Bullet launches an app to “screenshot podcasts”.

Adelaide SA, Australia—Bullet is an app for podcast listeners to share captioned video snippets of podcasts from any podcast app. Sharing a podcast is difficult as audio is hard for a recipient to immediately consume. Bullet enables anyone to get their friends to that “ah-ha moment” of a podcast by snipping up to a 30-second segment it and sharing the snippet with their friends as a captioned video. Bullet has launched for free on the App Store and achieved the number one product of the day on Product Hunt on June 2nd 2019.

The idea for Bullet came about from the company’s previously failed product. Initially, Bullet was an app to remotely create micro-podcasts using voice messaging (like early Anchor). Ben promoted these micro-podcasts by manually creating captioned video snippets of it using iMovie, which ended up getting traction on Twitter. The idea for micro podcasting ultimately failed, but Bullet decided to pivot and focus on making podcasts more “skimmable”.

Unlike snippeting features from other niche podcast apps, Bullet generates captions on the video for people to skim over instead of mere audio over a static image. Furthermore, Bullet is not proprietary to any particular podcast app and works on top of almost any iOS podcast app (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, PocketCast etc.). This is important as 62.5% of podcast usage happens on Apple Podcast, 9.5% of usage happens on Spotify and the rest of the pie is split between niche podcast apps.

As podcast listening rapidly grows, the main beneficiaries of the podcasting industry are still highly concentrated at the top. According to Andreessen Horowitz’s 68-page analysis on the podcasting industry, the top 1% of podcasts get 2825% more downloads than the median downloads per podcast (35000 / 124). This concentration is because alternative podcasts are hard to discover, as it is hard for listeners to quickly sample parts of podcasts to determine if they enjoy it.

“People quickly skim over news articles, tweets and Facebook posts to determine if they want to continue reading. There is no easy way to do the same for podcasts, this is why new podcasts are so hard to discover. We want to change that.” ​- Benjamin Lim, CEO of Bullet

The team consist of Benjamin Lim (CEO) and Aron Lebani (CTO), both who are based in Adelaide, Australia. Both members are programmers and met at the University of Adelaide’s incubator ‘ThincLab’. Bullet has raised around $80K USD from Startmate (Blackbird VC’s accelerator) and various angels.