One Question Friday: How Do You Make Your Podcast Standout?

okay hi it's producer ben this is one question friday this is where we take one question from a listener and we answer it on air today i'm answering it because sam sean took a long weekend they left a little early on friday and a few of you asked questions to me because i was on the show a little more than usual this week so i figured i would answer one of those questions so let's play it and before we go into the question as always if you wanna leave a question for sam john's to answer usually tame john go to m m pod dot com and click on the microphone in the lower right hand corner and you can leave a question and if we select your question your voice will be on air be beyond my first million okay let's get to the question hi this is jeremy my question is for producer ben what did he do to get your podcast found by famous people like sam and mister beast and do you have any advice for how to develop a good idea for a podcast okay so to answer the first question did i do to get my podcast found by sam beast so the first answer that i have to give honestly is nothing i'm extremely lucky that's how i feel and but i yeah i don't know i'm like like the first time i heard sam mentioned how to take over the world on my first million you may have heard used analogy before but i felt like i was watching tv and then all a sudden the news caster like looks out of the screen and is like you i'm talking to you it was very bizarre very weird i had no expectations no knowledge that he was gonna mention it and it just totally caught me by surprise because i was already a fan of my first million so i don't have like a deliberate strategy or anything like that for getting famous people to find and like my podcast i feel like all the strategy is essentially just the content and which leads into the second question do i have any advice for how to develop good ideas for podcasts and yes i do because i get pitched a lot of podcast ideas a lot of people come to me and most of them are good but bad what do i mean by that good but bad the the worst thing that your idea can be a podcast is fine and that's my reaction to most people's ideas for podcast i go yeah that sounds fine and there's a problem with fine and this is the problem i so before i worked in media before i did podcast and management consulting and i was on this one project where we worked for security sales company they guys go to door to door and sell security systems and they had a problem which was they had all these fraudulent sales and all these fraudulent sales as we looked into it would happen at the same time of the year it happened at the end of the summer and so as we dug into it what we found out was that the salesman for the security system were incentivize such a way where they had these really steep steps where it was like if you sell nine security systems you will make five thousand dollars but on your tenth security system it jumps up to twenty thousand dollars which is totally crazy right so what you would get is you have all these summer salesmen who are just selling for the summer and they have to hit these certain steps they have to hit a certain number of sales and if they do they're gonna need get this huge lump sum so towards the end of the summer they're really trying to hit these numbers and they get panicked and they start just selling accounts like crazy even if that means fu the numbers a little bit selling systems fraudulent stuff like that so it's a big problem so we go tell them hey this is a big problem you should do a more gradual incentive structure and the executives of the security system company told us you know we've actually tried that and it didn't work sales went way way down when we did that not just the fraudulent bad sales at the end of the summer yes we got rid of those but overall sales went way way down this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated whoa i can see the clients hold history recall support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hotspot spot girl at him and so we thought that was interesting to why do you think that is and what they said was panic is an exponentially greater motivator than mere desire so you might want something and you'll work a little harder to get something that you want but if you're panicked then you'll work ten times harder k exponentially greater and and i think that's true and i think that's true of podcasting and of content as well too many people think well i'll just produce something that's okay that's good that's fine that's ineffective i'm gonna try and capture as big of an audience as i possibly can what you really need to be optimizing for instead is not panic obviously but obsession it's better to have a smaller audience with a very few people who are totally obsessed with your podcast and so every decision i made with my podcast which a history podcast called how to take over the world was with that in mind so for example when i first started telling my friends and family i'm making a history podcast called how to take over the world everyone told me the same thing which is that name is like too aggressive you need to chill a little bit can you call it something like a little milder or how about you know life lessons from history and i just thought no i think i really really want to make a podcast called how to take over the world i think i would be obsessed with a podcast called how to take over the world just like how cool is that everyone wants to know how to take over the world or not everyone but i do i don't know how to take over the world but sounds incredibly interesting similarly if you listen to the podcast it's intro music is is now iconic a lot of people love it but a lot of people when they first heard it said oh that beat is like really aggressive if you listen to it's a very aggressive intro on and so a lot of people tried to talk me out of it they said it's good but can you back off a little bit can you make it like just a little less bro and a little less out there and if i had done that it'd would be more agreeable to more people but there would not be as many people who are obsessed people are obsessed with that intro on people love it and so to me that is be key to good content these really really strong emotions so you need to get people obsessed you need people to feel panicked right if it's if it's a a podcast about like a a social issue you need people to feel terrified feel horrified mortified that this thing is happening that you're trying to to illuminate and too many people go well this is a good idea right like this is interesting and that doesn't cut it and so i think the fact that i made a podcast that honestly does not appeal to some people and i i think a lot people don't realize that but like some people are very turned off by a podcast called how to take over the world this aggressive interim music and but that's okay because it's more than made up for by the fact that a few people are obsessed with it and they will then tell other people about it they evan analyzed the podcast and that is ultimately how people like sam mister v heard about it was through the grapevine and so yeah thanks for the question jeremy that's my advice make stuff that people are obsessed with okay next week one question friday we'll be back to sam and sean thank you for joining it