Starting today, Product Hunt has a new section to help people find new podcasts to listen to, in addition to hosting podcaster live chats.
The section works sort of like the traditional Product Hunt for apps and tech, or the more recent games, books, and "live" (kind of like an AMA) section. Community members can recommend shows and episodes they like, and they can upvote other peoples' suggestions. The recent books section launched with a fairly tech bro-y lineup of authors for the live chats. Based on a look at the beta version of the podcast section, the community podcasts selections appear to go the same way ('casts about startups and tech dominate), but of course, that can change.
Erik Torenberg, a founding team member of Product Hunt, told BuzzFeed News that "the community will be able to post new episodes (not just shows), listen to them directly from the site, create collections of their favorite shows, and discuss them with other fans and the podcast hosts themselves."
Podcasts have been exploding in popularity in the last year, but it's notoriously tricky to discover new ones – people want to know if their friends recommend a good new podcast, but they don't tend to, say, post podcast episodes to their Facebook page. [Full disclosure: I host a podcast with BuzzFeed called Internet Explorer, you should totally check out out.] In this way, something that is specifically designed for community-suggested discovery like Product Hunt could work really well with podcasts.
Product Hunt will also have live ask-me-anything-style chats with podcasters, kicking it off with Alex Blumberg and Matthew Lieber of Gimlet, which puts out Reply All, Start-Up, and Mystery Show. Ann Friedman, host of Call Your Girlfriend did a live chat yesterday, and her co-host Aminatou Sow will also be doing an upcoming chat. Other upcoming chats include the hosts of Reply All, Manoush Zomorodi of Note to Self and Ophira Eisenberg of The Moth.
