Customer-driven development - How we use co-creation to optimize our products.

The natural co-creation process

Sometime in 2004, I got an idea that would turn the audio tours market upside down. With nothing but my imagination and a small but dedicated team, we created a very simple platform and audio player that could easily be used by everyone. In 2009, we launched our online platform and Podcatcher. It's an incredible feeling to create a product you dreamt up and watch it become successful. To me, creativity plays a key role in a tech market where companies often imitate each other, and you quickly become a dime-a-dozen provider. That just doesn't fit with who I am and how I want to shape my company.

After the first 30 customers had joined our ecosystem, more and more questions started coming our way. Customers who used our system every day gave us new input that we used to unleash our own creative ideas and develop our product further. This natural ‘co-creation process’ with our customers resulted in more and more new features being added to the platform.

Audio-to-video synchronization & analytics

One of these new features was audio-to-video synchronization. A number of our customers told us they were showing films with subtitles in a few places in their museum. Wouldn't it be great if visitors – who were already walking around with a Podcatcher – could listen to the film's audio in their own language? We killed two birds with one stone: the subtitles could be removed to create a cleaner film image, and the galleries became quieter once the audio could be listened to on the Podcatcher. The best part is that every visitor can listen to the film's audio in their own language on the Podcatcher.

Our customers also wanted to know which tour languages were listened to, which museum pieces were most popular, the average listening times, etc.: insights from data, in other words. This is how our analytics module came to be.

Constructive criticism

Our customers didn't only share their needs with us. Sometimes there were also features that needed improving or functions that weren't performing. I find it really annoying when technology that's meant to help you gets in the way instead. That's why our mantra is ‘keep it simple’, and we only launch solutions once we’re sure they work. That's something we can only do once our product has been used in real-world applications and our customers have given us their feedback.

Our new ecosystem

We are currently developing an entirely new ecosystem that combines hardware with software. I am sure the new features will make our customers very happy. We can’t talk about them just yet, but these new technologies allow us to offer amazing features to museums and visitors. This technology can quietly be applied to existing features, we’re still excited about our ‘non-distracting’ and ‘audio-only’ philosophy.

We’ll share more on this soon!

We love to hear from our customers, which is why we host recurring customer discussions and webinars. There's a reason our tagline is 'the art of listening’. We also study the data. With more than 421 million stories told, we have a lot data available to us that we can use to look for patterns. How do visitors listen to the audio on the Podcatcher? Do they need to frequently adjust the volume? Can we automatically adjust the recorded audio to make the volume uniform? Do visitors listen differently on a Podcatcher than our App? And what about our mobile-friendly website? These are all questions that we can answer by carefully studying the data and using the information we've gathered to make improvements.

Creativity and passion are key in this, and our team has plenty of both. Share your ideas with us! We'll provide features to match in the future.