Shipped curated lists in ten days and users made 1,000 of them

Situation

Goodpods is a social podcast app. We had an older “Playlist” feature, which was just a simple list of items. The product wanted to replace it with curated lists: each list had a clear purpose, intro text, and additional text on every item explaining why it was in the list. The goal was user-generated discovery, giving users a proper format for recommending podcasts to each other.

Task

I was responsible for building the feature in the native app. A frontend developer worked on it too, but the app side was mine to deliver for the 3.6.0 release.

Action

I built it end to end over about ten days. I started with discovery, making curated lists show up in search results and on user profiles, so there was somewhere to find them before the destination pages existed. Then I built the curated list page itself, first a basic working version and then the full page, followed by a view-all page. Next I added viewing other users’ lists, then sharing, so a list could be sent outside the app. A few days before release I trimmed scope by removing featured lists from the discover screen rather than building that surface out for launch. I finished with a hardening pass: fixed a race condition that showed the share popup twice, added an empty state when viewing another user who had no lists, and normalised user-entered links by prepending https where it was missing. The feature shipped in release 3.6.0 and replaced playlists.

Result

Users created 100 lists by day two and 1,000 lists within the first ten days. Sharing outside the app did not help that much; most lists came from podcasters promoting their own podcast inside a list to reach new listeners. As in-app user-generated discovery, though, the feature took off immediately, and the adoption numbers were there from the first week.