Cooler

Maker

📌

What's up Product Hunters! This is Mike, CEO and co-founder of Cooler. On behalf of our small but mighty team of five, I'm excited to introduce Cooler to you! Ever felt like podcasting is weirdly... lonely? Even though millions of people are listening, it still feels like this: 🦗🦗🦗—when really, it should feel more like this: 😂👏❤️🔥💬? That's why we built Cooler—a podcast player designed to make listening more social, interactive, and fun. With Cooler, you can: Join the Conversation – Drop comments, react, and see what others are saying. Show your fandom – Rack up streaks, compete on leaderboards and flex your listening stats. Sharing is Caring – Turn your favorite audio clips into beautiful videos to share everywhere, recommend episodes, and see what your podcast communities are into. And we're just getting started. You see, the podcast industry is dominated by three players (Apple, Spotify, and YouTube), none of whom are actually podcast companies. Podcasts are not their primary source of revenue. So innovation has come at a glacial pace. The rest of the players are all fighting for the remainder of the market. While there are some really great players (shoutout Overcast!), it's been incredibly hard to break user's habits. That's why we need early adopters like yourselves to help us break through and usher in a new wave of innovation. Download the app, use it as a your primary podcast player for a couple weeks, and send me any feedback you have at mike@cooler.fm. We want to build this with and for podcast lovers like yourself!!

Report

3mo ago

Jonas Urbonas

Fable Wizard

Cooler sounds like such a fun and innovative way to bring more social interaction into the podcasting world—it's about time podcasts became more engaging! How do you plan to expand the social features to make the experience even more collaborative, like community discussions or live interaction with creators?

Report

3mo ago

Mike Su

Cooler

Maker

@jonurbonas Thanks for the kind words Jonas! We started with the foundational stuff to community building - comments, reactions, leaderboards, streaks, and sharing. While it's currently all built around asynchronous interactions, we definitely think there's opportunity to incorporate live interaction and live content like you suggest once we've reached a level of critical mass.

One area we're spending a lot of time thinking about is how to make the comments section even better. We have purposely stayed away from reactions to comments because what we've seen with most social media is that because the reactions are such an easy way to respond to a post, people often write comments that "chase" these reactions to get that dopamine reward. But the comments that tend to get the most reactions are the comments that are more bombastic, brash, and less constructive to meaningful conversation. So that's an area we're keen to figure out how to build in a healthy way.

We have a very robust roadmap, but want to also build alongside our users and take it where the community goes!

Report

3mo ago