3 Things I Learned Launching a Podcast
Introducing Connections, a Podcast for Young Professionals
Over the past 3 months, my Co-Founder Ray Cao and I have been working on evenings and weekends to launch our own podcast series for young professionals called Connections.
Before going into our learnings, here is some context on why we created this show.
For young professionals who aspire to be leaders within a company (i.e. they have no desire to start their own venture), there is very little opportunity for them to learn from the C-Suite leaders they aspire to become.
The stories of these corporate leaders are rarely told despite them running organizations that serve and employ millions of people around the world.
We decided to fix that by starting this podcast.
Our goal is to connect young professionals to corporate leaders in their industry through their stories, in hopes that our listeners can take these tactics and inspiration to accelerate their careers.
Here are a few things we learned throughout this process.
1 | Podcasts are growing rapidly amongst young professionals
Podcasts have more than doubled in popularity since 2008. According to the Pew Research Center, over 21% of the US population has listened to a podcast in the last month.
The format has grown to the point where Nielsen (the company behind measuring TV Ratings and In-Store Sales) has announced they will begin to formally measure podcast listener statistics by the end of this year.
According to Edison Research, the typical podcast listener skews to be a College Educated, 18 to 34 year old with a $75K+ Household Income.
These are young professionals who need the content we’re creating.
Many of them commute. Most multi-task. Podcasting was the perfect medium to use to reach them.
2 | Your show has to add value to a specific audience
According to Libsyn (the main Podcast repository, recommended by top professionals like Tim Ferriss) in 2015 were nearly 30,000 podcasts on their platform, up from 12,000 only 3 years ago.
The competition in content is fierce, but if you look hard enough, white space still exists. For example, top business shows like James Altucher, Tim Ferriss and Gary Vaynerchuk, based on from informal polls of my friend groups, seem to primarily serve entrepreneurs and entrepreneurially minded people.
Instead, with Connections, we focused our content to a business audience these top shows were not directly serving — young professionals who aspire to be great leaders in their current jobs or industry, but who are not necessarily inspired by entrepreneurs. For this group, the CMO’s and CEOs of their companies are the people they want to emulate.
With this angle, we also need to differentiate against general industry press, who cover company news quite well.
The focus of our hour-long interviews instead are about the individual themselves.
We cover their childhood. Their first job. The moments of failure where they thought they might get fired.
We discuss the specific tactics that have made them successful, in hopes that our listeners can incorporate some of these best practices into their own daily lives.
2 | Design your Infrastructure with your Guests In Mind
As we begun discussing this idea with others in the industry, it was clear this content would speak to a global audience from around the world.
That means we had to interview guests from all parts of the globe, which made phone calls the primary means of communication.
Given we most likely we are calling our guests during working hours, Skype was also unreliable as it may not be setup on their work computers.
Instead, our setup was simple — we record all our interviews using an UberConference conference line, and use software like Audacity to edit it in post-production.
Because of this simple setup, we were able to interview people guests based in London, New Jersey, New York, Bordeaux and Toronto, with more countries to come.
3 | Iterate before you Commit
We decided to launch on SoundCloud first, letting us gather feedback from our listeners on what content resonates with them best.
For the past 3 months, we’ve been sharing our podcasts via email with our target audience, young professionals, to get their feedback before we launch.
This has helped us make improvements to the show, one example being that we are making future episodes shorter to fit within a medium length commute.
Similar to iTunes, SoundCloud lets you listen on-the-go through their mobile app, and drives organic traffic to your tracks through their platform.
What makes SoundCloud different is that after publishing, you have complete flexibility to update the name of the show, change the imagery and branding, and even lets you replace and update audio tracks. You can iterate on the fly.
This let’s us gather a lot of information to optimize our content to ensure it truly meets the needs of our fans, before we commit and lock-in content to iTunes.
Once we have a loyal fanbase on SoundCloud and e-mail, we can direct their attention to our iTunes launch to drive early momentum up the charts.
Listen to our First Episode & Share your Thoughts
You can listen to our first interview with David Sable, the Global CEO of Y&R below.
Our upcoming guests include leaders from the brand, retail, agency and corporate world, such as:
- Phil Thomas (CEO of Cannes Lions)
- Jeff Smith (Company Group Chairman NA of J&J Consumer),
- Steve Sadove (Former Chairman & CEO of Saks Fifth Avenue and Board Director of Colgate-Palmolive)
- Martine Reardon (Former CMO of Macy’s)
If you’re interested please subscribe to get updates on new episodes, and our eventual launch onto iTunes and Android.
Your feedback, questions and comments are much appreciated. Please hit “Recommend” if you think others will enjoy reading this story.
Daniel Rodic is the Co-Founder of Exact Media, which is transforming the world of direct mail by enabling brands owned by companies like P&G, PepsiCo, Unilever and L’Oréal to distribute samples and coupons using the excess space in eCommerce parcels that have already been shipped to consumer.
Daniel was named Top 30 Under 30 by Marketing Magazine, and represented Canada at the G20 Entrepreneurs Summit in Moscow and Beijing. Daniel served on the Leadership Council for the United Nations Media for Social Impact Summit and he is a 2016 finalist for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
