Soundwave – Short-form Social Audio

Soundwave is a short-form social audio app that brings authentic ideas and stories together.

2021 was a meaningful year of change. I took a break from data pipelines to create a voice-powered social platform, empowering people to tell stories and use their voice to connect without the pressure of presenting themselves online.

The dream team --
Dan Ndombe - Co-founder, Engineering
Chloe To (me) - Co-founder, Product
Joey Walsh - Cofounder, Marketing and Research
Catherine Hill- Board Advisor

Things I worked on --
Product strategy
End-to-end design & experience
Design and branding system

Social media has lost its original value as an authentic place to share memories and connect with people.

Over the years, social media has rapidly evolved into a powerful marketing tool. In this fast-growing content creation industry, finding space for authentic, incentive-free content has become increasingly difficult. Establishing a voice and influence online often brings the pressure to produce content that caters to popular demands—whether it's the look, social status, or lifestyle.

The current social audio landscape is dominated by live or long-form audio and podcasting, which require significant production and processing. Soundwave is a place that lets users pick up their phones and share unfiltered, unedited thoughts on the go.

First version of Soundwave lauched in May 2021.

From a Figma mess...

To going live on the app store!

For the MVP, there were a few key flows I wanted to nail:

✏️ Sign up flow is the first impression. It has to be short, simple, and completely bug-free.

I aimed to keep the sign-up process to five questions or fewer. The decisions centered around maintaining a simple flow while still gathering valuable user data. Collecting email addresses is crucial to help bring users back to the app, and knowing how users discovered Soundwave helps us build effective analytics around marketing and promotion.

✏️ There is a clear hierarchy of information so user is able to navigate through the app without confusion.
✏️ Provide basic social interactions like follow, like, and share so that users feel rewarded for making content.

I wanted to mirror a simple and familiar social experience with a clear hierarchy of information so users can easily navigate the app functionality. However, every product is slightly unique, so I spent a lot of time organizing and deciding where things exist, like: what are the things users would tap on the most? Where should the wave feed be? Is there something users would want to see often but it's difficult to get to? etc.

User adoption was crucial for the initial launch. Basic features like share, like, and follow rewarded users for posting and interacting on the platform, boasting our metrics significantly.

User Acquisition, Bug Fixes, Feature Enhancements, Repeat.

For the first few months, my Co-Founder Joey focused heavily on getting the app out in the world to acquire users organically, while Dan and I worked on bugs fixes and new features. My role on the team was making decisions on what features to build next and designing them. We actively listened to our users and that greatly impacted our roadmap.

✏️ Some users were hesitant to make their first wave because they're shy! (or don't know what to say), so we rolled out a prompt feature to encourage them.

We spent time brainstorming interesting prompts and released a new one everyday. At about 300 users, the average number of waves created daily went from 50 to 80 waves a day. We knew prompts worked because roughly 74% of daily waves were replies from the prompts we posted. 🙌

✏️ We built more features like cross platform posts on Instagram/Tiktok, a leadership board, mentions, featured waves, notifications, etc. and brought the app to 1000 daily active users by August 2021.

These features were crucial to Soundwave's user growth and retention. By introducing cross platform posts to Instgaram/ Tiktok, we were able to increase the virality of posts and comments. This resulted in 70% of new user sign ups being driven by referrals. Notification features drove our retention rate for daily active users (DAU) to 30%, compared to the 20% typical for most social media platforms.

✏️ Sound is the soul of our product, so we partnered with Dolby to improve sound quality.

Soundwave is often used on the go. People record waves while driving, running to the store, doing chores, etc., so sound quality is ultra important.

By intebrating with Dolby.io, users were able to record studio-quality waves. Recordings would automatically remove background noise to ensure consistent and pleasant loudness, allowing users to make waves in any environment.

✏️ As the userbase grew, content became more and more diverse. We needed to improve discoverability of user posts, so we built a better search engine. We also introduced pools - subfeeds to organize topics.

Creating the Soundwave design system.

With everything moving incredibly fast, our component library didn't happen over night. Even though it took many extra miles at the begining to prioritize and create a design system for Soundwave, this established a solid foundation for our future processes. As a result, the design became more coherent and consistent, reinforcing a strong, recognizable brand identity across the app and all platforms.

The challenge of notification: how much is too much?

One of the challenges in growing daily active users was developing an effective framework for sending notifications. While notifications are crucial for driving engagement and encouraging users to return to the app, the sheer volume of daily content and social interactions means there's a thin line between providing valuable updates and overwhelming users with redundant alerts. For instance, receiving a notification when someone likes their own wave would be quite silly. To address these scenarios, I carefully mapped out the logic to ensure notifications were both meaningful and relevant.

Pivoting to mental wellness.

At 1,500 users, our retention rate began to drop. Our data suggested that many users couldn't find enough people with similar interests . For instance, users who posted about news and politics did not receive much engagement on their posts, and therefore churned. This pattern repeated for 1000+ waves, resulting in a high user churn rate on these low-engagement conversation topics.

Our data also revealed that mental health topics accounted for 57% of conversation traffic on our app, and users engaging in these discussions were more likely to be retained. Mental health topics also generated more new users via organic traffic compared to other subjects. The voice-based medium of our app was particularly effective for these discussions, as users connected deeply with the authenticity and emotions of their stories.

We therefore decided to focus on mental health topics as a key part of our platform to drive growth and retain users. So here's what we did:

✏️ Recategorize pools to be more focused on mental wellness discussions.
✏️ Highlight and feature popular mental health waves on the explore feed.
✏️ Update daily prompts to be more focused on self-relection, like daily gratitute.
✏️ Allow users to record their emotion on each wave.

In September, we launched on Product Hunt as the 2nd product of the day. 🫶

And people love Soundwave. In late 2022, we reached 5,000 active users.

The end of an era.

After 1.5 years of building Soundwave, it became apparent that my time as a designer was overshadowed by customer support, content moderation, planning for finances, and conversations with venture capitalists (VC). I spent an enormous amount of time doing the business work for my business and less time doing the design and building work I had enjoyed during the earlier months.

After much reflection and several rejected VC calls, we decided to shut down the platform and come back to full-time job that would enable me to do what I loved: design products with a team of designers. The decision was not easy, and we explored many options before deciding, but in the end, I'm happy about what I created with Soundwave and the community we created on the platform.

Learn more about the social audio space.