Tech Brew Ride Home - News On The RideHome+ Feed

Episode Date: August 21, 2021

Important news about changes to the RideHome+ program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Hey everybody, it's Brian. Welcome to a special bookkeeping episode of the TechMeme Right Home. This is just a quick note, primarily for Ride Home Plus subscribers, but I thought I'd share it with everyone because it has important news about the Ride Home Plus feeds that everyone should know going forward. The Ride Home Plus feeds are not going away, but I will stop doing bonus episodes specifically and exclusively for the Ride Home Plus feeds. So the interesting raise, interesting gadgets, and office hours episodes are coming to an end. There will be no more bonus episodes that only Ride Home Plus subscribers will get exclusively. You will still be able to get

the ad-free versions of the show if you subscribe to Ride Home Plus, and normal bonus episodes will continue for everyone, but that will be it in terms of exclusive paid-only bonus episodes. I'll explain my reasons for this in a second, but first up, if you are a lot of the first up, if you are are a monthly subscriber to Ride Home Plus, and this news disappoints you. I understand. If you search your email for either Supercast or Glow.fm, you will find your original subscriber email that will allow you to manage your account. So you can cancel right now before your next monthly rebill, if you should choose to do so. If you are a yearly subscriber, you should be able to cancel and get a pro-rated refund for the remainder of your yearly term. But I hope you don't cancel. But I hope you don't

cancel. I hope having the ad-free feed and the ability to personally support the work that I do every day will be enough for you to keep your Ride Home Plus subscription. In fact, that's kind of why I'm forced to stop the Ride Home Plus exclusive bonus episodes. I'm just one guy, and it's just become too much work. That's the long and short of it, really. Actually, there are three reasons that kind of overlap that cause me to have to stop the special bonus episodes only for Ride Home Plus people. Number one, it's too much. much work. We hired someone to help me research and edit these bonus shows, but it didn't work out, and so I've been doing them myself each week, and I just simply don't have enough hours.

That's the long and short of it. Number two, though, only about 300 of you signed up for the Rite Home Plus feeds, and that was not nearly enough additional revenue to cover the salary of the extra hands to help me. It also meant that no one wanted to come on to be interviewed for the office hours episodes, because, you know, why sit and talk to me for an hour, only to to have 300 people hear the conversation. I had several guests lined up that pulled out when they learned that their episodes wouldn't go to the full audience. And actually, number three, and directly related to that, it was killing me to put so much work into these extra shows for so few people to hear them. I'm actually fine doing bonus episodes, even for no money so long as all 50,000 of you at least

get a chance to hear it. But it was breaking my heart to do what I think was very good work, only for the vast majority of the audience to never hear any of it. I think of all of you as my family, my audience, but most of you were missing some of the story, and that was kind of making me wonder what the point of the bonus episodes that only 300 people would hear was. If I'm outlining investment trends in the interesting raise episodes, then when I circle back to those trends in the daily episodes, most of you wouldn't know the full story that I've outlined elsewhere because you never heard it. I think very much of that phrase, here's what you missed in the world of tech as the mission statement for this podcast. I hated giving most of you an incomplete picture of what was

going on. But Brian, we 300 subscribers to write home plus are your best listeners, your most valuable audience. And yes, I acknowledge that, which is why if you want to cancel, feel free to do so. You have my sincere apologies if I disappointed you. I bought into the subscription revenue is the future hype for podcasting. And I guess. it just didn't work out for a show like this one. If I continued to try and grind myself into the ground for a product that didn't even become a significant part of our business, much less a driving part of what we do, the overall show was going to suffer. So I'm cutting bait now to preserve my sanity, gain more time for the show as a whole, which will allow me to continue to make

it better, and pursue other ideas that hopefully will benefit the entire audience going forward in the next coming months. Thank you for your understanding. Hopefully. And believe me, we've got some really interesting new stuff coming for everyone very soon.