The 400+ Episode Streak Podcaster: Mindsets, consistency, team building and repurposing

Hey, folks, and welcome to another episode of the Creator Toolbox. This is the show all around the nuts and bolts that go behind a creator business. I'm Colin Gray from thepodcasthost.com and I'm joined this week by Matty Lansdowne. How are you getting on, Matty? I'm well, thanks, Colin. How are you? Good, yeah, very good, Very good. Yeah. So thanks for coming on the show, Matty. It's great to have you on here. You're an epic podcaster

and you've done how many episodes you on now? Like 400 or something like that? Yeah, 413 as of yesterday. Nice. And the show called how to Not Get Sick and Die, is that right? That's the one. Perfect. What's your elevator pitch for it? I can guess from the title. It's a great title. It does what it says in the tin, but give me it anyway. Yeah, it's basically a one stop shop for health and

wellness. We do the full spectrum all the way from mainstream medicine, all the way to energy medicine, nutrition, all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, just anything that pertains to the life experience and any desire to continue it. Yeah, perfect. Well, yeah, like I said, it's just whenever we meet somebody who's got into the hundreds, never mind into the multiple hundreds, it's always there's so much to learn from anyone like yourself that's done that many

podcasts. So it'd be great to get you on here and talk through some of the toolset you use for that. So let's dig into it then. You mentioned a few here. One you mentioned was the kind of mindset behind it. I think that'd be a great one to start with because you have to have some kind of mindset, hack some kind of really solid ideas around the mindset. You need to get to where you're going to hit 400 episodes. So,

yeah, talk me through that. How do you think about that? Yeah, it's a good question because I think podcasting is, as you know, there's so much that's involved on the back end. And I think compared to maybe Instagram or TikTok or the other platforms that you might choose for organic growth in a business, I feel like maybe it's changed, but I feel like podcasting, podcasting is a bit of a bigger commitment. And whenever somebody asks

me like, oh, can you, you know, give me a rundown on how to start a podcast? I always ask, are you sure? Because it's, you know, that's why the statistics are the way they are in regards to how many people give up. You know, there's a lot involved. And so I think one of the things that I, in regards to my mindset, that I guess maybe growing up in sport was really helpful, was just this idea of commitment to sort of a goal, which I guess

is not about vanity metrics. I think that was the important thing. Right. And so in the very beginning when I started, I firstly, I got some great advice from a mentor because I burnt myself out trying to be everywhere all of the time on all of the platforms. And then he just said, what are you good at? And I basically said, speaking and having opinions. And he said, amazing, be on a podcast.

And so I just decided I'm going to get rid of all of the other noise, you know, and if I happen to have the energy to post anywhere else, I would do that, but that I had to religiously, every Wednesday, commit to 100 episodes of a podcast, no matter what the metrics said, no matter if nobody was listening. So I just committed. I was like, 100 is a round number. That's two years of weekly podcasts. I'll reassess then.

And so I think I find that really powerful because after that hundred, it's now a part of my identity. I'm the guy that's never given Mr. Podcast. And so because it's such a fundamental part of my identity now, it just is, you know, and so, so I can't, I can't ever miss a podcast that would be so off brand. Right. It would attack my integral belief in who I am.

That's really interesting. Yeah. So it's like a. I mean, how it's committing to a certain length of time where it becomes really a part of what you do, just an integral part of what you do. How, how long do you think that takes, do you think? Hundreds, a minimum. I mean, that's a couple of years. Like, do you think, did that kick in earlier, do you think? Yeah, I think the answer is yes.

But at the same time, it depends what you're building because I think, you know, if you're leaning towards podcasts, that's long form content. And the people that listen to long form content, the numbers are lower compared to a viral TikTok, but they're usually more invested.

And so for me, the other thing that I like about long form content, which is not saying that short form content doesn't have its relevance and its place, and I've always also use it, but the thing is, I don't want a business that's going to be amazing for one year and then dies. Right. I would rather build steadily and slowly over a long period of time so that in 10 years, life is much better than it is now, rather than just stuck in the grind of having tried 10 ideas in 10 years.

So once I found my thing, I thought, sure, maybe I could get enough data in 30 episodes or 50 episodes. But I was sort of thinking either way, the business behind the podcast and my desire to impact the world and in the area of health and wellness and nutrition, that's there anyway. So even If I do 100 episodes and it fails, there's still 100 episodes of content that's relevant to my mission and my vision out there in the world for people to find. Yeah, I love that

concept of the. Here's my core goal. So I need to get an episode out on a Wednesday every single week. And then you're stuck. Because we can't help it. We're creators. We're always thinking about these other things to do with the content, isn't it? So you're like, but that cannot stop me. You know, sorry, bonus points. To get, like, clips out or get like a newsletter out or all these other things out is bonus points if I have the extra time. But I cannot let that stop me getting just the

episode out and taking. Taking a win from actually releasing that episode on its own as well. Even if you don't get any of the other things done. Yeah, I think that's so important because especially if it becomes a part of your normal workflow, it starts no longer feeling like a win. It's just the default things that you achieve. And so I think, yeah, making sure that, you know, in your business, what is

the thing that holds the business together. And for me, at the, at this stage, the podcast is very much the fundamental foundation level where 99% of clients find me. They spend, you know, 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 episodes before they reach out and choose to spend money with the business. So it's like, even though there's all these other shiny objects, I'd like, oh, maybe I'll start a newsletter. Oh, I'll do this. It's like, hang on,

hang on. What's paying the bills? What's feeding the kids? You know, that kind of sort of. Bring it back, bring it back. Back to the podcast. Nice. I'd love to dig into that as well, actually. Later on, I'll ask you a few questions around the business behind this as well, and what the podcast powers that'd be really interesting to get into actually. But just now it was Matthew that introduced me to you and one of his main things that he said you were great at was the workflows, the systems.

And it sounds like, I mean, what do you have to put in place to make sure that that happens? You know, that you do. That is the thing that everyone commits to.

Like I'm going to do a weekly podcast, but most people fall off the wagon, but you actually managed to make it happen. So what do you have to put in place to actually make sure you get that out every single week? Yeah, I'm pretty lucky at this point. I don't do much more than hit record. And then it's taken over by my two fantastic team members who have been around since episode 80. So it's a well oiled mach, you know, 350 episodes later or whatever we're at, we're at now.

And so I guess two parts to that system. One is having systems thinking. And often people that are creative are usually a little bit at conflict with that idea of systems thinking because it's repetitious, it's boring,

it's unexciting, it's methodical. But the way that I see it, and I think I said this to you before we hit record, was that the idea of writing down a process or sop, a standard operating procedure to hand off the task to somebody else really excites me because it's the last time I'll have to do the unexciting bit of the podcast. Yeah, for sure. So I think, yeah, having, having systems

thinking is important. But even if you don't like sort of pushing yourself out of your comfort zone to get it down on paper, maybe the screenshots as well, maybe screen shares or screen grabs of you doing the task as well, putting it all into a document that is easy to understand, easy to follow. So the SOPS is part two, Systems thinking one, SOPS part two. But the third part is essential and that's team members that also have

systems thinking. And I think that's really important when it comes to team members and employees that are in those types of admin roles or sort of day to day repetitive task roles. Is that like we've got our creative guy, the multimedia guy that does all the editing. He is definitely not the person that does all the organizing and the planning and the scheduling. Right. Because they're both very different

personalities. So I think, yeah, the team behind it is very, very good and sort of Janet, who does my Admin and management of myself and our designer. She is incredibly. Systems thinking follows the sops to a T. Like, you know, finds things that everybody else misses. She's fantastic. So I think there's. Those three elements are important to developing those systems because the brilliant thing is most of us don't like all of those tasks.

We do it to have these conversations. Right. To hang out with cool people, have DNM's, discover things, and then we sort of shut the camera down and we're like, oh, it's just me in my room now. That's very boring. And so if we can hand those tasks off to somebody else who absolutely thrives in that environment, it allows us more time to get on more of these interviews. Yeah, absolutely. I love that. Yeah. Building a team, it's just.

It's such a tricky thing. I love that framework, though, actually being able to figure out who kind of mirrors your thinking around following those. So pes, those systems have had exactly the same thing where we've hired people where, yeah, they either can or they can't. You're like, well, here's some instructions. But people just. A lot of people just struggle with that and maybe it is something around. They're just very good at something else and it's just not necessarily following

a rote set of instructions. And yeah, it's interesting. So assuming, though, that somebody is early enough that they didn't have, you know, they maybe can't get a team in the first place. The first. You said about episode 80, you hired somebody, is that right?

Yeah, that's correct. I was 2am and the podcast was due to come out at 5am, three hours later, and I still had my day job, I worked in a cancer hospital, and I just had this moment of I'm only ever going to edit a free podcast in my spare time if I don't get help. Yeah, yeah. So, but what did you do? Were there any particular tricks or mindsets or frameworks you used before that for those first 80 to actually stick to it? Because that's still a year and a half of getting a

podcast out every single week, which is impressive. Yeah, yeah. No, I think it was just mainly I didn't want to be someone that said I was going to do something and didn't do it. That was honestly the big thing. And maybe it's myself or maybe it's a lot of podcasters, because usually we're kind of extra extroverted people. So I basically told everyone I'm going to do 100 episodes of a Podcast. And that meant that I just felt socially accountable to the words that I had spoken so

that I had to do it. And then it became a conversation point. When I caught up with people, it's like, oh, so is this podcast happening? I'm like, yeah, episode 22. And then see them a few weeks later and like, yeah, right, yeah, we're at 40 now. And they're like, oh, you're really doing this. Okay. And it was like, yeah, I'm the podcast guy now. You know, that's brilliant. I think one thing that we often tell people as well, or advise is to have that certain day of the week as

well. It sounds like Wednesdays was your day. I'm not sure if you recorded that day too, but was that kind of part of it as well, just having that really solid routine? Yes. However, I would say one thing that was important to me because I had a day job and a relationship and life like all of us have, I strived to always be eight weeks ahead of schedule. And so that's generally the agreement that I have with my team as well. And so we sort of fluctuate between, you know, three or

four ahead of schedule and ten ahead of schedule. We bounce in that space. But for me, just to have no anxiety about it going out and it being okay, and if somebody cancels or there's a tech issue with one episode, we're totally fine. So for me, I used to sit down and this. This is probably still the same now. And maybe some hardcore entrepreneur types would disagree with this mentality, but for me, I have to

be in flow. And so sometimes I'm just in flow and ideas are pouring out of my head and I'm in podcast mode, and I'm not saying and are and ah all of the time, and I just will. Will smash out three or four or five podcasts in an afternoon. But then, yeah, some weeks it is much toug actually get the creative juices flowing. And I have to listen to other podcasts in my industry to get inspiration and be like, oh, what are people, you know, what are people talking about? Like, I don't

even know. I'm brain dead, you know, today or this week or. And I have to produce content. So. And I think all creators go through that high, the high and the low of content creation and having lots of ideas and then having seemingly nothing. So. So, yeah, I like to be in flow and sit down and wait for that flow to happen. But if it doesn't happen, I have to curate it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's interesting. It's like a. We, we talked in the last week's episode actually a little around the kind of pro versus the amateur mindset and the feeling that, you know, you have to do it like professional writers. Journalists don't get writer's block because they just have to deliver a story. And potentially they are waiting for a certain part of the week or they're able to kind of power that flow. They're able to trigger that in more

ways than one. But I love your approach to it as well, in which you're saying, you know, when it does happen, you just make the most of it. So when you've got a day where you are like that, you know, you get five weeks worth of content out of it. When you're in that kind of mood. That's excellent. Are you doing. So is your show a solo show? No. So what happened is about three weeks. Three weeks. Three years into the podcast,

I was sort of. The numbers were starting to stagnate a little bit and I was sort of getting stuck around 25, 30,000amonth. And so what I thought I could do was to double the download numbers would be to add another episode in. So I sort of changed slightly the format. So previously I would do a week on, week off, solo interview, solo interview. And then once I added a second episode per week, it was basically a coaching with Matty episode that happened

on Monday. So Monday's episode for the last two years and ongoing is like a short 10, 15 minute episode. Very direct, very sort of behavior oriented, psychology oriented. And then Wednesdays is the interview. Now, occasionally I'll still do a Wednesday episode solo if there's a spot or something I really think needs to be said. But that's kind of how it's fallen now is that I do the short sharp episodes on Monday and the interviews are Wednesday.

Yeah, interesting. Yeah. So you're mixing it up. I actually, I really love that approach because it's. The solo episodes are so much building your authority, like your connection with the audience much more than the interview ones. But you're still getting the interview ones in for

the variety and bringing in external factors and stuff. And I often, some of the shows we work with will have people, you know, doing three interview shows in a month and then the fourth one of the month, like, you know, the end of the month, it's a solo show where the person showcases a bit more of their, you know, their expertise and experience and all of that kind of stuff. So mixing up.

That's great. And it was just when you said, you know, you can knock out five in a row, that's the big advantage of doing a solo show, isn't it, that you don't have to rely on somebody else's calendar, never mind the quality of their content as well. Have you found it hard to transition to just being able to speak by yourself for 10 to 15 minutes?

No, I think before I actually started the podcast, and the reason that, I guess my mentor at the time sort of had suggested is podcasting a thing that you can do is because I'd done a lot of public speaking before that, so. So it wasn't too much of a transition. And another added factor that made the transition easier was that I've been a musician for 17, 20 years now, and so sitting down in front of microphones and tech and recording

and editing software wasn't unfamiliar to me. So those two factors set me up very nicely to be a podcaster, which is why when I speak to anyone, my advice is, what are your strengths? Go towards the platform. Is it podcasting? Is it Instagram? Is it blog writing? Go towards the place that, you know, caters towards your strengths, because otherwise it can be, you know, a really difficult process to force yourself through it. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. All right, so I'd love to dig into

your repurposing. You said your other. One of your other tools was a framework you have around repurposing your audio content or your. I suppose it'll be your video as well, to. To. Towards YouTube, like how you really get more out of it. And plus, I love the fact you brought a question. We always put that in the list of things for people to bring to the toolbox, but not many people do bring a question to

wrestle with, so that's. I'd love to get into that, too. I'll do. I'll do one quick tool. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna do much this week because I think there's so much to dig into in your stuff, actually. But one thing I'll mention is I've been really playing with, and it might tie into your repurposing approach potentially, but. You ever played around with a GoPro, Matty? No, I haven't, actually. No, you never used one? I mean, I've had a couple of GoPros over the years.

I do a fair bit of outdoorsy stuff, flip mountain biking and walking and stuff like that. And I always enjoy playing around with a GoPro just to get a bit of different types of footage. They're just great Little cameras, even though you have these things built into your smartphone these days, they're just different somehow. It's just fun being able to have it out and mounted

to your head or something like that when you're on a bike. But I've always found that playing with the footage afterwards is just too cumbersome. Like, it's massive video files, they're always quite long because you tend to press record and then you ride for like 20 minutes or walk for half an hour or something like that. So I've always had all of this video footage and done nothing with it, essentially, because it's just hard to pick out the good bits and it takes absolutely ages.

So. But GoPro have released, and this might not be new at all. This might be years old, but I only found it maybe six months ago, what they called GoPro Quick. So as the name suggests, it's an approach to be able to get something good from your footage really quickly. And what it does is really smart in that on your phone you have the GoPro Quick app your camera really smartly.

I love this kind of great product design here. When you take your GoPro home, you plug it in to charge it and it automatically connects to your WiFi and uploads all the footage to the GoPro Cloud, where as soon as you plug it in. So you don't even need to do any kind of synchronization or anything like that yourself. So 20 minutes later, you're sitting in your house, you open up your phone, you get a notification, and GoPro says, oh, we've created a quick draft of all your footage from

today. And you open it up and it actually has this highlights reel of your entire set of footage. So, like 20 different video clips, even if they're all 20 minutes long, it's actually picked out loads of different sections and segments and put them all together to music, good transitions, stuff like that. And initially I thought this is cool, but actually, you know, I'd like to have a bit of control over this. And I never really thought it's just an automatic

thing, it's quite cool. But then I just started playing with it more a couple of weeks ago and realized the editing app within QWIK is actually really powerful as well. So you get this quick edit that it creates for it, but you can go into there and you can actually really quickly and simply jump into every clip and see which part it's chosen. You can adjust it a little bit, you can add another clip from that. And obviously this is going back to spending

a bit of time on it again. But there's something around that quick first draft that takes away so much of the barrier to actually creating something from this. So I've been loving making this and it's. And I've just made so much more with it. And the really cool thing is that I think it's even interesting to people out there, maybe yourself as well, that you can do this with any video. So it doesn't even have to be a GoPro video. So the quick app can actually draw. So you've got your

GoPro clouds. There's an option in there to just look at cloud videos, but you've also got a phone tab. And so you go into the phone tab and you can select 15 different videos from your phone. Tick, tick, tick, tick. Make an edit. And it does exactly the same thing. It creates a quick edit to music transitions quick. Somehow I don't know how it does this, but the AI that's built into it is really good at picking out the actual highlights, like the parts that I would have picked

out. So it's really cool. Yeah. So I don't know, I found it really useful. I've made a load of outdoorsy stuff with it. I've made actually some stuff for work as well, though, like taking some videos around the studio and bringing them together using this. So, yeah, I don't know, can you think of any uses for that in your own work or is that. I just think it's really useful and quick, fast, good videos. Yeah, I think that's fantastic.

I mean, any app that allows me to upload like an interview that can then cut it into a highlight reel would definitely have my vote of utility because that's one of the cumbersome things. And actually going to be about the tool that I share is the idea that. Yeah. Sitting there listening and trying to pull out the really

good stuff. And if you miss it when you're listening to it, it's very easy to miss it or just spend hours and hours and hours trying to get that content ready for then somebody to come and then spend more time editing. So I think that sounds amazing. I. Yeah, it's a good point. I've never tried it with an actual interview like we're doing just now. I'll have to try that with it, see what it brings out. It's more designed for action and

movement. I would suggest it's like the GoPro approach. So it's for really bringing together when you're out and about, really. But I'm going To. I'm going to go try it actually with an interview one, but I can imagine it being like, you know, a vlogger. They're out and about doing A Day in the Life. Or like I say, I'm kind of doing a little tour of our studio or something like that.

Yeah, stuff like that. Anything that's got a bit of movement in it, a bit of, you know, a bit of the boring parts, you know, when you're, you're doing the vlogging or you're doing like a studio tour, like you're walking between things and that's the boring part that needs cut. So, yeah, it's a really cool tool. The behind the scenes stuff. Yeah,

totally. So, yeah, if you're out there, if you think that sounds useful, you can find at GoPro Qwik, it's Qwik with a just a K. They miss out the C. Q U, I C sorry, Q U, I K even. And it does have a subscription, now that I think of it. It's about 24A. So it's not very much 24 pounds a year, so maybe 30, $40 or so. But I've found it. Yeah. Saves enough time to be well worth it. So. Cool. All right, yeah. So your tool. Yeah. So this is around your repurposing side of things, is that right?

Yeah, that's correct. So it's, yeah,

leveraging AI, which we're all, I guess, getting into that space and trying to. Yes, yeah. And it's learning so fast, but something I've found so far, and this might change because AI is learning so rapidly, but I found that a lot of the programs that extract shorts or reels out of your content every time I've uploaded a full episode to those platforms, I've been unimpressed or a bit confused as to what it extracted. Absolutely the same. Yeah, totally. Yeah. I find it

just not there yet in terms of being able to do it automatically. So. Yeah, definitely, yeah. And for that reason, after we experimented with the team, you know, we tried, I don't know, 10 different apps, websites, softwares, trying to find something. And I thought, nah, this isn't right. And so I thought, I want to create this system still because I'm not going to sit down and listen to it for hours and watch it for hours. And so what I thought I could do and this was genuinely quite

organic out of my head. And then I did it and I don't know if anybody else is doing it, probably loads of people, but. But basically I was like, let's get the transcript out of Riverside and we're going to upload the transcript to Claude. So Claude is just like ChatGPT, except I think it's a bit better. And so upload it to Claude. Sorry.

And then the first prompt is basically the information about the podcast, what it is, what it's about, what's the demographic, what is the purpose of the podcast, all of that really functional kind of information for the AI to know what context

to put the transcript into and whatnot. And then the next prompt says, search this transcript basically to find 30 to 60 second segments of the conversation that are SEO friendly, controversial, inspirational, those kind of highlights that you want to extract, basically. And that's basically the two step prompt that we use for every single episode now.

And so it took a while to refine the prompt and the only bit of time that it takes me now is that I sort of scan the final seven shorts that it has decided on to sort of select if they're good enough. I'll sort of read them out loud to myself. You know, it's a five minute job. And yeah, we've been doing that now for about probably 20 episodes. And that I find has been far better because it also allows the AI to know what to extract in relevance to your podcast and your brand and the expectations

of your listeners. And so that little process has been incredibly useful. And some of the stuff that it pulls out, yeah, I sort of read it or watch it once it's been edited and I'm like, that's amazing. Like, how good is AI? Yeah, that's really interesting. Dumbly, I've never even thought of doing that. Despite the fact that I use Claude for tons of stuff just now. I've just always written off the idea of being able to automatically make clips because

I've been using the likes of, well, a few different ones. I probably won't name them because I'm saying they're not very good, but I've just not found a good one. But yeah, using Claude to actually do it with a bit of context, that's what it is, isn't it? Like I found anytime I'm using AI for just about anything, the big difference is the context. It's giving it some background, giving it some other information

to work with. Because presumably, you know, a clip, a great clip from a comedy podcast is going to be very different from a great clip from an education podcast. It's going to be completely different criteria, isn't it? Oh, absolutely. And I think the other thing that is missed with A lot of AI prompts is telling the AI what role it needs to take on for the task, which is basically how I start

every prompt now. And so like my prompt for extracting the shorts content I've got, you know, based on the information provided and acting as a viral content expert specifically for YouTube. That's like sentence one. So that it's like, oh, now I know who to be. Yes, yeah, absolutely. Any other tips in that prompt? What other things have you refined over the, over the months in doing that? Yeah, yeah. So the prompts are quite big. The context one. Yeah,

is quite big. Sort of talks about the unique selling points of the podcast, why it's, you know, important for the listeners to listen to this show and not other shows. So it's got the episode format in there as well. It's also got the YouTube goals, like what the point of us going live on YouTube at all is for. So that's all in there as well. And that's the first prompt. So that's all the background information about what the podcast is. And then the second prompt which is asking

to extract the shorts. So I'm asking for seven of the most engaging, SEO friendly, controversial highlights from the transcript. And I've said that this should align with current trends or the areas which were highlighted in the previous prompt, basically. And then I've got a few, few sort of subheadings. The first one is extract. And it gives some information about what it should extract. And it's got to capture the topic's essence. It's got to be informative, educational and

inspirational. And it's got to provide. This is really important because this is what we got wrong for a while. The third point under the extract is provide necessary context for the viewer to understand because that sentence meant that it went from getting random sentences that were interesting but made no sense to anybody to actually sort of telling a full story. So that it was like, oh, now I understand what that sentence is about. So it took me for a while to figure

out that sentence. But yeah, beyond the extract, then it's prioritized. So, you know, there's obviously a lot of content over an hour conversation telling it which content to, to focus on whether it's controversial, whether it's a hack or a myth or something like that. And then I guess beyond that, it's sort of just refining those kind of instructions, sort of making sure that the, the extracted information appeals to the viewers emotionally and it's content that

encourages the viewer to keep watching. So that's in there as well, and then also the last section of it is all the other little bits give us an SEO optimized title, three to five hashtags, a hook or a teaser sentence for the first three seconds that we can pop at the front. So it's quite. They're quite large prompts, but for sure, yeah. That's so good. I love that. Yeah, there's so much in there. The context or the telling the story, the full background part in

there. I can't remember what you called it, but it was the idea that you had to actually give people context for the 60 seconds. That's the thing I think a lot of tools fall down on. I've used opus, so I'll mention it because I think it is probably the best of the bunch. But I find a lot of the ones that it brings out, you want to put a header in or something to at least give an idea of what you're talking about. Like, quite often it jumps in

and it doesn't give enough of that background. It doesn't give enough context to actually let people know what the whole thing's about. So, yeah, that's so good. Have you used Projects in Claude at all yet? Yes, have I? Maybe I'm in there all the time myself, but tell me more. It's a very generic term, so it's like quite easy to get mixed. But Claude call this one feature called. Well, they call a feature called.

They have a feature called Projects. And it's essentially nothing more than being able to put some background into a particular project that will power that project. So from then you can actually put your prompts in, so you can put some background information for this project every single time. So every single time, take these instructions. And then you can add other resources like PDFs, like uploads,

like URLs, whatever you like. And so it means that every time you open this project, you could take your transcript, just paste it into that project, and that prompt would just be there as the basis of that project, if that makes sense. But one of the. So I mean, that would save you one copy and paste potentially. But one of the other benefits is something I've been using it for a lot recently, is in this kind of sense, I use it a lot for

the metadata. So like you say, SEO titles, descriptions, chapter guides, all that kind of stuff, but not to refine naturally. Interesting. But I also recently uploaded, I took five or six transcripts from podcast episodes and then five or six blog posts that really well reflect my writing style, a few emails as well, so I put all of this into one PDF and uploaded that and

just called it writing samples. And then in the project context, the background you can say when you're outputting titles, descriptions, please always follow the style reflected in the writing style document. So you've got like, you can add, and you can add any other resources too, but it makes it. That actually made a biggest difference to me being able to use it for titles, descriptions, all that kind of stuff because it suddenly reflect reflected the way I speak and write.

So I found that really useful. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. I love that. I'm going to go in there and yeah, I've got a few things to probably compile into a single project that would save having to remind the AI. Like, okay, we're back to being this, this role in this context. Yeah, so that's great. I didn't know that yet. Cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not, it's not that long. It's not been here that long. So it's kind of new. But it's yeah,

really useful. You can even. One thing I've done as well is to take, if you have a particularly good one, you upload that as an example. Here's an example of one you've created in the past, which was a very good output. So use this as a framework. So that can be a nice thing to do as well. Yeah, but that's cool. Okay, perfect. Right, so that was around repurposing. Love that. Mind if I just ask a few more questions during the show as well?

I'm just so interested in that. You've got to 400 episodes like your whole business behind this. I mentioned that that concept of this podcast is powering your business. You've mentioned that a couple of times. What's the business behind it? Yeah, so the business evolved

out of the podcast being successful and so where it started and what it is now are sort of two separate things. But it's always been essentially a nutrition psychology coaching service, if you like. So the program that's sold via the podcast is programs mostly for middle aged women. There's some men that come through and some younger women, but mostly sort of 40 to 60 year old women that we help with emotional binge and

overeating. So we're basically trying to target people that have yo yo dieted for many years with little success and going deep on their psychology basically as to why, why they haven't been successful. So. So yeah, so that's basically. And as part of the podcast, one thing that I do on every single episode that you'll listen to, One of the first sentences I always say is my mission statement. And the mission statement relates directly to trying to sell that program.

And the reason for that was that at some point someone said, you can't be doing this free podcast forever. You need to let listeners know that there's stuff they can buy and that you're here for a reason, not just for fun, basically. And so that mission statement was very much about just highlighting to people. I've got a mission, I've got a vision, I got. I can help you if you want it. It's there. Rather than people being like, oh, you're just the podcast guy, you know, surely you

make money from that. Right. You know, so. So, yeah, so that's what hangs off the back of it, basically. And we've at this stage, yeah, we've had 323 people through our programs, which then they're quite high ticket programs. So. So, yeah, it's going well. Excellent. Yeah. I love that idea of using a mission statement as your call to action almost because it's. Yeah, it reflects what you, you actually believe.

Mission statement should obviously be like something that you genuinely believe. It's your real kind of purpose, your why. So it can really resonate with people. But equally it tells them what you can actually do for them and obviously pay for if they enjoy the free content. Here's a way of getting more of it, essentially. I love that. That's really good. Yeah. So is that your full time

business now? That's what you do? Yeah. Yep. So I left the cancer hospital day job almost four years ago now and it's 100% because of the success of the podcast. The podcast. I haven't monetized the podcast itself very much. A little bit here and there, but it's essentially the front door to the business. So. And you know, I'm very fortunate to be able to say that I earn, I now earn much more than I ever earned as a cancer scientist.

So it's just wild that a podcast with me ranting about health and wellness became that. Yeah, that's so good. So you're, you have sponsored a little bit. If you've taken some kind of sponsors over the years, that's. Is that what you're suggesting? Yeah, I've never, I've never done paid ads, I've never done that kind of thing, but I've done paid guests. I've played with that. Yeah, a little bit. So,

okay, we've got a little system in place. For whenever we get inquiries, Janet has a little system and an email template sequence she goes through to sort of see where they're at financially, if they can, you know, pay for the spot. I specifically try and charge CEOs and product representatives. If it's just a coach that's sort of similar to me, or they're starting up, or they're just an expert in their field, but they don't really. They're not representing

a corporation. I'm sort of a little bit more flexible. But if it's a CEO that's very much like, I'm here to sell product, I'm like, guess what? So am I, basically. So, yeah. So, yeah, so we make a little bit of money. It's not much, honestly, per year. It's probably $10,000. But, you know, $10,000 is not zero dollars, so that's good. Yeah, for sure. So. So, yeah, so we.

And I guess if for people that say there's no budget, you know, we're not focused on paying for podcast slots right now, we basically then try and cut a deal in regards to promotion, because, as I'm sure you experience, Colin, as well, like, a lot of people are on so many podcasts, they actually never promote the podcast that they're on because they're on so many. And so we actually make it a point of being like, you have to agree

to promote the podcast. And if somebody says, I'm not going to, we literally say, well, unfortunately, this isn't a fair exchange of value. And so, you know, all the best, because, yeah, we sort of started offering paid, and then go down and try and cut the best deal we can in the sense of, like, can we tap into your audience somehow? Can we get in your newsletter? And if they're sort of no to everything,

then it doesn't go ahead. But. But, yeah. So it generates a little bit of money, a little bit of promotion, and shockingly, even having famous people on in our industry hasn't really bumped the numbers very much at all. The biggest, most downloaded episodes are my solo episodes with who Knows why. But that's a thing. Well, that's a podcast thing, isn't it? They've got to know you. They've got to trust you. You're the guy on it. So, yeah, that's so good. So you're

essentially primarily, you're your own sponsor. The show is built around promoting your products, which is such a good way to monetize a podcast in general. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that's when I get offers for ads and bit of money here and there. I don't want to cut my nose off despite my face. So for me it's. It's basically unless it's going to be 350,000 or above, I'm not going to replace it. Yeah. What are the other elements of the business then that make up

the kind of the growth side of it, the marketing side of it? You've got the podcast as one of the front doors. Do you run newsletters? Is a blog an important part of it? You mentioned YouTube as well. What's the kind of full web of content you're putting out there? Yeah, so it actually isn't that great and it's about to get greater. But for five years it hasn't been huge. It's been audio only podcasts for basically the first four years.

I didn't promote on Instagram, I didn't promote on Facebook. It was just all organically discovered through Spotify, Apple podcasts basically. And then it just. Yeah, as the numbers started to stagnate over the last couple of years, I got more into the video side of things and then, yeah, moving I guess more towards YouTube now to try and grow further there. Just given that that's such a big search engine and, and trying to put content up over there and we're only starting there. You know,

we've got less than a thousand subscribers. We sort of get about 10,000 views per month over there. So hoping that over the next couple of years that grows significantly. And also Instagram's coming next, although that's not directly for the podcast, it's more for program client stuff. Plenty of the podcast content will appear there as well. Yeah, yeah. How are you thinking about YouTube then? Last, last question on this before we dig into your. Your question

to. To Mullen. When you're thinking about YouTube, taking it from the podcast, are you using the podcast content? You've mentioned the repurposing of potentially short clips and stuff like that, but are you repurposing longer form too? Or are you creating stuff custom for YouTube?

Yeah. So we upload the full interview, actually. Well, I make an executive decision as to whether or not I think the episode was good enough to be on YouTube because there's plenty of episodes where they might be good listening while you're out for a walk, but to put on YouTube, they might be a little bit boring. And so I make that decision. Then the full interview goes up and some of our most watched content is the entire episodes. Sure. They don't hang around for the whole thing.

But plenty of comments, plenty of engagement, and then we do shorts as well. So that's only been the last two months we've done that. And the next step will be clips. And so that's the sort of in between, sort of extracting one question from a podcast for seven minutes or so. So that I feel like that's going to be the. Where the money's at basically, is like the clips,

I feel like is where it's going to be. People will really resonate because it's a small amount of content, like in a long form fashion, but not so long they have to hang around for an. Hour and getting very specific, isn't it? Yeah, that's been our thoughts around this show. The whole premise behind this was to have a variety show where we talk about 3, 4, 5, 6, even different things, different tools, different mindsets, frameworks, cut them up, five or ten

minute clips, like you say, and publish them all separately. So with one recording session, you can get like 5, 10 different clips that actually perform. Probably even better, like you say, because they're so focused, you can base them around this one question that no doubt other people are experiencing. So, yeah, love that. Totally agree. Yeah, I think that's where the.

At least with the way that YouTube functions and people's attention and focus functions at the minute, it's difficult to get people to sit down and watch two people, a podcast interview that don't move or go anywhere, you know? Yeah, agreed, agreed. Not super engaging unless there's heaps of editing. But. But, yeah,

yeah. Although, do you know what? I've been surprised at the engagement we've got with some of our longer form episodes and watching some other creators out there as well, doing really well with like half hour episodes which are not very focused. Like it's an interview like this. And surprising. Surprising what people watch there. All right, I don't want to keep you forever. Matty could probably talk to you about this for a long time though. So you had a question you wanted to

bring. So go on then, pose it. My question is that I'm

always wrestling with is how much content do I produce? Well, so you're thinking about how much do you produce in terms of you could produce any amount, as in you could think of dozens and dozens of things to produce, but it's how much should you produce in any given week? Yeah, basically. And I guess I've got a podcast mentor here in Australia who produces seven podcasts a week every single day.

Yeah. And his podcast is like one of the biggest in the world as a result, just, you know, the dedicated listeners listen to everything versus, you know, somebody that might do podcasts for seasons, you know, where they do 10 episodes and then take a break. So, yeah, I'm always wrestling with this idea of, is it all about more, more, more, more, more, or is there a sweet spot? You know? Yeah, just I don't know the answer. That's why I'm always like,

do I need to be on Instagram? Do I need to be on these other platforms? Because it's time spent creating, you know. It'S a really good. It's a really good question. I struggle with this, too, because there's so many different ideas, so many different things you could do.

I find often the time when I end up most stressed, most feeling, most like, purposeless, feeling like I've had a bad week, not bad, not a good week, certainly is when I've tried to do too many different types of things, not try to do too much. Like, I can work all sorts of hours as long as I've got one thing that I'm working on and have a real purpose behind it, like one, let's say one YouTube

video that is going to take me 20 hours to edit. I can spend, like, two days solid doing that and just get it finished and feel really good about that. But if I spend those 20 hours doing eight different things and feel like I've not even done any of them very well, they're all just a test. That's when I feel stressed. It's like the

lack of focus. So that's where I always end up leaning with this, is if I know I'm not going to do something really well, and I'm kind of just trying to fit it in because I feel I should, that's when it starts to fall down. I don't know. Does that make sense to you? Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. And I think that sense of accomplishment is what makes most people feel good at the end of the day or the end

of the week. And, yeah, when your attention's split and you've done 10% of 20 tasks, you feel like you've done nothing at all. Yeah, exactly. What is it? Is it. Is it particularly stuff like social media that brings this on? Because I find that's the same for me. Like, I think, oh, but I'm not doing Instagram. I'm missing out on something. Is that. Is that the same with you? Yeah, completely. And I find. I find the idea of documenting my life and being in stories all of

the time really draining. And I would actually say that, you know, maybe 10 years ago when I began this journey of just being, Trying to be in business and all of that kind of stuff, that it really subtracted from my relationship at the time because I was never present. And so I wrestle with this, like, do I have to be this influencer that's showing all of these parts of who I am and not being present for my partner and my soon to be kids and my life and, and stuff like that. So.

And I don't want to be looked up, you know, at. To my. By my child. Like daddy's always on his phone, you know, like that's. So I wrestle with this, like, but maybe I have to be to pay the bills, you know, I don't know. No, I think you're totally right. I get the exact same thing. I just, I mean, we're on our computers all day, every day these days. Like your work will be the same as mine. You're just, you're always looking at a screen and I can't

do it at home. I need to be able to switch off. And I find if I do end up spending, even if it's something productive, like I end up thinking of an idea for a story and I put it together and I do spend 10 minutes putting some little edits in to make it nice. I feel like, yeah, just utterly drained at the end of that because it's just extra. And it also ties into that whole purpose thing as well. It's like it doesn't feel like it's kind of going towards the main goals

potentially. And I think you've proved that you can do 400 episodes of a podcast, create a really successful business, and not much social media in there by the sounds of it. Same with us. Our whole business was built on a blog. It was simply writing about podcasting. Obviously I was podcasting alongside, but it was the blogs that took off and made the business what it is today. And I didn't do any social at the time and I delve into it every four or five months.

I'll get this pressure, like I'm missing out, I'm missing out and I'll do something in it, but I just burn out on it again and I'm like, no, this is not a good idea. So I'm totally with you. I feel like, yeah, I'd much rather, I was going to say I'd much rather have a smaller business without having to do social round the clock, but actually, I don't even think that's the case, I think you can have a bigger business by actually just focusing

on the one thing that you do well. But it sounds like yours is podcasting. Ours is probably. Ours is podcasting and writing. We kind of do cross the two over, but, yeah, I don't know. I would stick with what you're doing. Sounds like. I agree. Yeah, I think. Yeah. Because I think the natural evolution of a podcast that is obviously to YouTube. We're already having these conversations on a video anyway.

And it seems as well that the trend for YouTube at the minute is doing a lot of talking head videos where people are following personalities. It's becoming a little bit more influencer, like, or, you know, Instagram, like, where people are just happy to watch someone talk at a camera. So now might be the time that it. For anybody that wants to leverage what they're already doing. And that's. That was the big thing for me is that going to YouTube is not like recreating the wheel.

It's not adding what we've already got, you know, and we've got like two or 300 hours of content just sitting there waiting to be used on YouTube. That's it. And if you get to the point where you have a team, you build something where you're fortunate enough that you can hire somebody else. And that was again, same with me as well. The blog earned enough that. That was when Matthew joined the team here and he helped me start to do much more podcasting from there.

And with yourself, it's like taking on the team to do the video. And I think that's the trouble. Like, some people feel like they have to do video and therefore they try and do it alongside a podcast by themselves. And that just falls over so often because it's just so time consuming. But absolutely, yeah. If it's not adding, if it's been able to use the content, you've got to create something different repurposed elsewhere. I think that's where it counts. Yeah, I would.

Yeah, I wouldn't wrestle with that too much. I think you're taking the right decision there, in my humble opinion. Yeah. Just the normal amount of FOMO that I'm experiencing, by the sounds of it, that's it. Totally. Exactly the same as me. We'll go through this. I'll hit this cycle every single four or five months. I'll just do a little bit of Instagram. Oh, no, I need to do stories. Oh, no, I hate this. Yeah, totally. This has been so fun. Thank you, Matty. So many good things in

here. So. Yeah. I mean, where can people find your podcast if they want to go and listen? Yeah, sure. So how to not get sick and die, all of the podcast apps, Obviously we're on YouTube as well, so yeah, come and check it out. We've got Monday episodes which are shorter, Wednesday episodes which are a bit longer. So yeah, hang out and listen and reach out if you like as well. And does the business, does the service have a separate space or is it on the same site?

Yeah, it's all through the same space. So. And I guess my website is sort for that is sort of just my name. Mattylansdown.com and sort of most of our people reach out through social media, but we're sort of in a rebuild at the minute, which is why we're sort of looking into Instagram and stuff like that just to, to set up the business side of things in a, in a way that helps leads and inquiries flow through much more easily. So. But like you said, one step at a time.

I'm now at a point where I can hire help. Yeah, it's not all me, but you know, and as they say, don't compare your now to somebody else's five years down the track. Yeah, perfect. And I'll, I'll take a leaf out of your book for our little call to action at the end as well. Actually like our mission for the product that we create. One of the products we create is Alitu. It's a podcast

maker app. The mission behind that was to just make it easier for people to make a podcast, take away some of that editing pain and we built in call recording, audio cleanup, audio editing with the text and the waveform and podcast hosting as well, just to give people one space to make their podcast to get consistent and actually get to that place that you are, Matty, where you can actually put out 100 episodes week in, week out,

hopefully without too much techy stress and with less time than it would be otherwise. So if anyone out there is listening and you would like to try it out out for your own podcast, go and check it out over@alitu.com that's a L I T U dot com. There's a seven day free trial so you can see if it works for you at no cost. All right,

thanks again, Matty. It's been great fun. Thanks Colin. See you later. Yeah, I'll talk to you soon. And out there listening. Thank you for joining us on the episode. Hope you got a few things for here to take into your own creator world. We'll talk to you next time.