Our vision at Shuffle has always been to make podcast listening less lonely. I think it's a universal experience to be chuckling to yourself while listening to a podcast, or thinking "OMG I need to discuss this with someone".

It was always frustrating to me that the podcast experience hasn't changed in the 16 years since Steve Jobs' announcement — every single popular podcast player today is a different skin on a glorified play and pause button. Yet I meet podcast fans everyday just dying to send me recommendations and to talk about their favorite podcast, even if I have no idea what they are talking about.

Ada Yeo @adayeoyh

It boggles me that in this golden age of rich media that all podcast players have the exact same UX... Which is basically one big play button lol. Where are the: - personalized reccs - community discussion - social signals - transcripts

January 14th 2021

19 Retweets232 Likes

Check Out The New Shuffle

It all started with podcast clips

We had thought that helping podcast fans share short clips into a personalized discovery feed might be our wedge into creating social behavior around podcasts. This made sense because there's tonnes of great podcast content, but it’s impossible to share and discover a 2h-long mp3 file.

We feel incredibly lucky to have gotten over 5,000 clips from the community over the last few months Shuffle has been live. However, when we spoke to our power users, we realized many of them weren't sharing the clips with others off-platform, which is what we designed the app around.

This hit us hard. If they weren't sharing it anywhere, why were they spending 5-10minutes per podcast episode creating a clip on Shuffle, sometimes even creating multiple clips?

After talking to them (thank you to our OGs who put up with me), we realized podcast fans simply wanted to react to the best moment and share it with a like-minded community. Clips were simply a means to an end.

With that key insight, we're excited to launch the new Shuffle, where it's 10x easier and more fun to react to your favorite podcasts with a like-minded community — think fun emojis, thoughtful comments, and funny memes.

What's new?

• Podcast discovery: We've got a brand new feed which gives you a glimpse into each room (i.e. episode), alongside the the social reactions and accompanying audio moment.

• Post fun reactions while you listen to a podcast: No more wondering if anyone else thought the same moment was funny. Listen, react, and discuss your favorite parts with others in the same episode!

• Queuing: Easily add episodes to your queue from your subscriptions, the feed, or search. Many of you are already using Shuffle as your default podcast player, but for those who haven't made the switch, just know we're going to be building more features down the line to reach parity with other players. We're starting with queuing — try it out!

For everyone who has created or liked a clip — don't worry, you'll still be able to access and export them for the next 3 weeks on your profile. If you need help, just reply to this email.

We're just getting started and we couldn't be more excited to share this new product with you. If you're along for the Shuffle journey and want to make your favorite podcast shows more fun and social — reply to this email telling me the names of your top 3 favorite shows so we can loop you into a special group ;)

Check Out The New Shuffle