2017 Breaker Year in Review
It’s been a big year for Breaker! Well, it’s the only year so far.
2017 has been a great year for Breaker. The Breaker iOS app launched publicly on March 20, 2017 at Y Combinator Demo Day and we’ve been growing quickly ever since.
Since launch, Breaker has grown from a team of two co-founders (myself and Erik Berlin) to a team of eight. This summer we moved into our first office in the Mid-Market neighborhood of San Francisco.
We’ve also added so many new features this year!
Our first features added after launch were all about helping our users find their friends on Breaker. We added the ability to find friends via Facebook and Twitter and also to invite friends to join. We also made our push notifications much fancier — adding episode artwork and descriptions and follower pics and bios.
In May, Breaker added support for JSON Feed, a new specification for publishing podcasts, and got a nice shoutout in Daring Fireball. In June, our team attended WWDC, where we had the chance to chat audio with Apple developers and used what we learned to improve our audio playback. One new audio feature we added was Skip Silences for automatically skipping silences in audio playback. We also increased the choices of playback rates, ranging from ½× to 3× speed.
Breaker is all about discovering great podcast episodes with friends, and in 2017 we experimented with our Discover tab. At the beginning of the year, Breaker showed popular episodes based on Likes, Listens, and Comments as separate tabs, but soon merged them into one overall popular score. Now you can view overall hot episodes by Day, Week, or Month, making it easy to find good episodes to listen to. Breaker also shows you which hot episodes your friends have liked.
Design was a focus for Breaker in 2017. We worked with Josh Williams to create a new brand for Breaker, including a new logo, wordmark, colors, and style guide.
We also redesigned the entire Breaker app. Instead of re-launching with an entirely new design all at once, we redesigned each screen one at a time, gathering user feedback with each iteration. When the new iPhone X launched on November 3, Breaker was ready! The app worked on the new iPhone X from day one.
To finish up the year, on December 11, Venture Stories by Village Global became the first podcast exclusive to Breaker. The first week of episodes were only available to Breaker listeners and featured enlightening interviews with entrepreneurs, investors and tech industry leaders.
Now, for some 2017 Breaker stats…
Top 3 hot episodes of 2017 🔥
2017 listening stats 🎧
- 45 years, 4 weeks, 3 days, 11 hours, 5 minutes of podcasts listened
- 20 days, 23 hours, 20 minutes of silences skipped
- 8,951,874 new episodes released
Overall, 2017 was a big first year for Breaker. We’re so excited to make Breaker even better in 2018 and can’t wait to share with you what we’re working on next.
Happy 2018! 🍾🎊
Download the Breaker iOS app and listen now at https://www.breaker.audio.
