The Brief

The Huberman Lab podcast launched in January 2021, and Dr. Andrew Huberman’s infectious passion for science quickly resonated with a global audience. By late 2022, Huberman Lab was regularly ranked as one of the top health and science podcasts across all platforms, and needed a platform tailored to their audience.

Andrew and his team remain laser-focused on releasing an incredible new episode every week, publishing over 160 episodes since launching. Each episode offers a deep dive into a topic — covering nervous system and body processes, highlighting actionable tools and protocols, and always including important context and health considerations.

The previous Huberman Lab website helped users browse episodes chronologically, but offered limited ways to search and discover content based on specific topics, guests or areas of interest. Similarly, the site’s email capture strategy was under-optimized.

Huberman Lab partnered with DoubleUp and 8020 to design, build, and launch an all-new website to better serve their audience, and scale alongside their ambitions to broaden and deepen the public’s burgeoning interest in science.

The Goals

At the outset, we established three goals for the new website:

1. Improve search functionality

The previous Huberman Lab website didn’t allow visitors to easily search for specific topics or protocols, forcing them to invest more time in scrubbing or (re-)listening to portions of content or entire episodes to find specific details.

When specific tools and protocols proved harder to find on the official site, visitors resorted to using unaffiliated websites, AI chatbots, and other platforms which provided incomplete or incorrect information. Crucially, such sources almost always missed broader context, which in the case of health practices and science information could be dangerous.

We understood that combating misinformation was a crucial priority. The best way to do so was not only by building a superior search and discovery experience for all of Huberman Lab’s content, but also by ensuring that experience encouraged users to  directly engage with the science presented in the source material.

2. Improve content discovery within the site

True to Andrew’s original mission of increasing the public’s interest in science, the teams agreed that the website’s design and information architecture needed to go further than simply offering an improved search experience. We wanted the new site to encourage deeper exploration of related content, whether using a podcast episode, newsletter resource, or search modal as the starting point.

Improving search

After identifying which content was most sought after, we comprehensively cataloged Huberman Lab’s entire content library. This foundation enabled us to build a delightful search experience that quickly and accurately connects visitors to the specific information they’re looking for.

With such nuanced health and scientific content we needed to consider not only a visitor’s specific search term, but their actual search intent. For example: Someone searching “supplements for focus” should see results for “supplements” and “focus”, but also L-tyrosine, acetyl L-carnitine, phosphatidylserine, Alpha GPC, etc, because these are all supplements covered in multiple episodes of Huberman Lab around focus and productivity.

The DoubleUp team used our native expertise in science content to fine-tune the search logic to prioritize a visitor’s search intent. We also laid a foundation for the ever-growing content library by ensuring it was easy for the Huberman Lab team to index future content as their library grows over time.

Improving discovery

While most visitors are used to browsing podcasts by episode, we also designed a new way to organize and present the content library to serve users looking to explore by topic, and help the new site rank better for SEO. We developed a list of 22 topics and 90+ sub-topics to house not only the 300+ hours of existing content, but optimized to accommodate future content releases with minimal future adjustment.

We designed a scalable Topics page template and tailored topic-specific copy for SEO. These pages consolidated previously-siloed content, and with new sorting and filtering options allowed visitors to — for the first time — explore all of Huberman Lab’s content by topic. For example, exploring the popular topic of “sleep” now empowers visitors to browse all relevant full-length episodes, timestamps, newsletters, Live Event Q&As and AMA questions in a single place.

We also increased discovery opportunities by integrating a search modal that displays suggested topics and episode lists (rather than relying on the visitor’s text input). Individual episode pages also include a list of related episodes and display clickable topic tags to encourage further exploration.

The Results

Optimizing the email capture funnel

Huberman Lab’s guiding ethos is that science information should be accessible to all; we used this insight to develop a tasteful conversion strategy that was fully aligned with this philosophy.

Rather than simply gating previously-unreleased content behind an email capture, we developed a lead magnet to answer one of the audience’s most common questions: What protocols does Andrew Huberman recommend people implement into their daily lives and routines?

Optimize user experience for email signups and premium subscriptions

The Huberman Lab Daily Blueprint is a rich guide curating popular content from several episodes, delivered immediately to new email sign-ups and designed to be immediately actionable.

Alongside several focused conversion optimizations, the lead magnet — presented by Andrew in a short video — has more than doubled the website’s visit → email conversion rate.

Supporting Science with Huberman Lab Premium

Launched in partnership with Supercast in late 2022, users initially needed to visit a separate, Supercast-hosted landing page to sign up for Huberman Lab Premium.

In its first year, the Premium membership allowed Andrew and his team, along with a generous dollar-for-dollar match from the Tiny Foundation, to contribute more than $500,000 to five separate research projects and meaningfully support student fellowships. With a strong start and impressive continued growth, the team wanted to fully integrate the offering into the new website.

In partnership with Supercast we also developed a completely new, fully integrated premium dashboard where members can log in and access all of their benefits and exclusive content in one place.

A foundation for accelerated growth

"This project has been a perfect blend of our shared values and commitment to excellence. Working with DoubleUp has been a standout experience, and we're excited about the positive impact this will have on our mission to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.” said Ian Mackey, Vice President at Scicomm Media.

The new site was extremely well received by Huberman Lab’s audience, and achieved our initial design goals; radically improving the search and discovery experience for new and returning website visitors alike, and increasing the average time users spend on the site overall.

Crucially, our work also successfully significantly increased key conversion metrics that have directly helped accelerate Huberman Lab’s growth rate. By achieving a more than 100% increase in the average number of new email signups the new website has directly accelerated the growth rate of Huberman Lab’s email list, the value of which will continue to compound over time.

Fully optimizing the premium membership sign up flow also helped to double the average number of new premium member signups. As the Premium business continues to mature, all future growth will continue to directly support important Scientific research.

The new hubermanlab.com represents a huge upgrade, both achieving our initial design goals and accelerating Huberman Lab’s overall growth rate, while staying aligned with the team’s mission to ensure accurate science information is accessible to everyone to increase the public’s interest in science.