New York-based startup Supermix is harnessing artificial intelligence to help podcast creators quickly scale and promote their content and expose them to a wider audience.
Through its AI tools, Supermix can convert a 1-hour audio podcast into 10 bite-sized videos containing the bits of the conversation most likely to be picked up by social media algorithms, which will expand the podcast’s reach and draw more people to be interested in listening to the entire thing.
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The startup was founded by two up-and-coming entrepreneurs from New Zealand, Xavier English and Zac. It began when English’s sister met Zac while studying at a top US university. She later introduced the two, and they quickly got along and began sharing business ideas, before they moved to the US to pursue their startup dream.
The company’s AI tools have their roots in the ‘Something Good’ project, a precursor to Supermix that attempted to streamline the search for new movies by scaling movie trailers to a shorter, more browsable form. Whilst that project struggled with aspects of its implementation, the young entrepreneurs were undeterred and pivoted the technology into the podcasting space, leading to the current iteration of Supermix.
“I’ve always marveled at the podcast’s ability to put the listener in the room for conversations with extraordinary people, that they would never normally be party to, but finding your perfect podcast isn’t as easy as it should be. With our tools barriers are removed for podcast creation and visibility, helping to eradicate this problem.” Says cofounder Xavier English.
According to English, while Supermix is focused on using AI to help podcast creators scale their content, it does not “take the person out” of the process, which is an often-repeated point by AI skeptics.
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“On one extreme, there’s small podcast agencies that do everything manually, which is inefficient in terms of time, effort, and resources. On the other side, is the pure AI tool, where there are no editors involved. While AI has indeed advanced by leaps and bounds, it is not perfect, and there is still no substitute to human creativity. That’s why we want to position ourselves in the middle of the scale, where we use AI to speed things up but rely on the human brain to do what AI can’t. We believe in integrating the two and staying nimble enough to keep up with technological development,”
English says that “Supermix will help further grow the popularity of podcasting, as it will lower the barrier to entry and encourage more people to give it a try. One of Supermix’s clients started a podcast and, within 10 days, the clips from the podcast had gathered more than 980,000 views on social media, which was then converted into over 20,000 followers.”
“Look at how many radio hosts are still active, as well as the number of radio listeners that have yet to get into podcasts. This proves that podcasting still has room for growth. So many people have awesome things to say and they have amazing conversations with their friends over an extremely diverse range of topics. But they don’t have podcasts, because they’re under the impression that they’re too hard to start. We let people scale their creativity easily by supercharging their content. We tell them that podcasting is all about having interesting conversations, and they shouldn’t be bogged down with the other stuff. All you need to do is record, and we’ll do the rest.”
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