SoundPoints: A New Medium for Location-Based Audio
The Challenge
Audio is one of the most intimate formats for storytelling, but it has always been decontextualized from place. A podcast about a neighborhood isn’t the same as hearing that story while standing in it. Walking tours exist, but they’re locked behind app stores, guided by strangers, and designed for tourists. There was no simple, open way for anyone with a story to pin that story to a place and share it with anyone who walks by.
The technical problem was also interesting: how do you create a format where the experience requires physical presence? Not just suggested, but enforced — the audio only plays when you’re there.
The Approach
We built SoundPoints as a two-sided marketplace: a creator tool and a discovery experience.
On the creator side, anyone can pin audio content to a GPS coordinate in the world, group those points into collections, set a price, and get paid directly via Stripe — keeping 90% of revenue. The format is deliberately open: walking tours, podcast extensions, sound art installations, historical narratives, environmental recordings. The platform doesn’t prescribe what a SoundPoint is.
On the explorer side, the map shows nearby points. Get within range, and the audio unlocks. The constraint is the point: you have to be there. That transforms passive content consumption into a form of exploration.
The underlying architecture handles GPS range detection, user progress through collections, payments, and creator analytics — built to support both casual experimentation and serious commercial use.
The Outcome
SoundPoints is in beta with creators actively publishing content. The platform demonstrates a viable creator economy model for location-based experiences: low friction to publish, real revenue share, no intermediary platform tax.
What this demonstrates
Marketplace thinking from first principles — designing for both sides of a network simultaneously, and building the constraints (location unlock) that give the product its character. This engagement shows how Ministry of Product approaches novel product formats: understand what makes the experience meaningful, build the minimal system that enables it, and launch to learn.