BlogTalkRadio: Investment #10

I first met Alan Levy, Founder and CEO of BlogTalkRadio (BTR), through my friend Howard Lindzon. And once I spent some time with Alan hearing his vision and getting a grip on his platform, I knew he had a big, BIG idea. Here is Alan’s description of the business on the BTR website:

BlogTalkRadio is the social radio network that allows users to connect quickly and directly with their audience. Using an ordinary telephone and computer hosts can create free, live, call-in talk shows with unlimited participants that are automatically archived and made available as podcasts. No software download is required. Listeners can subscribe to shows via RSS into iTunes and other feed readers. Our network has produced tens of thousands of episodes since it launched in August of 2006.

BTR gets to the crux of one of my key investment themes, the democratization of the Internet. With BTR, anyone can set up a real-time radio show. You need a phone and an internet connection. That’s it. Whether eloquent or stumbling, stunning or somewhat harder on the eyes, famous or merely famous in one’s own mind, BTR gives your the tools to easily and painlessly reach a live audience. BTR scores high on another one of my key investment themes, ease of use. The process of getting a show live is simple. Even Scoble can do it. Here is what Scoble said about BTR:

I love the new BlogTalkRadio. Why? I just call a phone number,
+1-646-200-0000, (you can call it too). I record a conversation with my
cell phone, and then it builds an RSS feed that points to MP3’s of my
conversation. What’s the URL? It is my cell phone’s phone number. No need to sign up. No need to give personal details, or even agree to anything.

This way I can make a podcast whenever I want. Utterz does something
similar, but you gotta setup Utterz before you make your phone call. I
like frictionless publishing and no signup before you start makes a lot
of sense to me.

These were Robert’s reflections from using BTR during a discussion he was having with Dave Winer. Pretty cool. I’ve been working with Alan to help BTR achieve its goals as quickly as possible. Like all of the entrepreneurs I back, Alan is very commercial and focused on monetization without degradation of the user experience. And so far, I’d say he has done a masterful job balancing these two sometimes-competing interests. He is off to a great start (if you can call almost 3 million monthly listeners a start) building the company, and I am proud and excited to be involved with helping Alan fulfill BTR’s promise. You should check it out.