I've witnessed this countless times. It's a huge anathema to bring up to founders looking for a quick way to build a community the fact that... humans have intrinsic motivation, and if you slap money on it, you might simply crowd that one out.
Design is such a powerful word. It means everything and so means nothing. And our practice of design really was the whole thing. Ultimately, it was your experience. From the very founding ideas of what the product is and what it does and how it’s architected and how it’s built—its appearance is just one small part of the whole thing.
Here's the bottom line: building a podcast audience is hard. I'd argue it's the hardest audience to build, but it's also the most valuable audience you can build.
There is so much freedom to play and experiment in these shared non-monetized spaces, but the music industry is deeply broken and it is making music matter less, not at its core, but the consequence of diminishing its monetary value while placing the burden of popularity on broke artists means the whole thing feels like a demoralizing shakedown.... See more
So what you see when you watch someone surfing is they take control momentarily, to situate themselves on a wave, and then they surrender. They’re carried along by it, and then they take control again, and then they surrender. I think that’s a very good analogy of what we do throughout our lives, actually. We’re constantly moving between... See more