Fall in Love with SoundCloud again
- Role
- Lead Product Designer
- Company
- SoundCloud
- Year
- 2023
Summary
I led the improvement of the apps' experience and pushed SoundCloud towards profitability. The company struggled due to poor customer experience, low-quality streaming, and confusing premium plans. With new leadership, including our new CPO, changes began. Our efforts led to major design changes, adding essential features and improving service quality. This helped quadruple SoundCloud's subscribers, pushing it towards profitability by Q3 2023.
About SoundCloud
it is an online audio & streaming platform based in Berlin. one of the most recognized names in the music industry. And as we say… What's next in music is first on SoundCloud. it's currently a subscription business model. selling its plans to consumers & audio creators. while now it's looking into changing towards creator & fan economy to be more community-based.
Background
SoundCloud was founded in 2007 and has been around for 15+ years yet it was a failing product and never turned a profit. it used to be the hot new thing where people upload & listen to music for free but what happened?
in short, Spotify came around and had a sharp focus on building a premium subscription service and took over the world. SoundCloud was watching from the sidelines and didn't offer a subscription plan up until 2016 but that didn't work either. why?
- Lacked essential experiences for a streaming service. Couldn't create/edit playlists, Didn't have a play queue, etc…
- Couldn't capitalize on its unique value proposition of being an open platform where communities can be built.
- The product suffered from spammy comments and followers which made it cheap and untrustworthy.
- Low-quality music streaming.
- The premium plans were confusing and the product wasn't good at pushing them either. Conversion rates were low and churn was high.
so anything anyone wanted to build on these shaky grounds never worked.