Stay Forever: A Platform of Their Own for Europe's Biggest Retro Podcast

Since July, stayforever.de has been running on its own membership platform. We built it together with the Stay Forever team.

Stay Forever is a German podcast about old games, made by Christian Schmidt and Gunnar Lott. They call it the biggest retro games podcast in Europe. More than 8,000 people support it every month, and until now all of that went through Patreon and Steady.

Why build a platform?

The idea had been around at Stay Forever for three or four years. Stay Forever wrote about the reasons on LinkedIn, and Gunnar in a first-hand report on techtag.de (both in German). The short version: if a third-party platform handles your funding, you don’t get to decide what gets built.

A few things Patreon and Steady couldn’t do:

• Podcast feeds that each listener puts together themselves
• Transcripts attached to episodes
• Delivering community extras without workarounds

On top of that, user data, communication and payments all sit with someone else. With a US platform, European data protection gets complicated. And if the platform changes owners or changes direction, creators have little say.

What we built

The website was rebuilt from scratch. The platform delivers podcasts and other content directly, handles payments, manages members and runs on servers in Germany.

For listeners, that means:

Feed builder. You put together your own podcast feed instead of subscribing to everything or nothing.

One place. Free episodes and supporter episodes come from the same site.

One login. Single sign-on with the forum.

Notifications. By email and on the website.

A clear overview. You can see what your subscription includes.

A direct line. Invoices come from Stay Forever, and so does support.

Nobody has to switch. Supporters who stay on Patreon or Steady lose nothing, and time already paid for is credited when they move over. YouTube and Spotify also stay important for reach. The platform doesn’t replace everything. It’s the home base for supporters.

How we worked together

Gunnar and I have known each other since 2011, when we both worked at Gameforge in Karlsruhe. Later we were both at Flaregames. That helps. There’s no getting-to-know-you phase, and we know how the other one thinks.

We kept the process small on purpose. Paul, the web developer at Stay Forever, sits between their management and us. He writes requirements as rough Trello tickets. We read them, ask questions or suggest a better approach, and then the ticket moves across a simple Kanban board.

We had a lot of freedom, including on design. Nothing had to match a mockup pixel for pixel. That only works when both sides trust each other, and they did. It was a lot of fun.

The launch

The launch went better than expected, GamesWirtschaft reported. Stay Forever had an internal goal of moving more than 20 percent of supporters off the external platforms by the end of the year. They hit it after five days. In the first three weeks, they gained more new subscriptions than in the entire first half of the year.

There were bugs, of course. A few podcast apps didn’t get along with the feeds, and we fixed that in the first days. Version 1.1 shipped three weeks after launch, and there’s a release planned every month until the end of the year.

The community is what helps most. Stay Forever listeners are very specific about what they’re missing, and the path from a forum post to a ticket is short. We shipped a lot of their requests in the first days, and the rest is on the roadmap.

What’s next

The list of planned features is long. That was the whole point: Stay Forever now decides what comes next.

If you understand German and haven’t heard Stay Forever yet, plenty of episodes are free on stayforever.de. Pick a game you played as a kid and start there.

Further reading (in German)

• Warum wir unsere eigene Podcast-Plattform gebaut haben (Stay Forever on LinkedIn)
• Warum wir unsere eigene Podcast-Plattform gebaut haben: ein Erfahrungsbericht von Stay Forever (Gunnar Lott on techtag.de)
• Megaprojekt: Retro-Podcast Stay Forever baut eigene Plattform (GamesWirtschaft)