Building an AI product and growing from 0 to 14,000 users
Oct 15, 2025
Overview
2022 - 2024 Podcast industry, B2C SaaS, web app
My role
Product Manager Head of Marketing
Tech stack
Webflow, Google Analytics, Segment, MixPanel, Customer.io, Figma, Notion, Intercom, Zapier, DaVinci Resolve
Meet the team
Bootstrapping a successful podcast agency and finding a key problem
Meet Jacob. He’s the founder of Resonate Recordings – a podcast production agency in the Midwest. He scaled Resonate up to work on 15 #1 Apple Podcasts, served clients like Honda, Salesforce, and Twitter, and created the original True Crime show – Culpable. I’ve worked with Jacob since 2017, across two startups (more on that later).
Despite all of these successes, there was always a problem. Editing podcasts was tedious work and efficiency is everything in an agency. To make their lives easier they began training a machine learning model to catch repetitive edits. As the model became more accurate they realized there was an opportunity to share it with others. The seed had been planted for Resound.
Phase 1 | Understanding the opportunity
Creating a podcast should be as easy as creating a TikTok
Podcasts have grown 700% since 2018, yet 44% of shows stop after 3 episodes.
A slide from our initial pitch deck.
What if AI could act as an “Audio Engineer Assistant” doing most of the work for you? That’s what we set our sights on – How might we automate podcast editing with AI.
To start answering this question we dove head first into customer research. We interviewed Audio Engineers, Producers, and others in the podcasting industry to better understand how they worked and what pain points they felt along the way.
As the problems we were trying to solve began to take shape, a decision was made to split away from Resonate Recordings and start a new company called Resound. It would focus solely on building an AI podcast editor for creators and target a younger, DIY demographic. We needed to create a new brand – quickly!
Brand identity
Crafting a modern brand by looking back 250 years
Ernst Chladni, German Physicist & Musician (1756-1827), shown next to his Chladni figures.
Meet the Father of Acoustics, Ernst Chladni
One of Chladni's best-known achievements was inventing a technique to visualize vibrating frequencies on a rigid surface, known as Chladni figures.
Watch how Chladni figures are formed.
Chladni Figures were the perfect nugget of inspiration
They visually combine art and science, aligning well with what Resound ultimately was – a platform rooted in logic, math, and technology providing creators the tools and features to express what makes them unique. Their voice. Our designer followed this rabbit hole and things began to take shape.
Primary logo
Typography
Brand palette
Monogram treatments
Chladni shapes & patterns
Initial ideas around a possible “Creator-themed” campaign. Every person has a unique sound.
Chladni head mascot
Building a marketing site to establish credibility online
Once we established the brand, we went to work building a marketing site. The process was simple but hard work. I created a wireframe in Notion, our product designer crafted it in Figma, and then I developed the website in Webflow. The result was a beautiful, fast, and responsive website that made it easy to grow our waitlist and set the foundation for adding new pages and changes quickly in the future.
Original website wireframe in Notion.
V1 of the marketing site resound.fm launched in Spring 2022.
Now that we had a solid brand foundation and website in place, we shifted our focus to build an early app prototype and craft our pitch to investors. It was time to raise funds and staff up!
Raising funds
Designing an award-winning pitch deck
From black and white to high-fidelity. I worked closely with our CEO and product designer to bring this pitch deck to life. I did market research, refined the outline and information architecture, and helped craft the copy, before passing it over to our designer. It didn’t take long to find partners and investors who were eager to help us achieve our goals. We even took 1st place in Kentucky’s Five Across pitch event! We were ready to go all-in building the product.
Early versions of our pitch deck contained a mobile app, which we scrapped for a web app.
Resound’s CEO taking 1st place at Kentucky’s Five Across Pitch Event.
Phase 2 | Beta launch
Learning to launch then launching to learn
Most of 2022 was spent in research, talking to podcasters, iterating on designs, setting up infrastructure, and training our first machine learning model at Resound. The result of all this work was a proof-of-concept demo that let you upload a file and see how many edits were detected, with the option to “accept” or “ignore” each edit.
Learning moment
At first, we thought Resound could be a mobile app. But after gathering feedback from a Waitlist Survey, it became obvious that a web app was the way to go. We pivoted and sent our early designs to the graveyard.
Early wireframes for a mobile-first creator app.
Early design exploration for a mobile-first creator app.
Beta launch designs after we pivoted to a desktop experience.
Later that year we launched Resound to a private waitlist of 250 people. We started gathering more feedback, hosting discovery calls with users, and learning how we could improve. Our mindset was to fail early and learn fast.
Learning moment
Engage your waitlist frequently. We didn’t want to “spam” our audience and waited too long to re-engage. This taught us the importance of staying top of mind. If you wait 2-3 months before sending an email, people forget who you are and lose that spark of interest that made them sign up to begin with.
Phase 3 | v1.0 launch
Maturing the product and the way we worked
With a full team in place, things began moving fast. We tightened up the way we worked using Scrum and organized our roadmap and features in Notion and Linear. Meanwhile, we were still collecting qualitative and quantitative data through analytics, surveys, and discovery calls with users. We shipped a lot of new features as part of v1.0, but these were some notable ones.
✓ Freemium pricing model
We rolled out subscription plans and went with a Freemium model to start – offering three upgrade tiers. I worked with our CEO and Growth Consultant Andrew Capland to craft our go-to-market pricing model. Working with Andrew was an amazing experience, and helped me level up greatly as a product manager.
✓ Robust lifecycle emails
Our emails were brought to life by introducing a new visual brand element – “The Chladni Characters”. These characters were used in key moments throughout the user journey to add delight, communicate concepts, and increase brand awareness. We built email flows to onboard, activate, engage, retain, and win back customers. We used Customer.io, powered by data from Segment (our customer data platform), to set up our transactional email system. This was a project I oversaw from end to end, which taught me a great deal about marketing automation.
Learning moment
Words can be your most powerful conversion tool. In hindsight, we found that simple, plain-text emails often outperformed our highly visual emails by a lot. Sometimes a beautifully designed email is the right move to build brand awareness, show off the product, etc. However, the power of the plain text email is a lesson we are taking with us for sure.
✓ Account creation and onboarding
We designed a 2-step account creation and onboarding process. Our goal was to strike a balance between added user friction and capturing helpful information about users.
✓ New machine learning models
We consistently shipped new versions of our machine learning model as it became more accurate. I worked closely with our machine learning engineer, overseeing data collection, human annotation, data quality control, and coordinating between our machine learning and software engineering teams to ensure alignment.
✓ Website, blog, and social media
We doubled down on content creation to build our brand presence, help with SEO, and be seen as a thought leader in the industry. I’ll touch on this more below.
Phase 4 | 2023-2024
Continuously improving the product and marketing
After building v1.0 of the product, we set our sights on solving new problems, maturing our marketing, and optimizing core growth metrics: Acquisition, activation, and retention.
1. We increased the website conversion rate by 3% over 6 months
We continued to mature and test our marketing website in 2023. We added dedicated feature pages, video, animation, social proof, partnerships, etc. As a result, we saw a 3% increase in the number of free monthly signups at Resound.
How we did it
Redesigned our homepage
Added feature-specific landing pages
Optimized the blog CMS template (and added two beautiful call-to-action cards to encourage free signups to try “automating your podcast editing with AI”)
2. We grew organic traffic from 0 to over 6,500 monthly with SEO
Data from Ahrefs.com for Resound.fm.
SEO was a critical strategy for our growth at Resonate Recordings, driven primarily by original blog posts, so we repeated much of the same playbook at Resound with great success.
The concept was simple, and it worked:
People find Resound by searching for podcast-related topics
Land on our blog or homepage
Create a free account to try a new AI editing app
Upgrade when they hit the limits on our free plan
How we did it
Wrote 40+ high-quality blog posts, following an on-page SEO optimization process
Carefully chose the homepage keyword, which ranked #1 for “AI podcast editing”
Leveraged domain authority from Resonate to link to Resound
Rode the “AI hype” wave of 2022-2024
Data from Ahrefs.com for Resound.fm.
3. We improved ALL core metrics by over 10% with ONE product launch
Resound’s product launch in October 2023 was featured as the headline of PodNews (25K+ subscribers).
For months we had heard from our users that they liked what we had, but they wanted more features. They wanted background noise reduction, instant replay of edits, more accurate AI edits, additional AI automation, and the ability to add their own edits.
So we listened. We built a series of 5 major improvements to the product in the Summer of 2023. The crown jewel of all these improvements was Enhance: An AI-powered feature that automatically reduces background noise and makes your voice sound professional in one click. I oversaw this feature’s development and launch from end to end.
The launch results were amazing:
Monthly traffic increased by 70%
Monthly free signups increased by 80%
Activation rate increased by 43%
Churn rate dropped by over 10%
Of course, not all these metrics stayed that high forever, but we saw notable improvements afterwards, and customers continued to give positive feedback.
How we did it
Built 5 major product updates and released them iteratively: Enhance, Silence Detection, Trim Audio, ML Model v0.7, and Instant Replay (a full rebuild of our audio editor).
Bundled 5 major improvements into 1 major “Fall Release”, with a blog, email, videos, etc.
Worked with PodNews, a daily industry newsletter with 25K+ subscribers, and was featured as the headline of the day.
Launched an exclusive lifetime deal on AppSumo a month later in November, which provided an additional marketing boost and leveraged the success of Enhance.
Watch the Product Release video to see what we built in the app!
Enhance, our AI mixing and mastering powered by a third party, was immediately loved.
User feedback for our Enhance feature has been incredibly positive since it launched in October 2023.
Humbling reality
Saying farewell and feeling thankful for the experience
We were listening to what our users and data said, making good improvements, and moving numbers in the right direction, but the investor market was drying up. Inflation and rising interest rates weren’t working in our favor either. Ultimately, our funding wasn’t able to support myself and others on the team. As tough as those decisions were, I’m proud of what we built and thankful for the relationships made along the way.
Conclusion
8 lessons: Growing as a product manager and marketer
I’ve worked for Jacob Bozarth (cofounder of Resound and Resonate Recordings) since 2017, and I’m so grateful for his investment in me over the years. I started as an audio editor at Resonate Recordings, pivoted to marketing, joined Resound as head of marketing, and then pivoted to product management. I believe my background in marketing made me a better product manager, and product management now makes me a better marketer.
Here are 8 lessons I learned:
PMs make things that are valuable, usable, viable, and feasible. They are valuable to users, usable by users, viable for the business, and feasible for engineers. (Marty Cagan)
Your job is to solve problems, not make features.
Product, growth, and marketing are three distinct roles.
PMs lead by influence, not by authority. This is obvious, but subtle and nuanced.
Small features RARELY take less time. All features take time and deep thinking.
The development process should serve you. You don’t serve the process.
In UX/UI design, instant feedback and status updates (progress bars) are critical.
Product managers are movie producers/music producers: Their goal is to make the very best movie/song/product by influencing the team around them. (Cracking the PM Interview)
I can’t wait to keep learning more!
Interested in working together? I’d love to chat. Book a 15-minute intro call.
This case study was designed in collaboration with Robby Davis (product designer). His work is incredible and he’s a great guy. If you need a designer, go to robbydavis.com.