This is Grow the Show, the podcast to help you grow your podcast. My name is Kevitch Midland and my mission is to help you, the independent podcaster, to get more listeners and monetize to the max. So you can have a thriving podcast business. Today, we are inviting back a friend of Grow the Show who has recently reached a huge podcasting milestone. And if you've been with us for a while, you might remember Gary Arnt.
Once his last visit, Gary's podcast, everything everywhere daily, has exploded, now racking up over a million downloads every single month. Now back in 2022, I actually ran into Gary at a podcast conference and we caught up. I asked him how his show was doing and he said, I'm gonna head a million a month soon. And when I do, I'm gonna have some new stuff to share with your audience. I said, just say the word. Fast forward to 2023 and here we are.
So today, Gary's going to share the secrets behind his solo podcasting success and the lessons he has learned from podcasting every day for more than three years and taking a show from zero to over a million downloads a month in that time. So if you're ready to learn how to make your podcast stand out and grow like crazy, then stick around to this episode of Grow the Show. The name of my show is everything everywhere daily.
I started it in the pandemic like so many other podcasts on July 1st, 2020. Prior to that was a travel blogger and travel photographer and kind of my whole world disappeared. In a span of a few weeks in March of 2020 and I needed something else to pivot to. And so I decided on a podcast. I had the idea several years earlier. I had the artwork, I had the music all laid out and paid for, but I never pulled the trigger on it.
And I made the decision during the pandemic to transition from doing a lengthy show that I would produce maybe once every two weeks to a shorter show that I produce every single day. And that was a business decision. And it's simply because the more episodes you produce, the greater advertising surface area your show has. So if you were to listen to a one hour podcast that had 14 ads in it, most people would find that to be ridiculous.
But nobody really minds listening to seven 10 minute episodes with two ads, which is fundamentally what I'm doing. So it allows me to have a higher value in terms of simply because I'm producing more shows. So monetarily works really well. The downside is it's a lot of work because I'm fundamentally writing a 2000 word term paper every single day about something because it's a scripted show.
So I launched the show and it began growing and in the course of growing the show, I began looking at what do other successful podcasts do and what do the large networks do. How did the big podcast get to be so big? Sometimes it's just a matter of being celebrity or being associated with a big brand. But even I found the big brands were spending money to promote their shows.
And I just did the math and then I looked at, well, okay, if I can spend this much money and do it by this much, then wow, this will pay for itself. So I began running ads on podcast apps and that worked out really, really well. And the show kept growing and then I had these huge spikes where we would just kind of take off both on Apple and Spotify and March of 2022.
The show hit my goal for that year of getting one million downloads and we've been at the million download a month level ever since. Incredible. You've been so generous in the growth show community. You've been on the show a couple of times. You've spoken to the growth show accelerator group in the growth show Facebook or all the time. So you've interacted with a lot of podcasters who would love nothing more than to get a fraction of a million downloads a month.
And so what I'd love to explore with you today are some of the blind spots that you see that these podcasters have that might be preventing them, the growth and or the business revenue from their podcast that they want. And so just to jump out of the gate with that, let's first talk about the podcasters content. When it comes to the actual content that podcasters are publishing, where do you see on average that most of our listenership and our audience here at Grasso could improve?
One of the big things that I think people need to focus on that they don't give enough focus to is the format of the show, which kind of goes into production. Most people are thinking in terms of an elevator pitch and you need that, right? You need to be able to summarize what your show is about. But there's a lot more to it than that, and in fact what makes the show a success is the stuff behind it.
If you simply said, SignFellows a show about nothing that really doesn't capture what the show is about, even though that was the joke, the show was about nothing. The characters, the writing, the inside jokes, all those other things went into the show to make it successful. And some of those things when you do a podcast, you develop them over time and you don't even know you're doing it.
So one of the things I did on my show is I had someone who said, I wrote a review and said, oh, Gary, I just, I've listened to every episode. And so what I did is kind of on the spot, I made up the thing and said, wow, thank you. You're now a member of the Completionist Club. And you can join. We have smoking jackets available and we have concierge service. And I made it a thing like they do on Saturday night live for the Five Timers Club.
When I host the show for five times, they have the special club where Steve Martin and Martin Short are there. And so I made this thing called the Completionist Club. Well, it turns out I now have people all over the world who are actively listening to every episode. And I've done a thousand episodes of the show to get into the Completionist Club. And they write me. And now we're opening up chapters of the club all over the world.
I just read a review on my, the show I did today from a guy from Norway. And I said, great, we're now opening up the Oslo chapter of the club. We opened up the Singapore chapter. I did one in Honduras. And this became kind of a part of the show and a format thing for the show. And then as I got people sending and reviews from different countries, we would unlock badges. So we just unlocked the Kenya badge or the South Africa badge. And I said, oh, we don't have any reviews from these countries.
And I had people who wrote me saying, well, I am from that country and I left a review. And I just didn't know it. And then other people would come out of the woodworking and leave a review. So these are all organic things that were part of the show. And everyone's kind of going to develop their own as they develop a rapport with the audience. But the other thing is to think about what the format is.
And one of the smart things I did when I started my show, and I don't think I realized it at the time, is I developed a format that made the production of my show really simple, really simple. Meaning I, if I sit down at my computer and I've written the script of the show and my shows are about 10 minutes, I can probably be done recording and editing and have it uploaded within 20 minutes.
And while I have an intro that I read, a cold open, I have theme music, I have an audio cue where the ads end, I have the body of the show, another audio cue when it's done in my outro. Every episode, those seven elements, every single time. And I can just, I use Garage Band, which is the least sophisticated thing there is. I drag the elements into place, but boom, boom, boom, done export. It's just that simple.
Or a daily show, simplicity, turned out to be a huge part of my ability to get the show at the door every day. Maybe that's not as important if you're doing a weekly show or a biweekly show or something like that. But I think people do need to be thinking about, okay, once we have the idea for the show, what is the format going to be? There are several other things I've done. The first thing you hear when you listen to my show, always and every time, is my voice.
I will never have a pre-roll ad on my show because I think that absolutely ruins it. And there are too many, and there are some very successful podcasts out there that have like 10 minutes of ads and then the show starts. And you know, you just skip past all that stuff and everybody does it. So I make, I always have my voice first. I have two ads in my show and I will never have three.
And I've turned down many tens of thousands of dollars at this point to put a third ad in my show, but I won't do it because I think it ruins the show's integrity. And you just can't have that many ads for a show that short. Well, I signed with the new network this year and that was one of the points of contention in doing the contract. I insisted it would be only two ads.
So there are other things like that and it's going to be different for the show, but people need to figure out just what the format is going to be and play with it at first. Yeah. It's far better that you play with your format in the first six months that your show was released when it's going to have the smallest audience it will ever have. And don't be afraid to change the format because oh, well, I don't want to alienate my listeners. I'm going to lose the current listeners.
Like, don't worry about that if they like you stick with you. Well, you just shared how you have this extra format of the club that has just kind of sprung up and that kind of happened organically. And I think that's a testament to the fact that you can test and you can add cool additions to the format. I'm testing a version of Grow the Show that isn't as heavily produced as a different format.
And you know, maybe like on a different day, we'll do just conversation episodes or something like that. But I think a key point here is that you want to avoid not having any sort of format, right, which is where like there are tons of podcasters who just, they just talk, right? So that's something that you've come across before where there is no format. Right. And your idea for the show, my show is a show for these people. That's fine, but it can't end there.
And for too many people, it ends there. And in some ways, the format of the show is really more important than that top level thing. If you look at a popular show like the Jordan Harbinger Show, his show is, you know, it's an interview show. He has many guests on about all kinds of different things. It isn't necessarily something you can condense down to talk show. My show is literally about everything. It's in the name of, it's in the title.
But it's more about the curiosity and learning and a particular show format that now everybody is listening to. So yeah, I would give thought to that your show format. I don't think there's necessarily a best way your show must follow, you know, this way. I'm a big believer of having your voice being the first thing heard, but beyond that, I think there's a lot of ways you can go. Your show may have different segments.
Okay. This is the segment of the show we're going to talk about this thing or I used to have a podcast called This Week in Travel. I did it for 11 years. And so we would do introductions, have a guest. We would do new stories from the travel industry for about 10 minutes. And we would all just chime in and give our thoughts or opinions on it. We would interview the guest for about 30 to 40 minutes.
And then at the end, we did a thing called Picks of the Week where everyone, including the guest, had something that they recommended. And it could be an app, a travel product, whatever, it could be anything, even a destination. And that was the format of the show. And we stuck with that for the most part for 11 years. But it was a format, right? And I think that's something that people need to think about. Yeah. And not enough people are thinking about it.
In addition to that, you know, you want to define what your show does and you want to define who it does that thing for, but I think what we're getting at here is you really, really need to also make it clear how it's going to do that thing for them, right? So you don't just want to have a show that talks about a medical condition or something like that. It's how is that show going to serve the people who, you know, are talking about that medical condition?
Is that kind of what you're saying at all? It's just a matter of tightening things up and being, I think if you have a show format, it's kind of a, you know, where to stick everything in every slot, right? Yeah. Okay. We have this segment of the show we need to fill. Every news, every TV program does this, right?
It starts out with headline news, then they move to local news, then they got the weather, then they got the sports or some, you know, that rough combination is going to be kind of every 30 minute news, newscast. There's a format. You can play with that format. You have something really big and you skip sports or whatever on a given day, but you need to have the format. And it's basically putting the show, it just simplifies the entire process of producing the show.
When you go into a new episode, you know, having the structure lets you know what you need to fill and what you need to do. So even if you want to have a conversation, that's fine, but you have an idea of, okay, the conversation's going to last about this long. We're going to do something else here or whatever it might be, you need to have the format. Okay. So we've spoken about the content. Let's talk a little bit more about the business side of podcasting.
Now you privately have made a distinction to me that I think is really worth exploring, which is that there's really two types of business models for a podcast. I have one and you have the other and I think it's really important for people to understand which one they're building because they work very, very, very differently. So can you start by explaining what those two different formats are? Sure. The type of format show you have, you are selling a product and service.
You have the Grow the Show Accelerator program and other things that is a high value product and you're targeting a very specific group of people. So the natural audience for what you're doing is probably going to be less than a show like mine. My show is a very broad-based show. I talk about everything. It's educational, I have a big audience and my primary monetization method is advertising. Too many people are thinking that they're going to make money off sponsorships and ads.
In reality, the more I get into this world, I realize how hard it is to do. And these are not necessarily mutually exclusive. There can be hybrid things where you can do both. But by and large, you're probably going to be making most of your money in either one of those two ways. Advertising is very difficult because you need volume for most advertisers to care. There are exceptions, of course.
There are some very niche shows that have gotten sponsors and they have done very well because those sponsors target a very niche audience. But by and large, I think you need to be thinking either I'm going to be in one of those two camps. You know, every time I hear about someone who's doing very well, they're making six figures on their podcast and they may only have like 500 downloads in episode. They're almost always going to have that first type. They have to.
They have to be selling a product or service. They have a coaching service or whatever it is. They're using the podcast primarily as like a lead generator. Whenever you see a really big show, they almost never have a product or service because it's almost too big to deal with that many people. I've thought about it. I'm not even sure. My show is kind of just a general informational show. What am I going to be coaching? Yeah. That's literally just called school.
Yeah. I'm not, you know, I don't know what it would be. Everything. You know, I thought about doing tours. I've had people asking for merchandise. I could sell a book. You know, they're ancillary thing. But again, that would be a little bit different. I don't think that those would ever even be bigger than advertising for me, given where the show is at right now and where I think it could be.
And so I've been talking to people in the past and they've listened to the previous episode I did with you about how to grow your show doing ad spends that you should look at, okay, what is the value of a subscriber and how much are you spending to acquire a subscriber? And if the value is greater than your cost of acquisition, then you can continue to make money.
But a lot of people are coming to me saying, well, the value of my subscriber was like, you know, $2.40, but it's costing me $2.00 and sometimes it's more than that, so it's not worth it. And what I told them is, well, then you need to change that number. Yeah. We weren't thinking in those terms. They were thinking like, well, this is my podcast, this is what it is and it can never change it. I was like, no, change it. Want to double your revenue? Double the number of shows.
Yeah. Through two shows a week. And they don't have to all be interview shows. You can, and I'm sure you've seen this. I've seen this with people where they have an interview show and then they add a second show that's just them. Yeah. It doesn't have a guest. Those shows often perform better than the interview shows because the reason people are listening to the podcast is the host.
Yeah. And so when it's just the host and you're conveying information and teaching people, they're on board for that. And now you have two episodes. The number of episodes is, I guess, more important if you're selling ads than if you're selling a product or a service. But to the guy that had $2.40 value per subscriber, the other thing was, okay, well, now you need to start thinking of other ways to monetize other than ads. You know, if you're doing ads, increase the number of shows or grow it.
And if you're not, then you need to think of something else. And he had done a whole bunch of things in a real estate. And I was like, well, why aren't you talking about that on your show? Yeah. This is a no-brainer for you. Yeah. This would be a lead manor where you could be doing, you know, $10,000 sales for the people listening to your shows. Yeah, I should. I kind of wanted to keep it a separate thing. I'm like, at what cost? Right.
Right. And he's like, yeah, I guess that, yeah, I could do that. I was like, yeah, it's completely changes the economics of everything that you're doing. It doesn't even need to be a core component, but it just needs to be a part of it. And it was like, yeah, well, now suddenly the $2.40 value per subscriber can go to like $100. Right. You know, by just changing the business model.
Yeah. And I think the point here is that it may not be obvious to folks that you can, like, to you just said, that you can actually change those numbers. You can change how much each subscriber is worth to your business. And you can also change how much it costs you to get a new subscriber, depending on, you know, what you do, where you advertise or whether you're using your time or buying advertisements based.
The different ways that you can increase that subscriber value, you said basically they boil down to either publish more if your show is monetize via advertisement or sell something. Is that kind of the gist of what you're putting forth? Well, I mean, and I think I've heard this on your show. You're either selling something for someone else, aka an ad, or you're selling your own stuff. Your margins are going to be higher on your own stuff.
So you're selling something somewhere along the line, even if you were trying to sell subscriptions to the show, which probably isn't going to work for most people. You're still selling the show. Then you got to have a pretty good, you know, pretty well-produced show with a decent sized audience on top of that. And I think a lot of people, when they're in the initial stages of starting a podcast, are not thinking of the business model.
Right. And that was something I was very keen on when I launched my show. I was running all the numbers, like, okay, how many, you know, downloads do I need to get in order to be able to do this? You know, I need to get to 10,000. That's the magic number to get into a network if I can achieve that. And so I had it kind of all mapped out. And I'm seeing a lot of people that have not, they just want to have a podcast. Yeah. Which is okay. There's nothing wrong.
You know, we could add a third category of this to hobby podcasts. None wrong with that. There's a lot of alternative reasons. Like, when I did this, we can travel for 11 years. We made zero dollars in 11 years. And we never tried. But what we did do was we got on stage as the keynote for like five different conferences. Yeah. And we got flown in the places around the world. And we didn't episode of this. We can travel on stage in front of a live audience.
We got to meet all sorts of people in the travel industry. So it peed off for us for the reasons we wanted to get into it. If that makes sense. Yeah. It was never about trying to monetize. But we all three of the, the mean to other co-hosts, I think it worked well for us while we were doing it. But we didn't make any money. And that was fine. It's okay. I want to go back to you've mentioned how you've considered actually selling something directly to your audience.
And it sounds like something that you might do in the future, but you haven't done quite yet. And I know for a fact that there's tons of growth show podcasters who have shows that are more aligned with the entertainment model over a marketing for a business like mine model. And so can you walk them through how they might consider what to sell? Because I get that question all the time. And I would just love to hear how you think it through.
Like if you were to say, okay, you know what next month I'm going to start to, I'm going to actually sell something directly to my audience that I can raise my revenue. How would you go about deciding what to sell? A lot of it depends on your niche. You could be in a very technical niche where you're doing something for accountants, let's say. And let's say you could publish the, so we're recording this in 2023.
And so in 2024, you're going to launch the accountants, whatever, whatever, Almanac, which is a summary of all these tips and things that all every account needs to know. Here are all the dates that are important. Here are all the facts and figures, whatever. Some sort of compendium and Almanac that you could sell every year. That would be very specific to that sort of audience. For my audience, one of the things I want to do is to just to sell travel.
Because of my background, and I talked about my previous travels all the time, and because of the nature of my show, I thought it would be a no-brainer to just have a tour that goes and explores some of the places that I've talked about in previous episodes. And we could do lectures while on the tour, we could do stuff on Zoom beforehand where we give some lectures. And I floated the idea, this was very early on in the show.
And I had like 100 people who were interested in doing a 10-day tour of Rome. And I was going to have 10 slots for it. And the show has grown so much since then that I don't think I can afford to take 10 days off for 10 people. Yeah. So now I'm thinking of renting a riverboat in Europe for like 50 to 100 people. And that changes the economics of it completely. And it simplifies it as well because I don't have to worry about hotels or anything like that.
So I want to talk to a river cruise company about potentially just renting a ship for a week. And then on board, we can do lectures and stuff and do a whole bunch of other things to create a unique experience for the listeners. So that is something I definitely want to do. It's just a lot of logistics involved. And I have to find a good partner because you can't just go buy a boat. The others, you know, I've had people that are wanting merchandise. I've never set up a store for anything.
I think a lot of people do that too quick. Yeah. I've waited until people have asking me for it. And so I have enough people now asking for it. So I think that'll happen. The issue with me is just I need help. My show is still a one man operation and doing the show every day is so time consuming. And that's obviously my top priority that I need someone to help develop a store. There's a big potential for books.
I write a script for every show that all gets published online in the form of a blog post. So I'm making revenue off it from there and the ad revenue I get from my website, just about covers my rent. So I got that taken care of, but I could reformat that into form of books. And the other thing I'm going to do, this is probably the highest thing in my party list. And this could potentially even dwarf what I'm doing right now in terms of revenue is to launch a YouTube channel.
Not a, oh, put your podcasts on YouTube type channel that they're talking about. This would be a proper YouTube channel with video using the voiceover from the episodes. Maybe I'll re-record it as the basis, but then doing a proper video. And given that I have over a thousand episodes done with scripts and everything else, that would be something I think that would be, that would have enormous potential.
And given all the studying I've done on the YouTube algorithm, I would think that with, if I was publishing one or two videos a day on the types of subjects that I do stuff on, doing something in the neighborhood of like, you know, I think I could get a million subscribers within say two to three years. Yeah, I think it's doable. Yeah, I just need to find help with that because video is another thing. And there's been all this talk about, oh, pivot to video. I am not a big fan of that.
If I do video, it's going to be a separate thing. I'm going to have a separate staff to do it. There will obviously be linkages with the podcasts, but the podcast will always come first. Because in no one ever talks about this, the CPMs on YouTube are horrible. Yeah, like a crappy podcast CPM is an amazing YouTube CPM. And an amazing podcast CPM doesn't exist on YouTube at all.
And kind of everyone forgets that because they just see public numbers on YouTube videos and they don't know what's going on. So I would actually use the channel as a way to get people into the podcast and use that as my call to action at the end. Yeah. Because I can make more money from the podcast subscriber than a YouTube subscriber. Right.
I think what to call out though for the podcast listener who again is like, I have an entertainment only show I'm trying to think of ways to generate revenue other than sponsorship. It was so valuable to hear you think through that. And I think the gist is like, you know, just think about what your audience has in common and what things they would want to buy. So your audience is super into just like learning about the world and, you know, travel.
And so thinking about a cruise or a bus trip or something like that is the first place to go, right? So I think a lot of podcasters could do events. It doesn't have to be a tour necessarily, but it could be a retreat. Yeah. Hey, we're going to spend three days at this resort. It's going to cost you this much money. These resorts are happy to do these kind of deals. You just guarantee, okay, we'll get X number of rooms. They give you a rate. You put in a margin on top of that.
And yeah, I've done events like this at like, you know, high end hotels that didn't influence or event before the pandemic. And again, depending on your audience, if it's just regular listeners or depending if it's a higher, you know, caliber of people for your particular niche, you could potentially get sponsors for the event. Yeah. Selling a book is never a bad idea.
Again, depending on the type of show, if you have a type of show, I see a lot of these these ideas pop up in the Facebook group about people saying, you know, my show is to help people who have suffered through this. Selling a book about that might, you know, be a pretty good idea. Here's my story, my journey of how I dealt with this. This is. People are looking for that kind of thing and it's something maybe more than you could do through a simple podcast episode.
But I think that the niche determines the products that you sell. And again, this is why you need to be thinking about show format and your business strategy, ideally, before you ever launched the show. Because in all these things I've talked about in terms of tours and YouTube channels and books, I had all that in mind before I ever did episode one. It's just my first priority was to grow the podcast to a point where it was making a significant amount of revenue through ads.
Then I could use that to fund all the other things that I want to do as I start hiring more people. Yeah, awesome. Yeah, we've covered a lot. Are there any other like blind spots or sort of FAQs that you feel like you're getting a lot from the community that you feel like listeners should hear? Everyone's been talking about pivoting to video and I just think video is a different thing than audio. You can, I mean, if you do an interview show, it is very easy.
Like what we're doing right now, this is very easy to put to YouTube. For what I do, it's very difficult because it's a scripted show. And watching me read it is like watching a video of somebody recording an audio book. It's not entertaining. We would need to make a video with like, you know, B-roll footage on top of it and historic photos and stuff like that. Animations, yes. But I've always thought the, everyone talking about, oh, you got to pivot to video. No one talks about the money.
And I think that's something you really have to look at that I've nothing against YouTube. There are many successful people with YouTube channels, but it's its own thing. And that's the thing you need to know. And it's going to be very different. And if you want to do video, by all means, launch a YouTube channel. But I don't think it's the same thing as a podcast. And there have been people that tried doing studies. They looked at like, here are the top podcasts in the world.
How do they do on video? And like 5% of them had successful YouTube channels. Maybe. Or if they did, it had nothing to do with the podcast. It was like some successful YouTuber that did this other thing and then they launched a podcast that was just totally different. Right. Like, it was a Jake Paul. Yep. Like his YouTube videos and then he has a podcast where he talks with his friends and has some guests. It's a very different thing.
And it always just seemed to me it's to be like, oh, you have a successful restaurant. Well, have you thought about farming? Just because they're both with food, right? Right. Right. They have some similarities to be sure, but they're just very different things. Yeah. And for me, the podcast will always be the first priority because I control it because the CPMs are better. You know, if I could launch a YouTube channel and one day it could just disappear.
Yeah. Because someone hacked it because YouTube decided to take it down because I don't own it or control it. And that is a huge problem. So that's why if and when I do launch a YouTube channel, it's going to be second to reach to the podcast always. What's funny about it is I think it's definitely easier for an interview show like this to post video, to repurpose and post on YouTube. But I actually think that your format though it would be harder to port it over would do better.
I would agree because like it's really easy to post on YouTube, but like people aren't watching our long interviews on YouTube as much, right? So it's kind of funny that even though it's easier, it's going to be harder to be successful. Whereas in your case, it's harder, but it'll be easier to be successful, I think. But I think that was the whole reason behind me doing a daily show. Yeah. It's harder, but in the end, I think it pays off. Harder up front. Yes. Hard now, easy later.
When I pitched my idea for my show to friends I had, I knew that I had successful podcasts. They all had the same reaction. One, this is a great idea, it will be a hit. Two, you're insane for doing this because this is too much work. That because everyone I knew and it wasn't a lot of people, but there were a few that tried doing daily podcasts. They all gave it up at like after a year because they just get burned out because the grind of doing it every day.
So far, I've managed to keep it up for three years and now I'm at a new point where like I said, I got to a million subscribers a month and I took a pause because getting to two million downloads of Unsold inventory meant nothing. I wanted to sell it the inventory and now that's happened. And so now I got cash coming in, we got revenue coming in. I can now afford to take my podcast promotion up to a higher level, start investing more into it and to really get the flywheel turning even faster.
So basically what you're saying is you intentionally haven't grown the show past a million because you have not yet filled up your advertising revenue. We have as of March, right. But before that, it wouldn't make sense to pay to grow the show if you weren't yet maximizing the ad revenue for where you currently were, right? Right. And it was also an issue of so I have new surroundings. You can see I got a brand new place. I got acoustic panels in the back. I've moved.
So in I and why I wanted to build up a war chest. I wanted to build up a cash reserve. And I was really kind of living on the seat of my pants for two years. So taking that pause, the show didn't shrink or anything. It's still growing at an organically slower rate. But yeah, it's put me in a financially better position business wise by kind of taking my foot off the gas for a few months.
And even though the audience hasn't grown, the revenues have gone up significantly for me over the last two, three months. Like yeah, dramatically. And that's been the biggest thing. How have you kept from being burnt out after three years? Like I got to think that's an active process. I've gotten to a point now where I can write a show in three hours where I have to think about it.
And that's really kind of, I wouldn't say it's hard, but I just need, so the show I did this morning, I woke up at 5 a.m. and it was a show that I was having problems thinking of, okay, what is the story going to be? And it was about a day on November 12th of 1833 that had the largest meteor shower ever recorded. And it occurred in the Southern United States. And if you've ever seen a shooting star, it's like, okay, it was like 50 shooting stars a second.
And this went on for like eight hours, right? And everyone was waking up and it was just like fireworks in the sky constantly. So I'm like, okay, that's an interesting fact. How do I tell the story? And then once I figured out, okay, this is how I'm going to tell it, then it was just a matter of typing. And I was able to do that, no problem in like three hours, 8 a.m. Little after, probably close to 830, I started recording it and it was out the door by nine.
And so I've gotten that system down to pretty much a science where I can write research, produce the shows in a very short period of time. And it only took me three years and a thousand episodes to get to that point. So yeah, so I've written well over two million words in the process of doing this. And it's not as onerous as it sounds. Like if you told people you could make tons of money for working three hours a day, most people would say, oh, that's pretty good.
And so the actual amount I spend producing each show is like three to four hours, I would say now. And then a lot of the other time is spent, I have to do more custom spots for advertisers now. So the network I'm with Glassbox Media has done a very good job of selling the show so far. You know, they'll come to me and it's like, okay, this advertiser, they're going to need three different spots this month, one for this week where they talk about this special, all this one, this one.
So I'll do all those. I'll do a couple different versions for them. There's a lot of that. I'm looking at hiring someone right now to do some of the video and promotional stuff that I've been mentioning. Hopefully to get a store out the door to sell merchandise. I've had a lot of demand for the completionist club, t-shirts and things like that and tours and other stuff. So it's kind of from a business standpoint, I would say, I'm kind of just starting right now. Right.
That the three years was building this base, building a successful show. Now I got revenue coming in and now I can kind of start taking it up to the next level, including just growing the show bigger. Because I think that I can easily tenx the show still. Yeah. Maybe not easily, but I can do it. You can, sure. Based on what I know other educational history type shows have done, I can do that. Incredible.
So 10 million downloads a month is not out of the question and it sounds like a lot, but it's a daily show. So it's definitely something I think I can do. Well Gary, this has been so valuable. Thank you so much as always for the time. Do you want to send anybody anywhere? If someone wants to check out the show, remind them how they can find it and what it's called. So everything everywhere daily and you learn something new every single day, things that you didn't even know that you didn't know.
And literally the topics cover everything. Mathematics, geography, history, science, you name it. Awesome. Gary, always a friend of the show. Thank you so much for coming back on Grow the Show. Thanks for having me. This episode of Grow the Show was produced by me and Jeremy Grader. Post production and social media content was provided by podcast boutique, who is my top recommendation for editing, post production and social media services.
If you want to make your show sound more professional and have awesome short form videos and more from your podcast content, you can learn more about podcast boutique by going to podcast boutique.com or by clicking the link in the show notes. For Grow the Show, my name is Kevin Schmidtland. I'll see you next time.