Project

Fireside

TL;DR

Co-founded and designed a video-first podcast platform from the ground up, taking it from an early product idea through brand, product strategy, and a working iOS beta.

The Problem

Podcasting has evolved, but the core listening experience hasn't changed much. As video became a bigger part of how people consume podcasts, we saw an opportunity to treat podcasts as a more visual, mobile-native medium from the start.

The Research

We explored how people discover and consume long-form podcast content — especially the moments where watching, listening, and navigating an episode overlap.

Rather than simply adding video to an existing podcast experience, we designed around the behaviors that make mobile video compelling: visual discovery, seamless switching between watching and listening, and easier ways to navigate long conversations.

The Solution

Fireside brings full-length vertical video, background audio, discovery, and chapter navigation into one experience.

The product is available in limited release with early content partnerships while we continue developing the platform and underlying technology.

Validation

We put the early experience in front of users to understand whether a video-first podcast experience felt natural — and whether features like chapters and seamless switching between video and audio actually made long-form content easier to explore.

Fireside received an average score of 8.9/10 in user testing, with particularly strong reactions to the visual experience and the ability to move between different parts of an episode.

In-Episode Chapter Search

Every episode, broken into moments — AI-generated chapters turn a single long episode into a list of named, searchable segments — so you can jump straight to the moment you want instead of scrubbing a timeline.

Conversational Search

Search that remembers what you were doing. Instead of a static search bar, we designed a conversational search that holds context — so "what was that episode I was listening to?" is a real, answerable query, not a dead end.

Beyond the App

Building the technology behind the experience.

Fireside's vertical experience created a problem of its own: much of the video we wanted to bring into the product was created for landscape screens. We built our own patent-pending video transformation technology to bridge that gap, originally as part of Fireside's content workflow.

More to come on this as the technology is still in development.