Welcome to the Doing Content Right podcast chapter. I originally concepted this chapter in April 2021. I created a suite of slides and a presentation (which you can find here), but this was at the very beginning of my own journey into podcasting.
By the end of that year, I had grown my own podcast with my partner Calvin Rosser, the Sh*t You Don’t Learn in School, that has now down over 100k downloads. Not huge, but also not bad considering this was done very part-time and with zero capital. I’ve also gotten to see My First Million rise to become one of the most influential podcasts in business, having guested on it a handful of times and gotten to see the inner workings. I also got to build HubSpot Creators, with our starting point being the HubSpot Podcast Network. And now I’m going further down the rabbit hole… I’m the new host of the a16z Podcast, one of the biggest and longest standing podcasts in technology.
In December, I wrote up this chapter with excitement to share it, but as things do… it got bogged down in my never ending todo list. Having been half a year since, I decided to open-source my notes from the past and not let me penchant for perfectionism get in the way of sharing information. Also because if not now, it will never publish!
So if you choose to go through this information, know that there will be errors, some things will be outdated (again, written in December 2021), and I still have much to learn. But perhaps that’s what can be so compelling about podcasts — they’re the unfiltered (or less filtered) version of someone’s brain, full of filler words, stumbling blocks, and emotion… instead of something perfectly distilled down.
Okay, let’s begin. :)
This particular chapter is based on my personal experience growth hacking with SYDLIS, since I think it’s a story more relatable to most creators who have more time than money. If that’s not you, you might choose to look elsewhere.
What I’ve focused on in this chapter is how anyone, regardless of their following, can build a podcast from the ground up. I dislike listicles as much as I dislike people with already massive followings saying, “Look, I hit the charts overnight, so you can too!”, so hopefully this guide is a breath of fresh air, as I try to diverge from those themes.
I’ll share everything that I learned in the last 6 months in growing a new podcast from 0 to 1000 downloads per episode (2022 edit: now 5000+ downloads/episode), with no budget and no external help. Many of the same tactics from the core of Doing Content Right can and do apply here (it would be a terrible sign if they didn’t!), but I’ve tried to include podcast-specific advice. And as I always say, read this like a textbook, not a novel!
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/J8u6hskQtu0Ijp_d-05peUr4B5HTGmXe4QgkTEvaKciuzdsEiQsKQEI9X5VKT30xDwXHYMbOLEDio42Ay47KeynMpW1w5aPDKFTSbxVa0ZSwHvTTZAPlx6ELeoQ_CKS2VKFkJ1-WgZVsmJd2o-4bPA
Just to set the tone for this chapter, we’ll be covering the following:
PS: This section is augmented by the slides here or this playlist!
If you learned anything from Doing Content Right, it is that we live in an era of content competition. That competition was not derived from a change in desire, but a change in the tools that allowed for people to participate; a democratizing force.
Remember: content is just a way of communicating ideas from one brain to many brains. That democratizing force applies across content mediums, whether it’s a tweet, a TikTok, a newsletter, a podcast, a book, and movie, or any other form of content. That’s also why, you’ll see one form of media often being replicated across another (ie: a popular tweet can be fodder for a long-form article, which can be fodder for a podcast episode)