Everything between the question and the episode.
The parts you see, and the parts that quietly do the right thing.
The widget
One script tag puts a recorder on your page — inline, as a modal, or as a floating bubble — and the same tag renders your archive, your latest episode, or one specific episode's player.
It lives in a cross-origin iframe, deliberately: your stylesheet cannot break it, and its recorder cannot read your page. Typing instead of talking is a first-class fallback, and so is uploading a file when a browser can't record.
Mockup of the embedded ask widget: a visitor presses record, a waveform moves while they speak, and sending shows a thank-you note.
The inbox & the studio
Every question arrives transcribed, so you triage by reading. Answering is one page: listen, record, tidy the drafted title and teaser, publish. Anything that goes sideways has a lever — re-draft, fill in anything missing, rebuild the episode, redraw the key art, retry transcription — and the publish button lists every blocker at once instead of one per attempt.
Mockup of the creator console: an inbox of transcribed questions, and the studio where an answer is recorded, the drafted title is edited, and a checklist turns green before publishing.
The episode
Question, a beat of silence, answer — spliced into one MP3 with real ID3 chapter marks, so podcast apps show skippable segments and the page shows a two-tone scrub bar. Dead air is trimmed from the ends only; a pause while someone thinks is part of how they talk.
Every episode gets generated key art in your palette — a card in someone's timeline wearing our red would be us advertising on your content.
How should I value startup equity against a lower salary?
Mockup of an episode player: one audio file, with the question and the answer as separately coloured segments of the scrub bar and chapter buttons to skip between them.
An archive you arrange
Answers pile up, and the newest is rarely the one you'd hand someone first. Feature the few that lead — pick them, put them in the order you want, and that's what your home page opens with. Pick none and it shows your most recent, exactly as it always did.
Episodes are also filed under themes, drafted with the rest of the metadata and confirmed by you, never invented behind your back. Each theme becomes a real page on your own domain — /themes/retirement/, in the sitemap, with every answer on that subject — so “I've covered that a few times” is a link you can send.
Mockup of a curated archive: a row of themes a visitor can filter by, above three episodes in the order the host put them in.
Your domain, your feed
Verify a CNAME and everything moves to your own domain: episodes, transcripts, canonical tags, the sitemap, and a real podcast RSS feed you can submit to Apple or Spotify. Episode pages carry schema.org Q&A markup with both transcripts inline, and oEmbed makes them unfurl playable in Notion, Ghost or Substack.
Mockup of two addresses: the same episode moving from a subdomain of ours to the customer's own domain, where its transcript earns their search ranking.
Built for other people's voices.
Four separate consents
Voice, photo, name, location — each its own checkbox. Voice and photo are never pre-ticked, and that isn't configurable.
Withhold, never grant
Everything published is the asker's consent AND your toggle. You can always pull something back; you can never reveal what they didn't offer.
Real erasure
Erase the person, keep the answer: files purged from storage, the episode rebuilt without their voice, the key art redrawn. Askers can do it themselves.
Branding by reading, not by form
Point it at your site and it proposes your palette, your fonts, copy in your voice, a disclaimer suited to your field, and starter questions from your real subject matter. Everything lands beside a live preview, and nothing applies until you accept it.
Prefer to do it by hand? Every colour, corner radius, font and line of copy in the widget is editable.
Mockup of branding setup: Open Mic reads the customer's website, extracts its palette and fonts, and proposes a theme, a disclaimer and starter questions — applied only when accepted.
Insights without surveillance
Episodes opened, episodes played, listen-through, questions asked — counted as daily tallies, not visitor profiles. No cookie, no cross-page identity, robots and link-unfurlers excluded. The insights page says exactly what is and isn't counted, out loud.
Mockup of the insights chart: daily bars of episodes opened and played.
Your team
One account can hold several spaces. Owners handle domains, keys and invitations; editors do the daily work of triaging and answering. Invitations go to an email address and check the address, and the last owner can never be removed.
Followers, done politely
Askers can follow a space — double opt-in by construction, since the only page that can tick the box sits behind an emailed link. New episodes go out one send per person in your brand, not ours, each with its own unsubscribe link.
See it before you believe it.
The whole install is one tag, and it's free while we're in early access.