In an increasingly connected world one new trend that has emerged is the idea of podcasting. A podcast is basically the new radio talk show where people can record themselves talking and having discussions and then post these conversations on platforms like Apple Podcasts to show the world their thoughts. This trend has definitely been growing over the last couple of years, but there have still been hurdles that have prevented people from getting involved in this new podcasting community. These include issues like a lack of equipment or a lack of skills needed to edit and record proper, well-made audio.

This is the problem that Jacob Thornton and Ian Ownbey, two guys that use to work at twitter, are trying to solve with their app Bumpers. They saw that the podcasting world was becoming an increasingly larger industry and to help get more people get into this community they created an app that allows people to record their own podcasts with just their phone. This idea came to Ownbey when he and his friend trying to start their own podcast. They were very excited for it, but soon realized how difficult creating a podcast actually was. He said that they would spend so much time editing with the mechanics or learning ProTools that they ended up getting frustrated and giving up on the idea as a whole.  However, the silver lining to this was that Ownbey, unlike most people, saw opportunity in his frustration. He realized that if he had this much trouble creating a podcast, then others probably have had the same issue as well. Thus, Bumpers was created to help regular people, like Ownbey and his friend, generate their own podcasts on a simple platform.

I think that this story makes some very interesting point about entrepreneurship. Sometimes we try to do something, and it doesn’t work out for us, or it is too complicated for us to understand. However, a true entrepreneur sees opportunities in these frustrating situations and finds ways of improving old methods of doing things. Ownbey and Thornton have proved this point with their app raising $1 million dollars led by Spark Capital. Another important lesson this teaches is that sometimes being an entrepreneur does not require creating something completely new, sometimes people just need something to be simpler or made more efficient. In this scenario, creating a podcast was definitely not a new thing, in fact people have been doing it for a many of years. The genius of Bumper isn’t that it allowed people to create podcasts, what makes it a success is that it gave people an easier and more efficient way to make podcasts. By doing this, Ownbey and Thornton have opened up the market to a larger pool of people that would not have been able to create these podcasts before, and this has paid off well for them.