Maya Prohovnik: evaluation

Transcript context

…You mentioned there was this feature that made it easy to distribute your podcast, and this touches on a question that actually asked Mike Mignano, the CEO of anchor what to ask you. And he's like, ask her about the story of how you made that actually possible to distribute the podcast to platforms, and it ended up being a very unscalable solution. One of our principles from the very early days of Anchor was build things that don't scale, where we were like, we're a ridiculously tiny team. We're trying to do this really big thing. We had raised very little money, and so we were always just trying to figure out how can we hack into whatever growth we're trying to make happen. So when it turned out that people wanted to distribute their podcasts everywhere, it's gotten a little bit easier. But at the time, I'm sure you remember what podcast distribution was like, where it's like there's all of these different podcast platforms you have to manually distribute to all of them. Apple Podcasts in particular can be really difficult for people who aren't tech-savvy because there's this whole, you have to prove that you own your RSS feed, you have to know what an RSS feed is. You have to sometimes deal with 301 redirects. There's just all this stuff that's deeply technical in a way that we were just like it doesn't need to be. And so one of the steps there was to submit your podcast to Apple Podcasts, you had to have an Apple ID, and there are a lot of people in the world who don't have iPhones, and so we're building for everybody. So we were like, how can we reduce that friction? We were obsessed with reducing friction, this was our constant battle. And so we had this idea, we hired a couple of college interns and we brought them in and we were like, people are going to push this magical one button in the Anchor app and they're going to say, I want to distribute my podcast, and your job is going to be to do all that same manual stuff manually, but to them it's going to feel magical and it happened automatically. I still don't know how many people know this. I think people think that we had some secret backdoor deal with Apple for distribution, but we just had college students making Apple podcast accounts and then submitting hundreds of thousands of podcasts through these accounts. And that resulted in lots of interesting technical and relationship situations. It was a really interesting thing, and eventually that didn't scale, eventually we stopped doing that, obviously, but I think that is such a cool example of the importance of how you're packaging what you're offering to people where if we had said you request distribution and we'll have one of our team members get back to you in three days and let you know when you're on Apple Podcasts, that doesn't feel very magical or it's really saving you any time. If all you see as a user is you're hitting a button and then 24 hours later you're somehow magically on Apple Podcasts, that was so much easier than manual distribution was at the time. And I think that was a really big part of why we got so much hosting market share so quickly because it was such an insane benefit over the other platforms which otherwise had been commoditized at that point. ink that was a really big part of why we got so much hosting market share so quickly because it was such an insane benefit over the other platforms which otherwise had been commoditized at that point. So, it's funny now to think back on that, but I think it's also related to we were so good at being willing to humor what seemed like stupid ideas and try them. And so that is something that I definitely recommend to product people is let yourself have the silly ideas we always talked about yes and when someone has an idea, how can you build on it and think about how it might work instead of saying, no, that can't work because, and so we had a number of those things where it was like nobody understood how we were doing things so differently, and it was just because we weren't afraid to do the silly unscalable thing for a while.…

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