TopicCast - Hobbyist Podcast Topic Search
AI-powered full-text search and topic index across community tech and maker podcasts, letting listeners find episodes on specific projects (e.g., amateur radio, Audacity noise music, shell scripting) instead of scrolling 'Latest Shows.'
Tech hobbyists, makers, and self-learners who listen to community podcasts
- Full-text transcript search across thousands of community podcast episodes
- Topic-cluster pages (e.g., 'all episodes about amateur radio field days') with episode summaries and key timestamps
- Personal learning list to save episodes and topics
- RSS feeds for topic streams so listeners can subscribe to a subject, not a show
Hacker Public Radio has released nearly 4,700 episodes since 2005 but the homepage only surfaces 'Latest Shows' with limited search; hobbyists cannot find specific topics across years of community content even though the archive keeps growing daily.
HPR explicitly invites scraping of a ~4,700-episode archive and surfaces only 'Latest Shows,' but the broader community of tech-hobbyist podcast listeners is small and already served by general-purpose indexes that include HPR.Hacker Public Radio ~ The Technology Community Podcast ↗I Ran the Same 10 Queries on Every Podcast Search Engine ↗
Listen Notes already indexes ~31M episodes / 178M with full transcript search, and NicheBase / PodCurator target niche discovery; a community-tech-microsite faces direct incumbents, not an open lane.The Best Podcast Search Engine - Listen Notes ↗NicheBase™ — The Home Base of Your Niche ↗
Target users are hobbyists consuming a free, community-produced podcast; willingness-to-pay is low and analogous podcast search tools (Listen Notes, Podchaser) have struggled with mass-market monetization beyond narrow API/lead-gen use cases.Podcast Discovery: How to find podcasts? - Listen Notes ↗5 Best Podcast Databases Compared for Outreach Teams ↗
HPR's daily-release cadence and 'scrape if you wish' stance provide durable supply, but a UI over one community's archive ages slowly and risks irrelevance as general podcast search absorbs the need.Hacker Public Radio ~ The Technology Community Podcast ↗
Public archive with explicit scraping permission, small corpus, and proven patterns from Listen Notes / NicheBase make this straightforward to build as a weekend-scale project.Hacker Public Radio ~ The Technology Community Podcast ↗5 Best Podcast Search Engines in 2026 (Episode-Level Tested) ↗