COMPANY

Name: Laughable

Legal Name: Byway Endeavors, Inc.

Location: New York City, New York

Founded: 2015

Founder(s): Stuart Foulston, Ned Kenney

Website: https://laughable.com

Social Media Following: 361 Likes on Facebook, 3575 Followers on Twitter, 925 Followers on Instagram

INDUSTRY – Audio content

Size: $88B (2016) (Source: BusinessOfApps)

Projections: $189B by 2020 (Source: BusinessOfApps)

Introduction

Laughable is a platform that primarily showcases comedic podcasts and content, in addition to some number of non-comedy podcasts. As such, it claims to be the world’s largest curated collection of podcasts, and touts itself to be the best way for comedic content creators to reach larger audiences. Listeners can use it to find and explore new audio content, creating a “global marketplace for comedy”. Laughable is available free for download on the App Store and Google Play Store.

The Product

While Laughable itself curates and creates profiles and showcases content of various comedy content creators, it also allows them to create or update their own profiles, and add more content to their profiles.

In addition to primarily being an app that showcases comedic podcasts, Laughable’s extensive profiles for various artists and groups allows users and content creators to connect, discover and explore comedic content in new ways.

The company also dedicates a significant amount of energy to developing tools and analytical insights that serve the app, such as the Laughable Artist Graph, which creates linkages between leading content creators based on the listeners they have in common, or Laughable Episode Timelines, which made Laughable the first company to show content creators how listeners interacted with their podcasts on a minute-to-minute basis. Laughable Geographic Insights also shows content creators the geographic location of their listeners (which Laughable also says contains no personally identifiable information and is accurate to within 1 km, but deliberately thrown off by between 250 and 500 meters to protect user privacy).

Moreover, Laughable only features content that is freely available, and doesn’t showcase work that’s behind a paywall.

Origin and Founding Team

Laughable was founded in 2015 by Stuart Foulston and Ned Kenney.

Stuart Foulston graduated with a BA in Jazz from Leeds College of Music, and a DipHE in Electronic Engineering from the University of Southampton. Ned Kenney, meanwhile, graduated with a BA in Government from Dartmouth College in 2010. He worked at JP Morgan and WebMD before co-founding Laughable.

Performance and Trends

Laughable does quite well in its domain: it’s the top rated App Store app for podcast players (91% of their 3,600+ iOS App Store reviews rate them 5 stars), and has also enjoyed the distinction of being specially featured on App Store several times since its founding. The company also claims that the average user spends 8 hours per week on the app listening to podcasts, and an additional 35 minutes a week engaging with their user interface.