Context

Spotify reached out to Steady that they’d like to display our members-only podcasts on Spotify, so we set out to allowing our creators to show their content on a huge platform.

Goal: Increase the reach, the number of paying memberships and convenience for podcast creators and their members

Core challenge

At Steady, each member gets a personal RSS feed from the creator, because the access is controlled at episode-level. However, Spotify at the time had only show-level access settings (unlike Apple Podcast and other podcatchers that enable adding any RSS feed). We needed to make some changes and compromises to allow our creators access to the largest podcasting platform, while still keeping their content exclusive.

Resolution

Project leadership

Since this proposal affected the whole company's priorities - product, marketing, etc., I've prepared and led a kickoff meeting where all teams could collect their questions, concerns and potential blockers that we'd follow up on and commit to what we'd achieve and a timeline.

I also led the a weekly checkin between teams on top of our regular team standups until our product manager onboarded. These early alignments made sure any issues were quickly discovered and addressed.

Digital whiteboard of a planning meeting

Product design

Spotify only allowed at the time for each show to have free or paid episodes, while our creators had the option to set up as many tiers as they needed. Unfortunately we couldn’t allow publishing multiple shows for different tiers due to external limitations. We mapped out the potential options, and directed our regular discovery calls to focus on podcasters, which also gave us valuable feedback about our current podcaster flows.

A diagram showing how Steady creates an individual RSS feed for each member, while Spotify creates one per podcast

Option 1: we allow all episodes on Spotify, some are paid, some are free. We discarded this option, since the free episodes were currently not available on a public RSS feed, and that would have tied creators to Spotify above all other podcasting platforms. We couldn't compromise the company value of keeping creators independent.

Option 2: We enable all paywalled episodes to also automatically appear on Spotify once the integration is enabled. We discarded this option since it would take away control from creators and lead to misunderstandings - we continuously had to clarify what are the options even within the team!

Option 3: We ask creators which paid plan’s episodes should also appear on Spotify - they can opt in certain plans. This left the most control in creator's hands and got positive reactions in CRM and discovery calls, so that's what we did.

A diagram explaining the three options we could consider on how to solve the problem between Spotify and Steady's technical implementation and mental model of podcast distribution

User flows

1. Set up the podcast distribution, and opt in to display the show on Spotify

2. Connect Steady and Spotify accounts to listen on Spotify for the existing listeners

3. Reach potential new members through Spotify (the money-making flow)

On top of this major addition to the podcast editing page, we also improved the first experience of this page for new creators (see below - new version on the right), and rolled out a dedicated marketing landing page.

Results

The number of new memberships exceeded our internal goal for revenue growth
Feature adoption rate over 30% among podcast creators
Over 20% of all members connected their Steady and Spotify account

And we also attended the All Ears podcasting conference in Berlin!