What We Learned Starting Our Podcast In 2016
Lessons From Launching Seeking Wisdom
We launched our podcast at Drift in the beginning of last year.
And as expected, there was a little bit of a learning curve — from episodes that sounded too scripted and never saw the light of day, to buying new podcasting gear, to figuring out how to promote a new episode when there isn’t just one place where people listen to podcasts (there’s iTunes, Overcast, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Pocket Casts, etc.)
But after 50 episodes of Seeking Wisdom, there’s one thing I can say for sure:
Launching a podcast has had a real impact on our business.
Can I measure it? No. Not easily. It’s all anecdotal (and I know that will make some people nervous).
But it’s impossible to ignore how often we hear about Seeking Wisdom — from new customers, to candidates coming to interview at Drift, to friends (both personally and professionally).
There isn’t a pretty chart I can find in Google Analytics to see it, but it’s something I know in my gut because we hear it every single day.
Outside of that, the biggest learning was the simplest: we needed to be ourselves.
People wanted raw, uncut, honest, and informal conversations about business, life, and learning — so when we threw out the scripts and just started talking about what was on our minds in an authentic way, things started to take off (and we started to build an audience).
We posted one 15-minute episode per week (for the most part) and Seeking Wisdom was downloaded more than 100,000 times in the first year, and it received 175 five-star reviews on iTunes.
So as we turn the corner into 2017, we thought we’d tie the first year together by re-visiting some of the most popular topics from 2016, including:
- How a modern product team should work.
- How to become a learning machine.
- The power of learning from others.
- Why you need role models.
- Innovation, not invention.
- The secret to running effective 1:1 meetings.
- The art of managing up.
- Advice for recent grads/millennials: you need to carry the water.
If you’re new to Seeking Wisdom, this is the perfect episode to start with.
And if you’ve been a fan of the show, you should enjoy a few of these topics that we decide to revisit (after you’ve subscribed and left a five-star review, of course).
See you in 2017.
“Investing in yourself is the most important investment you’ll ever make in your life. There’s no financial investment that’ll ever match it, because if you develop more skill, more ability, more insight, more capacity, that’s what’s going to really provide economic freedom. It’s those skill sets that really make that happen.”
— Warren Buffet
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