Wenbin Fang

Wenbin Fang is a software engineer turned founder who runs Listen Notes, a podcast search engine and database. He started it as a side project out of his own habit of listening to several hours of podcasts a day, then quit his engineering job at Nextdoor in December 2016 to work on it full-time and incorporated Listen Notes, Inc. in 2017.

Listen Notes grew into a business that serves both listeners and developers: the PodcastAPI.com product gives apps programmatic access to the podcast database, and his X bio says it is used by around 15,000 apps. He has added smaller products around it, including Listen Later playlists, microfeed (a lightweight CMS), Transcript.New for audio-to-text, and CurateKit, a curation tool.

Fang is known in the bootstrapping community as an example of a long-running, very lean company. Interviews describe Listen Notes as a one-person or tiny-team lifestyle business that he runs to keep full control over his time, and the company's own site describes a small, efficient team in San Francisco.