Okay guys you know me, I almost never say anything is for everyone.  Almost never.  I will do so right now though with Fountain.fm.  Why?  Because it is simply the best podcast app on the market.  I don’t care who you listen to, you can likely listen to them on Fountain.fm and get free bitcoin for doing what you do anyway.

Some have called it buggy, it does occasionally not stream you sats or remove some you may have earned as a listener but I think mostly it is simply people not understanding a few things.  I will cover those at the end, first let me tell you everything awesome about it.

For Listeners

1.  Free Sats – again just for listening to your favorite shows
2.  More Free Sats – go to the discover page, you will see promoted content, hosts pay to promote clips, they generally pay really good for your attention.  Plus you discover new podcasts.
3. More Sats – You can make clips of shows you love.  When someone else likes your clip you get 10 sats.  Not the show host YOU GET THEM.  I just gave 10 likes today (100 sats) to a guy that made a clip of TSP I really liked.
4. Meet and Connect – with other podcast fans, follow them and see what they listen to or when they make clips.
5. Find Cool New Content – Go to the discover page and check out the clips that are popular, get a small sample of a show and decide if it is for you.
6. Communicate with Hosts – Go to their show page or any episode, click boost to send them some sats, you can also enter a text message and they will see it in your boostagram.  I am going to start taking questions in live steams this way.
7. Stream Sats to Hosts – Pull up an episode, click the lightning bolt, enter the amount of sats per minute and start streaming sats to your favorite host while you listen.
8. Super Easy Onboarding – If the stuff above sounds to technical or something like that, do not worry!  It is all super easy.  And when you are sending 100 sats it is only like 2 cents so just play with it and learn from it.
9. A More Private Form of Bitcoin – Okay you won’t get rich as a listener and clip maker but the BTC you get is all in lightning form, Fountain.fm doesn’t take any documentation, it is just an app.  When you withdraw to a wallet like Wallet of Satoshi, you can then send on chain to a hardware wall at some point.  Is it like a try privacy coin, no but it is the best kind of bitcoin the kind you earn.

For Podcasters

1. Easy Onboarding – When I first set up my show for streaming sats it was kind of complicated to do.  If you already did this you will need to undo it so you can claim your show on Fountain.  But that is literally find your show, click the lightning bolt, enter your email, receive a link, click and done.  You can now get sats from your fans.
2. Easy Splits – I give my web admin 20% of all sats streamed and boosted to TSPC.  I just found him in Fountain, went to my show, clicked the three little dots at the top of the app, select manage splits and put in his name, set the precent and done.  If you have a team you do splits to your team.  Have a big time guest you can split all sats sent for that episode only with your guest, etc.
3. The Latest Cutting Edge Tech – If you are a pro podcaster (earn your living with your show) you literally NEED this.  Fountain opens up so many things and what kills a business is apathy.  New competitors use the latest tech, you need to as well, and this is it.
4. Clips are Amazing for Marketing – You can make clips of your show, you can download video versions of them even if your show is just audio.  And drop say 5 clips of an episode into a YouTube playlist.  Here is an example from a recent episode of Bitcoin Breakout – Guy Swann – Top Clips You can also upload them to say twitter as one offs, etc.  What you can do with the clips is ENDLESS.  The best clips though are made by your fans.  They know what they want to hear.  Use those clips your fans make, they are gold.
5. Reward Your Fans – I don’t send sats to every single clip that people make but when I really like one I send 100 sats, sometimes more.  All you do is like a clip and 10 sats go to the fan, you have to have some of course.  But use Fountain and you will have plenty.  They are doing a marketing function for you, so throwing them some sats for doing it is totally warranted.  And think about how that builds your relationship with them! Clips are so powerful I am coming up with a contest I am going to run just to get my listeners doing it more.
6. Promote Your Show Cheap – So I made a clip I thought people would like for The Bitcoin Breakout.  I then paid fountain 50 bucks to feature it on the Discover Page.  I am getting tons of new people checking out the show and my cost per listen is about 3 cents.  Compare this to Pay Per Click with Adwords!

There is more but that is enough for this article.  Now lets talk about some things I think people call “buggy” that are more likely getting past a learning curve.

1. Trouble Finding a Podcast – My wife had this issue.  There are two places to search for content.  The “Discover” Screen.  There you find clips, people, playlists and hash tags.  Not full episodes and not shows.  The other place is the “Podcasts” screen, there you search and find shows and episodes.
2. Not Getting Sats – Many times you simply have hit your daily limit.  I really think Fountain should add some sort of a link to their excellent FAQs in the app.  It would fix a lot of issues.  Says there is a daily cap right in it.  The other issue is you get sats listening to episodes or promoted clips, not all clips.
3. Can’t Withdraw My Sats – New users have to use the app a while before they can withdraw.  Fountain does not say how long or what parameters they use to see that a user is not a bot, I don’t blame them.  Suffice to say in about a week my withdrawals opened.  The amount you will have unless you fund your wallet from outside in the first week or two is so low it really isn’t worth worrying about.
4. Withdrawals are Confusing – It can be counter intuitive if you’ve used bitcoin a long time.  Because you send to receive.  When you withdraw you go to Wallet, hit the three little dots next to the word wallet, select an amount to withdraw.  It will generate a code you can copy or scan.  You go to the wallet you want to withdraw from, click send and enter that.  And that wallet receives the sats.  Do this once and it will make sense.

In the end, this is the future of podcasting.  Built in marketing, listener relationship management, advertising and monetization.  It is simply podcasting done better for both listeners and hosts.  If you are not already using, I can only say, go get it at Fountain.fm right now.

* If you want to follow me on Fountain, my profile is https://www.fountain.fm/jackspirko

P.S. – As the guys at Fountain are really busy but approachable and may actually read this, I figured I would add a few features I would like to see added.

1. Pay People to Make Clips – I can sort of do this, but it would be cool if I could deposit some sats and say some users are pre approved as “Clip Makers” or something like that.  The better the job they do the more I’d pay them.  Not sure my idea is the best way to go here but there is something here and it should be explored.
2. Daily Limit Notice – I don’t need this but if I were Fountain I would do it just to avoid new folks thinking there is a problem.  At the top of a clip when you are listening it says “Earning” and a sat counter shows you they are coming in.   When you cap it just keeps spinning but the number doesn’t go up.  If it just said something like “Daily Limit Reached” it would be really clear to people what’s going on.  The best customer service is done by stoping the problem preemptively.
3. A Messenger of Some Sort – Fans send me boosts with nice messages on them.  Most are not for the air just hey man thanks for what you do.  I’d like a way to acknowledge them.  Something just like, hey man, thanks.  Perhaps Fountain could charge a couple sats per message so it is not over used.  In the end though Fountain may eat messaging apps to.  This is an open source world they don’t need to dev a messenger that does this, just integrate one.  Several exist already. Say you take something like Cups Messenger and plug it in to Fountain.  Let that sink in.

* Editors Note – On my 4th feature it exists it is just hard to find.  As long as a person has boosted an individual episode not the show.  You go to that episode, you should see “show notes” and “boosts”.  If you go into boosts for that episode you can reply to boostagrams.  You can set sats so I image they go back to your booster.  I am not sure about that yet.  But the ability to respond to episode boosts does exist.