Listening to Ep. 1 of “Doing Your Business”
Observations after listening to the show about profitable non-tech, non-VC backed companies
Betaworks VC investor Matt Hartman recently released the first episode of his new podcast, Doing Your Business, where he interviews founders of profitable, non-tech, non-venture backed companies. (This is his post announcing why he’s doing the show.)
It’s excellent.
Within minutes, I realized that these are conversations I’ll return to often in 2016. Here’re a few thoughts inspired by the first episode.
1. Doing Your Business has a neat, new(?) way of engaging with listeners
Matt begins and ends his show by asking listeners to call a certain phone number and leave a voicemail with comments and analysis about the first interview. He promises to include the best ones in the next episode.
While this call-and-respond request is familiar to anyone who’s heard a call-in section of a popular radio show, it’s the first time I’ve heard it applied to a podcast. Is this something other shows do?
A few things jumped out at me when I heard the request:
- It’s a great way to retain listeners. If you’re one of the people who called the show, it’s likely that you’ll listen to the next episode to hear if your comment made the podcast. This tactic will keep people coming back.
- It could be a good way to acquire more listeners. If your call makes it onto the show, it’s likely you’ll brag a little by sharing the show link with your friends. Those friends might become listeners, call in, get featured, share the link with their friends, and so on — a virtuous circle of work-of-mouth referrals.
- This could be a neat way to create a community. The New York Times published a sweet piece a few weeks ago celebrating fourteen of the most influential commenters on nytimes.com. These commenters are some of the most visible members of a core group of people who post frequently, and the community knows them well. Over time, this call-in request might give rise to a community of repeat callers, in the same way that there seems to be a core group of repeat commenters on Fred Wilson’s avc.com blog/salon.
- People are going to call Matt for the same reason people call into radio shows — the thrill of potentially having their voice heard by lots of people. As a VC investor at Betaworks, Matt likely enjoys a strong network of smart people, many of whom will probably be listening. If you’re an ambitious person looking to get in front of that crew, saying something insightful that gets you featured on the show is a good way to do that. (If you call, it’s probably a good idea to start off with an identifier that helps people find you online. Something like “Hey Matt, this is Jason, Twitter handle XYZ. Just calling to say…”)
2. There’s something really nice about hearing experts share insights about an industry you know very little about
Matt’s first interview is with Eric Chang, co-founder of premium furniture company Hellman-Chang. During their conversation, Eric acts as a guide into the world of high-end furniture design and manufacturing.
For example, he shares how purchase decisions for luxury furniture are often made by interior decorators, not the property owners themselves, and how those interior decorators have access to special showrooms not accessible to the general public. For people who work in that industry, this might be painfully obvious, but as an outsider looking in, it’s fascinating.
There’s something deeply nourishing about a skilled person holding your hand and walking you through a world you didn’t know existed. With a guide into these parallel universes, you get to learn the different constraints within which they operate, as well as the surprising similarities between your work and theirs.
What does a prototyping tool company have in common with a butcher’s shop or a travel agency? I have no idea, but I suspect that people who routinely learn about other kinds of work expose themselves to startling insights that give them an advantage over more myopic competitors.
Matt says future episodes will feature many other companies such as a wine maker whose wine was just ranked in the top 100 in the world, and the producer of a hit broadway show. I’m excited for every one of them. As someone who has worked in tech for most of my still-early career, I worry about how little I know about how other industries work.
3. Doing Your Business is part of a trend of an explosion in podcast content in 2015
2015 was arguably a breakout year for podcasts, propelled by the success of the media phenomenon, Serial. Millions of people downloaded episodes every week.
You know that period of time in 2014 when it seemed like everyone was creating a personal email newsletter? It feels a little like that with podcasts today, except people are coming at them with a refreshing amount of creativity, either tackling old topics in different ways, or exploring brand new niches.
While I never ended up listening to Serial, I noticed the buzz. I started listening to shows and soon went from knowing nothing about podcasts to following multiple shows a week.
Doing Your Business will join my growing list of podcasts I follow religiously, and I look forward to seeing how the podcasting will continue evolve in 2016.
(If you’re curious about the evolving podcast landscape, there’re a few resources you can check out at the very end of this post.)
4. The ‘P’ word — Who gets to be an entrepreneur?
When the question of the role of privilege in the entrepreneurial journey comes up, it can spark two violently opposing reactions.
One reaction is to deny that privilege exists at all. This reaction plays to the popular myth of The Entrepreneur as a gritty, hard-nosed maverick who builds a thriving business with nothing more their own two, calloused hands. It neatly sidesteps the reality of inherited wealth and the invisible social and material infrastructure that allows someone to take on an unpaid internship, access loans from family, and gain invaluable introductions.
The other extreme is to cynically assume that the only way to succeed in business is though being embedded in intersecting “Old Boy” networks. It falls into the trap of throwing ones hands up in the air with a sigh of resignation, assuming that the decks are already stacked, so why bother. Go too far down this path and financial success by itself is cause for deep suspicion.
As with many things, I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle. Yes, in Eric Chang’s story, we hear about how he c0-founded Hellman-Chang using the proceeds from a lucrative former business, and how he and his co-founder were lucky to be able to be able to afford the expensive power tools and raw materials that allowed them to practice woodwork as a hobby when they were kids. But it’s also clear that Chang has a genuine passion for this craft, and he’s spent much of his life working extremely hard towards being able to pursue a dream that has no guarantee of success.
Personally, I believe it’s possible to accept that people who have something to fall back on are more able to take on the risk of entrepreneurship, and also accept that successful entrepreneurs, by definition, are able to make the most of the resources available to them.
I suspect future episodes of Doing Your Business will show a similar pattern of people who were awake to opportunities around them, and who marshaled their resources to take advantage of the opportunity to create something of value.
Listen to Episode 1 of Doing Your Business
The first episode of Doing Your Business is only about 20 minutes long (I actually wish it were a lot longer). If you’re eager to learn about how different industries work, it’s well worth checking out.
Here’re some resources about the evolving podcast landscape
- Sign up to Hot Pod, a weekly newsletter about podcasts.
2. The Nieman Journalism Lab arguably has some of the best content about the state of media and journalism, and they’ve been tracking the podcast space closely. Here’re all their posts about podcasts
3. Technology commentator Ben Thompson proposed a super interesting theory about the publishers will monetize in the future, and the role podcasts will play: Grantland and the (Surprising) Future of Publishing.
4. Read this set of predictions for how podcasting will evolve in 2016.
