It all started in my college dorm at 2AM - I was just makingsome short LoFi music beat for fun - the song was called Droplet, and decided to share it with my friends. It became a quick hit in my dorm, and I released the short song onto YouTube and it got 20,000 views.

As Gen-Z's we always see these eithersuper visually beautiful posts, or empty, instagram posts with black screens, so lonely but rich in auditory creativity. We envisioned that 15-30 secondsound bites, or Drops, can be this new media format.

The Water Metaphor

• Droplet: The scrubbing feature to fast forward a drop is shown as a water droplet.
• Waves: As someone records, the wave moves upwards as if it's filling up a cup.
• Clouds: To separate random content, sound categories are used.

Why are we unique?

1. Short-form audio: 15-30 seconds (unlike Spotify and podcasts), audio only (unlike TikTok). We want to be the sweet spot between audio and short-form content.
2. Sound Memes: Become a viral Dropper by using our audio tools creatively, dropping what could become a ‘sound meme’. Ultimately, any user can comment on Drops to chime in conversations and be part of a community of our four main niche sound categories (comedy, music, thoughts, ASMR).
3. Spontaneity and Immediate accessibility: Instead of taking 30 days to produce audio content and a professional audio editing software, Droppers only need 30 seconds and a click of a button on an iPhone. We also want to value raw content as well as professional content. There’s no need for a professional approval process unlike on Spotify/Distrokid, and users don’t need to fuss about using audio engineering platforms like Logic Pro X or Ableton to refine work. We want to provide the world with more creative sound bites, faster!
4. Search Engine: Searching for sounds hasn’t been easy, as describing audio is hard to translate to text. With our tagging system as our “search engine” for sounds, users can find drops easily. Imagine wanting to know what does the Paris atmosphere feel like – Droplet brings French artists’ music, new ‘words-of-the-day’, coffee shop vibes, and perhaps even ASMR recorded nearby the Eiffel Tower, right to the user's fingertips.

The design process was a very robust one, with over 500 interviews from users. Please refer to the entire portfolio project in the link above for access.