Defining High Priority needs for a new Product
WHERE
New York & San Francisco
WHEN
2015 - 2019
I founded a company and designed, built, and finally launched its flagship product in 2017. Along the way it inspired the New York Public
Radio Station, WNYC, to build an audio feedback section in their App (2016) and was piloted by the BuzzFeed Audio Team in 2018.
Because I am an auditory learner, I was inspired to build products for the sonic web once I noticed that the sonic web was non-existent (2015). In the following page you will see a few of the design decisions I faced and made while developing RecRoom. These learnings led to the development of a fully-functional audio survey platform at the beginning of the podcasting boom.
As an avid Podcast consumer and auditory learner I knew that podcasts had the potential to be much more interactive. I went through three major iterations before landing on the final product design which was validated by a team at WNYC.
The guiding constraint was customer pain. As I got to know my customer, audience engagement leads within podcasting companies, the product came into focus.
What is the Customer Pain?
The web is centered around text. That fact caused a few problems for professionals in the world of digital audio:
1. It is a PAIN to interact with your audience in audio.
You have to use additional technology to interact with your audience in audio, the format of your end product. Audiences are asked to email voice memos or call a number and leave a voicemail. Producers then have to listen through hundreds of responses in order to find a useable submission.
2. It is a PAIN to share audio to social media.
After your marketing, media, or production team combs through submissions they have to engage the video team. The video team generates an animated clip to back the text and then the Social Media Programmer can launch the assets if the final assets are delivered on time.
3. It is a PAIN to do the peripheral work that it takes to monetize your audio.
You have to run surveys in order to determine the demographics of your listenership. You also have to write show notes to make your show more discoverable in iTunes. This adds to the workload of the audio team.
These insights led me to design the concept of Annotatable Show Notes. This concept landed me a meeting with the New York Public Radio (WNYC) Team that produced the popular self-help show, Note to Self along with the organization's Head of Social Audio.
The Concept
From the podcaster pain points we can see that the entire audience engagement workflow sits outside of the show production process:
developing messages for social media, parsing through listener submissions, and creating show notes and user surveys sit outside of the process of creating podcasting companies main deliverable, the podcast.
My goal was to develop a streamlined process to help teams maximize their efforts and provide more value to their audience.
A mobile app that lets show hosts generate interactive show notes and track interactions with them.
The host records a message to their audinece and has it automatically transcribed. As they speak they can click to add links, images, and questions for their listeners. They can then receive their listeners responses in an analytics dashboard which would ease the process of finding great listener clips.
The Note to Self Team found the annotatable show notes one-page pitch compelling enough to meet! Through our meeting we were able to land on the key elements that would fit in their workflow and cut out elements that didn’t.
Insights from the meeting
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Podcasting teams at professional media organizations think about audience engagement and site visits because those metrics signal their audience’s brand loyalty and thus, likelihood of making monetary purchases down the line.
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Seeing the number of audio submissions, platform from which the survey was accessed, and commonalities between responses were the most frequently discussed.
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Show hosts at larger media outlets have teams that support them. Producers and Audience Engagement Coordinators that sit on the Marketing Team are commonly the owners of the audience engagement work.
The Note to Self Team and WNYC's Head of Social Audio felt very seen and heard by the end of it.
They offered $10,000 if I could build the solution that was articulated.
Conclusion
Working Towards Traction
Over the next year I designed and built the solution that was articulated during the meeting which included dropping the annotation portion of the annotation pitch! Due to resources and timing, the WNYC team piloted their own in-app voice memo gathering solution. I continued to build out the solution and pitch it to others.
I hit the road, developed marketing materials, and found events where I could reach my customer to get traction.
Thought Leadership
These efforts led to a modest set of users and an exciting Beta-Test with BuzzFeed's Audio Team but eventually revealed the need for a larger market, more support, and a better inroad to build a sustainable business.
I greatly deepened my technical aptitude and negotiating skills by bringing RecRoom to life.
Online News Association Panel
One-on-One Engagement
Online News Association
Midway Booth
Exploring Adjacent Verticals
American Conference of Teachers of Foreign Languages
