Playpod: Scaling an AI-Enabled SaaS Ecosystem from 0-1
Playpod: Scaling an AI-Enabled SaaS Ecosystem from 0-1
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TLDR
TLDR
As Founder and Product Lead, I am directing the 0→1 development of Playpod—a secure, narrative-driven ecosystem designed to bridge the gap between creative technology and classroom reality. By identifying that 70% of educators felt "technologically paralyzed" by existing tools, I designed a product strategy that prioritizes structured workflows and AI-assisted safety. This turns podcasting into a measurable, curriculum-aligned assessment tool that teachers can actually manage.
Behavioral Win: Reduced adoption friction by replacing "high-complexity" tools with a guided, pedagogical workflow.
Operational Win: Integrated an AI safety layer to automate content moderation, reducing teacher workload and ensuring school compliance.
Recognition: 2x International Startup Winner; Full-tuition Babson Leadership Scholarship.
Overview
Overview
Playpod.Education is an award-winning startup I founded and led as Product Manager, and Lead UX/UI and Learning Designer. I owned the product vision, roadmap, and delivery of a multilingual podcasting platform designed for K–12 and higher education environments.
The goal was not simply to build a podcasting tool, but to enable safe, curriculum-aligned podcast creation in schools by addressing the real barriers to adoption: educator confidence, time constraints, and lack of institutional support. The platform combined a classroom-ready web app, educator onboarding through eLearning, and analytics-driven iteration. Pilot programs showed a 25% increase in engagement, validating the product direction.
The Problem
The Problem
While educators wanted to use audio, they lacked a professional, controlled environment to distribute it.
Distribution Friction: Using general tools like Spotify or YouTube exposed students to uncurated content and ads, making them unsuitable for K-12 classrooms.
The Passive Barrier: Audio was traditionally "un-trackable." Teachers had no way to verify if a student listened to an episode or understood the material.
Safety Liability: Schools required a "walled garden" architecture where content was subject-categorized, age-verified, and proactively moderated
The Solution & Product Strategy
The Solution & Product Strategy
To move podcasting from a hobby to an institutional tool, I defined a roadmap centered on Cognitive Scaffolding and Administrative Trust:
A "zero-install" web app that transforms passive audio into a literacy tool. By integrating automated, word-by-word synchronized transcripts, students can map sounds to text in real-time, a high-value intervention for literacy development and language acquisition.
Unlike consumer audio apps, Playpod allows educators to embed worksheets, tests, and age-appropriate subject categorization directly into each podcast series. This turns "content consumption" into a "measurable learning outcome."
An automated flagging system that scans content for inappropriateness. This addresses the #1 administrative barrier to student-led creation: the risk of unmoderated content in a school environment.
Key Product Decisions & Strategic Trade-offs
Key Product Decisions & Strategic Trade-offs
- Designing an Integrated "Assessment Layer" over a General Player
The Decision: Built a platform that integrates pedagogical tools—tests, worksheets, and subject-categorization—directly into the audio experience.
The Trade-off: Sacrificed the broad, "general consumer" appeal of a standard audio app to build a niche, school-based architecture.
The Result: Deep Product-Market Fit. By aligning the workflow with actual school subjects and teacher needs, Playpod became a tool for active learning rather than just passive consumption.
2. Cognitive Scaffolding via Synchronous Transcripts
2. Cognitive Scaffolding via Synchronous Transcripts
The Decision: Prioritized a "word-by-word" automated transcript engine over static text blocks.
The Trade-off: Invested more development time into front-end data synchronization and transcript precision.
The Result: Accessibility & Literacy Impact. This decision turned the audio player into a literacy tool, allowing students to map sounds to text in real-time—a high-value feature for early learners and language departments.
3. Safety-First Infrastructure: Proactive Content Moderation
3. Safety-First Infrastructure: Proactive Content Moderation
The Decision: Prioritized the development of AI-enabled flagging for inappropriate content at the architectural level.
The Trade-off: Shifted development resources away from "social" engagement features (like comments or likes) to focus on backend governance.
The Result: Institutional Trust. By solving the #1 administrative barrier(unmoderated student content) the platform becomes viable for school-wide pilots where safety and COPPA/GDPR compliance are non-negotiable.
4. Ecosystem Support: The "Educator-as-a-User" Strategy
4. Ecosystem Support: The "Educator-as-a-User" Strategy
The Decision: Launched a free, comprehensive "Podcasting as a Learning Tool" course as a core part of the product offering.
The Trade-off: Dedicated significant non-technical resources to content production and curriculum design instead of software features.
The Result: Reduced Adoption Friction. By training the primary stakeholder (the teacher), we ensured they understood how to leverage the tool effectively, leading to higher long-term retention within the classroom ecosystem.
Technical Leadership & Delivery
Technical Leadership & Delivery
Building a secure EdTech product requires balancing pedagogical "ideals" with engineering "realities":
Agile Iteration: Directed a cross-functional team to refine the AI safety engine based on real-world classroom "edge cases."
Privacy-by-Design: Ensured the platform architecture met rigorous US (COPPA) and EU (GDPR) standards from day one—a non-negotiable for enterprise school sales.
Stakeholder Alignment: Pitched the product to international juries and investors, focusing on Workload Efficiency and Safety ROI, which secured multiple 1st-place awards.
Information Architecture: Designed a metadata structure that allows for seamless categorization by subject, age, and difficulty level, ensuring that teachers can find curriculum-aligned content in seconds—a critical requirement for adoption in busy school days.
Milestones & Recognition
Milestones & Recognition
"We are proving that the most powerful creative tools are the ones that respect the educator's time."
Winner of 2 International Competitions, validating the product-market fit for secure, structured EdTech.
Awarded 100% Scholarship for Babson’s Startup and Business Management program based on the venture's strategic leadership.
Pilot programs established across diverse educational contexts, providing the data to scale from Beta to Public Launch.
Press Recognition
Press Recognition
A few national newspapers and magazines that featured the project:
Retrospective: Scaling the Vision
Retrospective: Scaling the Vision
The success of the Playpod Beta has confirmed that in the EdTech space, safety and simplicity are the ultimate features.
Next Step for the Roadmap: Transitioning the AI from a "safety tool" to an "assessment assistant." By using the same transcription engine, we will provide teachers with automated project summaries and rubric-alignment suggestions, further reducing the gap between student creation and teacher evaluation.
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