Certified.fm
Music Curation done by humans for humans.
I'm reaching out to creators on TikTok (manually) as good music recommendations come by. I'm surprised how many are actually responding. One of the more requested features is the ability to stream the playlists on the site. I honestly didn't think it would be possible with Spotify's limited oembed link.
But it did.
Now, when you land on a curator's page, you can listen to the playlist, right there. You can check the vibe of the playlist before you save it or listen all the way through. If you have an authenticated Spotify account, it lets you listen to the full thing.
This is really a differentiator from the other link-in-bio tools.
Other news: I ripped out the custom grid work. That was a feature that I thought was cool, but honestly wasn't that useful. It added a lot of complexity for other features and created a ton of extra testing every new feature.
For the payoff of... playing around? It's been replaced with a simple feature tag that will let you feature a playlist at the top with a bigger visual treatment.
Check it out, what are your thoughts? What else could differentiate this? What distribution channels should I try?
Been a minute, but here's an update.
Catch Up: I started a link-tree for music creators in Certified.fm that focuses on sharing spotify playlists. I hated all the auto-generated stuff spotify creates, and had some nostalgia for the old TRL days where people curated music they loved.
So I'm bringing it back.
I recently finished implementing a WYSIWYG editor that lets users resize the playlist blocks in a grid. It was really cool to implement and test. I wanted to give people the option to emphasize certain playlists with size, and rearrange based on what they wanted to show off.
But this feels like one of those feature traps. I thought it would be cool, so I did it. I probably could have simply kept the "featured" flag that keeps certain playlists tagged to the top, but damned if this isn't more fun.
I got a few more users and some random comments here and there, but no major traction yet. I also started sharing stuff on TikTok which is so far beyond my comfort level. Every time I open that app, I have to tell myself, "If 1,000s of people see this, it's because its resonating. If it sucks, no one will see it, so what's it matter?"
Either way. It's no lie that distribution is the real struggle. Especially with all the AI coding tools. Finding a problem, solving it in a way that makes sense, and then getting it in front of those people is super tough.
What's been the best way to find those first user champions?
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
Got some traction with friends/coworkers that enjoy sharing music.
Added "random" button to explore random profiles
Playlist voting mechanism
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 amount 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.
Hey all, I built this super quick playlist sharing app this week: https://Certified.fm
I am exhausted by Spotify's generated playlists that just seem to be the same 25ish songs in different orders, all prescribed a "vibe". I want to discover new music from actual humans who curate. I miss some of the old DJ vibes.
Love to hear your thoughts on it. Next feature add is probably a randomize button to find random profiles.
I'm honestly not sure there's a huge market for this, but there are subreddit specifically for this purpose. There's a large influencer marketplace for recommending music... and for a bit of nostalgia, I'm reminded of setting your songs on your MySpace page back in the day.
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