If you look up milestone in a dictionary, you will see something like this:

Milestone /ˈmʌɪlstəʊn/ - a significant stage or event in the development of something.

This past week saw three, quite significant milestones for Leonardo English, and the English Learning for Curious Minds podcast.

1. We now have members from 50 different countries
2. The podcast just passed 10,000 followers on Spotify
3. The podcast just passed 100,000 downloads on Spotify
   

If you have been following this journey, and if you are a contributor to any of those numbers, thank you. 

Here are some of my thoughts on these three milestones, what they mean for me, and what they mean for the future of our mission of making a more interesting way of improving your English.

Leonardo English now has members from 50 different countries

My hypothesis when starting Leonardo English was that having a curious mind transcends age, nationality, gender, geographic border, or anything else that is used to separate us.

It is therefore significant to me that people from 50 different countries have now decided to become members of Leonardo English, some from countries I know well, some from countries I know absolutely nothing about.

If I were reading this, I would be curious about which countries these were, so here’s a list, in order from largest to smallest (in terms of number of members of Leonardo English):

Spain, Italy, France, Brazil, Turkey, United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Germany, Poland, Russia, Mexico, Slovakia, Japan, United States, Ukraine, China, Peru, Canada, Netherlands, Burma, Denmark, Serbia, Colombia, Argentina, India, Malaysia, Austria, Ireland, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, El Salvador, Brunei, Sweden, South Korea, Portugal, Chile, Oman, Thailand, Ecuador, Mongolia, Belgium, Morocco, Slovenia, Latvia, Kuwait, Australia, Switzerland, Viet Nam, Romania, Somalia.

That’s 50 out of 195 countries - just 145 to go…

10,000 followers on Spotify

For those of you who listen to podcasts on Spotify, you will know that you can “Follow” a show in order to save it to your library and be able to access it easily.

Unlike some other podcast players (for example Apple Podcasts), Spotify doesn’t currently automatically download episodes for you, or notify you, but a follower is at least someone who is interested in listening to your show, and wants to be able to find it again easily.

It’s just fantastic that there are now more than 10,000 followers on Spotify.

If you’re one of them, thank you.

If you are not, you can find the show here: English Learning for Curious Minds on Spotify.

100,000 streams on Spotify

For the podcast nerds, you will see that I have written ‘stream’, and not ‘download’. 

Spotify doesn’t count ‘downloads’, which is normally only when someone presses ‘play’ on an episode; it only counts streams, which is when someone listens to the first 60 seconds of an episode.

Long story short, a 'stream' is better than a 'download'.

The English Learning for Curious Minds podcast has now been streamed over 100,000 times. To everyone who has done this, thank you.

Some thoughts on Spotify

Spotify is a great way for people to discover podcasts, and being on Spotify has helped literally thousands of people to discover English Learning for Curious Minds.

But, Spotify has its own ambitions, it wants listeners to become Premium subscribers to its own service.

It controls the relationship between the podcast and the listener. 

Many creators have justified fears that Spotify might do things like start charging money for podcasts to be shown to listeners, or it might try to monetise a podcast episode in a way that the podcast isn’t comfortable with.

Much like Facebook encouraged companies to bring their audiences to Facebook and to set up Facebook ‘Pages’ in the early 2010s, only then to start charging companies money to communicate with their customers, things could go the same way for Spotify. 

Spotify is a for profit company, and has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in podcasts. It needs to make that money back, and many podcasters are worried about how it plans to do it.

That’s why the second and third milestone, although significant, could be undone in an instant. 

We’re just getting started

At Leonardo English, we are on a mission to build the most interesting way of improving your English. We only started this journey 16 months ago, and it is fantastic to see how many people have joined us on it.

If you are a member of Leonardo English, or a listener to the podcast, thank you for your support. You are amazing.

If you are not yet a member, but are ready to go on this curious English learning journey with us, then I’d love for you to become a member.

Thank you, this is just the beginning.

Alastair - Founder of Leonardo English