New embed player ships | Sep 1

Elena Reyes: Okay. The embed player is live across every public listening surface Mato touches as of this morning. Blake: No preamble, huh? Elena Reyes: No, straight to it. This is Made on Mato, our weekly change log. I'm Elena. Blake: I'm Blake. And yes, before anyone asks, this show is put together with AI. We've said it. Moving on. Elena Reyes: Moving on. But this one's the headline for a reason. Publishers have been asking for it for a while. Blake: Some of them louder than others. Elena Reyes: You have no idea how many messages we get about this exact thing. Blake: I read the inbox too, Elena. I have some idea. Elena Reyes: Sure. But it's not just the player. There's a rollback buried in this change log too. Blake: Wait, something got rolled back? Elena Reyes: Later. And there's a design decision this week I genuinely don't agree with. Blake: Oh, we're doing that today? Elena Reyes: We're doing that today. Blake: Alright. But first, the actual thing that shipped. Elena Reyes: Right. Who asked for it, what it replaced, what broke getting there. Blake: Lets start there. Elena Reyes: Okay, so the change log entry from August 31st. The whole thing basically centers on this redesigned embed player, and it's live everywhere Matos publishes publicly now. Blake: Every surface? Not just the show pages? Elena Reyes: Every surface. Episode pages, show pages, wherever a publisher drops the code. Blake: Alright. Walk me through what actually changed, because redesigned player could mean anything. Elena Reyes: Right. So there's a separate blog post from a couple days before the change log, August 29th, and it lays out four things. Responsive layouts, so it resizes depending on where you stick it. Blake: Makes sense. Elena Reyes: Cover-aware color. It pulls a palette off the show art instead of some default blue. Blake: Oh, so no more every embed looking like the same template. Elena Reyes: Exactly. Light and dark themes, obviously. And copy-ready code for both episodes and full shows. Blake: Copy-ready meaning what? You paste one snippet and it just works. Elena Reyes: That's the idea, yeah. No fiddling with dimensions. Blake: Hmm. So what was wrong with the old one that this fixes? Because they don't say. Elena Reyes: They really don't. It's not in the post at all. Blake: I'll guess. The old embed probably didn't match the show's branding, right? Every publisher's got their own colors, and if the player's just stuck on gray forever. Elena Reyes: That's my read too. But it's a guess. Maybe it was also just clunky on mobile. We genuinely don't know. They didn't say why, just what. Blake: Could also be a licensing thing. Some component they were using got deprecated. Happens all the time. Elena Reyes: Sure. Could be that too. Point is, nobody's confirmed it, so I'm not gonna pretend we know. Blake: Fair. Still, if I'm a publisher, cover-aware color is the part I actually care about. Elena Reyes: Because it looks like your show and not a generic box. Blake: Right. That's the difference between something you're embarrassed to link and something you're proud to put on your homepage. Elena Reyes: Embarrassed is strong. Blake: I've seen some embeds, Elena. I stand by it. Elena Reyes: Fair enough. Blake: What about a show with genuinely ugly cover art, though? Does cover-aware color save them or just match ugly to ugly? Elena Reyes: That's a great question the blog post absolutely doesn't answer. My guess is it just pulls the dominant color, good or bad. So if your art's ugly, you get an ugly toned player. Blake: So it's not a design fix, it's a mirror. Elena Reyes: Right. Mirror, not fix. Blake: Okay. So light and dark themes, cover-aware color, responsive copy, paste code. That's the whole player. Elena Reyes: That's the player. That's the headline item in this change log. Blake: But it's not the only thing in that entry, is it? Elena Reyes: No. There's more packed into the same release. There's a browser-only guest brief builder in there. Blake: Wait, for real? That's a different animal entirely from a player redesign. Elena Reyes: Totally different. Yeah, they just shipped it in the same batch. And there's some workflow clip stuff too. Blake: Okay. Now I want to know who actually asked for the guest brief thing, because that's not a design ask, that's an operations ask. Elena Reyes: Right. That's a whole different kind of feature. Let's get into that one properly. Blake: Yeah. And there's supposedly something in here about scripted episodes getting rolled back too? Elena Reyes: There is. Recovery Net, they're calling it. We'll get to that. Okay, so that's the headline. But you said this change log had something for anyone who books guests. guests. Blake: Right. Same entry, same week. There's a guest brief builder now. Elena Reyes: Wait, browser only? Like no app? Blake: Yep. Runs right in the browser. You build the brief for whoever you're interviewing without downloading anything. Elena Reyes: That's actually huge for me. I've been doing that in a shared doc. Blake: A shared doc that three people forget to update. Elena Reyes: Every time. So this replaces that mess? Blake: That's the idea. One place in the browser. Done. Elena Reyes: How much time is that actually saving, though? Like shared doc versus browser tool. Is that an hour or five minutes? Blake: The change log doesn't put a number on it. My guess is it's less about total hours and more about the doc not getting lost between three people. Elena Reyes: That tracks. Less faster, more doesn't disappear. Blake: Exactly. Elena Reyes: Okay, what else is in there? Blake: Three workflow clips. Elena Reyes: Three specific clips or just some clips? Blake: The post says three. Doesn't say what they cover. Elena Reyes: Hmm. My guess is booking, prep, publish. That's the whole guest pipeline right there. Blake: Could be. We're guessing, though. They didn't spell it out. Elena Reyes: Fair. What's the last piece? Blake: Targeted recovery for scripted episodes. Elena Reyes: Recovery from what, though? Blake: That's my question too. The entry doesn't say. Elena Reyes: Because scripted episodes can fail in like five different ways. Blake: Right. A voice model times out, a beat comes back malformed, a section just doesn't render. Elena Reyes: So is this catching all of that or one specific failure? Blake: My read is it's narrow. Targeted is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Elena Reyes: So probably one known failure mode they kept seeing. Blake: That's my guess. Maybe a beat drops mid-generation, and instead of the whole episode dying, it just retries that one piece. Elena Reyes: That would actually explain the word targeted. Not a full re-render, just the broken part. Blake: Which is a very different fix than, say, a timeout retry on the whole job. Elena Reyes: Right, and they didn't tell us which one it is. Blake: Nope. We need the actual failure logs for that, and we don't have them. Elena Reyes: Either way, shipping a recovery net at all is a sign. It means someone noticed scripted episodes were failing often enough to build a whole feature around catching it. Blake: Right. You don't build that for something that happens once a year. Elena Reyes: So even without the specifics, it tells you something about how often this was breaking before. Blake: Frequent enough to notice. That's as far as I'll go on it. Elena Reyes: Okay, so Brief Builder, three clips, quiet recovery net. That's the rest of the entry. Blake: That's the rest of it. Elena Reyes: Before we get to the vlog segment, quick word from the platform this show is actually made on. Blake: Yeah, this one's real, not a bit. Quick word from Mato, the platform this show was made on. Elena Reyes: If you've been thinking about launching a podcast for your company or brand, now is a pretty good time. Blake: For a limited time, when you sign up for Mato, they'll also include a custom cover design, white glove onboarding, your own custom jingle, and a spot on their promotional list. Elena Reyes: And that package is worth five thousand dollars. Blake: Head to himato.com to get started. Elena Reyes: I always feel weird reading that about our own show. Blake: I mean, it's true though. I'd want the custom jingle regardless. Elena Reyes: Don't let the sponsor line fool you. We actually fought about the jingle idea in Slack. Blake: We did. I wanted something moodier. You wanted actual trumpets. Elena Reyes: Same. Okay, so that's the full changelog minus the one thing we haven't opened yet. Blake: The blog post itself. Because a post like that always leaves something out. Elena Reyes: It always does. Hmm. So the blog post about the embed player. Blake: The one we just went through, yeah. Elena Reyes: It never once mentions analytics. Like, why would you redesign a player and not say a word about tracking? Blake: Right. No plays data, no attribution angle, nothing. And that's weird because Mato clearly cares about that stuff. It's just not in this post. Elena Reyes: Which sent me digging into the studio page instead because that's where they actually talk numbers. Blake: What'd you find? Elena Reyes: Mato's studio page describes UTM tracking on every episode, and it says that data flows straight into HubSpot and into Salesforce. Blake: Wait, so every single episode gets its own tracking tag? Elena Reyes: Per episode, yeah. That's what the page says. Blake: Okay, okay, that's actually useful information. For a publisher, that's the difference between someone clicking and knowing which campaign it came from. Elena Reyes: Think about it from the publisher side. You've got a UTM tag on every episode link, and suddenly you can see which show note or which newsletter is actually driving the click, not just the play. Blake: And that ties into their sales pipeline, not just their analytics dashboard. That's the part I didn't expect, attribution feeding straight into a CRM. Elena Reyes: Exactly. And none of that shows up anywhere near the player post. It's a completely separate page. Blake: Which makes sense, sort of. One's a product announcement, one's a sales page. But if I'm a publisher trying to figure out whether this player actually helps my numbers, I'd want those two pages talking to each other. Elena Reyes: Totally. Because the whole value of the player is arguably that people click through into something you can track, but the post never makes that connection. Blake: It just says the player looks nicer and works on your phone. Elena Reyes: Which, fine, that's true, but it undersells the actual point. Blake: I mean, publishers don't read blog posts for vibes. If the post's whole job is to sell you on switching players, leaving out the tracking piece feels like a miss. Elena Reyes: Or it's just two teams writing two pages, and nobody connected them before it went out. Blake: Okay, separate question. When did that blog post actually go up relative to the changelog entry? Elena Reyes: The blog post went up on the twenty-ninth. Blake: Right, we covered that. Elena Reyes: Yeah, but here's the part worth flagging. The changelog entry that formally lists the player didn't land until two days after. Blake: So the blog told people about it before the changelog even mentioned it. Elena Reyes: Which is backwards from how you'd expect it. Normally, the changelog's the record, and the blog's the marketing built on top of it. Blake: Unless the blog basically was the announcement, and the changelog entry was just the paperwork catching up. Elena Reyes: That's my read. It reads like a summary of stuff that already shipped, not a first mention of anything. Blake: Two days isn't a huge gap, but it tells you something about how they operate. Ship first, announce loud, log it quietly after. Elena Reyes: Yeah. And honestly, that tracks with how a lot of changelogs work everywhere. The exciting stuff gets announced first, and the formal record trails a couple days behind it, whether that's here or anywhere else. Blake: Which is fine, honestly, as long as somebody's checking the changelog is accurate eventually. Elena Reyes: Sure. Just don't use it as your first source. Blake: Makes sense. You ship the thing, you write the post because that's the fun part, and the changelog gets updated whenever somebody remembers to do it. Elena Reyes: Which honestly is how most changelogs work everywhere, not just here. Blake: For a publisher, that's actually a useful habit to know. Check the blog for what's coming, check the changelog for what's confirmed. Elena Reyes: That's a good way to put it. Two different jobs, same company. Blake: Fair enough. All right, feature stuff done for the week. Elena Reyes: There's actually one more post that landed this week. Blake: And it's not another feature. Elena Reyes: No. This one's about how the whole thing looks. So this other post, the one that's not about a feature, Mato dropped a new website, new logo, new portraits, the whole visual system live as of today. Blake: The first of September. Elena Reyes: Yep. And the post frames it as putting people in motion and actual content ahead of what it calls software chrome. Blake: Software chrome. Elena Reyes: Their words, basically. Less dashboard looking, more like you're looking at people talking. Blake: Okay, but walk me through the timing. We just spent two segments on a changelog. New player, new brief builder, workflow clips, a recovery feature. That's a full week of engineering. Elena Reyes: Right. Blake: And in the same week, somebody's shooting portraits and picking typefaces? Elena Reyes: I mean, when else do you do it? You can't wait for a slow week. There's no such thing at a company this size. Blake: Sure, but design time isn't free. Every hour on a logo is an hour not spent hardening the recovery feature we were just guessing about. Elena Reyes: Okay, that's fair, but you're assuming it's the same people. Do we actually know an engineer sat down and photographed portraits? Blake: We don't. That's the point. The post doesn't say who did the work or what got deprioritized to make room for it. Elena Reyes: So we're guessing. Blake: We're guessing. I'll say it plainly. I don't know if design and engineering traded hours against each other this week. Nothing in what they published tells us that. Elena Reyes: But you think it's likely. Blake: I think a small team doesn't get a rebrand and a four-part changelog in the same seven days without something else moving slower than it would have otherwise. That's a guess, not a fact. Elena Reyes: I'd push the other way a little. A logo and some portraits, that's design and maybe a contractor, a day or two of work tops. It's not stealing weeks from the player rebuild. Blake: Maybe. Or the person who picked the color system is the same person who signed off on COVID-ended UI in the player. In a shop this size, that's plausible. Elena Reyes: Huh. Now you're just speculating about the org chart. Blake: I told you, I keep a list of things I think are wrong. This week, it's whether now was the week for this. Elena Reyes: Here's where I actually land. Publishers don't care about the logo. They care whether the embed works and whether the brief builder saves them a call. A new coat of paint doesn't move either of those. Blake: No argument there. But a company site is also the thing that convinces a new publisher to sign up in the first place. If the old site read as clunky, that's lost business, not vanity. Elena Reyes: Did the post say the old site was clunky? Blake: No. It just said the new one puts people ahead of Chrome. Draw your own conclusion about what that implies about the old one. Elena Reyes: Which is exactly the kind of line that tells you nothing and everything at once. Blake: Right? So I don't think we resolve this one. You think the design spend was cheap and fine. I think it's a real trade against shipping speed, and we don't have the receipts either way. Elena Reyes: Yeah. I'm not going to talk you out of your list. Blake: Wouldn't be much of a list if you could. Elena Reyes: For what it's worth, I don't think either of us actually believes the new site looks bad. It's genuinely nicer to look at. No argument there. Blake: Agreed. I just don't think nicer to look at and worth doing this particular week are automatically the same argument. Elena Reyes: Fair. Okay, since we can't settle who spent what on who, let's go look at the numbers Mato actually publishes about itself and see if those hold up any better than a paragraph about portraits. Blake: That I can actually check. Elena Reyes: Okay, so Mato's own press kit, I actually went and read the whole thing this week. Blake: And? Elena Reyes: It says a normal podcast episode takes eight to twelve hours to make and runs about fifteen hundred bucks once you count editing and everyone's time. Blake: Sure. That tracks with what I've heard from actual producers. Elena Reyes: Right. And then it says on Mato, that same episode takes about thirty minutes. Blake: Thirty minutes versus twelve hours is not a small gap. Elena Reyes: No, it's not. But it's their own comparison on their own page. Blake: Which is the thing I want to flag before we go further. This is a company describing its own product on its own marketing page. Nobody audited that eight to twelve hour number. Elena Reyes: Totally fair. It's not independently checked. It's just what they're claiming. Blake: Right. So we should treat it as a claim, not a fact we can hand you. Elena Reyes: Agreed. Okay. Separate document. There's a press release from May this year. Blake: What's in it? Elena Reyes: It says Mato passed ten thousand listeners across all its shows in a thirty-day window. Blake: Ten thousand listeners across how many shows, though? Elena Reyes: Doesn't say. Just the total. Blake: That's a pretty wide net to fish that number out of. Elena Reyes: Yeah. And it also says four enterprise customers and around ten thousand dollars a month in recurring revenue at that point. Blake: Four customers pulling in ten grand a month combined? Elena Reyes: That's what it says. And it says they were prepping a seed round. Blake: Ten grand a month across four customers works out to about twenty-five hundred each if you just divide it evenly, which the release doesn't actually claim. Elena Reyes: Right. That's our math, not theirs. Real world, it's probably lumpy. One customer paying more than the other three. Blake: Okay. Four customers is small enough that you could actually go find out who they are if anyone wanted to check. Elena Reyes: Sounds like a homework assignment for somebody, not us. Blake: I mean, that's the point though. A press release from May with numbers like that is a snapshot. It's four months old relative to everything we just covered this week. Elena Reyes: Right. And it's still their own release. Nobody's verified the ten thousand listener figure independently either. Blake: So we've got two documents, both self-reported, both from the company describing itself. Elena Reyes: Which doesn't make them false. It just means we shouldn't repeat the numbers like they're audited. Blake: Exactly. If a publisher's trying to decide whether to trust Mato with their show, the honest read is, here's what they say about themselves, and here's what we don't actually know. Elena Reyes: Like whether that ten thousand listeners is still growing or whether it plateaued right after the press release went out. Blake: Or whether four enterprise customers is now six or still four. Elena Reyes: And that's the actual risk for a publisher deciding whether to sign with Mato right now. You're trusting a snapshot that's already a few months old. Blake: Which isn't unique to Mato, honestly. Most companies only publish numbers when the numbers look good. Elena Reyes: We genuinely don't know. Nothing published since May updates it. Blake: Which for a company shipping a new player and a whole new look in the same week is kind of a gap. You'd think they'd want to show the growth curve. Elena Reyes: Maybe that's coming, or maybe the numbers didn't move enough to brag about. Blake: That's its own kind of answer, honestly. Elena Reyes: It is. Okay. I think that's everything we've got out of this week's changelog and the two blog posts. Blake: Player ships, guest brief builder, workflow clips, the rebrand, and now their own numbers on the table. Elena Reyes: That's the week. Blake: Handoff. Elena Reyes: So that's So that's where the numbers leave us. Self-reported. No outside check. Blake: Yeah, and I'm not settling that tonight. Elena Reyes: Fair. Full changelog, both blog posts, all of it's up at hi.mato.com if you want to read past what we covered. Blake: If you're running a show on Mato and you've got opinions about any of this, email hello@hi.mato.com. We'll put you on. Elena Reyes: Seriously, we want the pushy publisher who thinks the rebrand was a waste of a week. Blake: Or the one who loves it. Either side. Elena Reyes: Right. And if you're new here, subscribe so you get next week without hunting for it. Blake: And hey, if you think we got something wrong this week, that same email works for that too. Elena Reyes: Please, actually. We'd rather hear it than keep saying it on air. Blake: Honestly, half the reason I do this show is I don't know what Mato ships until we sit down and read it together. Elena Reyes: Same. That's kind of the fun part.