Do you consider yourself
a Korean? Certainly. Yes. So I create a daily podcast called pod news, a weekly podcast called pod land and also a newsletter as well, which goes out to every single day, which everybody should get a it's free@podnews.com. Yeah, I
know that is the singular newsletter. Everyone in podcasting reads. So pretty much everything you create is about podcast.
Yeah, pretty much podcasting or radio. I'm a radio consultant as well. But I suppose one of the things that I like to do is I like to be in control over what I create and all of the tech that runs the pod news websites is mine as well. So I've written all of that and I'm looking at it from a point of view of what can I build.
That will both save me time and save me effort, but what we'll do exactly what I want ends up not being the WordPress plugin, but actually ends up being something a little bit more involved. So I ended up coding everything myself. Well, when did you learn to code and how? Oh, let's go to school many years ago. So over there in the UK where I used to live. The BBC ended up doing something very farsighted in the early 1980s of launching its own computer.
And the BBC model B is what a lot of people, my age learnt to, to a program. And it was a great tool and, and really set you up for learning how to code and learning what to do.
So have you tried out any of the no-code tools available today?
I haven't, no. I think they would drive me crazy. So I've stayed well clear of them.
Oh, yes. And sticking to the basics. As at least to my mind, one of the core philosophies of the way you build out your grouping of media properties together, because you've got pod news, which is very much, it is the daily podcasting news, what has happened. And then when I look at the podcast versus the newsletter, the podcast is pretty much, you write running down the headlines of the newsletter and. That really easy flow of repurposing. And then how does pod
land tie in? Well, I suppose I've got pod news, pod jobs and pod events, and then Heartland is a weekly podcast that I do with a friend of mine called Sam who lives in the UK. I live in Australia these days. And it's essentially a excuse for me to actually have an opinion because I don't really have too much of an opinion in the pod news newsletter because yeah. That long. Yeah. And it's news.
And so it's actually nice being able to interview people, being able to have a chat about what's been going on and focus on that as well. So that's been great. Fun doing excellent.
Is there any, like one opinion piece that stood out to you that you've created in the past year or two around podcasting that you think is still either your best or most important work?
Oh, I don't know about this. And I know what gets a lot of clicks and a lot of views is there's a lot, a long article around how to understand statistics in podcasting, what stats are available, where you'd find those stats, what they actually show you. And that's a pretty good, regularly updated article, which is done. I mean, it's. Made to be as factual as possible.
So there's a little bit of opinion towards the end, in terms of podcasts, stats versus radio, but apart from that's about as, as far as it goes. So that does really well. I think some of the things that I've been doing recently, just really holding the industry to account things that I'm most proud of, whether it's large podcast is either by accident or on purpose massaging, the figures that they had for their podcasts, which uncovered around three years or so ago, or whether it's.
The leader in this space, just messing things up and not telling anybody which I documented last week. And interestingly, it looks as if that pushed it to release some form of a statement and some form of apology. I think that's the sort of thing that I'm please, that pod use can do. And I don't want to be the source. Publication that sits there, copy and paste his press releases and has no view around keeping people honest and keeping people working on what's best for the industry.
I would rather focus a little bit more on taking the industry forward. And if that means taking, holding some people too. And I'm quite happy doing that. I mean, a really lucky situation, I think, where I don't have to worry about a particular advertiser or a particular viewpoint. I don't frankly care whether large companies send me on press junkets. And so therefore I can, I can write the stories that matter really, which is a nice place to be.
How do you go about building your audience now?
Yeah. Growing audiences after a while, you get to a point where there is a certain amount of momentum behind you, it's much easier to steer a tiny little speed boat than it is to steer an oil tanker. So there is a bit of that. But I spend a long time in things like Facebook groups, subreddits and Twitter, helping podcasters out, helping them know that, that the tools that I've built exist and hopefully adding value. And while I add value, of course, I'm talking about what I do as well.
I think helping people out is one of the best ways of doing things. REL is missing to us at the moment from squad cast and squad cars do exactly that they are helping people. With all kinds of things and it just so happens that they have a great time. So for remote recording as well, right. Certainly a tried and tested route to getting in front of the audience that you want to be in front of and actually being a trusted and appreciated part of it.
And has that thought process changed at all over time? Because I know you've had a moment to be around within the podcasting industry now.
Yeah. So I've been involved in pod hustings since very late 2004, but when I started pod news in 2017 was actually a little bit taken aback by the industry because it's a very friendly industry. It's. Collaborative industry and everybody wants everybody else to succeed. And that's a wonderful thing. So I think from that point of view, it's always been that sort of industry where you can grow audiences by just being helpful.
The wake up call, I think to me, was going to podcast movement in 2018, which was in Philadelphia realizing frankly, that I'm the other side of the world. I've not talked to people face to face. I had a good number of thousand people getting my newsletter, but I wasn't that sure. How many people. We're aware of it. And I invested in a branded shirt and just the amount of people who would stop me in the corridor and say, oh, pod news.
I read that every single day was a real wake up for something that I didn't realize was as well read as it is. So that was certainly a really nice sort of awakening, I guess.
How do you go about
monetizing now? So monetizing is sort of three different areas. There is sponsorship for the newsletter and indeed for the podcast, if you want that, too. So that's a, long-term, you're buying a month at a time. You can get any message that you want. Okay. And it's a good, strong way of advertising a brand. And so pod page for example, is our current title sponsor as of yesterday. So that's a good and very healthy part of it. And that's around a third of the income.
The next third is people who are supporting me in my work through Patrion. So you see a large amount of logos. Bottom of every newsletter, those that some of the companies doing that. And there are some individual people as well who are supporting me, who I really must work out how to thank more often and to suggest the wealth of people there is really useful and helpful to me because it does, as I was saying earlier, really help the independence of the thing. And then probably another third.
The classified section, which you said that you've used. It was interesting actually building that tool because I've run other newsletters in the past. Classified sections have never really worked for some of those other newsletters. Cause they'd been a bit too small and a bit too niche. So I thought to myself, I owe it to myself to write the code for the classifieds. I owe it to myself to at least spend a bit of time doing that, just to prove that it won't work for this newsletter as well.
But I set myself a goal. A day to write the code for the classifieds system, which meant writing the code for user accounts, credit card payments, writing the code for actually how you would charge and how you would book all of these things. So I got most of it done in the day, but what was strange is having written it, of course, the benefit in the time zone that I'm in is that I then went to bed just where. You guys in the U S wake up. So that was good, fun.
Ending up, waking up the next morning to discover that not only had someone used it, but somebody had booked $500 on it and I suddenly thought, oh wow, I need to make it look better. So I think a very much, a lot of people talk about MVPs about a minimum viable product. And I think that was a great experience in that, because that really showed me that get something out there. With it is a really good plan rather than waiting three months going through internal testing and everything else.
And there's lots that's wrong with it. And I need to rewrite the user registration in the next month or so, but that was a great experience, I think. And I
will say you have one of the easiest classified experiences of all newsletters. I've worked.
Oh, great. I'm glad that it's worked. I was quite pleased with the pricing model, which goes up the more classified ads, the raw, because I wanted to make it cheap for anybody to use it, but also I didn't want there to be more than four or five ads a day. And so the pricing model, I was quite proud of just basically thinking up on the spur of the moment, going, we'll try that and see if that works. So I'm glad that it worked for you.
What's your north star metric for success. How do you know you're on the right track?
Oh, I think that's, um, the amounts of subscriptions which are growing and the amount of sun subscribes to try and get. So I've plugged that into a slack alert. So I get a color to every time somebody subscribes and I can see what company they're from and where they are. And I also have a knock-knock alert of when somebody unsubscribes and the unsubscribes kill me every time. But thankfully I have enough new subscribes, which is keeping that going.
And obviously the statistics of mine are all completely anonymized now. So I don't it. And I don't know what stories individual people click on. I still know. Overall open rates. I still know overall click rates. And so I can actually sit there and work out. Okay. What stories are people finding? Interesting, but also what's the open rate of the newsletter next that is doing well and doing above the industry average, then that's that's success that I'm looking for.
Obviously being a profitable company helps as well. But in terms of the creative success, it's most certainly around that sort of thing.
What's your current
goal as a creator? Yeah, my current girl, you always look at the number of subscribers and you want that to hit around number. So at the moment, I'm on something like 19,200, I would dearly love to make that 20,000. So that's my next sort of very short term goal. So from that point of view, that's obviously the next sort of step, to be honest.
My main thing that I used to really enjoy doing that I'm hoping to enjoy again, is to take part in more conferences and to come meet more people because I find that being a tremendously enriching thing, it's wonderful talking to people. Face-to-face. It's wonderful.
Being able to stand up and help predominantly Americans normally in America to talk about the other hundred 90 countries, which are out there having worked in Canada, having worked here in Australia and the UK and for European companies as well, being able to actually talk about the benefit of everything else out there, which is knowledge that I have that few other people do in the podcasting world. The next goal that I have in terms of that.
Yeah. Firstly, I'm running a podcast conference next Monday, or doing eight hours of it in Sydney. So it'll be my first interstate flight for nine months. So I'm massively looking forward to that. It's called podcast day 24, and it's an in-person event in Sydney. Very much looking forward to. Fine. And hopefully taking parts at podcast movement evolutions in March of next year. And it'd be great to meet with many of the people who are haven't met with and to say hello to old friends. Well, if
you could send a tweet back to your start, what, and when would it be?
Well, I think I would probably do a couple of things. For a radio station and I was a radio presenter for a couple of years. I worked in the creative department for radio station, basically writing radio ads. I think then I would tweet that person and I'd say, don't be so damn self-important because I think that there's a certain amount of time when you need desperately to believe in yourself. And when you're believing in your.
Then you start being a little bit too arrogant, and I think that's a regret, but in terms of starting pod views four years ago, now, I think I would probably tell myself mutations is a good thing and make sure that you focus on the things that matter.