Celebrating 100 Episodes of “Around The Coin”
How It Got Started
The day was 3rd of December, 2013. I had put up a post on my Quora blog about starting a new blog, and two fellow Quorans whom I had been observing, reading and interacting online, commented.
The two gentlemen in question were: Brian Roemmele and Mike Townsend.
We three started Around The Coin, a banking & payments podcast whose inception lay in a simple comment thread.
Very casually Brian mentions starting a podcast and Mike Townsend, cementing the idea. Here is a screenshot of that moment, that serves as a memento.
The Long Journey
Running a weekly podcast hasn’t been easy. We started with very rudimentary equipment and the sound quality was horrendous. Our resident audiophile Brian Roemmele told us how to invest in better microphones and how to better record our audios.
Over the last two years, we haven’t changed the format much. Our show is still long compared to other (we average about one-hour), and every now and then we will have an odd guest interview and so many times we end up skipping a week, because one or more of us are not available.
Mike & Brian wake up on an early Sunday morning to record the show, which is Sunday evening in Pakistan, from where I log in. Needless to say, their Sunday mornings and my Sunday evenings are usually spoken for.
We’ve now become accustomed to it.
Perhaps the best part of hosting this show with my fellow co-hosts, is the pre-show talk that we have It used to be 15–20 minutes, but now easily stretches for an hour. The information and stories exchanged during the pre-show conversation cannot be aired for reasons of privacy and that we spill a lot of beans, speak freely and just chit-chat about random things, but all in all, it has been a wonderful look forward to moment now in the podcast — the pre show conversation!
Thank you!
We are extremely thankful to the listeners. So many of them. What started out with a few listeners mostly friends and family giving us support, are now in the 1,000s. Depending on what topics we discuss or whom we interview, the listenership can be anywhere from 5,000 to as high as 15,000 listeners. Most of them subscribe to us on iTunes.
We haven’t commercialized the podcast (yet?) because we believe in what we do. We love talking about all things banking, payments, fintech, economics and especially behavior.
In the coming weeks, there are grand plans to give an uplift to the podcast. We think after a 100 episodes or so, it is time to up the game. We are always open to suggestions as to what you want. Please get in touch with us, either through LinkedIn, or by leaving a comment below.
Thank you for being here with us on this wonderful journey.
Here to the next 100 episodes!
