Tumble Media: The Origin Story
Tumble Media was born in the back of a trailer.
Seriously. Here’s how it happened. Three of us — myself, Marshall Escamilla, and Sara Robberson Lentz, had been working together on Tumble, a science podcast for kids, for about a year. It had started as a side project, an audio experiment for an audience off the radar.
Even though our podcast was far from paying the bills, we knew we were onto something. We had found that kids are deep and engaged listeners. We’d learned that families are hungry for screen-free entertainment. We discovered that teachers love using audio in their classrooms, and students love listening.
We knew enough to dream big. That’s why we decided to formalize our relationship into a company. We found a lawyer, who happened to work out of a converted Airstream trailer parked in front of an East Austin convenience store called Ideal Soul Market. We climbed into the trailer, went over a few documents, signed on the dotted line, and Tumble Media LLC was born.
We’ve come a long way from #lawyervanlife. Our instincts were right: The kids’ audio space got much bigger. Our work with Tumble and Kids Listen, the non-profit advocacy group of which we are a founding member, helped lay the foundation for what was to come. Through collaboration, we raised awareness of the genre, built a vibrant and supportive community of creators, and spearheaded research to put data behind our audience for the first time ever.
Just as Tumble Media saw the opportunity to pioneer the space, we have a vision to keep innovating within it. At a time when the larger podcast industry is consolidating, we believe in defining kids’ audio for ourselves, as creatives and advocates for our audience. We believe in making content that respects children’s intelligence and curiosity. We believe in the power of collaboration and making genuine connections. And we believe in creating the podcast ecosystem we want to work in — a space for where creative contributions will be both respected and well-compensated.
That’s why we are 1) scaling to become a children’s educational audio production and consulting company and 2) distributing Tumble Science Podcast for Kids and Tumble en Español independently.
We are making room to grow. Right now, we’re developing new original content, to launch in Summer 2021. We’re also partnering with brands and institutions to create a variety of new audio products for kids, including activity-based podcasts and audio courses. Plus, we’re offering to share our experience and expertise through consulting with companies who are entering the Kids & Family space.
One of the things we’re most excited about is our partnership with La Coctelera Music. La Coctelera Music is an incredible podcast production studio run by Nuria Net and Alex Garcia Amat. Together, we created the first-ever translation of a kids’ podcast from English to Spanish. (That’s Tumble En Español, for the record.) And we can’t wait to extend our collaboration and create content for US and LatinX markets. More on how we plan to do that in a later post.
In fact, we’ll be sharing a lot in later posts. Subscribe to our new publication on Medium to stay informed about our new projects. If you want to learn more RIGHT NOW, check out our website, tumble.media. And if you want to talk about working with us, please reach out! Our inbox is always open at hello@tumble.media.
