Apple Podcasts Startups

9 Minute Morning Routine is a daily podcast created by Shaan and producer Ishan designed to help listeners start their day relaxed, calm, and focused. The show launched with distribution on Apple Podcasts and was announced alongside discussion of timely current events, positioning itself as a wellness-focused audio content product.

Anchor was a podcast hosting and creation platform founded by Mike McNamara and Nir Zicherman that evolved from a voice messaging app (Anchor 1.0) to a podcasting tool (Anchor 2.0) and finally to a distribution-focused platform (Anchor 3.0). Acquired by Spotify, Anchor now powers over 75% of all new podcasts created globally by making podcast creation and distribution frictionless. The company's success came from relentless focus on reducing friction for creators, willingness to pivot when data and intuition aligned, and an unscalable but effective early strategy of using interns to manually submit podcasts to Apple Podcasts.