#VoicesOfIndia: Candid Conversations with Naga Subramanya B B
Naga Subramanya, a Chartered-Accountant-turned-podcaster behind the Passion People Podcast talks about his journey and inspiration.
The Passion People Podcast is all about deep conversations with passionate individuals. Naga Subramanya, the host, is creating this podcast to inspire you to follow your heart and chase your passion.
It brings on board some of the most influencing people who share their stories hoping to motivate the listeners to steer their life in the right direction. The PPP premiered in December 2016 and is presently in its season two, followed by season 1 with more than thirty episodes.
In this interview, Naga Subramanya talks about his inspiration behind podcasting, the journey, the challenges faced and more. Excerpts from the interview-
We see you have a very interesting background in finance and advisory, so what’s your life outside podcasting? And, how did podcasting happen?
I am a Chartered Accountant by profession, so that means working a lot with numbers and people, and connecting these two things.
I qualified my CA in 2012 after which I worked with Texas Instruments for about three and a half years, followed by a year off. During that year, I had a bunch of activities planned and I travelled the country and met some amazing people.
That’s when I figured out that there are some people doing extraordinary things while we hardly break off our routine, cribbing about life in general. So, I wanted to encourage people to come out of their comfort zones and follow their passion. I wanted to help them bridge the gap between wanting to do and actually doing.
This inspired me to begin the Passion People Podcast so I can share conversations with people who are following their passion, and take them to the other side of the world. I wanted people to realize that there are normal people like us doing extraordinary things, and help everyone know their story.
Talking about my life outside podcasting, I work with a Chartered Accountancy firm and we help startups raise capital, we do ‘buy and sell-side advisory’- it’s all very exciting work because it’s on the cutting edge of technology and business, something I’m really interested in.
How did you select podcast as a medium for the Passion People Project?
So, I interviewed for the FoundersGyan podcast back in 2016 and that gave me the kickstart I needed.
Being a guest on that show proved to be that aha moment when I realized how much fun podcasting is. It doesn’t carry the bells and whistles that come with being on a video.
You see, it’s comparatively easy to drive listens on a video with a bunch of attractive people and the necessary editing. But audio-based delivery of content is more intuitive and authentic. At the same time, it doesn’t carry the need to buy all that expensive equipment. It’s also easier to get people on board for a voice conversation.
Personally, I love listening to things better than reading them. I connect to sound, music, and audio a lot. I always wanted to be a Radio Jockey but that never materialized, so I saw podcasting as a way to fulfil that desire.
As a guest on your own show, you talked about this Buddhist meditation known as Vipassanā, and about mental health. Considering the amount of work pressure an average individual faces, how would you suggest we approach mental health?
I would want to expand the concept of mental health into self-care, which would include both physical and mental health.
You see, as kids, we were hardly taught about what self-care is, about how to deal with anxiety and real issues, issues we would face as an adult. I find this extremely important, and I’m in fact, working on a podcast on adulting which would explore themes such as how to be an adult, things we wish we’d learned.
So yes, mental health is extremely important considering the amount of work we are bombarded with. We really should have a set of people with whom we can unload our burden, share what we are feeling and talk about our problems.
You have written a blog about how PPP began here on Medium. What caught our attention were these three specific symbols you chose- the helm, grain, and ripple star. Why these three?
So, I told you about these amazing people and their inspiring stories I came across in my gap year. When I had to design a logo for the PPP, I knew I had to do justice to these stories by designing a logo as thought-provoking as their stories. The constraint was the free number of icons I had on the Canvas logo maker and then ascribing a story to it. ;)
Talking about the helm, I see life as the sea and us, humans, as the captains of our own ships. So, it’s people who have steered their lives in a different direction whose journies I wanted to capture.
The grain depicts independence- independence of thought and the independence of resources or that to self-sustain. You see, what you do needs to sustain you both emotionally and financially. In my case, my job sustains me financially and podcasting sustains me emotionally. :)
But I believe that’s not quite enough. While carrying out life in a decent way, we also need to spread that message and carry everyone around with us- and that’s the ripple star.
You maintain an active blog along with your podcast. As a content creator, how do you approach a blog differently from a podcast?
You see, the way the podcast started was when I got confidence in creating content by blogging. You might have noticed that I have a bunch of blogs. These blogs chronicled my 52 weeks when I was on a break and helped me make the shift from text to audio.
But when I shifted from text to audio, I didn’t really want to let go of text and also had a lot of time on my hands. So I continued blogging alongside podcasting. There was also a significant amount of cross-promotion in the sense of the extra traffic I could get on podcasts through blogs.
However, once I had too many things on my plate, I started dropping off the blog. So, it was just me experimenting through different mediums and seeing if one is helping drive traffic to the other.
I think the reason why blogs are important is that there are people out there who like reading better than listening, and thus it helps us widen the base. I am figuring out a way I can transcript all my podcasts into blogs so that I can help people who like to read get the message too.
Can you tell us how the journey has been so far? What were the major roadblocks and challenges you faced?
So, the biggest challenge comes from the ambient noise that we’re blessed with in India- it is extremely difficult to find a quiet place to record at! I recorded the initial parts of the podcast on my phone and it was a challenge to get the right quality because of the incessant background noise.
Another challenge is identifying the theme of the podcast- what exactly are you going to talk about. Either you could go with a theme that is absolutely random or you could work around a theme that connects all your episodes. You need to offer your listeners some predictability in terms of theme, duration, frequency, etcetera.
Next challenge I faced, for an in-person, interview-based podcast, was having a continuous pipeline of people to interview. It was actually quite challenging to work out a schedule which is comfortable with people I’d want to interview, considering it is quite a time-taking process. This is what pushed me to take remote interviews, despite the fact that it helps us strike a better and deeper connection in an in-person interview.
Finally, I’d say that with India having the largest number of new podcasts coming in, it is a bigger challenge with every new episode. And to that end, it is similar to any other business- you face new competition every day and need to work hard to stay ahead in the game.
What are your comments on the monetization of podcasts in India?
Now, monetization of podcasts in India is something we’ve been trying to figure out for quite some time.
The first roadblock is getting the audience — most podcast platforms need at least 10,000 listens per month for advertisers to even consider, which is a tough nut to crack. I can’t say whether advertising is the way to go because siding these advertisers as an Indie podcaster is a challenge. Even if you do, negotiating on good terms is difficult.
The second model is where you host with the hosting platform like Audioboom or Anchor. These platforms negotiate, in bulk, with the companies which might want to use podcasts as a medium to advertise. But again, here too the size of audience matters.
Talking about the subscription model or listener donations, that generally requires the podcaster to produce additional content which is available only to the subscribers. This could be ‘behind the scenes’, extra artwork, extended versions. Given how small podcasting is in India already, I’m not sure how much of the sample space would go for these models and pay for that extra content.
At the end of the day, the question that looms is whether the space big enough for people to make money out of it.
Following up on that, do you think there is a threshold on the number of podcasts one can listen to/ number of hours a person spends on podcasts per month? Do you think that could influence them to donate or to pay for premium content?
I think it is less to do with the number of hours they spend on this medium and more in terms of their exposure to the content-creating process that can influence them to make a payment.
Let’s go five to ten years back in time. We did not then have access to streaming platforms like Amazon Prime or Netflix where you pay a nominal amount and are able to watch thousands of TV shows or movies at the same time that they get released all around the world.
Fast forward to today, there’s an evolution in terms of how content delivery happens. People are better equipped to understand what amount of effort goes in the content creating process. So, I think the more the people are in knowledge of this effort and the struggle that comes along, the more willing will they be to pay for that content.
In order to acquaint people with this process, recording videos of ‘behind the scenes’, or of the podcast itself and using YouTube as a medium to promote them can help. However, the podcaster needs time and equipment to do the same.
You can follow Naga Subramanya here, on Twitter and tune into his podcast here.
