Vriend van de Show

The challenge

Many podcast creators rely on advertisements for their income. Although this provides a consistent source of revenue, the podcast producers at Dag en Nacht Media thought it would be a good idea to offer listeners the option to support podcasters directly with a one-time or recurring donation. Dag en Nacht received support from Google News Initiative (GNI) to implement this idea together with Digital Natives.

Our Approach

In a strategy sprint, we explored various possibilities to achieve the goal. The bond between podcast creator and listener is incredibly intimate: a creator literally speaks into your ear. Listeners often express feeling like they personally know the creators of their favorite podcasts, purely because they listen to their voices up close every week. Many listeners want to give something back. Talk back, join discussions, or make a financial contribution. We wanted to develop something that meets all these interaction needs and is not simply a donation platform that can also be used by creators other than podcast producers.

In various brainstorming and sketching sessions, we tried to discover what this product should become. An app? A web platform? We sat down with creators to map out their needs and test a number of prototypes with them. This led us to a description and a long-term goal: the product would be developed as a web app to reach as many people as possible and would later be transformed into a native mobile app.

During the strategy sprint, we also came up with a name for this concept: Friend of the Show. A name that emphasizes the intimate bond between creator and listener. Friend of the Show is a term that already existed in the podcast world but never had an official meaning. With the arrival of our platform, this would change. It was also a great starting point to philosophize about what it really means to be a friend of a show and what we can develop to fulfill these expectations. Friendship is not just about (financial) support, but also about interaction, equality, telling each other what you think, keeping each other informed. The name Friend of the Show proved to be a huge source of inspiration, and the first features began to form in our minds: a reaction module, notifications, but also the possibility to submit a recorded voice message that your favorite podcast creators could use in their show.

Our lead designer Elmar Kruitwagen and our UX designers translated the concept into concrete designs of features that solved the main interaction problems. How do we ask listeners to donate without being too pushy? And how do we meet all the other interaction needs that friends have, without the donation option getting drowned out among all the possibilities? We tested another prototype with the creators and realized that we were solving too many problems at once. We made an important decision: we needed to focus primarily on the creators, the people we want to help further with this product.

As a minimum viable product, Vriend van de Show primarily needed to be a tool with possibilities that podcast creators currently don't have elsewhere – the concept only works if the creators enthusiastically start using it. Further along the roadmap, we could gradually enhance the platform with features that specifically excite listeners. Thus, we chose a very simple audio player, assuming that listeners would listen to their podcasts in their own listening app and only come to Vriend van de Show after the episode to discuss what they just heard. Later, the platform will be expanded with an advanced audio player with all the features that listeners are used to from their own favorite app.

By sharpening our focus and having podcast creators as a clear target audience in mind, the next prototype we created turned out to be a great success with the test group. We were ready for development. In a scrum team of five people (plus a few flexible experts), we worked for six sprints on a first version of Vriend van de Show. This version was tested twice with the creators in between. Due to the flexible setup of a scrum process, we could slightly adjust our focus along the way and ultimately arrive at a very strong minimum viable product. This went live on June 8, 2020, with ten podcasts from Dag en Nacht Media.

Result

On the day of the launch of Friend of the Show, the cycling podcast De Rode Lantaarn published their latest episode, in which they promoted the new platform. Within 24 hours, the podcast had received €1500 in donations. Listeners responded enthusiastically, but especially many other podcasters joined, allowing us to onboard more than thirty shows on the platform within a month. As a result, we immediately started with a diverse set of shows that we can analyze and draw conclusions from. For example, we notice huge spikes in donations when a podcaster mentions Friend of the Show during a broadcast, but we also see differences between the shows and their audiences. We can take these conclusions into account when determining the roadmap for the coming year.

Friend of the Show has become more than just a donation platform offering new revenue models for podcasters; it is a holistic solution to make the bond between creators and their audience even more intimate. The platform provides a home base for podcasters, a personal website where they have all the tools at their disposal to communicate quickly and easily with their audience. Listeners can find all episodes, extra updates, and can subscribe to the show's newsletter. The enthusiasm among both listeners and creators is overwhelming, and it is extremely exciting for all parties involved to see how the platform will grow in the coming years.