Case study · INNOVATE
Podium Entertainment
From digital publisher to technology powerhouse — patents, an acquisition, and a real product engine
North America's fastest-growing digital publisher wanted technology to be its edge: ML-driven title selection, a narrator-matching database, and an acquisition vetted properly. We ran strategy and product; our delivery teams ran the build.
- Industry
- Publishing / Media
- Engagement
- Multi-year, ongoing
- Services
- Product management & executive oversight · Technical due diligence (M&A) · ML product strategy
Situation
Podium is the fastest-growing digital publisher in North America — an Inc. 5000 company that built its lead in genre fiction by spotting what readers want before anyone else. Leadership wanted to push that edge further: machine-learning software to predict which titles would excel as audiobooks, and the technology foundation to treat intellectual property as a product.
They had the vision and the market. What they didn’t have was technology leadership to turn it into a development plan — and their project-based software vendor had hit its ceiling. “We were clearly not the vendor’s top priority, and that made technology development very inefficient,” said Jon Oxidine, Podium’s COO and CFO. “To the vendor, everything was a challenge instead of an opportunity.”
What we did
We entered on the ground floor: understood the business, set executive oversight, and placed a Ripple product manager to define and drive the predictive-software project. As trust built, the scope grew — a narrator database matching voice talent to titles, then technical due diligence when Podium investigated acquiring Bookstat.
That diligence mattered. Our team’s code review found the entire product had been written by one person, in a way that couldn’t be worked on by multiple developers or scaled to new demands. Podium walked into the acquisition knowing exactly what it was buying and what it would cost to make it scale.
Post-acquisition, we brought in our delivery teams to replace the outgoing vendor entirely: application development, data engineering, platform engineering, and the stack consolidation that merged Podium’s core systems with the acquired company’s. Ripple handled the brains — strategy and tactics — while the delivery teams handled the technical muscle.
Outcome
Podium went from an idea to filed patents and a completed acquisition, with a dedicated development team shipping faster than the vendor model ever did.
“The Ripple Group team has been invaluable. They’ve helped us achieve our goals, visualize what success means, and translate everything into a development plan.”
— Jon Oxidine, COO & CFO, Podium Entertainment
Outcomes
- Patents filed on technology that started as an idea in a leadership meeting
- Acquisition completed with code-level due diligence that priced the real risk
- Dedicated dev team replacing a project-based vendor that had hit its ceiling