By Riley Kaminer
Serial entrepreneur Stuart Goffman is an avid podcast listener. The West Palm Beach resident loves to share insights he gleans from podcasts with his friends. But there’s really no easy way to do it.
“I would text my buddies and tell them to listen to a podcast episode at a particular timestamp,” Goffman [pictured above] told Refresh Miami. “Then later, I would follow up to see if they had listened to the clip, and everyone would say, ‘No, I’m not going to go through all these steps to listen to those sixty seconds.’”
So Goffman did what any entrepreneur would do: began to devise his own solution. Fast forward to today, 18 months after initial conceptualization, and we have Picked Cherries, a social podcast sharing app.
The app, which launched four months ago, contains 1,500 creators and 200,000 episodes. Users can grab audio snippets – ’cherries’ – and share them with their friends. Listening to the clip is seamless both for people who have the app and people who do not.
The social component of the platform is key, noted Goffman: “With our sharing technology, listening to a podcast is going from an isolated event to a shared experience.” That’s the core value proposition for podcast fiends, in his mind. “Fans can listen to the whole episode. When they hear something that resonates with them, they can pick it and share it.”
He asserted that that platform offers an important opportunity for podcasters to stand out from the crowd in a highly competitive media landscape. “1% of podcasters get 99% of downloads,” he said. “That means that 99% of podcasters are fighting for the scraps.” Making a podcast available on Picked Cherries increases opportunities for distribution, Goffman explained.
Goffman’s previous endeavors include formerly publicly-traded ecommerce company for baby products, an e-learning platform, an addition treatment center in Fort Lauderdale, and a critically-acclaimed TV show on A&E. He has been in South Florida for the better part of three decades, having spent 24 years in Fort Lauderdale before moving to downtown West Palm Beach during the pandemic.
Alongside Goffman is a team of co-founders that span the worlds of ecommerce, advertising, and even comedy. One of Picked Cherries’ co-founders, Jeff Hoffman, was one of the first employees of Priceline.com and Booking.com.
The eight-person team is fully distributed, with the main cluster in South Florida. “I never expected to launch a tech company in Miami,” he said. “But I am really pleased about how Miami has matured into a center for business and technology.”
He underscored the Brightline as a particularly useful recent innovation, enabling his team to easily meet in person. “Now I would never even think about driving to Miami.”
For now, the platform is free for both users and podcasters. Picked Cherries plans to continue its product development, starting with a playlist feature to make it easy for users to curate and discover new content. They also are working on an analytics package to inform podcasters about the content that listeners find most engaging. Picked Cherries is in the process of raising funds to further accelerate their growth.
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