Behind The Scenes Of The Pod

we're gonna talk about one thing that i think everyone will find interesting it's like inside baseball it's like behind the scenes of the pod what our current numbers are the revenue we're making from it and like how we grew it and things like that and also yours as well because you're earlier in your journey so that would be interesting people we'll start with got jonathan on here too who jonathan our numbers with he knows all about growth and how we grew it i'll do i'll kinda say what the high level numbers are for my first million and you could do the same for your pod so i just looked in mega phone that's the software we use so this every number i'm gonna say is the trailing thirty day numbers so trailing thirty days for my first million when we say the word downloads we mean youtube and also like podcast downloads which is basically apple and spotify and then a much smaller percentage is like stitch and all the other podcast stuff and so for that for the podcast downloads we did one point round up one point three so one point two five five it looks like million downloads on like the podcast podcasting platforms then our youtube page right now has a hundred and ten or maybe a hundred and twelve thousand subscribers and then the trailing thirty days we did two point seven million views of which a lot are youtube short so maybe in maybe one million to one point five million is actual episode dot episode views which is like any video that's more than like six or eight minutes long something like that previously not this past trailing days but the one before that i think we are at three point six million so we're down a little bit but because we had a few short go viral so one point three plus two point seven that's four million so that's about how many people saw stuff and then there's like all the social stuff so my personal socials have been viewed i just look this up over the trailing thirty days on tiktok i think i have two or three million views and then on instagram i have like another two or three million views so that's like the total reach right now what are you at for how to take over the world so right now monthly are at about seventy thousand sorry eighty thousand downloads and then my per episodes you know stuff that's mature so like a good example walt disney has been out since january has been out for a while and that's hovering around that one's got thirty nine alexander the great has forty three so around forty thousand my biggest episode is now almost it's fifty four so like kind of fifty thousand ish per episode and my numbers is like obviously the totals are way different and weird because my volume is so much lower what's our volume what's my first millions volume well as you mentioned so we're going three times per week and then we've got the shorts on youtube and then we've got the clips on youtube which drives a lot of the volume as you were mentioning my first millions downloads per prep episode so that's the number that matters most it ranges from like fifty thousand to a hundred and fifty thousand right that's right depending on if you include youtube because if you include youtube we have some that pop up to the like half million may maybe a little less but like the dha mesh episode did really well the peter levels episode did really well and those have hundreds of thousands of views just on youtube alone so are you doing to grow for me the big thing is just fixing my production process which is totally broken for how to take over the world it's it's really just a volume game at at this point for me are you making money from it i'm making a little bit of money i'm at least i am making money i used to i was negative for a long time and then i was neutral for a couple months down positive how much you charge for an ad about a thousand bucks per placement so everyone asked my first million i get messages all times saying hey can we advertise on the pod so my first million i said we're gonna talk about how much revenue it makes it makes zero revenue because hubspot when they so the way the our process worked with my first million was the hustle owned my first opinion so sean actually came up with the idea and he goes hey can i do i wanna create a podcast you guys wanna meet my publisher and i but we're gonna own it and he said that's fine and so we did a revenue split i don't remember what we did but i think we did fifty fifty so let's say the hustle sold ten thousand dollar ten thousand dollars worth of ads the hustle gave him five thousand and we kept five thousand and then we also paid for it which i don't know if that's actually a good deal for him or us i don't know but when we sold the company hubspot bought the hustle and they bought the podcast with it and now hubspot is the only advertiser on the pod but we don't make any money from it so directly although they can calculate how much money they would make off of it if they had to go and buy those ads elsewhere but i think so i went and talk to a friend my friend has a podcast in the health and wellness space and i asked him how much revenue do you guys do and so they get seven million downloads a month and they are currently doing three million in ads five million selling like programs like fitness programs and then like another half a in in like merge and affiliate deals and so collectively they're doing around ten million in revenue with about sixty five percent profit margin so it's quite good and so i think that our pod just off ads would maybe be in the six million range so it would be around seventy five to a hundred and twenty five dollars per one thousand downloads and that would be separated in like a bunch of different thirty dollar per thousand downloads ads so we could probably charge twenty five to forty dollars per ad and then you have like two or three ads in the in each podcast and that's how you get to like that five or six million range then another like three or four million just off some my courses or paid community yeah and that's not taking into account costs because if we are selling our own ads we probably have to get that guy to actually sell it and he'd take a cut correct stuff like that yeah i so what i was talking now for for for jonathan do you know for production side you know between we got ben you know producer we've got ezra who does the video and audio cutting video and audio editing we have the short form clip folks we have our youtube producer so between that whole team it's like twenty five k and then a month yes and then if you include you know other ways to grow the show whether it's buying ads on other pot podcasts other platforms it could be in anywhere between like twenty five k month to upwards of like fifty to a hundred just like it our cost right now not including me and sean it's like five hundred thousand dollars a here roughly yeah i mean and and you can scale that up and down it's just like we're being aggressive with our growth goals so we're putting a lot of investment into that and our growth is basically you buy ads on other people's podcasts and that works decent it seems but actually hard to track but that's decent and the other thing you tried like buying ads on youtube channels and things like that right do any of them actually work you think we ransom some ads on youtube and it definitely drives like a lot of use and some subs but it's not necessarily sustainable and you always kinda question the quality of those subs yeah i don't know if we've kinda tested everything and like the thing that we're most bullish on is obviously the short form clips it's also not easy to tell how well those are kind of performing in terms of viewers and listeners to like the rs feed but you know i it's just like a long term play and as you're seeing like your growth on instagram and tiktok is largely driven by these clips from the show and so it's just like you're not gonna maybe that viewer isn't gonna convert the first time they see it the second time they see but hopefully by the fiftieth at the time they see your face or like fuck i just need to check out what he's up to and check out the podcast ben well are you doing anything to grow no basically just working on more production that's basically it but like my organic growth has been huge like honestly as long as i produce more episodes like it's gonna keep growing i've done a little strategic like who i choose in order to grow a little bit like what i cover and i think probably with broadcasting that's the biggest driver of growth and you are basically at how many so the way that we found ben was i was just i was actually taking a flight at like five am and i was like exhausted and i was like i need some inspiration and i think i looked up like napoleon or something like that and i saw your pod and at the time roughly how many downloads did you have at that point monthly downloads would have been the like hundreds to maybe low four digits as getting like a couple thousand perhaps episode and then we mentioned you on the pod and is that like the thing that was like the big up like we we did this like pretty big thing about you where i was like sean this is like the greatest intro song and pod ever heard of and yeah how much did that boost so i've gone from k to like forty k and i would say that it's been like half and half so half of it was like a big ups swing like i immediately went up to like ten to twenty and then since then it's been steady growth from twenty up to forty dude that's the thing about pods everyone talks me they they're like i wanna i wanna do this and i go just so you know it's very very very hard to grow so at the hustle we had maybe one point between one and one point five million subscribers when we launch this pod and so sean was like hey i do this thing he said alright great he was in fact i already have like a pilot episode he sent it to me i was like oh dude this is like great as is i'll give you three weeks or four weeks to like get like ahead of the game and then we'll we're we'll launch one a week and basically that first week we launched i think that first episode got fifty or sixty thousand downloads the next episode got like thirty or forty and then it just like ticked down until it was like five to fifteen thousand downloads per episode because we blasted it to the hustle got traction and this is how all pods and maybe maybe like all not all but many products work your launch is like epic then you go down and then you just over a period of a couple years were slowly work your way up and then one day someone didn't appear to one of his to one of his like one of his guests didn't show up and he was like hey you know how we do that thing so mic sean used to meet like every two weeks and we would just like brainstorm in front of a bunch of people and like know what thing that we do can you show up in like an hour and just come do it with me the person didn't show up and i was like i guess and the results were like decent enough that we're like alright i guess we'll just make this the thing and we'll just keep trying and from there it slowly went up and when we got acquired we had acquired in february of like eighteen months ago i think we are doing six hundred thousand downloads per month and then it like went up from there a lot and i don't actually don't know why it went up i i don't know what happened that's interesting so like the idea for what my first building became was basically an accident is that right yeah so it was at like first of all i didn't wanna do a pod for forever i thought it was a total waste of time i was we have to focus and he was like i have this thing and basically sean at the time was not a content person he is now and he's great but at the time he was just like my friend who just like was you know he wasn't on i don't even think he was on twitter he was started again he's more of an operator than a couple he yeah yeah yeah yeah he was just he was just my buddy who had a company in the gaming space and obviously he was always charismatic and he was pretty good at storytelling although i would say that's even improved a significant amount but he was like i just interviewed my our buddy sue here just here's the pilot and i heard it i was like oh dude this is this is baller this is awesome it wasn't actually that different than anything else it was called my first million because he was gonna talk about how people got the first million users or revenue or or profit whatever and he was all about the early days but which frankly isn't that unique but he was pretty good at it and then like six months in or three months in someone didn't show up and he was like hey come do this and me and sean loved this podcast called the fighter and the kid and it was brian cow and bread and shop two guys sitting on chairs just like goof around and we're like oh that i think we could do that and so we just kept doing it i that's interesting to me because a little bit when i started my podcast it was the same thing of just that it was kind of an accident i was sitting there i had been reading this napoleon biography and i thought i wanna remember this like i wanna retain more of this information i i should create something i should make like a blog post or tweet storm or something and then i had all this audio equipment lying around i thought oh i'll just do a podcast about it and i bet people would like to hear what i learned from reading this biography of napoleon and i think a lot of really good podcast start that way is not someone sitting down and like gaming the system of like alright where is a niche that i i wanna make a podcast where where's a niche but people who are just kinda doing stuff and and then it turns into a podcast when becomes successful do you think that's right maybe i think you could like i think there are worlds like i hope media does this nicely i think podcasts which is a podcast podcasting company does this nicely gi media does this nicely who else does those there's wonder does a decent job some are still better than others but basically where they come up with ideas and then they launch them almost like a movie where it's like planned and hopefully successful and then other times it's organic i think the the problem with podcast podcasts there there's a bunch of upside i'll talk about the upside in a second but here's the problem the problem with podcast podcasts is the same problem that i have with copywriting and hiring writers which is everyone can talk and everyone a lot of people like talking with their friends therefore the noise to signal ratio of people who want to do it versus who are good at doing it is like really really hard to determine who's like great so you have a ton of people launching podcasts that are a they're not committed to like the long term like they're not committed to making this and be treating it like a job where you you know me and sean we were we record every single monday wednesday less of an emergency so they're not committed to that b they're not actually good at they don't actually have the skill or the talent and they think they do because they talk with their friends a lot and so there's like a lot of crap out there and see it's not really like well thought out where it's like you know sean and i joke we're like you need some attributes man like you either have to have this like crazy like interesting niche or and i would say this is definitely in sean's case slightly in my case you just have to be really charismatic and good storytelling or you have to have like some crazy experience so like you're just an expert in x y and z or like you know you're in the nba for twenty years so you can talk about like what it was like being in the nba like you have to have something that's intriguing in a weird angle or you have to be super talented like a malcolm glad well or something like that you know what i mean yeah so what you've touched on something that there's this guy eric news who's his background is in public radio and then he was kinda one of the og of podcasting and he's got this framework that i love for creating a hit podcast so he calls it a diamond but there's really four attributes on which you can be unique and you need to be unique on at least well really two of them in order to be a successful hit podcast so the four ways you can be unique are what the podcast is about who hosts it who it's for or the way you tell the story okay so it's who so it's how it's told what it's about who it's for or who it's by okay so basically the concept or the person exactly and most people only do one and that's where they fail they're like i'm gonna make a podcast about gorillas because there no podcast about gorillas and it's like well are you jane good rudolph like are you an expert you need that second thing to make it successful and it you maybe you don't have to be the expert but if you're not the expert then it's like then you have to differentiate in terms of how you tell the story you have to get a really high production value or you know you need to like have gorillas on the podcast or something like that like you but most people are just think of one new idea and stop there whereas i think my first million is successful because a what it's about is unique in that it's kind of an entrepreneurship podcast that covers everything from like little side hustle all the way to like big you know tech ideas that could be you know hundreds of billions of dollars so it's unique on what it's about it covers everything and then the the who you and sean have the experience and are really funny and super engaging and it's like it's like the all in pod like people talk about that and i'm like you know i think that they're like pretty okay host themselves so i think jason's pretty great but like you're gonna listen to anything that they say because they are so successful their world view is so much grander than mine and you know they're hanging out with like ex presidents ceos of you know fortune five hundred companies like they've built billion dollar companies like they have access to things that i don't therefore they don't even need to be and i'm not saying they're not charismatic and i'm saying they don't even need to be that charismatic in order for it to be awesome right exactly they have that second angle the second angle doesn't have to be that you're a great entertainer but you could have very unique insights like those guys do but you gotta have something for that second angle this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated well i can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hubspot grow better but let's talk about the upside so the the upside to a pod is i have never ex i don't i'm not popular i mean i'm somewhat popular on social media but i'm not like that popular on the video or picture based social media and so i've not experienced what it's like to have fandom there but for our pod the benefits of having a podcast and i noticed this to myself i'll listen to other people is i truly become like fans of these people because i get to know them so well and that is like a huge benefit and so like i'll mention like sometimes people will come up to me and they'll like yeah like i'm i eat this food because you talked about or i read this book and i'm like i don't even remember mentioned that like i just said i talked so much like i don't even remember all of it but people like listen so much that they get to know you and it's like creates true fandom i think you probably could get that out other platforms but i think it's more so this because if they're thirty to sixty minutes long they really get to know you and also the the hard part though is you know the best way to circumvent someone's bullshit detector is just not bullshit and that's the hard part about that's the hard part about about podcasting is when you talk for forty five minutes or an hour and a half five or three days a week or whatever it is you you have you had you can't lie a lot you can't lie at all because it's gonna cut catch up to you you have to be authentic you have to or if you're gonna play character you gotta play that all the time i mean like you really have to be authentic the the greatest thing and the worst thing about podcasting is such an intimate medium like you're in someone's ears they're doing when they're doing the dishes when they're commuting they feel like they're friends with you i think more so than youtube instagram like any other media format tv whatever people really feel like they have relationship with you which is a little weird and like as you alluded to i think the most difficult thing about podcasting is that it's really difficult it's like hand to hand combat to build a big audience but the best thing about it the best thing about podcasting is that you can build a really valuable following with very few followers if you have thirty five thousand followers on youtube you just can't do much like you're nothing and i talked to someone the other day who has thirty five thousand downloads per episode on his podcast and is making a half a million dollars a year from it and one genre or category productivity yeah alright so thirty five thousand downloads in episode and he's doing half a million in ad revenue yeah and then she could be doing way more off like courses or whatever else he wants to sell he could be doing three or four times as much as that yeah and he's talking about doing that stuff he's not doing it yet so like i don't even feel like that's the limit of what you could do with that many followers so i do think that's the beauty of podcasting is if you can like grind it out to get a decent following of a few tens of thousands you can make like real money in podcasting yeah and the best way i think to do it is if you already have a business so for example i didn't know this but you know the guy patrick david bet i think the same as he's got that youtube channel called value payment so i just thought that he was like a personality and he recently had a life insurance i think it is the company that he sold for like three hundred million dollars and i didn't even know about that and that's way more valuable than i mean his youtube channel is very valuable but not two or three hundred million dollar valuable same with dave ramsey dave ramsey i was researching him his company's worth something like seven or eight hundred million bucks and it's a collection of real estate and selling like personal finance stuff and the radio show is definitely awesome but it's it it it alone ain't worth that it's not the monetization engine and so if you already have that monetization engine and you build the podcast i think it's lights out man i think you can crush it i and what's interesting is our pod is not even big so let's just say we're between one and three million downloads depending on a combination of youtube or not youtube i and it's it's not youtube first so like we we our faces aren't out there if i'm walking around a top ten city so like a new york down to like a denver i will get recognized maybe once a day and that is a very small audience that is not there's three hundred and fifty million people at america and we only reach one or three million of them a month and i get recognized probably five times a week or like yesterday i went to lulu lemon and i had to give her my email and my email is is my name and i told her my name and she looked up but she goes away from my first million are you saying for my i was like yeah i what's going on and she goes i thought i recognized your voice and like that happens all the time and that's what of my biggest surprises is that we get recognized on such a small audience and the people are like pumped they're excited which i would be too if i if i you know like brendan shaw is something i really admire and knew to temporarily probably have no idea who that is and he's not like famous a list famous if i saw him i would be dude can i get a picture you know what i mean it is so it's that's the interesting thing about podcast podcasts do you get like instagram models that slide into your dms so that's funny i surveyed my twitter audience and i said what gender are you and it was ninety three percent dudes and if you go to our meetups we had a meetup up in new york we had fifteen hundred people rs i don't know how many people actually showed up but let's just say eight hundred or five hundred people showed up i'm pretty sure it was ninety percent men as well so my stuff is mostly all men and also on all of my social media profiles there's a picture of me and my wife is as either the main picture or the cover picture so most every and i always talk about it so most everyone knows that i'm married so do i get like women dm me in the in the sexual sense no but that's not really like it's happened like maybe at most once a month but like you have to remember that a this is like a tech and business podcast and b i'm like a midwestern seven so like you know dude i'm gonna missouri seven at like a new york six you guys that like ninety nine percent of our audience if they had instagram models sliding into their dms once a month would not be like it's not that much to be like i got his instagram model sliding in my dms once a month baby i'm rich i'm famous well i get and i get i now how many fake hot profiles do i get sliding into my dms once four or five times a day so yeah i don't so i don't know how many of these women are actually real but i would say maybe one time a month there's someone who like i'll even i'll be sitting to sarah at my wife and i'd be like hey this is crazy check this out and like we'll laugh about it and i'm like you know i ain't touch an app but just so you know like this exists i was talking to someone who is more conventionally famous than either one of us and and they were talking about how they get like real like verified models sliding into their dms all the time this person has a girlfriend and and it's in a long distance relationship is very hard for them they're just like all the time these people are sliding that's crazy no i i get like i get like the hand models i don't get the fake bottles of the body models no i i don't exactly get that but what what happens a lot is if when it's warm outside i always work out outside and i'm always shirtless there seems to be a like just an unlucky pattern of i get recognized shirtless a a fair bit and i always put my shirt on right whatever i'm because like me and sarah had been on walks where i've been shirtless and like a guy will come up like with his like four year old daughter and say like what's up and i'm like oh dude i'm totally making this little girl uncomfortable to being in this shirtless dude right here like that's our joke is like i try if ever gonna be shirtless i'll wear like glass or something because i don't wanna be like that one time that i see someone that is like uncomfortable for them but that happens all the time i happened it yesterday you so you're saying your body's more famous than your faces so no i'm saying it's coincidence that i usually when i'm outside during the day i'm shirtless and again my maybe it's not a coincidence maybe they're just and maybe they don't recognize your face but they're like that those are sam packs i get tell those are sam apps i would and and like i've got like i've got like a new york seven point five ba so like it's not always embarrassing but the other so the other day we released an episode that was about like fitness and so we love after people loved it people love is a great episode but sam dm me and was like hey can we change my after pick i don't think i looked ripped enough and started sending me like five to ten shirtless picks is like dude if i'm gonna be is my body look best if i'm gonna be shirtless on the internet like i i would prefer like the best i hate be in the best like so like that's yeah but so anyway that's the update on the pod do we wanna talk more about that just like one other thing just like a couple frameworks that i think are interesting so i've been thinking this for a little bit it's interesting we do interviews and it's always surprising which episodes actually pop off like we'll get someone really really famous and their episode will do okay and then we'll get peter levels or we'll get der and the episode will go crazy we'll do super well dude because we need more unique weird people sometimes we're contact chaser you need unique people and it's like when you get unique people that have a super engaged audience that want to hear from them but don't get to hear from them often then it totally blows up so i've been thinking about that recently with my pod in terms of what i do so i could go the route of like doing more episodes like julius caesar like i could do a charlotte or winston churchill or muhammad ali yeah bottom line is there's actually a lot of muhammad ali content out there and you could probably find stuff that's as good as my podcast are nearly as good as my podcast out there and so i've pivoted to doing stuff that's it's a little more niche and so i just didn't an episode on b young who most people don't care about but some people care about very very passionately and so it's actually on track to be my most downloaded episode and so i'm trying to like adopt that peter levels up peter levels da like unique episode kind of framework of now i'm starting to think like okay bring me on huge in the mormon community like people wanna hear about that that's gonna down that's gonna drive downloads and then those people are into my audience who else can i do like who is the greatest emperor of of cambodia you know like cambodia probably don't get a lot of podcasts made about their heroes right so like can i do that can i drive something for that audience and then those people who become super you looked up have you ever watched bruno mars youtube videos no are they good no so that's my point so a lot like bruno mars is one of those guys who like everyone knows about but not that many people seek them out even though he's pretty amazing and i love his music videos and i was watching some of them and they have like one two three even four i believe billion views bruno mars has four billion views and you and i was wondering why and i looked it up on wikipedia and then i looked it on the youtube comments to see if it was like if it if i felt like it aligned but basically bruno mars his mother is filipino so he's part filipino and the filipino filipino i mean how many people live in the philippines it's like you know a ton i think like hundreds of millions so it's not exactly it's not exactly like a small little country but in terms of the amount of people who exist in that compared to their cultural relevance on a global scale you know they're not they're not exactly represented a ton and so when this american filipino guy it's kinda like jeremy lynn in the nba you know there there's a lot of chinese but there weren't a lot of chinese of about players and so bruno mars like got famous like the filipinos were like yes one of us they're killing and so they just like get behind that person same with bj york from iceland iceland like not exactly incredibly relevant you know they don't exactly invent a lot of things including entertainment that like it's recognized on a grand scale and when bj like gets a little bit of a love from america or europe they all pounce on that shit and they go hell yes it's one of us it's like it's like nellie in saint louis in saint louis where i'm front like you know my sixty five year old white dad is like nellie is the man he cern nellie like people everyone at saint louis is like nellie just our god he's our mayor we we'll do anything for nellie because he represented us and we didn't have a lot of representations saint louis so anyway i think it's the same way with different topics where if you find that one or two things that it's okay if it's not that many people but they're like passionate about it and they can rally behind it and they're like finally something for us that just makes it so much see so much easier to get popular it's a little bit of the amazon strategy right so amazon is the store for everything online right but didn't start out that way it was a bookstore and then it was a dvd store and then it was a dog toy store and it's like actually just a collection of niches that all got bundled and that i think that works for content as well you can just go out and collect niches and then it becomes like a big broad audience even though you don't start that way yeah and so right at this point we're a little bit more broad we're not that broad but we're more broad and like we make dumb jokes and we talk about kim kardashian and once a while now and but before it was just like this dude's making five grand a month on the internet you know what i'm saying alright that the pod that's a pod