In 2016 I had an idea for a product I thought had some legs.

Podcasting had a ton of momentum but all the hosting platforms at the time had the same flaw: the free websites they provided were awful. The design was out of date and the marketing framework for SEO, email, etc. was even worse. The opportunity I saw was found in the fact that virtually all the content you need for a podcast’s website is found in their RSS feed. The value prop that kept running through my head was:

Create a beautiful website for your podcast in seconds.

The name I gave it was PodSpace and the more I researched it, the more it made sense.

Now, I love to build stuff but I’m also a believer in getting market feedback as early as possible. If I’m headed for a dead end, I’d like to know that next week not next year. So over a couple of weeks I built a simple v1.0 that allowed you to input any RSS feed URL, hit enter, and magically have a slick website with additional features the podcast hosting providers lacked.

I then spent an evening emailing that first version to a handful of podcasting experts I followed to get their take.

The first reply I got was an apology for not having time to take a closer look (they were planning a wedding), a couple other people said they were okay with the designs the podcast hosts provided, but the next day someone replied with this line that I’ve copied and pasted from that email:

“In the past nine years of doing podcast consulting, full-time, I haven’t had anyone who was looking for a service like this.”

Responses like this are the exact reason I do discovery. I want to know what flaws others see, I want to have people poke holes in my enthusiasm, I want to have my ideas tested. We went back and forth with a few more emails, but he was sure that if people didn’t like what they were getting with Podbean, Libsyn, etc, they’d just take the time to build a website from scratch using WordPress or a full builder.

I wasn’t convinced and kept seeing signs in the market that there was demand for something like this, but I also didn’t have the experience he did.

So, eventually, I shelved it.

Fast forward nearly 9 years and I’m scrolling Instagram when I see an ad with a familiar headline:

Instantly build a website for your podcast.

With flashbacks to that project now a decade in the rearview, I clicked to see how close it was to what I’d imagined. The service, Podpage, worked just like my proof of concept. Enter your RSS feed, hit enter, and they’ll generate a beautiful website for your pod with nothing but the content from your feed. Thinking back to that conversation, I wondered how successful they were. Was my instinct solid or was that expert right all along?

I’d missed it when I first landed on their site, but once I clicked their logo again I saw it.

Listen, I’m not saying that if I’d stuck with it I’d have just as many users as Podpage does today – their level of design and UI is far beyond what I was prepared to deliver in 2016 – but it’s fascinating to realize that I saw something the experts didn’t. That I was on the right track.

Sometimes, yeah, I need to pay attention to the red flags. But sometimes? Sometimes the confident voices are wrong and maybe I need to trust myself – and my data – a little bit more.

It’s funny how I can only see my foresight in hindsight.