Podcasting has exploded over the last couple of years. According to Buzzsprout, in 2022, 62% of the population 12+ has listened to a podcast and roughly 79% are familiar with the medium. Podcasts are proving to be lucrative for companies and are a great way to get a brand message out there. Jacob Bozarth, co-founder of Louisville podcast editing company Resound, what is proving to be discouraging to podcasters is the manual editing process. Louisville Future spoke to Bozarth about podcast editing and about the origins of his company.

Podcasting seems to be the niche to be in these days.

The podcasting space has grown from 525K podcasts in 2018 to now 5 million. People are using them to grow their businesses and make money. But one of the problems with podcasting is that people don’t how hard post-production is. People enjoy the creative element, like adding music and the sound design. But the part that they enjoy the least is editing out the mess-ups and the ums and ahs and those types of things. We want to automate that as much as possible

And streamlining the post-production aspect is how Resound came about?

The first company I started, Resonate Recordings, is an audio production agency for podcasters. We work with about 3,000 podcasters around the world. A few months ago, we started asking ourselves, what’s next? What’s kind of the next thing we want to automate, something to streamline and improve the podcast process. One of the big drags on time was manually editing them.

It takes us about three to four hours to edit one hour of audio. A lot of that time is spent manually removing unnecessary filler words—the ums and uhs. It’s kind of mindless and laborious work. And so as we as we kind of started talking with our tech team and our software engineers, we basically hired a machine learning engineer to create a machine learning model for finding and recognizing audio discrepancies.

We built the first version of our machine learning model and it worked. We decided to spin out Resound in September of last year.

Resonate Recordings was bootstrapped but you’re going a different route with Resound.

We decided with Resound we were going to go the venture capital route and make this a software tool available for those in the podcasting industry. We just closed a pre-seed round of $1.35 million in July. All of our investors are from Louisville. The connections we made with Resonate Recordings have carried over to investments.

So what kind of time savings are we talking about with your platform?

Like I said, it takes about three to four hours to manually edit a one-hour interview recording (raw audio). With our platform it takes us a little over a minute to process.

Who is the customer for your platform?

We’ve been in conversation with a lot of different podcast technology platforms. We’re talking about the potential of those platforms being able to use our tech. We’ve had conversations with Spotify as well. And so we do want to make it available to the podcasters. That being said, though, I believe that our biggest power users are probably going to be the professionals in the space.

What was it like starting this company in Louisville?

I think, for me, an advantage was being a second time founder. We had already built out a network of people here in Louisville. We’d already built relationships with different partners and investors. I think if I had not been a second-time founder like it would have been a lot harder.

Another thing I will say about Louisville is that it was very easy to network with other founder. Folks like Brad Luttrell of GoWild and Bradley Davis, who started Podchaser. That was the most valuable thing I would say in the process of raising money was connecting with other founders, and getting their opinions, their thoughts, their feedback and their wisdom. They gave us unbiased advice because they didn’t any stake in what we are doing.

What advice would you give budding entrepreneurs?

It’s easy to talk about the successes, but you know, with every success, there’s just as many failure failures. I know we’ve had our fair share. I think talking about those is a good thing. What do you learn from them and how can you grow and change and improve?