Perooz
Summary
Our goal was to create a platform where podcasters, musicians, content creators, etc. could record and share audio clips.
My role
Co-Founder – Led research, conception, visualization, and testing of the entire product. In addition, I designed the entire UX and UI of the app. During the marketing process, I planned out the strategy for onboarding testers.
Goals
Experience the audio
Help the creators
When you spend a lot of time and money creating high-quality content and no one discovers it, it is demotivating.
Remove the barriers
Video creation requires multiple skills, expensive equipment, and a lot of effort.
Constraints
I gave myself and my partner a month to design and develop an MVP, so we could start testing right away. Within a couple of days, I produced a prototype so that we could begin.
We're live!
A couple of iterations were needed to fix bugs and improve the user experience after developing the MVP. We were able to get our minimal viable product on the Apple App Store within a month. My responsibility was to plan marketing strategies to attract the first batch of testers during the development process.
But wait?!
Immediately following our launch, we encountered new problems. We knew these issues would arise early on, but now we had some time to address them.
What is this app?
Many creators were reluctant to onboard a new app, not knowing whether their time would be spent well. We had to demonstrate to users that people will listen to them.
Not enough content
Onboarding listeners and creators at the same time was difficult. As a result, we didn’t have enough content to offer listeners a variety of audio experiences.
Teaching creators
Creators of audio content weren’t aware of how to present their content on our platform in a way that would grab listeners’ attention.
Let them know
To encourage users, I created a set of notifications that would occur when they listened to your content. By adjusting the frequency, we were able to make it feel good, but not overbearing. It was easy for our app to trigger these notifications without having a ton of users, so it was impacting users right away. Most of the content creators returned and posted more audio clips.
Build for our current users
Initially, we uploaded a variety of audio clips to give first adopters an idea of what Perooz is like. Once we had a few creators on the platform, we worked on ways to help them create more on Perooz:
1) We reduced the size of the audio clips, so the creators would have to cut to the core of the content.
2) We introduced a new feature called Story Rooms. Users were able to create content in a new way using this feature.
To be continued
Despite these added features, my partner and I decided to put Perooz on hold. Perooz is still available on the App Store, and we occasionally get users testing it.
This project was a worthwhile experience for me. I developed a better understanding of the audio space and the needs of content creators. In the future, I’d like to devote more time to researching the needs of content creators. Had we solved more of the creator’s pain points, I believe we could have had more success early on.