Podscan

What they built

Podscan transcribes podcasts in near real time and lets you set alerts for any keyword, brand, competitor, or name mentioned across hundreds of thousands of shows. If someone mentions your product on a podcast, Podscan tells you. It is a media monitoring tool for a medium that was previously almost impossible to search. Arvid Kahl (@arvidkahl) runs it solo, powered by a large transcription pipeline and, more recently, AI features built on top of embeddings and language models.

How they did it

Kahl is not a first-timer. He and his co-founder built FeedbackPanda, an education SaaS, and sold it in 2019, a story he turned into two well-known books, The Embedded Entrepreneur and Zero to Sold. Podscan is his solo follow-up, and he has treated it as a public teaching case from day one. He posts revenue screenshots, technical decisions, pricing experiments, and the boring middle of the journey where growth is slow. His audience on X and his newsletter, The Bootstrapped Founder, are both distribution and accountability.

The milestone he framed most clearly was hitting $10k MRR after three years of steady work.

The numbers

• $10k MRR for Podscan reached three years in, stated directly on X in November 2025. source
• Built and run solo, monetized as a monthly subscription with API access on top.
• Prior exit: co-founded and sold FeedbackPanda in 2019, then wrote two books on the bootstrapped founder path.

Podscan is a reminder that $10k a month is not an overnight number. Kahl's point is that the three years of grind are what make it durable rather than a spike, and building in public is how he keeps going through the slow part.