Breaker is a social app for listening to podcasts, where you can like and share your listening experience with your friends. In return, the app will learn from your likes and recommend new episodes for you.

Breaker co-founders Leah Culver and Eric Berlin started working on it as a side project, primarily because they wanted a new way to experience podcasts. One thing led to another and they got accepted to Y Combinator, raised funding, and started to do Breaker full-time.

Culver says that she and Erik listen to their users and built features that support their ideas. For example, Breaker now has "Breaker Upstream," a service that enables podcast makers to push exclusive content to a subset of listeners that are paying membership fees.

"Don't let anyone discourage you. Just keep in mind that you can build anything. Learned how to program, it's a superpower."