How to Build a Podcast Audience from Scratch

Jake Winstanley 5:40
Right guys Today we’re here with Justin, the co-founder of Transistor a podcasting hosting analytics software, which officially launched back in 2018. Today we brought him in to talk about building an audience for your podcast and how to stand out from the crowd. Thanks for joining us, Justin.

Justin Jackson 5:56
Yeah, it’s good to be here. Glad we can make this happen.

Jake Winstanley 5:58
Awesome, man. So yeah, to start us off what kind of process do you use to, to build your audience for your podcast or when recommending to other people for their podcast?

Justin Jackson 6:10
Yeah, so a lot of this probably depends on what you want to get out of it. If your goal is to build a big enough audience that you could get sponsors and make a full time living, that’s going to change things quite a bit. If your goal is to just have 500 regular listeners that care about what you have to say that you know that that will affect things as well. If you’re just hoping to do this for fun on the side, and, you know, develop yourself professionally, and maybe make a little bit of money as well. You know, that’ll change things to generally, you want to pick a topic that you’re passionate about And that has a big enough audience a big enough reachable audience to achieve the outcomes that you want. So that’s the first filter. Does that. Does that make sense?

Jake Winstanley 7:12
Yes, definitely. That’s why to do it.

Justin Jackson 7:16
And so I’ll give you an example. My co-founder, and I, John Buda, we have a podcast called build your SAAS. anyone outside of the software industry probably doesn’t even recognize that acronym. It’s S-A-A-S software as a service. And it’s a podcast for anyone who wants to build web apps or web based startups. And our audience is even more limited than that because we focus on the subsection of people who want to bootstrap it, who don’t want to raise venture capital.

And we had a few advantages here. One the easiest way to build an audience in podcasting is to bring an audience from somewhere else to your podcast. Yeah. And I had been blogging and tweeting and speaking at conferences, about building software businesses for a long time. And I had built up this audience, you know, I have around 11,000 people on my email list. I have thousands of people who read my blog every week, I have about 20,000 Twitter followers. And I also, another key piece is not just bringing an audience from somewhere else, but also knowing good channels. Knowing good channels you can use to reach an audience. And so in our case, I knew there were sites like Product Hunt, or Reddit slash are startups or indie hackers. So there’s all of the Hacker News is another one. There are all of these communities that have all of this kind of pent up demand. And a lot of people are interested in those topics hanging out there. So I knew how to reach people. I also knew that I built up this audience, and we’re talking, you know, I started blogging in 2008. And so we launched our podcast in 2018 10 years later, right. So that none of this licensing none of it, it generally doesn’t happen overnight. And the biggest differentiator I see on transistor side from the shows that succeed and the shows that don’t succeed are the people that want quick wins. The people that want to just turn it on, they want to go from zero to 11 overnight. That is going to make it a lot more difficult to, to kind of get the numbers that you want or to stand out. So I don’t know how we could refine that into steps. You know, first of all, be really clear about what outcome you want be really clear about the outcome you want. Number two, make sure that you have some sort of connection to an audience that you could bring to the show, either an audience you’ve built, or maybe an audience that someone else has built. Maybe you’ve got a connection with some guests that you can bring on your show that have big audiences. Our two biggest episodes. Oh, sorry. Yeah, our two biggest episodes. Number one, it was an interview with a guy named Taylor Hartwell, who is the creator of a really popular programming framework. And the second interview was with Jason freed, who is the co-founder of Basecamp. So having people who have built big, big audiences on your show if you do a good job. And if you’ve, you know, there’s a bunch of factors there. But if the show goes well, and if you have any sort of connection, meaningful connection with a guest, they’ll likely share it with their audience. And that can help you get a bunch of traction there as well.

Jake Winstanley 11:19
Yeah, I think that’s a really good point like that’s,

firstly, we speaking about people wanting to go from zero to 100. Like straight away, they want that growth good things come to those who wait and building over like building a wall one brick at a time consistently. It’s going to build that stronger platform. And I think so many people preach the patience to like the more patient you are. Just enjoy the process instead of kind of wanting that that quick win.

Justin Jackson 11:44
Yes, yeah. building an audience especially takes time. And even a lot of the folks that people look up to, you only see the result of it could be decades of work to get to that point.

Jake Winstanley 11:58
Yeah. What’s that saying? It takes like 10 years to be an overnight success or something like that.

Justin Jackson 12:02
Yeah, yeah, that it’s, it’s cliche, but it’s true. It really is. And a lot of if you look at the iTunes charts, you know, a lot of the top shows, like Conan O’Brien needs a friend. Well, clearly, he’s been building an audience for a very long time. Yeah. And he’s able to leverage all of these other high profile guests. And, you know, when you’re thinking about listening to a new show, maybe people don’t know or like Conan, but if they know unlike Tina Fey, and Tina’s on the program, then they’ll listen and have a smaller scale that applies to folks like us, too. If you haven’t guessed that people know unlike some of that trust rubs off on you, and people will be willing to give your show a shot.

Jake Winstanley 12:55
Yeah, definitely. So like once you kind of build your audience is there any external tools that you found have been really handy for people to kind of to grow a little bit more or something that kind of helps them along with that process.

Justin Jackson 13:09
Yeah, I mean, I think one thing is to do the research. So let’s, let’s take an example here. Let’s say that you want to start a parenting. Let’s say you want to start a parenting podcast. And the goal. Your goal is you want to make a full time living doing this. So let’s say you want to make $150,000 in revenue from your podcast a year. Well, I mean, the first step would be to go to Apple podcasts and look at, you know, parenting podcasts, what are in the top five, were in the top 10. And to kind of work backwards and see if that’s even possible. Like maybe nobody is making a full time income in that category. So there’s a misalignment between, you know what you want, and the medium the way you want to get there. So, doing research is one, I have a tool on transistor transistor.fm/preview. And what it’ll do is if you enter a podcast topic like parenting, you can search the apple podcast database, it’ll automatically bring up you know, the top shows in that keyword. And if you want, this is the other bit of research, you can add your show art and your podcast name, even if you haven’t launched it yet. And you can put it up alongside all of that other all those other shows. How does it compare? It’s kind of an eyeball test like, Okay, I’m going to be competing with Dr. Meg Meeker. You know, that’s, that’s my NPR life kit. Okay, so you Some, here’s my competition, right?

And tools like that can be helpful. And, again, making sure there’s alignment between what I want and what’s kind of happening. What else would I do? The other thing I would do actually is I would find listeners of those shows, and I would ask questions, so if somebody has recommended this parenting great kids podcast on Twitter, maybe I might reach out to them and go, Hey, I’m just curious. How many other parenting podcasts do you listen to? How do you decide which ones to subscribe to or not subscribe to? Even in coffee shops, I found podcasting has now hit critical mass. I’ll be listening to folks. And sometimes even just complete strangers. I’ll hear them talking about a podcast. Like, Oh, I just started listening to I just started listening to science versus, and I might say, Hey, I’m curious. How did you hear about that show? And then hear how, you know, how they heard about it. And if you ask enough those questions and most folks say, you know, I was browsing Apple podcasts and I just typed in a keyword, or more likely, I heard it, I heard about it from a friend. And those if you know, this is true, right? That’s the kind of thing you want to leverage when you launch your show. You know, you’re going to have to leverage things like word of mouth, you know, you’re gonna have to leverage things like maybe keywords So, this is kind of a, something that a lot of people don’t think about. If you type into Spotify, because Spotify shows music and podcasts if you type a keyword in there like maybe folks are, for example, on transistor, one of the more popular shows on Spotify is a super smash bros podcast. And I’m pretty sure some of the traction they’re getting is just because if you’re really into Super Smash Bros, and you’re searching for those keywords, what pops up right? And on both Apple Podcasts and Spotify, from what we can tell, it’s the number of people subscribing to the show or following on Spotify. That kind of dictates your ranking or at least part of your ranking. So you can optimize for some of that by if you have 10 friends, getting them to follow you on Spotify, or if you have 20 acquaintances, emailing them all and saying if you could please subscribe to my show that would mean a lot, right? So I think there’s tricks like that that you can use as well to, to stand out. I actually have I gotta remember where I have this, this chart.

Just give me a second here. I’ll see if I can pull it up while we’re talking here, but it has the top way like the top three ways people hear about podcasts. Okay, cool. And the idea being you want to optimize for the way people normally find shows right?

Jake Winstanley 19:00
Yeah,

Justin Jackson 19:01
Oh here we go.

Alright, so oh another point I tried to bring up the folks quite a bit is some people say there’s a lot of competition in podcasting. And you know, from what we can tell, let’s say there’s between 800,000 900,000 active podcasts on Apple podcasts right now. from what we can tell many of those most of those actually have pod faded meaning they haven’t published a new episode in I think, the last 30 days or something like that. And so, it’s very likely that 75% of all podcasts are, let’s say 50 to 75% of podcasts on Apple podcasts are no longer in production. But what And so to me, that means there’s a big opportunity. There, there might be, you know, 175,000 200,000 300,000, something like that active podcasts in the world right now. And when you compare that to, you know, there’s 22 million YouTube channels with more than 10 subscribers. There’s 500 million blogs in the world. I think there’s still lots of room and podcasting. And we’ve just ticked over 51% of folks in the United States have ever even listen to a podcast. So I think there’s lots of upside.

Jake Winstanley 20:39
I think that’s Yeah, it’s crazy statistics on like, obviously, a lot of people who are into podcasting have been into it for years. They’re like, Oh, yeah, podcast, like you’ve listened to heaps and different ones. I have listened to them for the past 10 years, I’d have to say, years and I’ve got family. They’re all a bit older. And they’re like, what is a podcast? It’s like I mean, just to explain what a podcast is, it just makes you realize that the whole kind of maybe the older generation, they don’t even realize and I’m like, oh, man, you can listen to this you can listen to that is what do you like? Like, I like this. I mean, you can listen to stuff about that. There’s got to be a podcast about that. And they’re like, okay, so yeah, it’s, there’s plenty of room for growth still, I think.

Justin Jackson 21:20
Exactly. So here’s how, according to Edison research in 2019, how do people find new podcasts to listen to? Number one by searching the internet 73%. So using some sort of search engine, Google, Apple podcasts, Spotify. I want a podcast about climate change. Yeah, I want a podcast about snowboarding. I want a podcast. And so you know, if I type into Google snowboarding podcast, what are the results right. And now Google is starting index podcasts, right? So I at the top of the search results, I see a bunch of options. Interestingly, a lot of them have snowboarding podcast in the title. Yeah. And so the show title you choose matters quite a bit. The joke I make about this is if you’re gonna have a show for farmers don’t say, you know, Steve Smith, a modern agrarian. Yeah, yeah. It’s better to say the farming podcast if you want to pick up on some of that search traffic because it’s likely the farmer or the person interested in farming is not searching. Steve Smith, modern agrarian. Yeah, they’re probably searching farming podcast. Yeah, that key was, yeah, and right now we’re still early on enough that you could you can target these really general keywords in your title and still rank for them in the different search engines. So that’s one suggestion. Let me go back to my list here. I’m already. So the next one is recommended by a friend how many what percentage at sorry, social media posts was second 67%. Okay, so people do pay attention when you share on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook. Yeah. And that might be worth doing, although it is just 1% higher than a recommendation from friends and family, which is 66%. And so, the and I think let’s just go back to the social media one. Yeah. I think a lot of folks what they do is they go Okay, I’ve got you know, I have 10 followers on Twitter. And so I’m going to post little clips. You know, these little audio Graham clips on Twitter. And that’ll be enough. That’s not the kind I don’t think that’s what you’re looking for. What you want to do is you want to actively encourage, if you have five listeners, you want to actively encourage them maybe in the middle of the show, or at the end of the show, to say, hey, if you enjoyed this, could you just say, I enjoyed this episode of this podcast on social media and link to our website? That would mean a lot to me. Those kind of recommendations are what drive folks to check out new podcasts. Or, hey, if you really liked the show, post in the Reddit slash our podcasts subreddit that you really liked the show. Those are the kinds of recommendations on social that actually drive new listeners as opposed to you just posting ideogram video clips to, you know, your small following. Yeah, so I would keep that in mind. Also, remember if you have a guest who has a sizable audience on social media, and they Share, that’s something you can ask them, you can say, hey, I’ve got this little clip that was amazing that you delivered. You can either ask them to share it, or you just mentioned them in your post and see if they retweet it. And that might be enough as well. So I think it’s, it’s worth optimizing for some of those channels. And usually my next point here, we’ve gone through a few things, but usually my next point is to say, none of these tactics matter if the podcast isn’t good,

So at the end of the day, it has to be entertaining. And it has to differentiate itself in some way.

And there’s a few there’s even before you get to the point of like, Is this good? Is this entertaining, there’s some table stakes stuff that you just have to have. You need to have decent audio quality. Like you need to get yourself a decent mic by the Samsun q to you, or the ATR 2100. It’s a, you know, $50 to $100 and plug that into your laptop and record with that. That’s just table stakes, you need to have good audio. It also needs to download fast. So if you’re hosting with a really cheap podcast hosting provider, and it takes forever to download your episode or to stream your episode, you’re going to lose people. These are just table stakes. And if it’s too long, you know if people are looking at your list of episodes and they’re all three hours long, and they don’t know they’ve never heard of you before. You’re not going to you it’s gonna be hard to for them. Yeah, yeah. So these are the kinds of things I’d be thinking about. And then once you get there, once you get past the table stakes, then how do I make it good? Well, that’s the million dollar question that that’s you have to be kind of committed to the craft over a long period of time. You have to practice a lot. You have to be willing to iterate, you have to be willing to accept critical feedback. You, you should emulate in the beginning, the folks that you think do a really good job. minimize distractions. If you have a creaky chair. If you have a fan that keeps going in the background, like minimize all of that. And me and also I would say Be yourself but be different. So don’t try to You know, don’t try to replicate your favorite morning Zoo radio host. Yeah, Hey, everybody is great, you know, like, you don’t need to do that you can, you can just be yourself and But still, you know, be entertaining that for independence, I think independent podcasters I think our big advantage is that we can be genuine. We can share real life, we can share the raw stuff that’s going on, and build a personal connection with people. Maybe it’s sharing the journey that we’re on. That’s john and ice podcast is saying, Hey, we’re about to start this company. And then we just take people through the whole journey of building a team, and then 2019 and 2020. And the funny thing is, is first of all, we attract this audience because again, we had some audience before, but there’s all sorts of Other people who are in motion who are trying to do the same thing. So then they start to kind of cheer you on, they’re on this journey with you. And we started a Patreon mostly to test the feature out in transistor. And I kind of accidentally realize that people want to support the podcast, even though it’s the story of us starting a business, right? And so, again, it’s not a it’s not full time money. I think our on Patreon, we probably make 300 and $400 a month. And then we do, we’re not doing this anymore, because it’s not worth it for us. But we would do two ad spots per episode. And we would book that on a monthly basis. And so it would be $300 a month per sponsor. For four episodes, so total, let’s say we’re making around $1,000 a month from this podcast. This really just You know, the story about starting a business. But there was enough traction there. And it was the right kind of I don’t know how to articulate this other than to say it was the right kind of content for the right kind of audience. And they were willing and wanting to be on the journey with us. And one of the ways they did that was by supporting us on Patreon. And the audience also was big enough that other that companies who want to reach people like me, wanted to sponsor the show. And so hopefully, that gives us a little bit of a picture of how that can work even without massive numbers, I think. I think we do probably two or 3000 downloads per episode in the first 30 days or something like that.

Jake Winstanley 30:51
Yeah, that’s cool. It shows that you don’t have to have like that massive audience or a huge big time podcast like it. You’re starting out and you’re like you said you bring an audience or you have someone that you bring on board that brings an audience over. And maybe you are just looking at that trying to get that little bit of a supplement income, that side kind of hustle starting out. You don’t have to go big, big boys to kind of get the to get the result you’re looking for you focus on something that, you know, it’s specific to the topic. I think you obviously had the really good kind of mix that perfect storm where it’s come together and it’s going all this is actually calling this is work. So I think that’s a really good point as well.

Justin Jackson 31:31
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you can see how it kind of all depends on where you want to end up. But yeah, there’s, there’s I’m trying to think if there’s one more thing Oh, the other thing I want to mention is that I think one of your best opportunities for promoting your show is before you’ve even published an episode. put up a website. That says, Hi, I’m doing a show about this or for these kinds of people or whatever, sign up with your email address to get notified when I launch. And this will help you figure out so many things at the beginning, and help you figure out how hard is it to reach these people? How hard is it to get them to sign up on a waiting list? As soon as they sign up on the waiting list, have an automatic email go to them that says, hey, so glad that you’re signed up. Here’s, you know, a little bit more, a little bit more about the show. curious what’s going on in your life that brought you here today? Like why are you even here? Right? And the answers to those questions before I’ve launched a podcast have been so helpful, because they let me know, this is what people want. This is the what’s driving their interest. This is what’s driving their curiosity. And then you can start to cater your content before you’ve even recorded an episode towards what people are telling You, again, even if it’s only one person or two people or three people. And you’re also starting to build a relationship with now with folks that will be on your side when you do launch, right? So, start to create a website. You know you can use tools like card C-A-R-D to build a simple little one page landing page. And the other thing I would do is I would record a teaser episode. And this is an actual episode type in Apple podcasts. It should be maybe 30 seconds or, you know, a minute or two at the longest, but it quickly introduces your show, right? Hey, everybody, I’m Justin and I’m really into snowboarding. I’ve been snowboarding since 1993. And this podcast is all about snowboarding in different locations. We review a new resort every week if you’re interested in that you can subscribe on Apple podcasts or you can go to snowboardpodcast.org and sign up, right, that’s a good trailer. And you should be able to embed that if you have a good podcasting host, you should be able to embed that episode on your landing page so people can listen to it. And I would also get it on Apple podcast and Spotify, just your trailer to start building up demand. You don’t need to have a bunch of finished episodes in the can before you launch. You can launch a trailer get people subscribing now before you officially launch. In some apps like Apple podcasts, it’s the first episode people will see when they click through on your show. And so even if it’s episode one people can play that get a 32nd idea of what your show is. You’re also just creating an asset that your fans can share with people, instead of saying, hey, you gotta listen to this two-hour episode, you can say, here’s a 32nd clip, right? And you can play that. So lots of opportunity before you officially launch to Yeah, to do some things that are going to set you up for success later on.

Jake Winstanley 35:24
Yeah, I think that’s a really good point too that you’ve made there as I kind of building that awareness. I guess a little bit of hype around it from the beginning, is you kind of getting people ready for it instead of kind of trying to force your way through and then bring people in. So I think that’s a good point.

Man, that’s awesome. I think you really covered a really good process there for how to kind of develop your audience and then how to stand out through the process as well at the word of mouth and few different paces has been good. So yeah, I guess we’ll leave it there. I really appreciate it. Justin. Thanks for thanks for coming on board.

Justin Jackson 35:56
Yeah. Happy to be here. Glad we can make it work.