Even though Podster has been in business for less than a year, the Danish startup can already boast about making their entry in multiple countries, including Finland, Sweden, Germany, and Spain. “Successful podcasts with numerous listeners can travel across borders”, state the founders at Podster.
The digitalisation of the world has made it a lot easier to make content cut across frontiers. It has been done with books and movies for years. However, it is still not custom to do the same with different types of audios. With focus on podcasts, this is exactly what the company Podster wishes to change.
“The sound market, and podcasts in particular, expands tremendously. If you look across borders, you will find podcasts with a great many listeners in the original language. These podcasts have a few things in common; they tell captivating stories, are of high quality and most importantly, they are produced by excellent creators. We are working day and night to license these amazing and high-ranking productions from all around the world in order to reproduce them, so the content can be available in various countries,” declares Henriette Høj Gharib, Co-founder and CEO of Podster.
The founders of Podster are an experienced ensemble when it comes to streaming services and startups. Henriette Høj Gharib and Lars Peter Ilsø Larsen launched Fairytell, a book service for children, in 2017, and sold it to Podimo in 2021. The other two founders, Klavs Vejlang and Erik Hougaard, have been working with software and hardware startups and established companies for many years.
Passion and authenticity are the secret ingredients
Podster has managed to keep a constant focus on genres and formats that already attracts listeners. The most popular genres around the globe are true crime, history, fiction, children etc.
What makes Podster successful, is their ability to invest in these popular genres, and to make sure the new content lives up to the standards of the original production. They put a lot of effort into matching the right manuscript with the right creator, translator, voice actor, producer etc. in each country.
Henriette Høj Gharib elaborates, “most companies in the audio business have a tendency to translate the source material rather directly when working with foreign productions. Our mission is to adapt the material to the target language. We achieve this by collaborating with local creators, who already possess a passion for podcast production and a certain authenticity. This is our so-called “cultural flavour” that we make sure to include in every Podster production.
The Danish startup Podster expects to sell shows in their catalogue to different distributors, which means their content could be made available on both premium and advertising based streaming platforms.
