What we learnt from hosting podcasts

According to Fast Company, more than 50 Billion podcast episodes have been downloaded or streamed from Apple! Truelist & Statisica published a study on top reasons why people listen and don’t listen to podcasts. Clearly, learning is the top answer, followed by Entertainment and staying up to date ( which loops back to learning).

Why start a podcast at all?

Scaling our start up Fitbots OKRs, we early on realized, content as a strategy was the natural choice to attract and nurture customers. Why? Well, 90% of folks we interacted with were new to OKRs or had a watered down version that never worked.

We would get all kinds of questions ranging from ‘What are OKRs?’ ‘How do you connect and align OKRs?’ ‘How do we pick the right metrics? ‘What’s the best way to run a check in meeting?’ ‘Do you know of companies who have sustained OKRs?’ And more.

So we doubled down on generating content and one thing was crystal, its all about experimentation. You will find different mediums of content— blogs, videos, guest posts, podcasts, webinars, visual carousels and more. At an early stage, you would need to check what works, and do more of that.

To us, Podcasts was a great choice, as listeners were hungry for easily consumable content, which is not salesy, not on the face, but more about sharing knowledge.

Getting Started

There’s always the errr… starting trouble. (Now, by no means was I born a podcast host :). However, I do consider myself as a person passionate about the Future of Work, and helping companies drive business outcomes with OKRs. If you combine that with the penchant to have a great conversation, voila, it sets a great ground for a podcast.) A simple update to LinkedIn was a start.

Founders are the best face of the company, at an early stage. If you have two or more co-founders, you could pick one who runs the podcasts. It also helps build muscle memory.

Picking the right Genre

We did some research on Top podcasters out there. This Week in Start Ups (Jason Calacanis), Nathan Latka , SaaS interviews with CEOs , The Adrian Tan Show, William Tincup Recruiting Daily are a few examples of awesome hosts.

Here’s what we found:

1. Each catered to a specific target ‘listener’
2. Each host has a unique style
3. Each podcast has a specific outcome ( for instance, Nathan Latka’s podcast data makes its way to Founderpath)
4. Each picked guests and topics which would be useful to the audience
5. They measure metrics that matter (for instance, number of listeners, downloads, reviews, episode frequency, website traffic , lead attribution, referrals).

Picking a name, targeted listeners and guests

We focussed on SEO when it came to picking a name. Called it the OKRs podcast show. Can it be better christened , hell yeah!

Target listeners: This one aligned to our Buyer persona. We mostly make a sale to Founders/ CEOs of companies, who are looking to roll out OKRs to drive business outcomes. Our choice of topics had to hit the ‘Job to be done’.

To them, what really matters is not getting OKRs right, but ‘Hitting their growth numbers as a team’. OKRs is a means to get there.

In short, the objective of the Fitbots OKRs podcast, was to share new learnings, by hosting leading OKRs practitioners or a peer Founder/CEOs who have learnt from implementing OKRs.

Inviting our Guests

Our first pick was the MD of Twitter for SouthEast Asia. Twitter has been practicing OKRs for a while, and we figured that it would be a great learning for our listeners. We eventually went on to host OKRs coaches who have a ton to share with others, and Founders/Business leaders/ HR leaders who have implemented OKRs for their companies. Here are episodes you could check out

Failing to prepare, is preparing to fail

Being a show host , there’s no winging it. Asking a guest for time, requires preparation. Here are some practical tips:

1. Watch prior podcast episodes of the guest or any content which tells you more about her/ him. You would learn a ton about them.
2. Pre circulate a list of questions
3. Have a conversation, not a robotic Q&A
4. Display emotions — fun, laughter, disbelief — we are human after all!
5. I usually like having a rapid fire round at the end of the podcast
6. Set up a date/ time which is mutually convenient. Select a space that is noise free for the recording
7. Get a good audio quality set up. Btw, full disclosure, we have not invested in fancy microphones. We use Zoom — been working fine so far.
8. Have a very good editor in your team ; we have a fabulous person who runs the edits!
9. Don’t make run your podcasts for an hour, keep it to 20 -30 min at most.
10. Amplify in both networks (of the guest and host)

Ok, what the heck are the outcomes?

We are still on step 1 , but in the right direction. There’s no magic wand here, if you look at our lead analysis, we get some great engagement on podcasts (likes, comments, shares), and working towards building momentum.

Overall, I truly enjoy hosting these. You can catch our episodes online too.