Podcaster
My Role
Ux Designer
Timeline
May 2025
Team Members
2 Members
Skill
Product Design, Product Stratergy
Podcaster is a Bitcoin-native podcast app built on our Split Prism engine.
INTRODUCTION
From the outside, it looks like a polished listening + creator dashboard; under the hood, every show is wired to a programmable revenue split that pays collaborators instantly in BTC.
The screens you see map the full journey:
onboarding & wallet connect
setting up a show and its split
sponsor/listener payment flows
User Front screens
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Podcasts are multi-player, but money usually lands in a single account.
From interviews and existing tooling we saw four repeating issues:
Manual accounting – hosts track sponsorship income in sheets, then push UPI / bank transfers once a month.
Delayed / missed payouts – editors & producers often wait weeks, and have to “remind” the host.
Low transparency – nobody except the host sees how much came in or how it was split.
Friction for sponsors – they want to pay one invoice, not chase five people.
Our design challenge:
“How do we let a sponsor or listener pay once, and still have that money fan out instantly and trustlessly to everyone behind the show?”
USER RESEARCH
Turning familiar flows into a place where getting paid in Bitcoin feels as simple as pressing play.
We used two parallel tracks:
Before drawing a single screen, we lived inside podcast apps.
We talked to indie hosts, editors, and small studio heads about how they publish and get paid. Everyone kept saying the same thing: “I just want it to feel like Spotify, but where money actually flows to my team.”
So we opened Spotify, Wynk, and Apple Music and started tracing their flows: how home feeds are laid out, how a show page looks, where the play button sits, how the mini-player behaves. Those patterns became our backbone.
On top of that familiar skeleton, we layered our twist:
the “Support / Sponsor this show” buttons, the split previews for creators, and the wallet / payout screens.
The result is an app that looks and behaves like a music app users already know—only now, every play and payment can split fairly across the people who made the show.
PRODUCT APPROACH
We treated Split Prism as a protocol and Podcaster as its first vertical interface.
Split Prism:
A Prism = 1 split rule set.
Each facet = 1 member (role + BTC address + share %).
When money hits a Prism, it creates a multi-output Bitcoin transaction and sends everyone their share directly.
How that shows up in the UI:
The “Get paid” → “Choose a wallet” screens bind the creator’s primary payout wallet.
The seed-phrase / secure wallet screens are a guided, non-technical backup flow to reduce crypto anxiety.
The “Boom, Done” confirmation screen closes onboarding with a show cover + summary of what’s connected.
From there, Podcaster exposes three pillars of functionality:
Create Split Rules – via the “Launch a podcast” + “Split Preview” screens.
Public Split Page → Accept Payment → Multi-Send – via pay sheets and sponsor/listener flows.
Activity Logs / Payment History – via the “Awaiting payments”, “Completed payments”, and transfer detail screens.
MAJOR UX FLOWS
Major Ux Flows
Creating your own podcast
Tap “Launch a podcast”, add name + cover, connect a wallet, and set splits between host, co-host, editor on the golden split wheel. In a few screens, a new show is live and ready to receive auto-split Bitcoin payouts.
Subscribing to a podcast
From the home feed, a listener opens a show, hits Follow and Play. When they tap “Support this show”, they pick a monthly amount, confirm, and see a light success state—subscription active, no crypto friction.
Managing or cancelling
Under Subscriptions, listeners see all shows they support. Opening one lets them change the amount or cancel. A single confirmation explains what happens next, then updates the plan with a clear “done” state.
DESIGN PARAMETERS
Feels like a normal listening app; play, follow, and discover are always the heroes.
Familiar patterns – Bottom nav (Home, Search, Library, Wallet), mini-player, queues, and episode lists like Spotify/Apple.
Studio look & feel – Dark background, warm accents, big cover art, clean typography.
Soft money layer
“Support / Subscribe” sits near the player, uses simple language, and never overshadows listening.
Clear finance screens
Wallet, subscriptions, and history use simple tables, clear labels, and human-readable copy so users can see what they paid and earned without crypto knowledge.
PRODUCT CONSTRAINTS
As a podcast app, Podcaster has to respect a few hard realities
Mobile-first listening – screens and controls are optimised for one-handed use on small phones, with offline and background play as must-haves.
Content-first performance – fast load for artwork, show lists, and streams even on weaker networks; we can’t afford heavy, complex screens that stall audio.
Familiar patterns – we stay close to common podcast UX (queues, follow, library, search) so users don’t have to relearn how to listen.
Regional and rights constraints – shows can be region-locked or licensed differently; the UI needs clear states for “not available here” without breaking the flow.
The split engine runs underneath all this, but the app itself must always behave like a reliable, everyday podcast player.
CONCLUSION
Podcaster starts as a podcast app you already know how to use: press play, follow shows, build a library, discover new episodes on the home feed. The listening experience is familiar, fast, and comfortable enough to be someone’s default podcast home.
The difference is invisible at first glance: every show is wired to handle money fairly in the background. By treating the split system as infrastructure and the listening journey as the hero, Podcaster proves you don’t need a “crypto app” to bring Bitcoin into people’s lives.