Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product)

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

I I still don't know how many people know this. I think people think that we had some secret door like backdoor deal with with Apple for distribution. But we uh we just had college students making Apple podcast accounts and then submitting like hundreds of thousands of podcasts through these accounts. And I think that was a really big part of why we got so much hosting market share so quickly because it was such an insane benefit over the other platforms which otherwise had been sort of commoditized at that point. Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products.

Today my guest is Maya Prohavnik. Maya is Spotify's head of product for podcasting. where she oversees product, design, and engineering teams responsible for building the tools and experiences for podcasters and their listeners. Maya was also employee number one at Anchor, which Spotify acquired about five years ago, which became the core of Spotify's podcasting hosting platform. Which now powers over seventy five percent of all new podcasts created in the world. In our conversation, we dig into why Maya is obsessed with dog fooding and why she encourages everyone on her team to create their own podcast. She's got four podcasts of her own, which are all very highly rated and people love.

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