Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned

You never know which of those tiny product changes are going to end up being this existential moment for your business. You really have to keep your eyes open and be ready for that to happen anytime, especially when you're still trying to figure out where your place is going to be.

We were obsessed with reducing friction, this was our constant battle. And so we hired a couple of college interns and we brought them in and we were like, people are going to push this magical one button in the Anchor app and they're going to say, I want to distribute my podcast, and your job is going to be to do all that same manual stuff manually, but to them it's going to feel magical and it happened automatically.

One of our principles from the very early days of Anchor was build things that don't scale, where we were like, we're a ridiculously tiny team. We're trying to do this really big thing. We had raised very little money, and so we were always just trying to figure out how can we hack into whatever growth we're trying to make happen.

Maya is encouraging her product team members at Spotify/Anchor to create their own podcasts to better understand user needs. "Their podcast" refers to each team member's individual podcast.

I really don't think that you can build the right things. If they talk to users all the time, they see the data, but all of them, once they finally start doing their podcast, they're like, I get it. Something clicked and now I feel like I really understand what they need.

Anytime I've given someone effective feedback, it's always well received, even if it's tough to hear, people want to get better and they want to know how they can improve.

I think your gut actually as a type of data and I think it's a totally valid one and it's just I think you need to be clear that that's what you're working with, but then it should be taken as seriously as any other data point.

We had this really interesting moment where the users were all telling us, there's no problem. We love this product. They were using it every day, they were coming back. It was slowly growing and we were just like, this just isn't going to get us to where we need to be.

We used to have this rule, the 80/20 rule, where it's like you can't just build for that 20, I don't think we made this up by the way. I think this is a common thing, but we'd always refer to it and say, we want to be building for the 80%, and even though the 20% are going to be more vocal.

We used to have this rule, the 80/20 rule, where it's like you can't just build for that 20, I don't think we made this up by the way. I think this is a common thing, but we'd always refer to it and say, we want to be building for the 80%, and even though the 20% are going to be more vocal.