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

**Maya Prohovnik** (0:00)
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 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 like it happened automatically. I still don't know how many people know this. I think people think that we had some secret backdoor deal with Apple for distribution.
But 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:48)
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 Prohovnik. 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 75% of all new podcasts created in the world. In our conversation, we dig into why Maya is obsessed with dogfooding 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. We dig into how she stays productive and organized in a very hectic senior leadership role, what she's done to allow for Anchor to continue to operate like a startup within a larger organization. Also, a bunch of really fun early Anchor stories, including how interns uploaded podcasts to Apple and Spotify manually before they could automate that. Plus, how to find a balance between using your gut and using data to make decisions. Also, public speaking tips. So much more. Maya is amazing and I'm really excited for you to hear this episode. With that, I bring you Maya Prohovnik after a short word from our sponsors.
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