On the last episode of Certified.fm - Implemented social links and misc link addition to the profile. I wanted to make sure people didn't have to choose between normal links and playlists
TL;DR for this update
Building in public is kind of interesting. It feels like throwing a gallon of water into the ocean. Sure, you're doing something, but man it doesn't feel like much!
It really puts all the advice you see on the internet into perspective: "Validate first, have customers before you build, etc". It's so easy to comment that. I have. Making that true is a lot harder.
That's why this is just a side project I'm having fun with. I sat out to do this because I was tired of the Spotify mixes and generated playlists that kept my music isolated to certain tracks on repeat. Hell, most of the playlists even shared 60-70% of songs with one another. I wanted some curation from actual people that have different experiences and exposure to music I wouldn't have.
But getting those people on the platform isn't easy. Thankfully, this is problem I'm interested enough in to push through some of the silence and keep going.
In the latest update, I added some new features to help drive community engagement. I'm hypothesizing that part of the problem is once you build a profile, there's no reason to come back and update it or view someone elses work.
That's become the "Random" button - where users can click and get taken to a random profile. I think I need to implement some logic that helps it know if the person you're going to has any playlists or not... since that's the primary value prop but for now it's truly random.
And as an extension of that feature, when you do land on a random profile with playlists, it's probably good to know which of the pliaaylists is good. And that's become the certified fresh vote.
Next to the playlists is a fire icon with a vote counter. Once a playlist reaches 5 voters (super tiny ammount for now, it'll scale up when more people join) it becomes "Certified Fresh". That's a nice big neon sign for "listen to this."
Check it out. Let me know what you think.
Great website. great idea.