Creator Spotlight: Kerning Cultures’s Hebah Fisher on going from podcast to network
Hebah Fisher is the cofounder of Kerning Cultures, the first venture-backed podcast company in the Middle East. A serial entrepreneur and journalist, Hebah previously built microfinance and business education programs in the Gulf and the States. We chatted with Hebah about how and why she started both Kerning Cultures the podcast and Kerning Cultures the company, and what it’s like working across seven time zones.
What’s the origin story behind the Kerning Cultures podcast?
Kerning Cultures was born out of wanting to tell stories we actually cared about. Most mainstream media in the Middle East doesn’t speak to us (youth), it speaks to our parents. Turning on the radio in Dubai, to this day, hurts my soul. And the stories are there — they’re just not reflected in the mainstream media. So we wanted to change that.
Our early stories profiled the startup scenes across the region, the history of the first maternity hospital in Abu Dhabi, a long-distance relationship made possible by MSN Messenger and 56KB dial-up speeds, and the elusive world of smugglers as a refugee across Europe.
The response, albeit modest in the beginning, was incredible: listeners wrote in long letters of how much our stories meant to them. Arab listeners told us they cried listening to our stories, it was as if we were telling their own; an American listener told us that after listening to our stories back to back, he sold his motorcycle to fund a plane ticket to visit the Middle East for the first time. In the five years and three new shows since, the letters continue to pour in and are the most wonderful example of how good storytelling can stir hearts.
Who has worked on the Kerning Cultures podcast? How did you finance the show to start?
Kerning Cultures went from a loose idea in my head to something vaguely more coherent on paper when I pitched the startup idea at the MIT Arab Enterprise Forum in Kuwait in 2015. The pitch didn’t win anything, but the Forum videographers included a man named Ramzi Bashour who ended up becoming a dear friend and our first sound designer. Ramzi taught me A LOT about audio, recording, production, and he and I released the first few episodes together. With an actual show live, our team grew: Dana Ballout was our first producer (she was good friends with Ramzi’s brother), and from there Razan Alzayani joined first as a producer and then as my cofounder.
And then came producers Alex Atack, Jacqueline Sofia, Ahmad Zeid, Alexandra Chaves, Percia Verlin, and Shahd Bani Odeh, sound designer Mohamad Khreizat, and marketing director Bella Ibrahim. To produce the kind of longform, quality storytelling we aspire towards is hard and takes a small village. I remember sitting in on a Radiolab pitch meeting some years ago; there were 28 people in that room.
The first three years, Razan and I poured our savings into Kerning Cultures. No one was making money: we volunteered, worked for equity, because we believed in the mission of telling good audio stories from the places we call home. And none of us knew how to do that in the beginning, so it was an exciting, steep learning curve, and with each story we got better and better.
At what point did you know that Kerning Cultures was more than a single podcast? Was it the plan from the beginning to create a larger company, or how did the strategy/vision evolve?
The business opportunity evidenced by players like Serial, Gimlet Media, Ximalaya, and Pineapple Street Media, were clear signals of the market opportunity in our own burgeoning podcast market. And as for whether we’d pursue the for-profit or non-profit route of media: I had co-built an NGO before, and the constant grant-writing and donor drives typical of public radio didn’t interest me. Kerning Cultures would be a commercially sustaining production empire.
Razan and I decided it would be a network of shows pretty early on. But it didn’t actually become that until we applied for Matter, a media accelerator program based out of San Francisco. In our pitch to the accelerator we spoke about Kerning Cultures as a network, but I realised in normal conversations I still spoke about Kerning Cultures as a podcast, not a network. Over the course of the five-month program, that shift in language led to a shift in the actual structure of the company and our planning. Matter invested pre-seed $50,000 in Kerning Cultures, and that enabled us to hire Alex Atack full-time as our first hire managing production. We were able to show the traction in audience growth and consistent production (the wonders of a full-time team!), and that provided the foundation we needed to raise a seed round.
When did you decide to apply for 500 Startups? What were your considerations when going down the venture capital path?
We started fundraising right off the back of our Demo Day at Matter. 500 Startups was one of our first conversations, and they’ve been wonderful allies since. With 500 as our lead, it made it eas(ier) to close the rest of the investment from angels and Podfund. The decision to pursue investment as a way to build our company was clear to us by the third year of Kerning Cultures’ life: the opportunity was there, evidenced by case studies in the US and Chinese markets where podcast companies were exploding, fueled by investment that enabled the production and marketing required; our issue after three years was that we needed a full-time team to hit the ground running.
Part-time, passionate volunteers can only get you so far, and the landscape in the Middle East was already heating up, with new shows launching weekly, the formation of eight new podcast companies (bringing our region total to some thirteen players), and streaming platforms like Anghami, Deezer, and Spotify beginning to roll out local podcasts in their catalogues.
It was either now or we’d lose on the first-mover advantage that honestly makes a difference in new media. Since closing our seed round, Heba Afify, Tamara Rasamny, Nadeen Shaker, and Shahad Altukhaim joined as producers, Tala Amhaz as our Head of Business Development, and Zeina Dowidar as our researcher. Our current 11-person team works on five Arabic and English shows, supplemented by freelancers.
How do all the shows in the Kerning Cultures network fit together? What defines a “KC show”?
The Kerning Cultures Network features English and Arabic shows that are from and about the Middle East. Some are interview-style, some are radio documentary, some are scripted fiction shows: one of the things we’re experimenting with as a network is ensuring a diverse portfolio of content reflective of the diverse interests of our listeners. Across all, however, there’s a standard of quality production that we strive to uphold. The flagship Kerning Cultures show has been called the This American Life of the Middle East by The Guardian, Al Empire features icons like Bassem Youssef and Mona Chalabi in its stories of exceptional Arabs around the world and their journeys to the top, and our newest, جسدي (Jasadi), explores in diary style our relationship with our bodies, our selves, and all that’s in between.
What skills or resources did you need to build/acquire in order to transition from a single show to a podcast network? What percentage of your time do you spend creating content versus business operations?
For me personally as the CEO, my role shifted from 100% production to probably 15% production and 85% business development, marketing, and operations. Of course, that has only been made possible by our exceptionally talented team of producers who have wholeheartedly embraced and since sculpted the actualisation of creating media worthy of our listeners’ time. We’re learning how to market our shows effectively and grow our listening audiences, we’re learning how to sell and commercialise our content, we’re learning how to grow our talent pool of producers, and we’re learning how to scale processes and operations from a single show to five simultaneously without dropping anything. As a team, we’re honestly stronger together.
