He did not want another list of shows. He wanted the good parts, cut out and lined up for him. So he opened two artificial intelligence tools, Perplexity Computer, which runs the coding task, and Grok 4.5, which wrote the software, and told them to build it.
What came back was Pod Me, a simple app that cost him $11 to make. It scans the top 25 podcasts, a list he has since expanded to about 75, reads the timestamps that podcasters now publish for each episode, and reorganizes the shows by topic instead of by title. Press play on what he calls the deep link stream, and it jumps straight to each relevant segment, one after another.
In his demo, he pulled segments about China and let the app play them back to back. The post where he shared the experiment has now drawn 1.1 million views. He called the approach "incredibly tactile and practical," built for himself and shared as he built it while asking people for feedback.
People replied to ask if they could use it. He said no. "I don't want to support this product," he said. "I made an $11 podcast product for myself."
What interested him more was what the app could become. He imagined a next feature that would stitch those clips together and export them as a single audio file, with a short voice break between each one. Instead of hunting through feeds, Calacanis said, a listener could head into a meeting with a 50 minute condensed file of the best thinking "from every podcast in the world."
That file would also help with discovery, he said. Every condensed stream would likely surface one or two shows the listener had never heard, like hearing a sharp comment and deciding to go check out that host's full show. Years earlier, he had backed a startup named Swell that tried something similar, and Apple bought it about seven or eight years ago.
Questions people ask
Can I download or use Pod Me?
Not right now. Calacanis said he built it for himself and does not want to support it as a public product, so there is no app store download or signup. The value for him was solving his own listening problem and sharing the building process.
How does the deep link stream actually work?
Most major podcasts now publish chapter markers with timestamps for each topic. Pod Me reads those markers across dozens of shows, matches them to a subject like China, and then plays each marked section in sequence using links that start playback at that exact moment.
What would the MP3 export feature do?
It would take the separate clips and combine them into one continuous audio file, with a spoken cue such as “next up” between segments. That would let someone listen offline, in the car or before a meeting, without keeping the experimental app open.