How lessons from Chinese apps helped this CEO build a global podcasting app

When Renee Wang set her sights on working for Google, she quit her job at a startup and spent the next eight months preparing for interviews and submitting multiple resumes in the hopes that it would increase her chances of landing job interviews with the search engine giant.

So when Wang quit after just four years at Google, sold her apartment in Beijing, and invested her savings to create podcasting app Castbox, her friends thought she was crazy to give up a job that paid well and had allowed her to live in Japan and Ireland.

“I learned a lot from the people at Google, and I enjoyed it, but after a while I wanted to move out of that comfort zone, to challenge myself in a new life situation,” said 32-year old Wang, chief executive and co-founder of Castbox, in an interview.

Wang Xiaoyu / Photo credit: Castbox

The kind of determination Wang displayed in giving up a well-paying job is perhaps indicative of the go-getter, driven personality that has helped her build Castbox – a podcast platform that is a one-stop shop for searching, creating, and listening to podcasts. Today, Castbox has 28 million users across 175 countries, supporting some 70 languages. In comparison, popular US-based podcast platform player Stitcher has over 12 million downloads.

Wang studied psychology at Beijing’s prestigious Peking University and taught herself programming and coding in university after she realized she had a knack for it while helping her then-boyfriend with a coding assignment. That led to a career in the technology industry: she started a small firm creating Android game apps that brought in advertising revenue and later set her sights on working for Google.

An avid listener to podcasts and audio content, Wang first became inspired to create Castbox in 2016 when she realized that unlike Apple, there wasn’t yet a dedicated app for Android smartphone users to listen to podcasts despite the growing market for podcasts.

She quit Google and founded Castbox with two others, making it an aggregator for podcasts on the internet, meaning that users could search for their favorite podcasts to listen to with just one app. Later, Castbox expanded into a one-stop shop for content creators to record, edit, and even publish podcasts directly from the Castbox app.

The podcasting industry was already a burgeoning business in 2016, and the growing number of listeners and podcasts in the US market, coupled with the lack of integrated podcast platforms, allowed Castbox to fill a market gap.

The company drew on features popular in Chinese social apps, such as a community aspect that allows users to discuss podcast episodes in a comments section as well as an in-audio search function.

Learning from popular Chinese apps and the kinds of features that Chinese users prefer, as well as the ability to iterate quickly and improve on the app, has been key to Castbox’s success, Wang said.

The community aspect, for example, came about because she realized that in the West every part of the listening journey was still very disparate. For example, users who listened to a new podcast episode and wanted to discuss it often head over to Reddit – a separate website altogether to seek out relevant threads for discussion.

In contrast, Chinese apps tend to integrate the social aspect directly into their platforms, to keep user engagement high and increase the amount of time spent in-app.

But rival podcast apps that are popular in the US lack this community function. This is primarily because consumers in the US are used to being extremely vertical, said Wang.