Radio Talk Show Hosts – The wrong market

In the early days of TalkShoe, as with many companies, we knew we had developed a unique and different product (live interactive voice communications using the Internet). What we didn’t know was exactly which application(s) would be the most effective targets. Whenever we talked to people about the service, we got an earful of suggestions for possible applications: book clubs, fan clubs, voice bulletin boards, voice chatting, podcasting, conference calls, talk shows, training, seminars, and a host of others. One thing we did know what that going after all these applications at once would be impossible and illadvised.

1-year Anniversary of Leo Laporte using TalkShoe

It’s our 1-year anniversary of Leo Laporte using TalkShoe, and time to reminisce…

It was back in October 2006 when Leo Laporte of TWiT-TV first told us that he was planning to use TalkShoe. Leo, for those of you who don’t know, is the #1 podcaster in the world by most measures. We had a couple of weeks to prepare, and we had no idea what kind of traffic Leo would generate, and what part of our system would break. At that time, we didn’t (we do now) for example have anyway to heavily load-test our system.

The BIG day came on November 5, 2006 when Leo and Amber (MacArthur) first went live with their net @ nite (http://www.twit.tv/natn) Talkcast (previously called Inside the Net). The whole company (all 10 of us) came into the office on that Sunday night, as we prepared for the 9:00 pm live Talkcast. We all popped open some beer, and as the time approached, we could see from our traffic reports that TalkShoe’s system was “heating up.” Web traffic jumped starting about 15 minutes before the show, along with telephone traffic.