Why You Should Start A Podcast For Your Business (Before It’s Too Late)

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode102

Whoa. You're listening to the six figure own studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio. Now your host, Brian Hood and Chris Graham. Welcome back to another episode

of the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood and I'm here with my bald, beautiful, amazing purple shirted and now you have a sweatshirt on because the seasons are changing. Christopher J. Graham,

how are you doing buddy? Hey Brian. I'm so good man. How are you?

I'm fine. Me and my wife is out of town. She's like in nymphos with her friend for like some concert or something. And so did you say concert? Yeah, I do it. Any husband does when their wife has gone and that is I sleep in, I skipped the gym. I eat terribly and I stay up late playing video games.

Well, I have some fun banter today. You have fun banter, fun banter. Anyone that listens to the podcast, it's like, Oh shit, here we go. How far do I have to skip to get to the actual content is episode. This is cool. This is relevant to our industry. So earlier this week my wife and I decided to splurge and buy the fancy tickets for our favorite band, bony bear, and they played it. The shot and staying to Ron Ivor dude, Bon Bon Iver, you, you freaking Freaker Freaker. I thought you're going to call me a scoundrel. You scoundrel. It's bony bear. It's French for a good winter case. You didn't know true fans. Anyways, he came to Columbus, Ohio and he played it the shot and seen arena, which is like the biggest place you can play in Columbus,

but I'm just going to stop you right there real quick. You just had and they put my glasses down a mm. Actually the moment with this stupid band. Go ahead.

It's true. I acknowledge that. That was my inner mastering engineer coming out. Anyways, here's the story. We got 14th road dead center. I can't wait,

so you somehow bring this back to our audience. There's no way this is going to happen, but we go ahead. I'm impressed. I'm just going to, I'm going to humor you here, listeners right now, we've got thousands of people listening to this story that will never make a point to our audience, but give Chris a damn chance cause there's like a one in 30 chance. He'll make a point here. Go ahead.

Okay, so when you usually go to a concert, it's a really loud PA system in mono. It's not even stereo that is,

no, not all concerts I've been to, but occasionally, yes.

But yeah, so Bonnie bear went big man and they hired this company who makes a PA system called the Lisa L. dash. I. S. Y. It was a 7.1 surround sound concert in a freaking basketball arena and it was the best concert I've ever been to in my life. It felt like I was wearing headphones, which as you guys all know, I like headphones a lot.

You are not just a gear slut. You're a headphone slot.

Yes I am. So let me explain a little more. There were so many line of of speakers and when any musician on the stage there, six guys on the stage, when any of them made any noise, it localized to that part of the stage from the PA system and it was, they must've had like Mike's at the front of the stage too because any movement they made sounded like you were six feet away from them. It was freaking incredible. And this is exciting because it brings live sound a little bit closer to the recording studio because it sounded like the record because it was in full glorious stereo and then some, it was so fun and the sound guys that put this on true artists, man, it was so impressive. Well that is amazing. Yeah. If you guys get a chance to go see Boniva air or if you guys get a chance to go see any concert with Elisa system, you're going to want to do that. It is very different than a traditional concert.

Well that sounds fun, man. I saw the photos and they looked amazing, so I'm glad you had fun.

Yeah, we had so much fun. The lights alone. It was the best light set up I've ever seen in my life. Their lighting director is also a genius and it was like being in a spaceship and unbelievable. Anyways, I just thought this was so cool because concerts are usually mono and loud and that's pretty much the extent of it and in my opinion, that's not like we're better than that. You know,

there like a live sound, loudness war that's like I, anytime I go to a concert live concert, I have to bring earplugs or out. Me too. I can't mix this week because my ears are gonna ring all week.

Yeah, I didn't have that issue. I, you know, I had really, really nice earplugs, but I wasn't, I didn't feel overwhelmed by the volume and that's kind of the thing, like the better something sounds, the less loud it needs to be. To sound really, really loud. That's great. I will say this,

I was still right. This is the 29 out of 30 times that you swing and you miss. We have maybe 1% 1% of our audience does live lighting and maybe 3% of our audience does live sound and the rest of us are just like,

cool story man. Well here's my point. Oh, if you are a professional studio guy, I've never really been into concerts because I've just been like, eh, loud, it hurts my ears. It's not in stereo. This sounds terrible compared to the record cause it's in mono. This was not that. And it's so exciting to see this glimpse of like, I'll go to concerts now if there's a Lisa system, I'll go if I reasonably like the artist just because it was so interesting. Can you explain to me how you, well, how did you figure out it was something called the Lesa system? Well, this was funny. I walked in the front door of the venue and one of my best friends walked in a different door at the same time and he was like, yeah, they got this Lisa system. And I was like, okay, whatever. And then we walked into the concert hall and it was like, Oh yeah, this is something really different than anything I've ever heard because I'm having a hard

like comprehending how I'm hearing so much and it's so wide. So I Googled it. I'm going to move on because no one listening, including myself, has experienced any of this. And so this is all irrelevant to us. I want to say, here's my story, here's my banter, and it takes about four seconds. Good. I hit level 50 on borderlands three on my character last night. That's what I did. And you're giving me crap for talking about stuff that's within our industry. Took me five seconds to say that that's more of a waste of time than anything I've ever said. All right, we're gonna move into a, hopefully something a little more valuable than that meandering story or my worthless story, but mine at least took five seconds. Indeed. But before we get into today's topic, we're going to talk about today's show sponsors. Oh, now really, we don't actually have show sponsors.

We always just have this segment in here because we like to, Chris and I have two other apps that are incredibly helpful to our audience because they save us both time and frustration. Chris has this app. If you go to bounce butler.com you can actually get it for free. He has a free open beta period right now. That should be going on for the foreseeable future. But let me tell you why you need this, why it's relevant to you and why this matters and why this saves you time. This thing. Um, if you do a lot of work, you have to bounce down a lot of files. This is just the, the nature of the game. If you're doing a sound design, if you're doing voice over work, even our podcast, if you're doing albums or singles or mastering or mixing or anything, anything with a lot of files, you have to do a lot of bouncing and pro tools or Cubase or logic or whatever other dog you're using.

You have to sit there. Why the dog processes the audio. If it's all pro tools, it's even in real time. So every single time you have to bounce something down, you are sitting there waiting for it to happen and then you have to select the next track and then you have to bounce that file down and then the next track and then bounce that song down and so on and so forth until you're done. This takes longer to do than it just took me to describe the problem because it's that annoying. So especially when you have 2030 40 tracks to bounce vocal up version, vocal down version, instrumental versions, all of these things, it just takes time. And even if you have an intern that's a headache to manage. If you have an assistant, you're paying that assistant to do this for you, no matter how you slice it.

This is a problem, especially for the busiest dentists. This is what bounce Butler solves. It would allow you to simply, it's like many, many, many, many sessions, however many you want. How many, what's the most? Somebody selected in one go that you've seen over a hundred over a hundred sessions and it will bounce them one after another after another and smart enough to know that if pro tools crashes, which it does, it will say, okay, you crash, let's open it back up and try to actually bounce it again. It'll do that over and over again until it either decides to give up or until protos cooperates. And then when it is done bouncing all 100 sessions, it will text you to let you know it's done bouncing. This is safe. Some people dozens of hours a month. And if you are a busy person, this is highly relevant to you are a very good friend lid Shaw of the recording studio rockstars podcast, which you guys should definitely go check out.

Used it to prep a of podcasts last week and he set it up at four o'clock with a ton of episodes and it finished like sometime after midnight that night. Just kept going and going and going. He's one of those savages that does in real time though, like Oh yeah, yeah, so it was like his episodes are an hour long. It's actually mentioned the story at the end of a one of our previous episodes, episode 100 Oh cool. They've heard this before. You didn't know I did that. Well, thanks man. So now we're going to go to my app, which is file past.com my turn to pitch. Well, here's the problem with this Chris, let me pitch your product. Brian, I've been reading a book on positioning right now and so I want to, I'm going to try to position this differently than you would otherwise. I'm all about you pitching my product file past.com is a collaboration tool for you to work with your clients.

And here's the problem. When you're doing revisions with a client, you are bouncing songs down and you're sending them to the client, whether it's through Dropbox or Google drive or we transferred, God forbid, or some other means. Maybe you're attaching them to an email or something ridiculous and now you need to get revisions on those tracks. You're trying to collaborate and get to the final version so the clients can be happy and they can go away and they can finally pay you the remaining balance of what they owe you. File pass makes this so much easier. Instead of 10 different apps and everyone's texting you the revisions on all these different devices on mobile and in social media and sending you emails and long list of stuff. File pass is all in one. You send them a link, their entire project is in that link and they can leave timestamp revisions directly on the tracks so you don't have to go through dozens and dozens of messages.

Lossless streaming, we don't encode the files. It streams exactly what you upload and when you're done, your clients can pay you through the app and it will unlock the download button. So they do not run off with your files until they've paid you. So if you want, we just launched new pricing as of the time this episode comes out. It's actually a couple of weeks ago. We have new pricing on it now, so if you want to go check that out, go to file pass.com we're still technically an early access but we'll be coming out of that soon. We're basically a stable well oiled machine at this point and will be coming out of early access to a full launch very shortly what you're talking about in the podcast so they're into pitch. Fascinating. We had a good conversation about file pastored earlier today and you brought up some interesting points about is file pass file sharing technology or is it collaboration technology?

Yeah, it's a little of both but I think it definitely goes further on the collaboration side. Like when you compare this directly to Dropbox, Dropbox is a better file sharing tool for just just sharing files. I still use Dropbox, like when I'm sending a video for editing to my assistant or when I'm sitting in like a full folder of like files and with folders inside of folders and it's already saved to my computer. Like there's just so much that Dropbox does that file past will probably never do because we're not building that. We're not building a Dropbox clone. What we differentiate is when you're working with a client, you are collaborating with them within our platform and Dropbox is does not make that easy to do. They have some of the features we have, but they have not prioritized that. And so that's how we're differentiating is making it so much easier to collaborate with your active projects so you don't have to run around with like a chicken with your head cut off to figure out what you're doing.

So I love it. Yeah. Cool stuff, man. Let's move on to today's topic for this episode. You've been pushing for this episode for a while. Chris. I have. I've kind of resisted it, but you've turned me around on it. I'm pumped and we're going to talk about why you, yes, you are listener Paul or John. Steve. There's probably Steve. Steve, okay. If you're listening to us right now or Debra, if you're listening to this right now and you run a recording studio or any freelance business mixing, mastering, editing, maybe you do voice over work, maybe you're a podcast editor or whatever. If you do freelance work, you should start a podcast and we're going to make the case why you need to do a podcast, what are the benefits of it and then how to what we even go into a little bit of the how to start a podcast, a successful podcast for your business. Totally. This is mainly a Chris episode cause he's like prepared like this whole argument on why. And I'm just gonna play the devil's advocate and agree with him occasionally because I like to disagree mostly. And then occasionally I'll agree with him. It's true. Yeah. So that's the angle of today. Chris, take it away sir.

So here's the thing, it's a little bit about Brian and I's story. A couple of years ago I met a guy named Todd and Todd became a friend pretty quickly and he invited me to be a guest on a podcast he had called the guitar knobs. Don't go looking for it. You don't want any episodes that I'm on on that cause I didn't know what I was doing yet and I was terrible on Taj podcast, but I was on there for probably like 30 episodes and I learned a lot about podcasting. I learned that it was really fun. Podcasting is just an excuse to hang out with a friend if you have other people on it. And so, you know, I did Todd's podcast eventually mastering had taken off so much that I just couldn't spare any time. It was like they're my busy season, which is usually the spring, but it was great. And as shortly after that I met Liz Shaw that we just mentioned, he has the recording studio rock stars podcast. By the way. I had a blast going on his show and ledge invited me to these mastermind group. Sometime later. Brian joined the mastermind group. Brian was a blogger back then at the six figure home studio blog and Brian and I met and it was love at first spreadsheet. That's correct. Actually no. When I, when I heard you on

lid Shaw's podcast, the episode you did with him, I was like, shit, I need to get to know this guy. This guy sounds like a smart dude.

Yeah. Hey, that makes me feel good. So anyways, Brian and I met, I went down to Nashville for summer Nam. We met and shortly after Brian invited me to do this podcast and we launched it. And to be completely honest, I knew, I was like, I'm going to have to tell my wife I'm doing another podcast. She's not going to approve, but I'm going to like, you know, there's a chance I could get some customers as a result of doing this podcast. I just want to hang out with Brian. I just want an excuse to talk about nerd stuff with him. And so we started in the podcast and it exploded far beyond, I think what either of us had ever even dreamed it would do. You know, at this point, there's thousands of people that listen every single week to the podcast and it's totally changed my life.

I never had any vision for this. You know, for what's currently happened and how it's affected the mastering business, the coaching thing that I do on the side, you know, and now this bounce Butler thing, it's been great with podcasts and you have to be authentic. If it's too rehearsed, if it's too kind of contrived, it just doesn't work that well and you have to be authentic. And for me to sort of lean in and you know, let people know how much I love dad jokes and stuff like that. It's been fun. So here's my point right now and this is what I try to convince you of. One of the best things that you might be able to do for your business is to launch a podcast because we are in the midst of a podcast revolution. Yup. It is getting so much more popular so quickly that what the future of podcasting looks like is almost unpredictable at this point. But I have a couple ideas on what I think will happen. And here's the point. We've had Graham Cochrane, we've had Joe Gilder on the show, we've had guys who weren't here. It would fall into that category as well. We've had guys who really rode the YouTube wave well. They started making great YouTube videos at a time when there weren't a lot of great YouTube channels and they've been super ridiculously successful beyond probably what any of you can imagine with their businesses.

Let me just interject here real quick before we even really start getting into a good solid argument here. A lot of people think it's already oversaturated. It's too late to start a podcast just like it's too late to start a YouTube channel. Natalie, is that incorrect? Because there will always be people that are breaking in now even on YouTube, which is infinitely more oversaturated than podcasting in general, but I want to give some stats really quick. YouTube has 1.9 billion monthly logged in users and I don't know what the current world population is. They used to tell me it was 6 billion. Now it's like seven or 8 billion. So that's like 25 30% something like that of the world population logs into YouTube every single month. That is a massive amount of people and that's just, that's worldwide. Yeah. As far as us, I'm not sure what the percentage is, but it's got to be damn near a hundred yeah, it's gotta be a massive, massive amount.

Podcasts, on the other hand, podcasts are growing. They are showing a great trend, but in 2014 only 15% of adults listened to at least one episode a month, and now that trend has continued to go up by 2019 we're at 32% of adults in the U S listen to podcasts. That's a much, much higher amount, but I think that trend is going to continue to go up and up and up. And not only that, not only this minimum of one episode per month think the overall listening time for the average American is going to keep going up and up and up. In 2019 we're about where YouTube wasn't like 2010 2011 it felt saturated. If you were starting a YouTube channel, then it probably felt like you were throwing videos into this black hole that no one has ever gonna watch. But people that stuck around and were consistent within 2010 are doing incredible on YouTube now.

So that's my little bit of argument there is just throw some logic and reason at you in the midst of Chris's speculation and encouragement. So why should you start a podcast? Here's the thing. Podcasting is really easy. It's a Mike dude. It's so is man. Like I created an email course, like a written email course for six figure home studio subscribers. Dude, I started working on it the first week of August. The first email didn't go out to the first week of October. It took that long to write and edit and prep all of this work for this free email course, this free course. And if I'd put that same exact content into podcast series until like a pod class, it would've taken me a week, maybe, maybe a week. Like it was insane how much easier it is to do audio than written or even video YouTube videos take on much, much longer time to do. So I, I'm just supporting your argument there. This is one of the easiest ways to get content out into the world.

Well, one of the reasons for that is because podcasting is a wreck in every form of media, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, you name it. There's a comment section and there are trolls who wait with baited breath to fry you publicly for your stupid opinions

and to take any win from yourselves. Like it is really hard to get a good amount of momentum in YouTube where you're being critiqued every single video.

Yeah. If you're popular YouTuber, you post and seconds later someone has said something mean to you.

If you just want to visit the South pole of the universe, go visit any YouTube comments section.

Yeah, totally. And so the thing about podcasting that's great is there isn't a comment section, it's just me and Brian and you were just hanging out. There's not like somebody that you're like, Whoa, wonder what they're seeing in the comment section. We don't have one. You know? And so it makes it really healthy and it makes it, it, I hate to use this term because I'm not a fan of this, you know, movement so to speak. It makes it a safe space. It's accepted that when you're podcasting that you might say something stupid and that's okay. I do it all the time. You guys know this?

Yeah. Like the time that I said fully artists would start using samples and like every Foley artists on earth came out of the woodwork to say no Brian. It's actually faster just to record the damn fully live. Yeah. People let us know real hard on that. Yeah. They let us know. Thank you for your input. I now know a lot more about follower than I ever knew before, but people were nice about it. At least. Would you say that you're fully informed now? Oh,

okay. Okay. I do appreciate how quick that came to you though. I do what I can. I do it again, but here's the thing. Podcasting is fun, podcasting is safe, podcasting is not emotionally challenging in the way other forms of media are. So here's my story with podcasting. We launched the podcast and it was just this really weird thing of like I started getting like messages on Instagram randomly from people that listened and then I started getting a lot more and a lot more. We go through seasons where I'll get like a few a day of just people reaching out and saying, Hey, love the podcast. My Instagram handle is Chris underscore Graham, G. R. a. H. a. M. anyways, side note, but here's what happened. We launched the podcast and I started noticing that I would get emails from people and people would book projects with me as a mastering engineer.

There's often a phone call involved in that as well, and they would say, Hey, love the podcast. And I was like, well what are you talking about? You've listened to my podcast. And then you hired me and you know, back then it was like, Oh, well we had 15 or 20 episodes in. It's good to know people don't hold your dad jokes against you. They love the dad jokes, Brian. Okay. They loved them. No, and so what I started to notice that was fascinating is somebody would book a call with me and we would talk about the project and they'd say, you know, love the podcast. And in the to I listened to every episode, I'd be like, what? You've listened to me talk for 20 hours, which made it really easy to be friends with them. Like we immediately had stuff to talk about. They immediately knew me well, and it was just like all the easiest conversations I've ever had have been with people that listen to the podcast. They call in and work with me as a mastering engineer. So it's been this amazing thing where it lets you build relationships with a lot more people than you ever possibly could by yourself in the real world. I think that's the big benefit here. Yes. And we knew we should've gotten

at this point a little sooner than we did now as far as we are in this episode. But the best thing about podcasting is you have someone's voice in your ears. It's usually headphones that I listen to podcasts on at least. So in your ear buds you are having a one way conversation with hundreds. Even if it's dozens. It's a lot of people like imagine talking to dozens of people into a room, but it's hundreds or in our case, thousands of our people are listening to us every week and they feel like they know us, they get to know us because they do truly get to know us cause we talk about a lot of personal stuff on this podcast. They do. You guys know more about me than my mom does. That's so true. She doesn't listen to this podcast, the six figure sex. He's no more about me than a lot of my family does. So that's how personal podcasting is. And you don't get this through any other medium. I don't think you get this personal on YouTube because the videos are so short. You don't get this personal on blogs typically just because it's, this is not the norm on the blogging world, especially in a business setting where you're talking about like educational. Well,

and here's the reason that the podcast is so effective at building relationships with people. Every form of media on earth, by and large is undivided attention. Media Fortnite requires your undivided attention. YouTube requires your undivided attention. HBO, Netflix, the movie theater, golf, you fill in the blank. It's all, I'm doing one thing right now by and large, and that's what I'm consuming. I guess golf is in a form of media for how they shouldn't.

Yeah, but I was about to say, I can 100% attest to, I have played golf by myself and listen to podcast at the same time. So

see, I know nothing about golf. I still have baggage, family, baggage of like, I don't play golf. Maybe someday I will.

I have a six handicap for anyone that knows what that means.

Boring. Anyways, so, so the thing that you got to keep mine is, and almost all of you listening know this, you're doing something else right now. You're driving somewhere. You're mowing your lawn. You are, you know, cleaning your house, you're doing your dishes, fill in the blank. Podcasting is not an undivided attention form of media. It's a multitasking form of media. And here's the thing, you only have a few hours a day of undivided attention. You have so much time that you can multitask some more than others. If you're at the gym right now working out and listening to us, you're multitasking. And guess what? There are not enough podcasts. There's not enough media for you to consume while you multitask. It's hard to find stuff that you enjoy and it's hard to find enough of it.

And just to be honest, I listened to some of the most quote oversaturated niches in podcasting, business niche software business specifically right now, even health and fitness podcasts. Those are some of them just notoriously oversaturated years and I still can't find enough good podcasts to listen to. So I think there is still plenty of room in the less saturated niches where if you think about this, and we'll get more into this later in the podcast, if you start a podcast in your area for let's just say a podcast about your local music scene, because if you start a podcast, it needs to be for your target customers, not for your friends and peers. If your podcast is for your business goals at least, so in Chris Graham's case, the six figure home studio podcast contains listeners of his exact party customer mixing the new year's recording engineers, people that work with a lot of clients every single year and then can send Chris a lot of projects every single year. So out of our thousands of listeners, if only a hundred people made Chris Graham there go-to mastering engineer for every single project, he'd be set for probably life. Yeah, you don't need that many recording engineers and tracking engineers to sustain your business because it's recurring income. Anyways, that's besides the point more on the final business stuff in my email series there with you and your recording studio,

you need to make content. It's about your target customer, so if you, some musicians make a podcast about your local music scene or about touring as a musician or about anything that is relevant to the needs, hopes and desires and challenges that your customer faces. Totally, and now here's a nugget of wisdom for you guys here. I built my mastering business first and foremost locally and then I began to advertise online. Once the business was moderately successful and people loved what I was doing and I ran ads and I use those ads to compete for people's undivided attention. Hey, look at me. Hey, look at me. Hey, I'm a mastering engineer. I would try to find a way to at the right time in their life, pop up and say, Hey, if you need a mastering engineer, check out Chris, grandmaster.com you can get a free sample and we can talk about working together.

I was competing for the ARN divided attention. My business exploded when we launched this podcast, but I'm not competing for undivided attention anymore. I'm competing for, Hey, hopefully my next customer is mowing his lawn and listening to one of my episodes of this podcast that I might've recorded a year ago. And he's deciding, yeah, I'm gonna reach out to Chris Graham. So it's a completely different way to market to people. And the beauty of it is for us, we're just being ourselves. We're not like pretending to be anything. We're not, we're not doing like if you need mastering, check out Chris' gram, mastering a dotcom, but there's none of this like businessy crap. I can quote you for that exact line in our previous episode somewhere. Well, that was a joke though. Come on. Okay, so podcasting is really interesting because like Brian said, it's like having a YouTube channel in 2010 if you are making consistent high quality regular content on YouTube in 2010 you're probably rich, right?

Your YouTube channel exploded and you probably have rooms dedicated to the free merge that companies send you in the hopes that you will mention it. I have drawers of free merge this with some more of that fire you had on your outline there. So what I just got done talking about was that it's a multitasking form of media. That's the important thing to grasp out podcasting. Here's the second important thing to grasp about podcasting. Apple invented podcasting in like what? Oh five row six you know how much money Apple has made off of podcasting, Brian? Zero. So you're telling me the biggest, most powerful, most entrepreneurial, most tech savvy company in the history of the world is not making money on podcasting. Hmm. I wonder if that's going to change. Here's why I think it's going to change. A couple years ago I bought an iPhone and an Apple watch and Apple's big promise was, guess what? Now when you go to Starbucks, you can use your phone as a credit card to wirelessly pay for your, it's going to be awesome. And then a couple of years later, Apple came out with a credit card. What? But that's crazy. That's not a super exciting idea. It doesn't even turn on. It's not electric.

It's a mixed message is what that is.

It's a mixed message. Apple is looking for ways to make money cause guess what? That's the responsibility of the people who run Apple. Eventually they're going to look at podcasting and say, Hmm, I wonder if we could monetize this number. Back in the day, in the early two thousands when we had iTunes and we would let people sell their music and then we would take 29 cents, very 99 cent song, and then they would take 70 what if we did something like that? Here's my point. Apple is going to make a move and when they do make a move, they are going to do everything they possibly can to promote podcasts.

Here's the bigger argument to me or the bigger side to this, that is Spotify just acquired 300 million plus dollars worth of podcast content. Who are the acquisitions? They made? Three big acquisitions,

arrow, Gimlet and one other company.

Yeah, all these big podcast mediums because Spotify is about to make big plays towards making podcast a large part of their business or else they wouldn't spend $300 million on this. Apple is going to return fire at some point. That means they're going to turn their attention towards podcasting, which means they're going to be pushing any podcasts they can to keep listeners on their platform and compete with Spotify. Why this matters to our audience? Because at the end of the day, that's the only thing that matters. Why does this matter to our audience? Because if you start a podcast today, you are setting yourself up for success for when either Spotify takes over or Apple takes over the podcast game and starts to really push podcast because you want to have a foothold on this industry in some way, shape or form a podcast with reviews. You already have listeners because they're going to be the ones that benefit from this.

When these platforms start really pushing podcasting and stop making it an afterthought because Apple at this point until maybe just recently podcasting has been this redhead stepchild that didn't want anything to do with. It's just this hobbyist thing. They don't make any money off of it. Now money is being poured into it and even if you have no plans to ever make money off podcasting as a podcaster, that means you don't worry about podcast advertising. Like I think we did the math before this episode. If Chris and I ran just traditional ads at industry rates, we would make like 800 bucks a month off this podcast, which is like fine, but it's nothing like this is after two years of podcasting. You can not make a living with two people off of that, not here in America. We don't have plans to monetize this podcast in that way, at least not for our main income.

We monetize through our own products and services. That's how we monetize this podcast. So you don't have to have a massive following and millions of listeners or even thousands of listeners to make a living off of podcast. You just need to provide valuable content to your target customer. So you are always top of mind. You have built a lot of trust with them and then when it comes time for them to hire somebody, they're gonna look to you first because you are already their friend in their head. They have built a relationship with you and that's the power of podcasting. Well, let's come up with a couple examples

[inaudible] in a couple of parts of our industry of podcast that could be started that would do well. And before we get into this, let me just say this, Brian and I both wish there were

five podcasts just like ours, business podcasts. Oh yeah. For the music or audio space. That would be awesome if we were the third biggest podcast in that category. Great. There's so much room. That's one of the reasons we're doing this is like it's our own just being selfish. We want more podcasts in the audio space. Now, that doesn't mean that we want you to go out and start a mixing podcast unless your customers are mixing engineers. You know what I'm saying? If you were starting a mastering podcast, you shouldn't start a masking podcast unless your potential customers are mastering engineers.

Man, that's such an important point. And I think that's the number one thing I see people miss when they're trying to incorporate podcasting as a marketing tool, is they make a podcast for their peers or their competitors rather than their customers. You can't do that. That doesn't work. So you have to think about who is my ideal customer and what content are they thirsty for? What content can I make that they would go nuts for? So if you were a company that did bespoke music for TV commercials, you would want to have a podcast that creative directors, the guys and girls who make the decisions on what songs make it into what commercials that they would want to listen to. So would be a podcast for creative directors or, and that might just mean that your cohost is a creative director and that you are a composer, our producer,

or that you are just a composer who's interviewing creative directors. Yes. For other creative directors. And here's the brilliancy of what you just talked about there. You can spin this however you want. The podcast gives you a platform to then go interview your ideal customers as well. In this scenario, yes, and I know a podcast or that does this, they don't care about how many listeners they have and they have a lot, they don't care how they monetize the podcast. They could do a lot more than they're doing right now. They don't even optimize titles or anything. All they care about is the two hours they get to spend talking to their ideal customer every single week on the podcast because that's how they get customers for their business is by interviewing them and building relationships with them and using the podcast as just a proxy as just a way to connect with them and to give them value for that two hour conversation.

So clever. So think about like if there's a band that you really want to work with and you were like, Hey, yeah, let's hang out. I'd love to talk to you guys. Love to be friends, love to talk about maybe doing your next record. That's a hard sell. Boom, really hard sell. And they're like, what's in it for me? But Hey, you know, I have the number one podcast for the local music scene in Ohio. You should totally come hang out with me and we're going to talk about your music to other musicians in Ohio. Almost every musician in Ohio that's Ohio focus is going to say yes to that. And then at the end of that conversation, it's going to be easy to say. Yeah. Tell me about any future records you working on who you're working with. Well, you know, we're writing a new record right now.

Dope. Okay, got it. I'm going to keep following up with them and I have a relationship. So this is a fascinating tool and Brian and I's experience here is that you don't want to sleep on the power of podcasting. Oh, for sure. Crazy powerful. Every day I wake up and something happens that day, or I'm like, Holy crap, this is so weird. Like at any given time, I think we did the math recently at any given time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. What is it like 13 or 14 or 15 people are listening to this six figure studio podcast? Something like that. Crazy.

Yeah. No, it's actually an insane amount. I forget what the math is, but in any given hour, it's hundreds of people, I think. Thank you.

Duration. That's an, it's a lie. I'm getting nervous now, but, so let's get back on topic. So let's say you got customers that you want to hire you, you got potential customers, you have come up with a podcast that allows you to either interview them or to get them to listen to you. I would say like both of those are really, really great strategies. It could be a combination of both, but if you do that and it goes well, here's the other thing that's interesting. I'm gonna ask for podcast reviews here and just in of embrace yourself. The only way that you can look at a podcast and say, wow, this must be a good podcast. It must be popular. His podcast reviews in the Apple podcast app, it's the only metric that matters right now and it's, it's silly.

Here's why. It's because Apple has not made it easy to identify popular podcasts yet. And here's the deal is I got an interview request on a podcast that I'd never heard of before and the first thing I did was look up how many reviews they had cause I wanted to know if they're serious or not. Yeah, it can be difficult to get started if you have no reviews, but it's not impossible. I know a guy who is interviewing some huge names in the recording space right now on his audio podcast and he has like 10 reviews and it's like brand new podcast and all he does is ask people, that's it. He just asks and they say yes for whatever reason it's easier to get started now than ever because a lot of these guests that would never have otherwise recorded with you are starting to hear this buzz about podcasts.

Like I'm sitting on my in a coffee shop yesterday in the afternoon working and I'm just hear this table and next to me talking about podcasts. Like it's just normal conversation. That's like when you start hearing that people start actually paying attention to podcasting as a whole. And so if you're offered to be a guest on a podcast and you're a, or a band or a musician or whatever, you're more likely to go on a podcast because you've heard all about this. Even if you're not a listener, you understand that this is a thing and needed pay attention to it.

Well this brings up an interesting point. So this guy that you just brought up, you know, he's just getting his start as a podcast or he's gotten free mentorship from some of the best people in his industry by inviting them to be interviewed on his podcast. Yes. If he called them up and said, Hey, could we talk for like an hour? That's gonna be a hard no from any heavy hitter. Can we talk for an hour? And then I let people listen to it, much more likely to get a yes much, much, much more likely to get a yes. And that makes podcasting fantastically interesting for those three reasons. It allows you to reach out to your customers and have a conversation. It allows you to reach out to potential mentors and it allows you to be in the ears of your potential customers. Lot of amazing stuff,

and this goes hand in hand with one of our previous episodes. I don't know if I can remember the title off tips. It was a episode one Oh one I think actually it's the last episode. Yeah, that's hard to remember. That one. This episode where we talk about the hero's journey and how that plays into you understanding your customer by putting yourself in their shoes. If you're already doing that, if you're already the type of person that is pursuing an audio career and you have a band that you're in or you're pursuing some sort of music career on the side or maybe the music career is your main thing and your studio's your side thing, you're in a fantastic position because a, you're in the audio world already so you probably have relationships and then be, you also can benefit from the mentorship you get from some of the guests you get on your podcast.

Because if I'm a producer and I'm only a producer, I don't really need mentorship from a musician whose other goals and aspirations aren't really aligned with mine because I don't really care about how they got signed or how they tour, how their booking agency works or what their deals are with their road crews. So I know how much I'm paying. Like no, that stuff matters to me as a producer. But if I'm a musician and I'm like, say I'm two steps behind you, like I'm about to book my first tour or I just got signed and I'm now going to someone who's two steps ahead of me, they're going to be much more likely to have valuable information for me and also my ideal customer. So I think that that really goes hand in hand with you being on the same journey your customers are on because you fully understand what they're going through.

So let me kind of shift gears a little bit here. Right now podcasting is kind of like a rubber band and it's been stretched really, really tight. Let me explain what that means. Any startup company in silicone Valley.

Here's the fun fact for those who didn't hear that episode, Chris has multiple times said silicone Valley. So I keep saying it just and I, and I really, I really love when he says that. Just like when you said the 16th chapel.

So gracious. Well let's kind of bring us back cause I have a Venn diagram of concentric circles. I, I'm just kidding. Oh man. Boom. Anyways, that's a deep cut. So here's my point. Podcasting, the entire industry is kind of like a rubber band that's been stretched tight because there are all these entrepreneurs, all these startup guys out in Silicon Valley who want to build a company to monetize podcasting.

Yeah. One of the podcasts I listened to is a podcast software company who's building their company like basically a publicly on the podcast and they share all the revenue numbers and stuff is super interesting, but they're doing great. They've gone from zero to $35,000 a month in recurring revenue in one year with their podcast platform, which is, I'll just shout it out. transistor.fm. That's the podcast platform they built.

Nice. So here's the thing. If you are an entrepreneur out in Silicon Valley and you're thinking, I've got this great idea for a new podcast app, it's going to make it more fun for people to listen to podcast. It's going to make them more fun for them to be able to see what their friends are listening to so that they can get recommendations about what episode I should listen to next, which is the hardest part of listening to podcasts. Which episode or listen to next? I guess I'll read a sentence about it and make a decision on that. So dumb. Here's the thing. Let's say you have this great idea, so you've got to Silicon Valley and you meet with people and you want to start this company. You know what? Every single one of those investors and fellow entrepreneurs is going to say to you, I'm going to say, hell no.

I'm not going to touch your app and here's why. There is a sleeping Tyrannosaurus Rex in this space and it's Apple and if they wake up, they are going to gobble up every single startup app that there is an [inaudible] them. In less than a minute. Apple will relaunch the podcasting app at some point with massive upgrades and every other company that's trying to compete in that space with maybe the exception of Spotify is going to go up in smoke that day. As a result of that, all the smartest people haven't tried to start these businesses and podcasting is stagnant as far as the app side, as far as the experience side goes, content creation is not stagnant at all. It's growing like crazy. One of these days, Apple is going to wake up and they're going to change everything and podcasting is going to be so much easier to get started in.

It's going to be so much easier to become a fan of. It's going to be so much easier to find episodes that appeal to you directly. You know, if you go on Amazon, you get recommendations for products based on your browsing history. Same with Facebook marketplace. Same with Netflix. Same with YouTube, not the case in the Apple podcast app. And Apple, as I understand it, as a 60% market share, 60% of people who listen to podcasts do it in the Apple podcast app, which blows my mind because that's literally the worst. The worst app. Yeah, and Apple knows it. We're not hating on Apple at all. We can't wait for them to move on this. It's going to be amazing. So my point here is that if you can play the game now, if you can get into podcasting now, who knows what your future will look like because if wakes up, here's the thing.

YouTube makes videos that you're supposed to watch with undivided attention and like a third of the globe uses it every month. Podcasting, not saying will but could be bigger because there's simply more hours in the day to fill with podcasting than there is to fill with YouTube videos. It's a massive opportunity for Apple. They will move. The only question is when, right? So this is a really exciting time. So let's transition away from some of the business stuff we're going to talk about. Let's say you're convinced like, yeah, I got to start a podcast. Give me some tips. Brian and Chris, this is the fun stuff. Here's a couple ideas on how to do that. I haven't approved of these by the way, so I may step in here and shoot you down, but go ahead. I would say the most important thing is that you have to keep it fun.

If you don't disagree, it's all business spreadsheets. We have no fun. Keep that shit out of your podcast. It has to be fun or it won't be sustainable. Yeah, and one of the best ways to keep it fun is to find a cohost that you could talk to for days on end. Love you. [inaudible] I looked this up recently, man. I didn't see many of the top podcasts that didn't have multiple hosts. Really? Yeah, almost all of the top podcast of like the most popular podcasts had cohost or even sometimes three people involved, four people in a couple of cases. That's amazing. So I think the accountability you have with the cohost is what's kept this podcast consistent. If there were just me, there would be just like my YouTube channel, just like my blog articles there would be, guess it would be fits and spurts is like 22 episodes out in the last two years.

It's all we'd have. Um, like two or three months behind with my YouTube channel, my one once a week I'm going to catch up. That's the goal. There'll be a large burst of YouTube videos at the end of the year. Probably back to our topic here. If you're going to start a podcast, make it fun, find someone that you can talk to forever, have a video chat with them. Brian and I have only hung out face to face four times or like three times. Nam Nam, Yosemite your wedding. Yeah, I forgot about your wedding. That's right. It was a blur of a day. It was a blur of a day. Yeah. So here's how we do podcasting. We get on video chat. Brian has a delightful microphone on his side. I've got a nice microphone on my side. We come up with an idea for the episode when we both are excited about.

One of the ideas that we're talking about. We press record and we talk about it when we're done. I send a file via Dropbox to Brian. Brian puts them together, does a basic edit. James Brian's assistant does a major edit. Bryan mixes it. Bryan publishes it. Oh, I don't publish it. James publishes. I just mix it. James. Yeah. Yeah. We hang out. I think you guys should be surprised to hear this pretty much. No more than four hours a week and that's like a, that's a pretty big week. You know? Right now we'll hang out Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2:00 PM Eastern to about 4:00 PM Eastern and that's about it. We just hang out. There's not a lot of preproduction.

Sometimes we do episodes and sometimes we just hang out.

Yeah. Sometimes we just sang, but the point there is it should be fun. It should be easy and you should feel a little guilty that you're wasting your time. If you don't feel a little guilty that you're wasting your time and doing the podcast, you're probably doing it wrong or you're just really, really successful

at that point. Let me push back a little bit here. And that is if you are the type of person where you're not the expert in your field, you can't do a podcast like Chris and I are doing. You can't have like topical episodes where you're the one coming up with the content. That's okay. As long as you and your cohost have good chemistry, you can still get the expert to come on the podcast every single week to teach your audience. That's the formula that so many successful podcasts follow the actual host of the podcast. In a lot of cases have no credentials, they just are good interviewers, which is a skillset in and of itself. But that just means they're good conversationalists and they understand how to get to the core of the issue to help their audience solve a problem.

Yeah. So here's what Brian and I did and I look back at like how we launched the podcast, and I think we did this right. Brian had a blog, pretty popular blog, and we launched the podcast and we did three episodes. And the pitch at the end of each episode was, we're not sure we're going to keep this up. We weren't, and if you like this and you think we should keep doing it and you don't think this is a waste of anyone's time, please go and write a review. We did that and pretty much overnight we had 75 star reviews, which is a whole lot in our industry. That's an enormous amount of reviews and so we decided to keep going, so that'd be my advice. Find someone that you can talk to for hours about a topic that you love that's ideally for your customers or that allows you to reach out to your customers or that allows you to reach out to people that you want to be mentored by and do a limited run. Don't make this commitment of like I'm doing an episode every week. We'll do a limited run, see how it goes, and go from there, but ask for reviews. If you can get a bunch of reviews, congratulations, your podcast will probably be popular because when someone thinks, should I listen to this podcast or not, what's the one indicator they have? If, if your podcast is good, it's just the podcast reviews in the Apple podcast player, it won't always be that easy.

That's my point. It's going to get harder. It's going to get much harder. But until then, it's the wild West and all you gotta do is have a microphone and a recording device and guess what? You're listening to a podcast for the recording industry. You probably already have all those things. Yeah, it's true. I think if you go back and listen to episode one, two and three of this podcast, you'll get a good idea of our strategy behind launching the podcast. And let me push back on that a little bit Chris, cause I don't think most people, unless you already have a platform, a good platform that you've taken time to build up, I don't think you can just launch three episodes and expect results. You might be right. Yeah, I think most people give up too soon. I talk about this actually and one of the, either the email that just came out this morning or the email that's coming out soon, the slow studios ramp of death and that is how long it takes the average recording studio to get to where their calendar is 100% full of only word of mouth work expectation.

They think it's going to happen the next time. Reality is it takes 10 times longer than that and most studios give up and quit and die before they reach full sustainability. We're going to have any push from marketing or anything. It's the same in the podcast world, our podcast, it must success as we had in the beginning. It's still been a slow slog over the last two years to get to where we are now and I think most people without that initial burst of attention from their already established platform are going to have much, much smaller results to start out with. I just think you have to have your expectations set accurately and you have to be willing to put in consistent work over time to build that into anything worthwhile.

Yeah. Well, and that's an important thing to bring up. When someone has a podcast that isn't doing particularly well, it's almost always the case that they don't publish weekly. Yeah. Publishing weekly's pretty important. Or at least monthly. People have to trust that you are going to publish consistently. Don't do what I do with my YouTube channel and tell so many people that you're going to publish weekly and then don't do it when you come across a great software idea. It's not good and it's embarrassing and I feel terrible, but I will catch up. I promise. Don't make promises you can't keep Chris. Exactly. So let me talk about the next point here. One of the things that we had going for us, other than the fact that Brian was a genius and super audacious was there were no business podcasts in our industry when we launched it.

It's true. Yeah. There were podcasts that talk about it from time to time, but there was no pure, we only talk about business. We are a business form of media. So on day one, Brian thought it would be a great idea to hire a professional voiceover artists and you've heard him before say the number one [inaudible] like so here's my thing with that. If you come up with an idea for a podcast where your elevator pitch is that you would be number one on day one, that's a good idea. You need to be clear about what your podcast is. Don't look at lids, Sean, Matt Boudreaux and you know these other guys and steal their idea of arm going to interview famous recording people and do the same show. I'm not saying that's a terrible idea, but if you want to grow you have to have a unique idea and some of our idea was we only talk about business and the whole gear sled alert makes our podcast pretty unique. For example, watch this NOI man AKG Mackie. You hear that in the background. You're not allowed to say brand names on our podcast or you get the gear sled alert because it's distracting for us, the solution is not like brands or like a specific model of something. This solution is creativity and a growth mindset, right? That's why you don't have customers. You need more. Those things. Think

about ways you can set yourself apart from other podcasts or other platforms or other people in the niche that you choose or in the topic that you choose. And I think the name does have a lot to play into it as well. It's easy to understand what the six figure home studio podcast is about in a very quick amount of time. Yeah. So make sure that your pitches easy, that you could meet somebody and be like, this is my podcast is about and the bit, Oh cool, that's awesome man. But if it's like, Whoa, we're Kenalog Thurston's kinda like Joe Rogan meets like, Oh, Mickey Merrill's, you know, meets uh, George Herbert Walker Bush, you know, that's basically authored. It shouldn't be complicated. It should be really simple and you should occupy a niche that hasn't been filled yet that people want to be filled. If you do that, things are going to go well.

Is George H w Bush Herbert Walker, is that what HW stands for? Yes, it is. God rest his soul. I didn't know that. Good Lord. You know what? Someone mailed me an envelope with the George H w Bush stamp on it. I cut the stamp out and I put it on my fridge. I'm not a political person by any means. I just don't follow politics, but I was just like, this is such a weird stamp that I'm putting in all my fridge. Read my lips, no new snacks. That was such a deep cut. That's his famous quote. Read my lips. No new taxes. That was mostly bill Clinton. Impression. I won't do that anymore. Sorry. Then anytime you try to do anything on this podcast, you fail. Great knack going to do it wouldn't be proud and that's what he said, not gonna raise taxes. You realize our audience is predominantly millennial people.

People that were born after Herbert Walker Bush. Yeah, with president. We're not going to talk about politics. It's not what we do, so let's keep moving. You should launch a podcast. If one, your customers will listen to it too. It would allow you to reach out to people that could mentor you. Or three, it would allow you to reach out to potential customers. You want to be number one in your niche on launch day. That's not an absolute necessity, but I sure as heck recommend it. Yeah. I would rather you have a generic podcast that in no way is original, if it allows you an excuse to have a conversation with your ideal customer. Exactly. To me it's like there's multiple ways to slice this. I don't think any one right way is their only way to do it. I just think there's so many ways to do it.

I can't be that prescriptive to our audience. Yeah. Well let's call somebody out on the podcast and in aggressive and slightly encouraging fashion Austin Hall of make pop music, the Facebook group. That's enormous. The dude is a force of nature. Austin, you should launch a podcast. I've told you this in private. No, I'm telling you it in public. Austin would have an amazing podcast and he could probably launch as the number one pop music podcast on day one. Yup. So when he was on our podcast as guest on episode 58 I mean you have to look now. I just know by heart which episode he was on. Shit, I was wrong. Episode [inaudible] we're not even going to edit that out, man. 59 of the podcast episode title is how to build an audio career a hundred percent online from anywhere in the world. Great episode. I think his group size is like 17 or 18,000 people at the time. It's at 23,000 members now, which is crazy.

Yeah, he could absolutely have the number one pop music producers podcast and instantaneously within like 17 minutes of launching, he's going to be number one. So that brings me to another point. If you already have an audience, a podcast is the single easiest thing you could start doing to make more content and to engage with more people.

I'd like to think we had something to do with convincing Graham Cochrane to start his podcast. I think so, and I think the world is better off for it. I'm hoping that this, this episode encourages some really, really good podcast to get started because we need more of them.

So after we had Graham on the show, I ended up hiring him as my business coach and it was awesome. And the way we did six business coaching sessions at the end of the six session, we ended it by me pitching him why he needed to start a podcast. So is it more, more of you Graham, more of your wisdom? I need it in my life and to be honest, that's a big reason why I'm launching bounce Butler. Like he was a real big inspiration of like, Hey, this business model works and man, it's been hard to balance the mastering business and continue to coach people and do bounce Butler. But thank God bounce Butler is finally at a stable spot where it's being used all the time. Every day.

Well dude, speaking of stable, we had major server issues with file pass over the weekend.

Oh man. Yeah. You told me that

we had a world record on support, things like over 50 messages and emails came through and support over the weekend from server issues. And I'll just say this, we fired our old cloud hosting solution and we moved to a different, better, more stable, faster cloud storage solution and we're paying 26 times the monthly price we were before. But it's worth it because it was an insanely low price before. And this is just a more established solution and it allows us to, we're going to build a feature out where we're going to have the fastest upload times in the industry for file paths.com so to wrap this episode up, Chris, any last final words of wisdom or encouragement or anything that you want to leave our listeners with?

Man. So when we make podcast episodes, there's a couple of like reasons we'll choose a topic. One is we're like, yeah, we know a lot about this topic. We want to share it with our audience. Another is, Oh, this is a topic our audience needs to learn about. So, you know, we've done research and the third we want you guys to do this. We want you to launch podcasts. We want people to hang with that are doing the same thing we are,

we literally have a mastermind group consisting of podcasters because we want an excuse to hang out with each other every week. And there's really not enough people to add to the group because there aren't enough audio podcasts.

Yeah. So like I really, really hope that like three, four, five, six, 10 months from now that somebody reaches out to us and it's like, you know, I launched this podcast, we're at a thousand downloads a month. It's going great and having so much fun. Dude, thank you so much for that episode that spurred us to finally jump into this world. I'm looking at you Austin Hall, through my microphone. Launch your podcast, man. So yeah, I mean there's just so many opportunities for you guys. This is such an easy place to get a win and making the media like it's not, you have to learn anything new. It's a microphone and it's ECU and it's compression and limiting. And maybe some like saturation or stuff. I don't even know what Brian puts on my voice and just talk. Just talk kind of like you're doing right now. You're not, you're not doing much, but you're just talking. Yeah. All you have to do is take your voice and drop it in octave. That's what we do. My voice doesn't sound this good and that's why our podcast is so successful. Show people your real voice, Chris.

Hey everybody.

Yeah,

I was actually just going to pitch, shift it up an octave, but I might actually pitch shift what you just did up on octave.

That would be like over 20 Hertz. I don't think Nyquist would allow human beings to a hear that. Anyways,

this episode is gone. We're done. Thanks for hanging and go start a podcast. Goodbye.

[inaudible]

so that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. Go out there and start a freaking podcast. I don't know how many more times I get to say that and then let us know in the six figure home studio committee or through an email or a DM on social media. Let us know that you started your podcast so we can go check it out. Next week's episode. We don't have recorded yet. I don't know what it's going to be about. I'm recording this outro minutes after recording the previous episodes. Al TRO, which means I actually haven't even left for Cancun yet. If things go as planned, I should be back home from Cancoon as of late last night, and so sometime this week I'll get together with Chris and we'll come up with whatever next week's episode will be. So I will see you bright and early 6:00 AM next Tuesday for our next episode. Until next time, happy hustling.

[inaudible].