Hey Sumolings 👋

Big news from the Castmagic team—we’re back with our biggest update yet, just in time for AppSumo Day.

This isn’t just a polish. It’s a full product relaunch.

Here’s what’s new:

🚀 Brand-New UI/UX

 We completely overhauled the interface to support side-by-side transcript + content generation, making it way easier to stay in flow and edit your AI outputs alongside your source media.

✂️ Smarter Clipping & Clip Library

 Creating clips just got smoother. You can now generate, manage, and organize clips for your recordings from your dedicated Clips tab.

🎬 Studio, Rebuilt from the Ground Up

 Our Studio feature now has a fully revamped infrastructure, giving you a place to generate clips, browse past exports, and soon—more customization for visuals so you can craft better audiograms and captioned content with way more flexibility.

 💬 Updated Magic Chat

 You can now chat with one or even multiple recordings. Use this to draft, summarize, or create content across several episodes or calls—all from a single chat.

🧠 Better Transcription, Faster Performance

 We upgraded our transcription models and cleaned up dozens of bugs behind the scenes. Things are faster, smoother, and more accurate than ever.

This relaunch sets the stage for what’s next at Castmagic—and we’re just getting started.

Thanks for riding with us. Your feedback, support, and trust continue to shape the platform we’re building.

Let’s make magic.

—Blaine & The Castmagic Team

YouTube URL import has now been removed from the deal.

This comes in light of ongoing enforcement around YouTube’s updated Terms of Service, which prohibit third-party downloading. The current workaround is to use an external downloader and then upload the file directly into Castmagic. Should YouTube adjust their TOS in the future, we’ll do everything we can to bring this feature back.

We also break this all down in more detail in the webinar we hosted last month—feel free to check it out for a deeper dive.

Thanks for rolling with us as the landscape shifts.

Hey Sumolings 👋

We wanted to drop in with a quick update directly from the Castmagic team.

First up—YouTube Imports.

If you’ve had issues importing YouTube links recently, you're not imagining things. YouTube updated their Terms of Service and has been actively cracking down on third-party downloads. Even major platforms like Descript have deprecated YouTube importing entirely due to these changes. We’re actively exploring compliant solutions, but this one’s a tough nut to crack—so thanks for bearing with us. In the meantime, the best solution would be to use an external downloader and then import directly into Castmagic for all your content creation needs.

Next—Studio is our top priority.

We've heard the reports of export instability in Studio, and we’ve already rolled out several fixes to improve performance. But we’re not stopping there. Our current 6-week sprint is fully dedicated to Studio: adding powerful new features and customization options, boosting overall stability, and rolling out an upgraded UI/UX to make it even easier to create stunning visuals, audiograms, and captioned clips.

We’re super grateful for all the feedback—it directly informs what we build and how we prioritize. Your support means a lot, and we’re excited about what’s coming next.

Thanks for being part of the journey.

—The Castmagic Founders

What’s up, Sumolings! 👋

I’m Blaine Bolus, co-founder of Castmagic and host of DTC Pod, one of the top podcasts in the consumer business space.

As a creator, I was constantly looking for a better way to extract value from my conversations and turn interviews into high-value assets for multiple platforms. Transcribing, pulling key takeaways, and writing content from scratch took way too much time—so I started wondering: Could AI do this better?

That’s when I teamed up with my DTC Pod co-host, Ramon, who ran Trend at the time, and our friend Justin, a technical mastermind and founder of Upside.

Together, we built Castmagic to automate content repurposing and make content workflows effortless for podcasters, creators, and businesses.

🚀 How Castmagic Took Off

We launched in March 2023, and things moved fast. Noah from AppSumo discovered Castmagic, used it on his podcast, and loved it.

Next thing we knew, AppSumo reached out, and we kicked things off with a launch event at SXSW. Since then, we’ve grown to serve over 100,000 customers and scaled to nearly $2M in annual revenue.

Some of the biggest brands in the world—including HubSpot, AppSumo, Impact Theory, Maxwell Leadership, Notre Dame, Yale, and Ministry Brands—use Castmagic to automate their content creation with AI.

✨ Why You’ll Love Castmagic

If you create audio or video content—whether it's podcasts, webinars, sales calls, coaching sessions, or interviews—you know how time-consuming it is to extract insights, write show notes, create social content, and format everything for different platforms.

With Castmagic, you can:

✅ Turn any recording into ready-to-publish content in seconds

✅ Automate repurposing with custom AI prompts that match your voice

✅ Create clips, audiograms, and captioned videos instantly

✅ Stay organized with a project management-style

Content Pipeline

We built Castmagic because we needed it ourselves—and now, it’s saving thousands of creators and businesses hours of work every week.

🎉 Let’s Get Started

We’re pumped to bring Castmagic back to the AppSumo community, where creators and entrepreneurs thrive.

Can’t wait for you to try it, and we’d love to hear your feedback! Drop us a comment, share your experience, and couldn't be more excited to continue building something great together.

🚀 — Blaine Bolus Castmagic Co-Founder

What are past projects, failures, or successes you’ve had in your career?

Before Castmagic, we were building, scaling, and solving problems across content, commerce, and technology.

🎙️ Podcasting & Content – I co-host DTC Pod, one of the top consumer business podcasts, where Ramon & I have interviewed 300+ founders, operators, and marketers shaping the DTC space. Since then I also started hosting Uploading, another podcast focused on content creation and creator monetization.

🍽️ Seated – Before that, I co-founded Seated (seatedapp.io), a restaurant tech platform that helped restaurants drive reservations and maximize revenue. Backed by Insight Partners, Craft Ventures, Greycroft, & Rho Capital, Seated scaled quickly, proving how strong incentives and marketplace dynamics could reshape an industry.

📈 Trend.io – My co-founder Ramon built Trend.io, a marketplace connecting brands with creators to streamline influencer marketing. His experience scaling creator-led growth was key in shaping Castmagic’s focus on automating content workflows for busy creators and teams.

💰 Upside & Blockchain.com – Justin, our third co-founder, was the co-founder of Upside, an eCommerce financing platform, and previously Head of Platform at Blockchain.com, where he built scalable financial infrastructure. His expertise in AI, automation, and scaling tech products helped us turn Castmagic into a seamless, high-performance content tool.

🔥 Building Castmagic – After years of creating content and seeing firsthand how much time went into repurposing, we knew there had to be a better way with AI. That led to Castmagic, where we’ve built the best AI-powered content repurposing engine to help creators, marketers, and businesses turn conversations into content instantly—without the manual work. Every experience along the way shaped how we think about product, content, and growth—and now, we’re bringing that into Castmagic to help creators save time and scale faster. 🚀

What 3rd party tools is your product critically dependent on?

1️⃣ OpenAI/Anthropic (GPT-4o & Claude) – Powers Castmagic’s AI-driven content generation, ensuring high-quality repurposed content.

2️⃣ Assembly + Deepgram (Speech to Text) – Provides accurate, automated transcription for audio and video content.

Where is your customer data stored?

Texas, USA

What is your current monthly recurring revenue (MRR)?

125

How many customers do you have today?

~100,000

What’s the origin of the idea for your product?

As podcasters, we struggled with repurposing high quality, information dense content efficiently. We knew AI could automate this, so we built Castmagic to turn long-form audio and video into ready-to-publish content instantly. We believe creators and businesses should focus on ideas, not busywork. Castmagic eliminates tedious editing and helps users maximize their content’s reach with less effort.

What problem is your product solving and how?

Manual content repurposing is time-consuming and inefficient. Castmagic automates transcription, content generation, and media clipping, saving hours and boosting content output. Unlike simple transcription tools, Castmagic creates fully formatted, platform-ready content tailored to your voice. Custom & Recurring Prompts, Studio tools, and a Content Pipeline make it a full workflow solution, not just an AI text generator.

What’s the #1 thing you’re looking to gain from the AppSumo campaign?

We’re focused on feedback, word of mouth, and usage—we want creators, marketers, and businesses to push the tool to its limits and share how they use it.

What are your plans with the customers, cash, and learnings from the AppSumo campaign?

We're excited to reinvest into the business to keep growing the platform. We’ll reinvest into new features, workflow optimizations, and AI improvements to make Castmagic even more powerful for users.

Any details to clarify about the deal?

Nope - all features in the AppSumo deal are fully live. Some high-volume users may need extra AI minutes beyond the base plan, which can be added separately.

Anything else you'd like to add?

Just excited to be back!