and ass on its logo. Ass being real, right?
A mule is a cross between a horse and an axe.
So we haven't earned enough money to ride horses yet. So we are still riding on asses. Asses. Alright.
Ases. Alright. And just yours and my asses right now. But anyway, so we worked our asses off and then we took a week.
Hello and welcome to the Metacast podcast. It's a podcast about us, meaning me, your host, Elie Bistelov, and my co-host, Arden Abdeka, building a company. And on this podcast, we talk about the process, how we do this, our insights. We are essentially doing this in public. We are sharing a lot more than other people would. And we hope that will help us attract some following and make it easier for us to promote our podcast app when it comes out. You see, we are very transparent.
Alright, so before we jump into everything else, what are we going to talk about today, Ilya?
We are going to give a bit of an update on what's going on. And we also need to mention at least one thing we're improving during this recording, because that's the goal we set.
We always try to.
Yep, not always succeed, but always try to. And we are going to talk about the book that we published about three weeks ago. We are going to let you behind the covers and talk about the process, how it all went, what software we used, what was the process, and how we are trying to promote it now and what's working and what's not working, mostly not working at this point.
Alright, sounds good. By the way, do you know that today is a special episode? 33? No, it's the first time we can actually talk about current affairs and weather and all that, and it makes sense because we're recording it the day before this episode goes live.
Oh, that's right, because we are so... what's the right word for this? Well, we failed to record last week. I guess that's not the right way to say this. That's why we are doing this on Tuesday, just before the episode comes out.
on Wednesday. Yeah, yeah. So let's jump into the updates because this is one of the updates, right? Ilya and I took a bit of a relaxed week last week. Ilya had his like kids starting school again and all that and I took a week off just before summer break ends. And before that we worked our asses off. Mark is explicit done for the episode. Sorry.
I didn't know you had an ass like an animal. So can we go on a tangent? So we were at Naples this Saturday, which is a city on the Mexican Gulf side of Florida. It has a coffee shop called Badass. And it has an ass on its logo as being the mule, right?
And now, complICe, to see
So we haven't earned enough money to ride horses yet. So yeah, it's still riding on asses. Asses. All right. Yeah.
Ases. Alright. Yeah. And just yours and my asses right now. Exactly. But anyway, so we worked our asses off and then we took a week break while listening to like our feedback and all that. Yeah, we onboarded a few users. They're using it, getting some good feedback. We launched the first three of them.
We launched our private beta on Monday last week, which was August 21st. It will go down in history as the day we sent the first email to about 10 users and gave them access to the app, which was actually, I think I was so tired. I didn't feel much.
And I was on a ferry already by the time you sent it. Off to Vancouver Island. But yeah, so because we took that breather at a week off and we were thinking that we'll record while I'm in Vancouver Island, but that probably wasn't a good idea anyway. So here we are recording the day before the episode comes out tomorrow. Yes.
Yes, which means I'll have to produce this episode myself. I can't outsource it. There's just not enough time. So we'll see how it comes out. One thing I think we should mention is we have been driving people more towards our newsletter, because what we are seeing with podcasts, podcasts don't promote themselves. No app, no Spotify or Apple would show our podcast to new people. So we need to somehow get people into the podcast to let people know about that podcast
even exists. And I've been pretty frustrated with social media in general more recently, because I don't understand how their algorithms work. It's pretty chaotic and they keep changing them and you never know what's going to resonate with algorithms. So you start writing for
algorithms as opposed to writing for the people. So one thing that we've changed over the last couple of weeks, we've repositioned our newsletter from being just a weekly update that, hey, there's a new episode into here are the things from behind the scenes from last week or so, where I write up three to five topics with insights about what's been going on, how it went, and what we personally learned from there, which I think resonates a lot more. We started to get
a lot more views on those newsletters. A bunch of people signed up. I think we almost doubled our subscription base. So we encourage everybody to subscribe to that. If you're listening to this but haven't subscribed yet, go to metacastpodcast.com and just enter your email.
We almost doubled our subscription base. And at some point, Ilya will just stop posting stuff on LinkedIn and Instagram and all that and just do it on the newsletter.
Once you have 5 million subscribers on the newsletter, yes, maybe we can.
Right now I see that you are experimenting a lot right with the formats, the timing and all that and see what works. It's unfortunately very chaotic and random.
Yeah, but now I'm thinking about LinkedIn as more of a top of a funnel channel for us. And I'm thinking about Instagram and TikTok more as sort of brand exposure because I don't think any subscribers or any listeners come from those mediums. But there's a lot.
But there's a lot of likes and shares on those things.
Exactly. Lots of likes, I would say lots of shares, but lots of likes and lots of views. So we will just stick our logo at the top. It's like a billboard. Whereas I think newsletter is where we really want to collect our audience, if it makes sense, on our own terms. So that, you know, we are not dependent on an algorithm that will decide that this email we will show to you versus not. So, yeah, that's the thing. That's the thing. That's the thing. That's the thing.
Okay, all right. I think you also wanted to talk about people's perception of what we're building versus what we're building.
I was just talking to a friend an hour ago, some good insights, I guess, too early to share in behind the scenes. We'll talk about that afterwards. But one thing he said is like, so you know, building this podcast for podcasters, right? No, we're building a podcast listening app, not a podcast for podcasters. And I think maybe those experiments that I've been doing haphazardly with content, they might've created this perception because a
lot of that was about driving people to the podcast. You're trying to entice people to subscribe to the podcast. And I guess people don't read everything that you write. They read, you know, the jump content and it creates a wrong perception.
People read almost nothing and that's totally normal.
Exactly, yes. Which means we probably need to be more intentional about how we communicate.
When you say branding, I think that's another challenge that we'll have is how do we differentiate the app from the podcast because both are named Metacast right now and we're just like trying out all these things right now. But yeah, that's I think another thing we'll have to figure out.
Yes, yeah. I think for now on the video side, because that's where we have the branding kind of concern because we have a lot of views on TikTok, for example, or YouTube shorts. And these are clips from our own podcast with the Metacast brand slapped on them. I think eventually when we have the app, we should just say that we should basically use those clips as an ad for the app. We could write something about the app there. I think for
now we can just stick our brand name. Yeah, we'll see. Those last clips from Corey Queen podcast from the 32nd podcast from last episode, they performed really, really well on YouTube shorts, which was surprising.
Did you say 9 hours? I was obviously like not paying full attention. I was on a trip but I think you said 9 hours listened or watched or something like that?
Maybe more by now, but there were 1400 views. And it's like a 28 second clip. And there was a very high rate of people actually finishing it, which was...
Which is good! Shall we get on with the entree of the day? Yeah, I'm hungry. Now that we've talked about we are building the app and we're doing the podcast obviously, you're doing the newsletter. In addition, because Ilya has a lot of free time, he also wrote a book. It's called The Pragmatic Podcaster. I finished it in about 3 and a half days. It was awesome while I got it on Kindle.
I don't usually read on Kindle. I like to listen to audiobooks more and I was actually thinking wouldn't it be awesome to hear this book by Ilya. Like Ilya narrating it on Audible someday. But I think, yeah, before we get there, he said okay let me whip up my Kindle. I'm on vacation anyway. So I read it. It was very engaging. I left a review also on Amazon. But I'll quickly say what I liked most was that it wasn't just the technical parts.
It was very motivating and inspiring. And some of the quotes, like every once in a while you'll pull in a quote that would resonate with me a lot. And it gave me the, like yes, this is exactly like pragmatic that you're talking about. So yeah, I loved it. I wish this was the book I had when we were starting. But thankfully you were there in person to guide me through the steps.
Yeah, basically this book is just a download of everything that I know and what we've learned from the people we had on the show, which became what I know from them.
But also your two previous podcasts and you have done some more audio like other types of audio, not just podcasts. So it's a synthesis of all of that information.
I think the first time I did production for music was in 2001, maybe 2000 even, because when I got my first guitar, I immediately started recording and then learning all of that by doing. Producing for podcasts is different, but also similar in many ways because it's
the same kind of technology you're dealing with. The reason why we wanted to do this initially, the hypothesis is that we can sell some books and have a revenue stream while we are building the app because right now we have not made any money from the app because it's not released yet. So that's why we published the book. We also created the
t-shirts, which nobody is buying yet because we have... Those who wanted to buy them already bought them and our audience has not been growing as fast to increase the pool of people who can buy merch. But the book, we thought that it's a very wide range of people who can discover the book, pay us $9.99. We get about $5 from that amount as a royalty from Amazon and that would help us bootstrap our business while we are working on technology. That's the origin of how we started this.
While we were doing the app already and the podcast, why did you also decide to write the book? Like at that time and not say like long time after.
That's because the reason was that we wanted to get some money sooner. And I also had more time on my hands because it was before we installed all of the coding stuff on my computer. And I was in this stage where I'm like, I don't feel like I'm contributing enough anyway. So let me just try to use that time. Yeah, use it use the time.
Just try doing that. Use the time. We'll talk about your process a little bit later. We'll also talk about the ad campaign and what you're doing with that. Again, experiments there. But before all that, what is the book about?
It is about launching a podcast. The title is The Pragmatic Podcaster, and the subtitle is A Step-by-Step Guide to Launching an Amazing Podcast.
What I loved is you have thought through every freaking thing that could come up when you think about launching a pod.
Right, except one thing which I realised later on is like when do you mark your podcast as explicit? That's the only thing.
We can add that as an addendum. It's a good topic because we have debated over it a few times, right? Is this explicit or not? Yeah, it's a bit subjective, I guess also, based on the creator.
But there are some things that are objective, like if you talk about like sex or violence or suicide. Oh, gosh. We just made it explicit. Because we don't talk about suicide, we just mentioned the word. If you discuss these topics, that makes the podcast episode explicit. Because you don't want younger audiences to hear about this. I guess now we just mentioned this in this educational context. I think it's fine.
See, this is a perfect example to go into your book as a new chapter or something like that. But apart from that, like, from scheduling, yes, how to send out emails so that you have a higher rate of success of response. And you have got a lot of success so far, right, from big names saying, yes, yes, let's do it. So that there is a lot of experience there already.
You've just signed up, one more big name.
Yep, yep, that's we're recording September 20th. Yeah, he's very big.
Yeah, he's a very big name professor. Can you teach entrepreneurship? I think will be one of the primary topics we will discuss. It's going to be very interesting.
Yeah, yeah. And the technical stuff, right? How do you choose a mic? How do you do post-production? After that, what do you do? All of that. But also, what you have given is for your budget and your time. So throughout the book, in every chapter, what I really liked is, see, like, you could spend two days doing this, or you could spend half an hour. And this is what you'll get if you spend half an hour, this is what you'll get if you spend two days on it. And it's up to you.
That's where the pragmatic part comes in.
Exactly. And that's what I really liked because it's for like multiple audiences and based on how much time the person who is creating the podcast has, they can figure out which route to go through. Yeah, I should think about...
I think about it as less of a multiple audiences question, but more as how do you start with the most minimal things you can? And then you grow from there. You sort of start with the base and then you pile up other things. And some people like me, for example, when I first started, I'm like, I'm gonna make it freaking perfect. Perfect. Perfect right away. And that's why it took me like three months to publish the first episode.
That was actually my favorite quote from the book. I already knew the quote, but the way you placed it, and I think you've done it in multiple places, is like, perfect is the enemy of done. It's not just the podcast. Why it resonated with me more is my last 15 years, I've been working at big companies, where especially when you launch to like external customers, millions of people in case of AWS, right? It has to be pretty much perfect in a lot of ways.
From the technology and security perspective, not UX perspective as the first one has shown.
But reliability, scalability and all, it has to be perfect. Otherwise it erodes the brand name of AWS. Right. Whereas now with the app, we're making these decisions every day. No, it doesn't, like, we don't need to do this. We don't need to do that right now. And it's almost like in the back of my head, before jumping into this, I knew that we'd have to do that. But now I'm living it day by day and I'm really enjoying and that's why this quote that perfect is the enemy of them resonates with me
a lot. And I love how you use that to tell the user or guide the reader that this is why, forget about it, we can do this later. Perfect example, the name for your podcast. And I was surprised when I read it first, but later on I thought, yeah, it makes sense. Because what you said is pick a name. These are the guidelines, right? Make it unique and all that, but don't think too much about it. You can change it always.
Yes. The cool thing about the podcast is that you can always change it later. Unlike, let's say, books. And we can talk about the process a bit later. But once it's out there, you're starting to build some brand equity. Well, I guess it's true for the podcast as well. But with the book, the important thing there is that there is a gatekeeper like Amazon. So they are that Cerberus dog at the entrance of that kingdom of books. And every time you submit a change,
you have to format in a specific way. They do the review. So it's a lot of overhead that goes into the process. Whereas with podcasts, the way they are distributed, and by the way, I also describe this in the book, because I'm like, actually, there are really people who are technically inclined. Why not just spend two pages and tell them how it's democratized? How podcasts are just files on the internet that are downloaded by your podcast app. It's no more than that.
It's like a webpage. You can just update it anytime you want. And then next time somebody listens to this, they will hear a different thing or see different name and all that, or see different cover. And the first few episodes, like nobody's going to listen to those anyway, unless you're already a big name. But also if you're already a big name, you can just use your name as the name of the podcast.
Or somebody might come back after you have done a lot of episodes and become like big. Come back and listen but that's okay. That's going to be a handful of people.
Yes, actually, that reminds me of our fourth episode with Jake and Jonathan. Yeah, so their episode, their broadcast was initially called the Product Breakfast Club. That's how it was called when I discovered them. Then they renamed to Jake and Jonathan just on a whim.
And Jonathan. We talk about that in our episode 4.
Yeah. It felt weird to me when I first listened to this, but after a couple of episodes, I'm like, okay, I guess it's just called Jake and Jonathan now. All of these things, they don't matter. What matters is what you have to say.
After you told me about it, I didn't feel that transition at all because I started later. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I didn't see that at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so half of the book is technical. What kind of mic, post-processing, what kind of tools, how do you use those tools effectively, all of that, hosting, publishing and all that. You go into the RSS spec a little bit and all that.
The interesting thing about the technical bits, by the way, is that none of them are complex. Even post-production, for somebody who's never done audio, it might feel like, oh my God, I don't even want to deal with this. It's too complex. But if you break this all down into small parts, they are pretty simple. You need to pull them all into a system. That's what I tried to do with the book. I was listening to Guy Raz this morning, how I built this podcast.
And it's not just the sound, it's all the music of the interplay, the narrative. It's almost, it's an interview but it's also like a narrative show.
Exactly. And just how he manages the conversation, it is just so good. And I'm like, if I wanted to achieve the same level from the get go, I would have never launched this podcast. It's still, we are what, 33 episodes in? We are still not there yet. And we may actually never be there. And this is where the perfect is the enemy of done comes in. Like do the minimal technical part, get it out, and then improve one thing at a time. Every time you release new episode. Yeah.
Yeah, yep. And the other half of the book, so this is what I connected with more. So here's what I'll say. The technical parts, if I was starting a podcast on my own, I think that would be the biggest hurdle for me is the post-production, especially the audio, right? And this part, thankfully you do it, so I still
don't and I don't understand most of it anyway. But reading the book gave me a great overview of what am I looking for at least at the very least, like what tools, in those tools, what do I do, what are the steps and all that. And I think if I were to start a podcast, at least I have a grounded base
from where to start. Because without that, I would just maybe discover some automatic podcast editing tool or something like that and just go with it because I wouldn't know better or how to do it better, even if I were to spend like maybe just 15 minutes more.
Yeah, when I was doing my first degree back 15 years ago, almost 20 years ago, we had a professor who was teaching theory of probability, kind of statistics and all that stuff. And he was a dean as well, you know, the head of the faculty. He said that we are not teaching you anything. We are teaching you to learn. You're learning to learn. That's how he positioned
the whole education. And I think it took me some time to actually figure out what he meant because when you're 18 years old, you expect to be just spoon fed stuff, right? But almost 20 years later, sometimes I have this thing like, I know what it is. I heard about it. So they gave me the map and then I can use that map to just go and read more about this. I don't remember what they taught us 20 years ago, but I know this thing exists.
And also if, let's say I work with other people and I have to manage them, right? I understand what they do on a high level. And I think it's the same thing maybe for you with the post-production thing. Like you don't do it, but you probably have much more appreciation to what is being done, what you don't see. And let's say if I were to get sick or something and you had to work with the contractor to post-produce this, you would at least know what they're doing. What to expect.
It's not a black box anymore.
And I could give actually useful feedback about like how this part is working or this part is not working.
You got to make the compressor a bit more...
But I think drawing a parallel, I think what you said also, I see that in my experience with programming. In the beginning, when I would learn something, I want to call this the bottom-up approach. I would learn how to write a function in that language, how to declare a variable, and that sort of like nitty-gritty details. And there. Now, when I get exposed to a new language
or something entirely new, I don't even think about those things anymore. Because it's the more and more of this you do, the easier it gets, because you know that there are only a few ways of writing a function. Yes, the syntax is going to be a bit different, but you'll get used to it in a couple of days.
Do you think you could use Duolingo to learn programming language? It's interesting.
My gut says the bite-sized education thing is probably not suitable for a language, especially in the beginning. But then again, if you're learning an entirely new language, my gut would have said the same thing. That it's not possible to do it in these bite-sized, five minutes everyday kind of thing. I think maybe it gets easier if you know a few languages and you want to learn a new one. That kind of format might work really well.
But I think when people jump into programming the very first time, it's almost like it's all colors on the screen. One of the first reactions I get from people who don't know anything about programming and they see my ID is how colorful it is. How many colors are there?
For more information on the Metacast app, visit www.metacastinc.com
Yes, so if you start from there, I think the bite-size format might not work in the beginning. But maybe after that, yeah.
And I think it's post-production that's similar as in you can't just do something. You have to understand the fundamentals. Like you need to understand what the waveform is, what the track is, what volume is, how you can mute it, and how you make those basic things. So what I was trying to do and what I did in the book is I basically stripped out all of the non-essential things. What is the absolute minimum you have to do to do the basic edits? And this is three pages of text,
essentially. It's three or four different things. It's very little. One of the things that inspired me was that when we were doing an interview with Guang and Ronak, our episode 14, I believe, Soft from Mr. Ventures, when they said that they spent too much time post-producing. And they also use Audacity, which is the free tool. So I have half a page on Audacity in the book as well. I downloaded it. And I'm like, just how bad is it? Compared to, maybe I just don't know how to use it
well enough, but no, compared to Reaper. Reaper is something that you have to pay for. Just 60 bucks. It's like the grand scheme of things, it's nothing. If you can even use it for free, I don't think they will force you to pay. You will start to violate the terms of service after 60 days. But I think for 60 days, you can use it for, I think 60 days, you can use it for free, under free trial. It has no limits. Justin Frankel in our episode 16 actually talked about that.
He's the creator of Reaper. He said it's too much hustle to introduce limits. You can just use it for free, essentially, if you want to. It's just not be ethical and karma will bite you back in the ass if you do it. But yeah, anyway. But the tool is just so much more powerful than Audacity. And also then GarageBand that Brian McCauley is using, just our second episode. When I was playing with those tools, I'm like, Oh my God, these guys, they could have sped up their workflow by maybe a
factor of 1.5x. If they learned two or three keyboard shortcuts in Reaper and bought a good mouse and that would be just like it. And I think people try to do a lot of it with free software and post-production is one of those things where you can do a lot with free, but you will spend a lot more time. Yeah. Then this is also
From The Pragmatic Podcaster pt. 1 Yeah, and this is also the sort of stuff that once you get used to a tool, even if you're inefficient, you're unlikely to change to another tool because there is a learning curve to the new tool.
This is a very good point. I think the same applies to ideas. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And what I also liked is, again, like I said, I had no understanding of any of this before the book. Once I read it, I don't think I could go and without the book, I could go and do it right now. So I don't have that level of expertise, obviously. But I think once you start doing it, you also start to see how you could do it in Audacity or in Logic Pro or in these other tools.
You know what you're trying for or what to Google for if you want to do the same thing in Logic Pro. Because right now, if I were to start, I wouldn't even know what to search for if I want to do this in Audacity.
That's actually a very good point because you can hear this sound, let's say like when you slice your audio and another clipping, clipping sound. It's like when you slice in the middle of sound, it creates this sound that I just made will probably be actually cut out by the thing that I use to post produce. You don't know what it's called. What are you going to type in Google, right? And I remember when I first started, first of all, there was no Google.
kolle b Ricardo St identified as A.uation of a journey through signs,
2001 there was Google but it was not like it is today. You couldn't just watch YouTube tutorial. By the way, one thing I did not attempt to do in the book is to explain everything because I think a book is not the right medium for teaching you how to do compression, for example.
For more information on Metacast, visit www.metacast.com
The first thing is you have to hear it. And it's very difficult to explain what you're supposed to hear if you actually don't hear it. I faced it recently with some of the Google help pages where they don't have any screenshots. And then like you like go here, you go there, you click there. And they're like five or six different steps. I can't remember any of them. I have to go back and forth. Whereas if you had a screenshot or a video, I would have just immediately got it like in 30 seconds. And that's the same point.
That's the same point I make in the book explicitly and intentionally is go and look up compression when you're ready to get to the next level. Go and look up this, go and look up that. I think eventually we should create our own videos so we can refer people to our own stuff. But until we have that, there is lots and lots of content that will teach you. But the thing that you said, but how do you discover that what you need is compression or what you need is EQ or what you need is reverb if you don't even know the term reverb.
Yeah, and you made it very simple in the book explaining these things in a sentence or two. The overall the whole book is very easy to read right that's why I finished it in three days. This is why I don't read physical books is in audio I can progress much faster. Right, I don't know it's just my the way I consume information in audio I can like probably finish the same book in two three days but if I read it on kindle it'll take me over easily three four weeks.
Right. Yeah, this is why it was very engaging like quick like chapters one or two page and I felt like kindle also shows you what percentage you're on and I would turn the page a few times and I'm like okay great 20% done already it's awesome yeah anyway okay so the other half of the book and I think this is the part that resonated with me a lot more because I understand those things more is the non-technical stuff. Are there any highlights you want to talk about in that space?
Yeah, I think one of the most important things for us and the things actually that we've been successful at and I was successful at it in my previous podcast is sourcing guests. Is like working up that guest ladder as we actually I think you came up with that term. Or maybe Brian McCullough came up with that term.
Ryan McCullough, baby, yeah.
It's basically like you don't start asking even mask for an interview, right? Actually there was somebody on LinkedIn, somebody I know. He's like, I want to start a podcast. I want my first guest to be Lex Friedman. Can somebody introduce me to him? I followed up with him afterwards. I'm like, were you able to get Lex? He's like, no, no, couldn't get to him. Right. Right. Which is totally understandable.
Like when nobody knows you, it's, it's very hard, but when you're Lex Friedman, you have these pictures on Instagram where you are like Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman celebrating your birthday. Yeah. And then the next picture is like Lex with Elon Musk. It's taken him probably eight years, 10 years to get where he is right now. So it takes time. It takes time to build up that thing. And there is no overnight success.
Yes. I think one of the highlights that in the book that I'm sharing is like, how do you actually engage those people, those higher profile people? How do you write emails to them? Even now, sometimes I get messages like somebody wrote to me like, Oh, like, can you tell me more about your, your startup? My first reaction is like, what do you want to know? I mean, that's my response to him. Like, can I, can you be more specific? But my, but behind my head, right? Like, who are you?
I, why am I supposed to respond to your message at all? And also tell you about my startup. It just doesn't make sense. Right. Right. I don't know who you are. The same thing applies in cold emails. Like when you write to somebody, you can just like straight away, ask them for stuff. But at the same time, you have to sort of ask them for stuff right away. Otherwise they don't know what you're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. And this is.
Celebrating your birthday! They will just dismiss it if it's not clear.
Exactly. And this is this balance, right? Where I guess we can talk about it now. Like whenever I write an email to somebody or a message, I always start with a TLDR so that people know what exactly it is they are reading. And the TLDR is like straight to the point, like I'm a host of this podcast, we would like to invite you to talk about X, Y, and Z. And then long story below.
I also really like the part about building the connection because we receive some cold emails nowadays right saying they're all gold trash but they go with oh I love your Metacast podcast if you want to do something like this and then the first few I think I talked to you about it and you replied immediately saying which episode did you like and there's no reply right and that shows that it's just fluff it's an attempt at a cold outreach email but they haven't actually listened to anything.
Gold and Trash. Gold and Trash. Gold and Trash.
Yeah, actually, like the next guest that we are having our podcast, he was a professor of mine at Wharton. So, but it's been almost 10 years since. I'm almost positive he doesn't remember me. Maybe he'll remember my face when he sees me, but like, we haven't talked for eight years at this point. And we haven't really been like close. I was just a student of his. So even then, when I reached out to him, I'm like, yeah, like, I'm just I'm your former student, etc, etc. But I am also like a user of your product, because he created a very cool scooter, which I write.
And I also mentioned a few stories that he told us in class, which I mean, I clearly remember. So there is like nothing manipulative there. But there is in a sense, because I know that these stories that I recite back to him, he will resonate with that. So that it's kind of a hook, right? So when you write emails, you have to be authentic, but you also have to be very intentional about what you're talking about. Genuine. Genuine. And I think specificity is very important.
Because specificity is what makes you believable.
Yes, credibility. Yeah, it had said credibility. Okay, so where can people buy this book?
Yeah, we've been for half an hour telling people how great the book is. Right now it's published in two places. We have it on GammaRoad at the www.pragmaticpodcaster.com. It's a domain that will get you to GammaRoad, which is a self-publishing platform for any kind of electronic content. You can buy it there for $9.99 at this point.
But I think yesterday we were doing an experiment where you give us anything you like. I don't know where we left off.
Peter Livington Bfollowed by off wipe Peter Livington Bfollowed by Peter Livington Bfollowed by Peter Livington Bfollowed by Peter Livington Bfollowed by
Amazon and The Pragmatic Podcaster pt. 1 I think that's probably why the hardcover prices of anything is like way more more than twice the paperback usually.
Yeah, but it also feels so much nicer. I got it like a trial sample thing, which has not for resale all over the cover. So I can't just order a bunch of them and resale them. So that one costs 750 that I paid to Amazon just for production cost. I think production cost is 750. And then I also paid three bucks for shipping. So it ended up costing me 10 bucks, like no markup. Yeah. Okay. So this is why it's important. If you want to support us and buy a book,
if you buy a more expensive one, it doesn't mean you support us more. Just if you get the cheapest one or the most expensive one, we still get our five bucks. So if you just support us, get the cheapest one. Yeah.
OK, so if you get... We still get our 5-bucks. If you like Kindle, get it on Kindle, otherwise get the paper back.
Yeah, get the paper back. Hardcover is just there. You know, you always have to have like three price points so people choose the middle one.
And I think if you get it and you read it, please leave an honest review of what you thought about it. That would help us the most. And if you can, copy-paste the same review into Gumroad as well as Amazon. Gumroad doesn't support reviews. Where did I leave a... I left a review somewhere, no? On Amazon. Wasn't there a rating or something I did on Gumroad? So on Gumroad you can leave a rating but not a rating. Oh, rating but no reviews, yes.
From Metacast Inc.
Okay, so we are 48 minutes in.
of a half an hour episode. So Arnab, let's do this. Let's split this into two-part episode. So this will be the end of the episode, 33 part one. And next week we'll have the part two where we will talk about the process.
The Behind the Covers of The Behind the Covers.
Yes, the process, I guess actually the more interesting stuff. Because this episode was mostly around how great it all is and how we think about the content. Next episode will be more around how you should write a book.
And your experience writing a book, promoting the book, ads and all of those things.
Exactly, yeah, a sample of one.
Okay, see you next week! See you!