New embed player ships | Sep 1

Elena ReyesOkay. The embed player is live across every public listening surface Mato touches as of this morning.

BlakeNo preamble, huh?

Elena ReyesNo, straight to it. This is Made on Mato, our weekly change log. I'm Elena.

BlakeI'm Blake. And yes, before anyone asks, this show is put together with AI. We've said it. Moving on.

Elena ReyesMoving on. But this one's the headline for a reason. Publishers have been asking for it for a while.

BlakeSome of them louder than others.

Elena ReyesYou have no idea how many messages we get about this exact thing.

BlakeI read the inbox too, Elena. I have some idea.

Elena ReyesSure. But it's not just the player. There's a rollback buried in this change log too.

BlakeWait, something got rolled back?

Elena ReyesLater. And there's a design decision this week I genuinely don't agree with.

BlakeOh, we're doing that today?

Elena ReyesWe're doing that today.

BlakeAlright. But first, the actual thing that shipped.

Elena ReyesRight. Who asked for it, what it replaced, what broke getting there.

BlakeLets start there.

Elena ReyesOkay, 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.

BlakeEvery surface? Not just the show pages?

Elena ReyesEvery surface. Episode pages, show pages, wherever a publisher drops the code.

BlakeAlright. Walk me through what actually changed, because redesigned player could mean anything.

Elena ReyesRight. 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.

BlakeMakes sense.

Elena ReyesCover-aware color. It pulls a palette off the show art instead of some default blue.

BlakeOh, so no more every embed looking like the same template.

Elena ReyesExactly. Light and dark themes, obviously. And copy-ready code for both episodes and full shows.

BlakeCopy-ready meaning what? You paste one snippet and it just works.

Elena ReyesThat's the idea, yeah. No fiddling with dimensions.

BlakeHmm. So what was wrong with the old one that this fixes? Because they don't say.

Elena ReyesThey really don't. It's not in the post at all.

BlakeI'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 ReyesThat'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.

BlakeCould also be a licensing thing. Some component they were using got deprecated. Happens all the time.

Elena ReyesSure. Could be that too. Point is, nobody's confirmed it, so I'm not gonna pretend we know.

BlakeFair. Still, if I'm a publisher, cover-aware color is the part I actually care about.

Elena ReyesBecause it looks like your show and not a generic box.

BlakeRight. That's the difference between something you're embarrassed to link and something you're proud to put on your homepage.

Elena ReyesEmbarrassed is strong.

BlakeI've seen some embeds, Elena. I stand by it.

Elena ReyesFair enough.

BlakeWhat about a show with genuinely ugly cover art, though? Does cover-aware color save them or just match ugly to ugly?

Elena ReyesThat'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.

BlakeSo it's not a design fix, it's a mirror.

Elena ReyesRight. Mirror, not fix.

BlakeOkay. So light and dark themes, cover-aware color, responsive copy, paste code. That's the whole player.

Elena ReyesThat's the player. That's the headline item in this change log.

BlakeBut it's not the only thing in that entry, is it?

Elena ReyesNo. There's more packed into the same release. There's a browser-only guest brief builder in there.

BlakeWait, for real? That's a different animal entirely from a player redesign.

Elena ReyesTotally different. Yeah, they just shipped it in the same batch. And there's some workflow clip stuff too.

BlakeOkay. 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 ReyesRight. That's a whole different kind of feature. Let's get into that one properly.

BlakeYeah. And there's supposedly something in here about scripted episodes getting rolled back too?

Elena ReyesThere 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.

BlakeRight. Same entry, same week. There's a guest brief builder now.

Elena ReyesWait, browser only? Like no app?

BlakeYep. Runs right in the browser. You build the brief for whoever you're interviewing without downloading anything.

Elena ReyesThat's actually huge for me. I've been doing that in a shared doc.

BlakeA shared doc that three people forget to update.

Elena ReyesEvery time. So this replaces that mess?

BlakeThat's the idea. One place in the browser. Done.

Elena ReyesHow much time is that actually saving, though? Like shared doc versus browser tool. Is that an hour or five minutes?

BlakeThe 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 ReyesThat tracks. Less faster, more doesn't disappear.

BlakeExactly.

Elena ReyesOkay, what else is in there?

BlakeThree workflow clips.

Elena ReyesThree specific clips or just some clips?

BlakeThe post says three. Doesn't say what they cover.

Elena ReyesHmm. My guess is booking, prep, publish. That's the whole guest pipeline right there.

BlakeCould be. We're guessing, though. They didn't spell it out.

Elena ReyesFair. What's the last piece?

BlakeTargeted recovery for scripted episodes.

Elena ReyesRecovery from what, though?

BlakeThat's my question too. The entry doesn't say.

Elena ReyesBecause scripted episodes can fail in like five different ways.

BlakeRight. A voice model times out, a beat comes back malformed, a section just doesn't render.

Elena ReyesSo is this catching all of that or one specific failure?

BlakeMy read is it's narrow. Targeted is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Elena ReyesSo probably one known failure mode they kept seeing.

BlakeThat's my guess. Maybe a beat drops mid-generation, and instead of the whole episode dying, it just retries that one piece.

Elena ReyesThat would actually explain the word targeted. Not a full re-render, just the broken part.

BlakeWhich is a very different fix than, say, a timeout retry on the whole job.

Elena ReyesRight, and they didn't tell us which one it is.

BlakeNope. We need the actual failure logs for that, and we don't have them.

Elena ReyesEither 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.

BlakeRight. You don't build that for something that happens once a year.

Elena ReyesSo even without the specifics, it tells you something about how often this was breaking before.

BlakeFrequent enough to notice. That's as far as I'll go on it.

Elena ReyesOkay, so Brief Builder, three clips, quiet recovery net. That's the rest of the entry.

BlakeThat's the rest of it.

Elena ReyesBefore we get to the vlog segment, quick word from the platform this show is actually made on.

BlakeYeah, this one's real, not a bit. Quick word from Mato, the platform this show was made on.

Elena ReyesIf you've been thinking about launching a podcast for your company or brand, now is a pretty good time.

BlakeFor 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 ReyesAnd that package is worth five thousand dollars.

BlakeHead to himato.com to get started.

Elena ReyesI always feel weird reading that about our own show.

BlakeI mean, it's true though. I'd want the custom jingle regardless.

Elena ReyesDon't let the sponsor line fool you. We actually fought about the jingle idea in Slack.

BlakeWe did. I wanted something moodier. You wanted actual trumpets.

Elena ReyesSame. Okay, so that's the full changelog minus the one thing we haven't opened yet.

BlakeThe blog post itself. Because a post like that always leaves something out.

Elena ReyesIt always does. Hmm. So the blog post about the embed player.

BlakeThe one we just went through, yeah.

Elena ReyesIt never once mentions analytics. Like, why would you redesign a player and not say a word about tracking?

BlakeRight. 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 ReyesWhich sent me digging into the studio page instead because that's where they actually talk numbers.

BlakeWhat'd you find?

Elena ReyesMato's studio page describes UTM tracking on every episode, and it says that data flows straight into HubSpot and into Salesforce.

BlakeWait, so every single episode gets its own tracking tag?

Elena ReyesPer episode, yeah. That's what the page says.

BlakeOkay, okay, that's actually useful information. For a publisher, that's the difference between someone clicking and knowing which campaign it came from.

Elena ReyesThink 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.

BlakeAnd 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 ReyesExactly. And none of that shows up anywhere near the player post. It's a completely separate page.

BlakeWhich 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 ReyesTotally. 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.

BlakeIt just says the player looks nicer and works on your phone.

Elena ReyesWhich, fine, that's true, but it undersells the actual point.

BlakeI 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 ReyesOr it's just two teams writing two pages, and nobody connected them before it went out.

BlakeOkay, separate question. When did that blog post actually go up relative to the changelog entry?

Elena ReyesThe blog post went up on the twenty-ninth.

BlakeRight, we covered that.

Elena ReyesYeah, but here's the part worth flagging. The changelog entry that formally lists the player didn't land until two days after.

BlakeSo the blog told people about it before the changelog even mentioned it.

Elena ReyesWhich 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.

BlakeUnless the blog basically was the announcement, and the changelog entry was just the paperwork catching up.

Elena ReyesThat's my read. It reads like a summary of stuff that already shipped, not a first mention of anything.

BlakeTwo days isn't a huge gap, but it tells you something about how they operate. Ship first, announce loud, log it quietly after.

Elena ReyesYeah. 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.

BlakeWhich is fine, honestly, as long as somebody's checking the changelog is accurate eventually.

Elena ReyesSure. Just don't use it as your first source.

BlakeMakes 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 ReyesWhich honestly is how most changelogs work everywhere, not just here.

BlakeFor 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 ReyesThat's a good way to put it. Two different jobs, same company.

BlakeFair enough. All right, feature stuff done for the week.

Elena ReyesThere's actually one more post that landed this week.

BlakeAnd it's not another feature.

Elena ReyesNo. 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.

BlakeThe first of September.

Elena ReyesYep. And the post frames it as putting people in motion and actual content ahead of what it calls software chrome.

BlakeSoftware chrome.

Elena ReyesTheir words, basically. Less dashboard looking, more like you're looking at people talking.

BlakeOkay, 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 ReyesRight.

BlakeAnd in the same week, somebody's shooting portraits and picking typefaces?

Elena ReyesI 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.

BlakeSure, 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 ReyesOkay, that's fair, but you're assuming it's the same people. Do we actually know an engineer sat down and photographed portraits?

BlakeWe 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 ReyesSo we're guessing.

BlakeWe'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 ReyesBut you think it's likely.

BlakeI 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 ReyesI'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.

BlakeMaybe. 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 ReyesHuh. Now you're just speculating about the org chart.

BlakeI told you, I keep a list of things I think are wrong. This week, it's whether now was the week for this.

Elena ReyesHere'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.

BlakeNo 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 ReyesDid the post say the old site was clunky?

BlakeNo. It just said the new one puts people ahead of Chrome. Draw your own conclusion about what that implies about the old one.

Elena ReyesWhich is exactly the kind of line that tells you nothing and everything at once.

BlakeRight? 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 ReyesYeah. I'm not going to talk you out of your list.

BlakeWouldn't be much of a list if you could.

Elena ReyesFor 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.

BlakeAgreed. I just don't think nicer to look at and worth doing this particular week are automatically the same argument.

Elena ReyesFair. 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.

BlakeThat I can actually check.

Elena ReyesOkay, so Mato's own press kit, I actually went and read the whole thing this week.

BlakeAnd?

Elena ReyesIt 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.

BlakeSure. That tracks with what I've heard from actual producers.

Elena ReyesRight. And then it says on Mato, that same episode takes about thirty minutes.

BlakeThirty minutes versus twelve hours is not a small gap.

Elena ReyesNo, it's not. But it's their own comparison on their own page.

BlakeWhich 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 ReyesTotally fair. It's not independently checked. It's just what they're claiming.

BlakeRight. So we should treat it as a claim, not a fact we can hand you.

Elena ReyesAgreed. Okay. Separate document. There's a press release from May this year.

BlakeWhat's in it?

Elena ReyesIt says Mato passed ten thousand listeners across all its shows in a thirty-day window.

BlakeTen thousand listeners across how many shows, though?

Elena ReyesDoesn't say. Just the total.

BlakeThat's a pretty wide net to fish that number out of.

Elena ReyesYeah. And it also says four enterprise customers and around ten thousand dollars a month in recurring revenue at that point.

BlakeFour customers pulling in ten grand a month combined?

Elena ReyesThat's what it says. And it says they were prepping a seed round.

BlakeTen 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 ReyesRight. That's our math, not theirs. Real world, it's probably lumpy. One customer paying more than the other three.

BlakeOkay. Four customers is small enough that you could actually go find out who they are if anyone wanted to check.

Elena ReyesSounds like a homework assignment for somebody, not us.

BlakeI 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 ReyesRight. And it's still their own release. Nobody's verified the ten thousand listener figure independently either.

BlakeSo we've got two documents, both self-reported, both from the company describing itself.

Elena ReyesWhich doesn't make them false. It just means we shouldn't repeat the numbers like they're audited.

BlakeExactly. 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 ReyesLike whether that ten thousand listeners is still growing or whether it plateaued right after the press release went out.

BlakeOr whether four enterprise customers is now six or still four.

Elena ReyesAnd 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.

BlakeWhich isn't unique to Mato, honestly. Most companies only publish numbers when the numbers look good.

Elena ReyesWe genuinely don't know. Nothing published since May updates it.

BlakeWhich 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 ReyesMaybe that's coming, or maybe the numbers didn't move enough to brag about.

BlakeThat's its own kind of answer, honestly.

Elena ReyesIt is. Okay. I think that's everything we've got out of this week's changelog and the two blog posts.

BlakePlayer ships, guest brief builder, workflow clips, the rebrand, and now their own numbers on the table.

Elena ReyesThat's the week.

BlakeHandoff.

Elena ReyesSo that's So that's where the numbers leave us. Self-reported. No outside check.

BlakeYeah, and I'm not settling that tonight.

Elena ReyesFair. Full changelog, both blog posts, all of it's up at hi.mato.com if you want to read past what we covered.

BlakeIf 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 ReyesSeriously, we want the pushy publisher who thinks the rebrand was a waste of a week.

BlakeOr the one who loves it. Either side.

Elena ReyesRight. And if you're new here, subscribe so you get next week without hunting for it.

BlakeAnd hey, if you think we got something wrong this week, that same email works for that too.

Elena ReyesPlease, actually. We'd rather hear it than keep saying it on air.

BlakeHonestly, half the reason I do this show is I don't know what Mato ships until we sit down and read it together.

Elena ReyesSame. That's kind of the fun part.