Prompt-to-Podcast, AI-powered Personalized Listening Experience

Prompt-to-Podcast, AI-powered Personalized Listening Experience

Timeline

Jan. 2025 - Dec. 2025

Launched in App Store

Skills

Product strategy
0-1 design
Product design
Visual design

Team

1 designer (me)
3 engineers
1 founder

Tools

Figma
ProtoPie
After Effects

Timeline

Jan. 2025 - Dec. 2025

Launched in App Store

Skills

Product strategy
0-1 design
Product design
Visual design

Team

1 designer (me)
3 engineers
1 founder

Tools

Figma
ProtoPie
After Effects

My Impact

As the sole product designer at Spice, I led the 0-1 design of an AI podcast app that use LLM to curate personalized audio and video content; drove product strategy and key design decisions in a lean startup team.

60K+

MAU post 90-day launch

$750K+

funding raised

launched

in App Store

0-1

mobile & web design

The Challenge

Traditional podcast creates a disconnected format between creators who produce hours of rich content and listeners who struggle to find the moments that matter most to them.

Listeners

Decision fatigue, information-overloaded.

Listeners face decision-fatigue due to the overwhelming amount of podcast selections.

"

I want to learn more about this topic but I don't know which of 50 episodes to start with, and I can't commit a full 90 minutes.

Creators

Lack of content exposure.

Highlighted contents are hard to resurface, limiting entry points and engagement for new listeners.

"

My best 2-minute insight is buried in a 90-minute episode, which would need some build up for my listener to understand.

The Solution

Spice uses AI to unbundle episodes into atomic content - clips, quotes, summaries, and personalized episodes - so listeners discover ideas, and creators' best moments find the right audience.

Prompt-to-Podcast AI Agent

Prompt-to-Podcast AI Agent

Prompt-to-Podcast AI Agent

Spice is an AI agent that select audio clips and curate them together to a personalized episode based on the listener's prompt.

Spice is an AI agent that select audio clips and curate them together to a personalized episode based on the listener's prompt.

A podcast community platform

A podcast community platform

A podcast community platform

Spice's algorithm collects, curates, and generates podcast from original episodes, curated clips, audio, to quotes.

Spice's algorithm collects, curates, and generates podcast from original episodes, curated clips, audio, to quotes.

Surfaces key quotes, clips, and insights.

Surfaces key quotes, clips, and insights.

Surfaces key quotes, clips, and insights.

By extracting selective content, listeners can find the most relevant and memorable moments directly.

By extracting selective content, listeners can find the most relevant and memorable moments directly.

Scroll for more detailed process

Scroll for more detailed process

Prompt-based AI podcast generation as the core MVP feature.

loading screen 1

loading screen 2

loading screen 3

Source screen

Transcript screen

Curated discovery of highlighted moments surfaces key quotes, clips, and insights.

original episode

AI generated episodes

short video

audio clips

quotes

Designing an onbaording experience for higher interest-alignment.

registration

new user sign up

interest chips

podcast chips

artist chips

The Pivot

Post launch, we pivoted from an AI-first app to a discovery-first app with AI as supporting feature.

The decision was made due to a combination of user insight, market shifts and technical constraints.

Casual listeners don't want to articulate what they're interested in, they want a rich feed of content to browse and pick from.

When faced with an open AI input as the first experience, most listeners didn't know what to ask for.

Back-end engineering faced difficulties to fine-tune the best AI experience.

Long AI generation times caused high drop-off before users ever reached the output.

My biggest learnings

Wearing multiple design hats in a lean startup.

Being the first and only product designer at the team in a pre-seeded startup means I was contributing to the product strategy, user research, and marketing. It was demanding yet inspiring for me to learn new design and prototyping skills.

Wanna hear more?

There's so much more behind the scene!

There's so much more behind the scene!

Let's be friends!

© Jen Zhang 2026 Seattle, WA

Rain drop, drop-top;

From sketch to mobile to desktop~