A Post-Mortem for Social Podcast Discovery

Text is different. Sure, some types of text (like newsletters) are somewhat podcast-like in their functionality, and have a low dunbar number. But there’s a lot out there that’s more utilitarian and is not about building a relationship with an author. (Breaking news, explainers, etc.)

So, what does this mean? Even if there’s a podcast app that does a great job of surfacing a bunch of new, seemingly great stuff, I’m still likely to keep coming back to my favorite shows.

Before I ever heard of Breaker, I wanted someone to build a “socially-sorted” podcast app that would help me listen to a wider variety of shows based on episode-level recommendations from friends