[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey everyone, my name is Angela Hollowell. I am your host here at Creative Architects by Castos. This is a podcast about the future of the creator economy. Today I'm joined by Daniel Desir Corbett, who is one of the incredible co founders of Women of Color podcasters. And I'm so happy she's here with me today to talk about how she's been building community for podcasters for quite some time now.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Transparency is so important. Like, I've had amazing highs this year. Amazing and also devastating lows. And I was talking to my husband.
[00:00:39] Speaker C: Yesterday and he mentioned, just like, despite.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: The setbacks where you're taking steps back, tomorrow, you have an opportunity to take a step forward.
[00:00:47] Speaker D: This podcast is brought to you by Castos. One of the best ways to learn something is to go directly to the.
[00:00:53] Speaker A: Top people in that field.
[00:00:55] Speaker D: At Castos, we do just that. Each episode of Creative Architects features creators who have taken their work to the next level. We hope that by watching and listening, it will inspire more creativity in your work. Along the way, Castos wants to be a part of your creative journey. From our suite of Tools, feature rich hosting platform, and even our production services, we're here to help connect directly with us by emailing
[email protected] or by clicking on the link in the description.
Thanks for tuning in. It means a lot. I hope you enjoy the show.
[00:01:27] Speaker A: So, from my understanding, women of color podcasters started as a free community. And then as the community continued to grow and scale, you said, hey, this is getting a lot for me to manage. I think it would benefit me and benefit everyone else if we had the funds and the capacity to actually give you the best community experience possible. And so it went to a paid community. Talk to me about that decision to make that transition from free to paid.
[00:01:50] Speaker B: So there are a couple of reasons why I was thinking about gaps that.
[00:01:55] Speaker C: I saw with the free community.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: We were in community with each other, chatting, sharing episodes, just talking about different aspects of podcasting. BUt there were three fundamental areas I.
[00:02:07] Speaker C: Felt like we didn't provide.
[00:02:09] Speaker B: One is access to experts and thought leaders and all the learning components. We did not have access to that. And I knew that if I wanted to have those speakers come in, I would be compensating them for their time.
[00:02:22] Speaker C: So we needed income for that.
[00:02:24] Speaker B: So that was a huge, big piece. Also, I had a small team of volunteers helping me, and at a certain point I felt guilty a bit. And just like I was burdening them because they're doing all this work to moderate the community without any compensation. And initially I had framed it as a fellowship of some sort where I would teach folks how to run large Facebook group. And that felt really good. And I had a lot of interest.
[00:02:55] Speaker C: I had an application.
[00:02:56] Speaker B: It was awesome. People signed on and they wanted to stay on, so they stayed on for a while. And I'm like, this is awesome.
[00:03:02] Speaker C: I have help, but I want to compensate them.
[00:03:05] Speaker B: And I think that's a good thing to want to compensate your team and.
[00:03:08] Speaker C: To see them continue on.
[00:03:10] Speaker B: So the need for funding became very apparent really quickly and selfishly. Some of these things were like, I wanted access to speakers and to experts personally for me. And I wanted to see a more intimate community. I wanted to get to know people on a one to one basis. And looking at like six years later, I know a lot of my community members by name. I know what they're working on, I know what their personal lives are like. So I definitely wanted to bring an income and just build this up. And when we started this pay community, we were one of the first to do this. There were other Facebook groups, many other ones, but moving into the membership route, we were one of the first, especially for people of color. So the actual launching process, I always write things when emotional because I feel like that just makes, it just helps connect my emotions to my readers. So I remember writing a post, an emotional post, and saying like, listen, we need help and we're going to start this membership and here's what we're going to offer, and we're going to close this group down. And I thought people were going to.
[00:04:22] Speaker C: Be upset and riot and be mad at me, but a lot of them.
[00:04:26] Speaker B: Were like, no, sign me up. I want to take the next step with you. I see what you're doing. I want all the things that you mentioned here.
[00:04:33] Speaker C: Let's go.
[00:04:34] Speaker B: So it always feels to me whenever I'm doing something new, there's so much.
[00:04:38] Speaker C: Nervousness that you're not sure of. Like, are people going to bite? And then you put it out there.
[00:04:43] Speaker B: In the world and you're free and you're like, wow, there are people who are rallying behind me. So that's really some of the things that happen behind the scenes to jump from free to paid.
[00:04:50] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. And I think that's like you said something about wanting to have more personal relationship with your members and then kind of learning along the way. They want that too. They're already on some level, bought into what you're doing and what you're creating and want to continue to grow in that experience and community. And I think that's the reality for a lot of people who probably consume free media. And then when they're offered something paid by someone they already kind of enjoy seeing things from, they're like, yes, I'll pay the extra to get a better experience. So to my understanding, you guys did an in person retreat with Women of color podcasters. What was the structure of that retreat? Why did you cap it? I think you capped it at a certain number. Talk to me about kind of the decision making behind that.
[00:05:35] Speaker B: Okay, so the honest is that we did not end up having the retreat, and there's a lot to unpack so we can get into it. So we've been running for close to six years, and I've always had this fear of doing in person because there's a lot of commitment, there's a lot of finances involved to put things on the line. But I said to myself, okay, 2023 was going to be the year, because.
[00:06:01] Speaker C: I feel like we had a sizable.
[00:06:04] Speaker B: Engaged community, and it was time for us to have our own event. Looking at the podcasting space, there's podcasting conferences, virtual and in person. But I noticed the retreat aspect.
[00:06:17] Speaker C: I'm a travel creator, so I do.
[00:06:20] Speaker B: A lot of traveling for my own show. So I said, you know what? Let's do destination retreat so that we can get to travel and we can kind of be outside of these structured sessions and workshops and all the things that we know about conferences. So I decided to do Vermont. I love Vermont in the fall. It's beautiful. It's just amazing.
[00:06:41] Speaker C: And I actually went ahead and committed.
[00:06:45] Speaker B: Quite a bit of finances to certain aspects to actually do this, because I wanted to know where we're going to do it. I wanted to know some of the.
[00:06:51] Speaker C: Logistics aspects, but honestly, I presold it.
[00:06:55] Speaker B: So knowing a couple of the commitments, I presold the offer, which is probably what you're referring to, or we put a page up. I did a campaign around it. I had an email sent out to the community. But when it came to, okay, let's actually get the sign ups going, it was very slow. It was very slow. And I had capped it to 20 people because that was how much the space that I had. That's how much it was allowed, that they would allow. But I also felt like 20 would be intimate, where we can get quite a bit of a lot out of these relationships. So 20 felt like a really good number, but because of the slowness of ticket sales and just things not really moving the way I was hoping to.
[00:07:38] Speaker C: I decided to close that down because.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: Again, when you're doing in person events, you have to financially commit. So there's bills coming down and not.
[00:07:46] Speaker C: Enough income to say, this is a thing.
[00:07:49] Speaker B: I've also learned in my years of content creation.
[00:07:52] Speaker C: It's not always that when you put.
[00:07:54] Speaker B: Out an offer, it's going to be like gangbusters and everybody's going to go to it. But as a creator, you can kind of sense, especially when you're preselling something.
[00:08:02] Speaker C: If you hit the mark or if.
[00:08:04] Speaker B: Your audience is looking for that. So what I've learned from that retreat experience is that my audience was actually looking for more learning opportunities. They really wanted more workshops, more of that pieces of those conferences that they're so used to.
[00:08:18] Speaker C: And that's kind of what I think.
[00:08:20] Speaker B: When you're doing something different from the industry is that you're going to have to teach and help your folks unlearn certain things, because folks were looking for a conference and we were more doing retreat relaxing, networking style events. So I learned a lot from that experience.
[00:08:38] Speaker C: But ultimately we decided to close it.
[00:08:41] Speaker B: Down because it just wasn't getting the attention so that we can continue moving forward with that project.
[00:08:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I appreciate that breakdown. I appreciate your honesty and vulnerability around that. And I think that this year, 2023, that has actually been a very similar story for a lot of people. We met at a podcast, like in person, at a podcast conference. I've been to three this year. I know you've been to some other podcast conferences, and podcast industry has just been hit really hard, and it's not unique to us. I think there's been some mixed reviews on Afrotech. I don't know if you've seen any of those. And I think the main critique has been like people saying, yes, the brunches are cute, they're fun. But I would also like job opportunities. I would like to learn. I would like for certain conversations not to be gatekeeped behind, like a higher tier that someone who's maybe early in their career cannot afford. And I think, again, that's just a reflection of how do you make something that is accessible to people at different stages in their creative journey or creative careers, and how do you make it affordable and accessible to where you're not, like, overextending yourself, but also providing something that's really good and high quality? And so there's this balance that needs to be struck. So we're going to switch gears for a little bit. I want to come back to women of color podcasters. But I did want to get into you have something that is a little less of a lift, but still very impactful, which is your grants for podcasters newsletter on Substack.
[00:10:16] Speaker C: Substack.
[00:10:17] Speaker A: The beautiful thing about them is that you can build in paid subscribers and paid Tiers, which is awesome. Talk to me a little bit about how the idea for that came to be. Is that something that was requested from your community?
[00:10:29] Speaker B: Okay, so it's a little bit of a long story. I have long stories if you can't tell long origin stories.
[00:10:36] Speaker C: So the background is that I was.
[00:10:39] Speaker B: A grant administrator before I quit corporate a couple of years ago. So as a grant administrator, I would help physicians and research, medical research staff apply for grant funding and also, when the funds came in, manage their funds. So I was a grant manager. I loved that job.
[00:10:57] Speaker C: I excelled.
[00:10:58] Speaker B: I grew in that corporate career within seven years.
[00:11:02] Speaker C: Loved it.
[00:11:03] Speaker B: However, around 2020, around the same time, I've been always having a blog and a podcast all those years too. But at that time, I saw funding opportunities specifically for podcasters, and some of them were just for creators in general, too. I was like, oh, bet, I'm going to apply. So I end up applying.
[00:11:22] Speaker C: I lost some, but I won four within like a two year span.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: And that to me was a new revenue stream. We ended up actually launching a subdivision of my podcast as a result of that. And it was a documentary, audio documentary called Millennial Wealth Builders.
[00:11:41] Speaker C: And I could not unsee that potential. I'm like, this is amazing.
[00:11:45] Speaker B: I've never seen creators winning grants at this record. What is it? Like breakneck record speed.
[00:11:52] Speaker C: I was just excited.
[00:11:53] Speaker B: I was like, oh my God, like, free money quotes.
[00:11:57] Speaker C: Free money.
[00:11:58] Speaker B: So I always had a back end of my mind. I'm like, what would it look like if I would share grants? But I wasn't ready to commit at that time. I was just sharing opportunities with my friends in our group, chats and stuff like that.
[00:12:12] Speaker C: And I kind of put the idea.
[00:12:14] Speaker B: Of creating something on the side. Fast forward. I was pregnant and it was a 03:00 a.m.. Moment.
[00:12:22] Speaker C: And I'm telling you, my son said.
[00:12:25] Speaker B: To me, in the belly, he was.
[00:12:27] Speaker C: Like, you need to look at this.
[00:12:29] Speaker B: Pursue this idea. He's all about his money, too, at baby in the womb. So I was like, okay, bet. So I started to look at tools because I knew I didn't want to commit to a website.
[00:12:41] Speaker C: Like, the process of building a website.
[00:12:44] Speaker B: And developing it can be easy, but it's also lots of moving pieces. Just a mess. So I was like, let me look at Substack. And I looked at a couple of.
[00:12:52] Speaker C: People who had substacks.
[00:12:54] Speaker B: They weren't in my field or anything like that, but I like the paywall aspect of it. I like how clean it was. So I decided, you know what? I'm going to start this newsletter called Grants for creators, and I'm going to just share opportunities that I find. And I started it as a free offer because I just wasn't sure.
[00:13:12] Speaker C: I didn't want to get out the.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: Gate, charge them for stuff that I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure how many grants there were out there, generally speaking, for creative people. And what's different from my approach is that I'm looking for funding opportunities by private funders. So these are companies. This is not the government for the most part. These are like private institutions, foundations, individual people, individual brands who are sending out money. And I just wasn't sure how much.
[00:13:39] Speaker C: Out there there was.
[00:13:41] Speaker B: So I sent out the first newsletter. And if you go on my Twitter, at the thought card, my pinned tweet is that moment. It was like, I just launched a newsletter.
[00:13:50] Speaker C: I am so scared.
[00:13:52] Speaker B: I'm frightened, I'm terrified. I don't know if it's going to.
[00:13:55] Speaker C: Work, but here's like a list of how many grants that I found.
[00:13:58] Speaker B: I mean, people were biting at the bits to get access to this.
[00:14:02] Speaker C: They were like, whoa.
[00:14:04] Speaker B: And it wasn't even a lot. It was like something like ten or.
[00:14:06] Speaker C: Something like that I found. But the magic of it was that.
[00:14:09] Speaker B: I was saving them time. Most creators don't have time to look for grants or funding opportunities unless someone sent it to them. They saw it on a reel or something like that.
[00:14:17] Speaker C: We don't have time.
[00:14:18] Speaker B: We don't have the time or the skills to look for grant opportunities.
[00:14:21] Speaker C: But guess what? I do.
[00:14:23] Speaker B: I literally worked doing this for healthcare.
[00:14:26] Speaker C: So I sent out a couple of.
[00:14:28] Speaker B: Newsletters, and once I felt like I was getting traction, I think I got my first thousand subscribers off the free tier and I was like, boom, paywall.
[00:14:36] Speaker C: $5, $5 minimally a month.
[00:14:39] Speaker B: Or you could get it for discounted annual rate. And people started coming in. They started coming in. And the consistency of the newsletter coming.
[00:14:47] Speaker C: Out made people realize and myself, like, wow, there's a lot of funding out there.
[00:14:53] Speaker B: You could literally spend your entire day spending just applying for grant opportunities because there's just so many opportunities out there. But that's really the origin of the project. We've since increased the price. We recently hit 5000 subscribers. I have a team of two staffers, one that does the research with me, that we look for grant opportunities, and then another who, funny enough, worked with me at corporate. Like, I left and she left. So it's so funny, literally. We have a grant team within, but I'm an entrepreneur now, so she helps with my formatting and things. So I have a very small, tight team. I believe last year we shared 600 grants. Last year, in 2022, I think we were looking at the numbers. I think we doubled this year. I think we're on the close to like 2.5 Xing what we did last year.
[00:15:41] Speaker C: So money is not slowing down.
[00:15:43] Speaker B: It is not slowing down, and it's just eye opening to just see how much money is out there for small businesses, for creative people, entrepreneurs.
[00:15:52] Speaker C: Again, we just have to find it. Let's find it. That's the hardest part.
[00:15:56] Speaker B: Sometimes.
[00:15:57] Speaker C: No.
[00:15:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
Obviously there's a reason why I took off QuickSam, because people are like, hey, I'm so early. I may not have a big enough audience for sponsors, but that doesn't mean I don't want to invest in creating the best show I possibly can. And that's completely understandable. And I think for a lot of reasons, that's why things like Substack work, in addition for you as a creator, but also for people like you, create posts. People can comment under those posts. People can talk to people. I think they call them like notes or chats or maybe both. Or they can talk to each other like, hey, have anybody heard back from this grant? What are some things that I could do to make my grant application better? And all of these questions that people have, because grants in themselves, while they're free money, depending on the amount, they are a lot of work. Sometimes they want like your birth certificate, proof that you were born from your mom, your first born child, all the things, okay, they want so much from you.
And it's just like, okay, this is the exchange on the chance that I get this money, and then, like you.
[00:17:05] Speaker C: Said, you don't have to pay it back.
[00:17:07] Speaker A: And when it comes to investing and creator businesses, this is one of the lowest risk ways of doing it right for funding bodies. So going back just a little bit to women of color, podcasters, you have made the difficult decision to kind of.
[00:17:24] Speaker C: Shut that down, our sunset that at.
[00:17:26] Speaker A: The end of this year.
[00:17:28] Speaker C: And I think I have my own.
[00:17:29] Speaker A: Hypothesis, but I've just been hearing this recurring theme of knowing when something, you have something that people want and kind of seeing maybe you have the makings of something, but maybe you don't have the resources to build it out in the way that people need. So talk to me about kind of how you knew it was time to maybe sunset that community.
[00:17:47] Speaker B: I've been thinking about it for quite a while. To be honest, I'm not a hasty person.
[00:17:52] Speaker C: I think about things, I see the.
[00:17:54] Speaker B: Direction, and it took me a while to figure out what I wanted. But over the last two years in particular, I've been doing one on one coaching as a podcast marketing coach. So helping folks grow their podcast. I love helping folks monetize through sponsorships in particular. And I love the intimacy of one on one and seeing the change and the opportunities that arise from those one on one connections.
[00:18:22] Speaker C: Now with a community, I still have.
[00:18:25] Speaker B: One on ones, but it's not as.
[00:18:26] Speaker C: Intimate and I can help them, meaning we bring in speakers, but I'm not.
[00:18:32] Speaker B: Part of their implementation process. I'm not typically coaching them ongoingly. So I think for me as a creator and as a coach, there's been just an interest in I want to.
[00:18:42] Speaker C: See this through and I want to.
[00:18:44] Speaker B: Be part of that intimate transition process, transformation process for my clients.
[00:18:50] Speaker C: So that's been part one and then.
[00:18:53] Speaker B: Just part two, understanding my capacity now as a creator. I'm a new mom, new ish. He's almost two, but I can see I want to do things like homeschool.
[00:19:02] Speaker C: My son, and for me to homeschool I need to have space and I.
[00:19:06] Speaker B: Need to really focus in on income generation and also just space, time and space so I can devote to my family. So these personal things really played into.
[00:19:17] Speaker C: The fact of like am I doing.
[00:19:19] Speaker B: All that I can for this community?
[00:19:21] Speaker C: And when I looked at it, I said, I feel like there's someone that can do more.
[00:19:25] Speaker B: And when I decided to actually went to Afros and audio with you and I started to share with people, I'm.
[00:19:33] Speaker C: Thinking of closing it down and they.
[00:19:34] Speaker B: Asked me important questions and the reactions.
[00:19:37] Speaker C: Gave me the confidence to actually openly.
[00:19:40] Speaker B: Share with my community that I'm thinking about this. So a couple of days ago, I posted in the community telling them, hey listen, if we don't find another leader to rise up to the occasion, this community is going to be gone by January 1, 2024.
[00:19:56] Speaker C: And let's just chat.
[00:19:58] Speaker B: I'm open to all possibilities and opportunities and the pouring of community support on that post. People raising their hands like, I want to talk to you, I'll dm you. I want to see this continue. I want to be a coordinator.
[00:20:12] Speaker C: What can I do to help? So, to me, that's what I want.
[00:20:16] Speaker B: I don't want to close it down. I want it to reinvent itself, reimagine.
[00:20:21] Speaker C: And serve women of color in the.
[00:20:23] Speaker B: Podcasting industry in new and exciting ways. And just because I can't does not.
[00:20:28] Speaker C: Mean that it should just close.
[00:20:31] Speaker B: So that's where we're at right now. I'm talking to a few people who are actually community members who knows my vision, values, and who knows they want to be part of this legacy, which is a very exciting thing. One of the things I've learned is that these brands that we're building are assets. They're transferable assets that we can, of course, decide ultimately to shut down and no longer offer these services. But there may be people in our communities who we can pass them on.
[00:20:59] Speaker C: To, who can continue, again, what we're working on.
[00:21:03] Speaker B: But I'm curious what your hypothesis was, because you mentioned you had a hypothesis. I want to hear what you think.
[00:21:08] Speaker A: So I knew about the family aspect, and I totally understand that and agree with that. I think another part of it is just like, I also saw how successful the grants for podcasters newsletter became. And I saw that when you went to free to pay, not everybody went to paid. Some people were just like, I'm just not ready. I'm not in that space yet. So I think you were kind of in this liminal space, right, where you had this really highly engaged community that was willing to pay, that was invested, that wanted what you were offering. But when retreat happened, it was like, well, this maybe isn't just the right thing, right? Maybe the things that are important to me aren't exactly matching with what they need. And I think that can be really important. You have to think about your own capacity, which you did. And I think sometimes people assume that when you create a community, you're creating for other people, or when you create a business or a podcast or a video, you're creating for other people. And I think sometimes people really underestimate how selfish we as creators are, and we want to create things that we enjoy, too.
And that's just the reality. And I think there's no shame in saying, hey, this was a fun ride. I loved it. I want to continue these relationships, but just not in this way. And I think that's my hypothesis. And I think we should be more open to the conversations about, like, I can do all of these things, whatever all these things are, but I can't do them all at once if they're.
[00:22:35] Speaker C: Going to be great and I think.
[00:22:36] Speaker A: We should have those conversations more often.
[00:22:38] Speaker B: You hit it on the nail.
I think honestly, the retreat not happening was like a really big blow. I was like, dang, really? Because also I didn't share this, but.
[00:22:51] Speaker C: I had a waitlist because again, this is like from virtual to in person.
[00:22:57] Speaker B: This is a big thing. I had a waitlist of over 100 people who raised their hand and they.
[00:23:02] Speaker C: Were like, I want to hear from you.
[00:23:03] Speaker B: I want next ups. And I had mentioned, like, this is happening within the year, so you have to commit soon.
[00:23:10] Speaker C: So I think it was a big blow to me because just despite the.
[00:23:15] Speaker B: Interest, the misalignment there, the financial commitment again of our family finances, hoping that this was going to work out and having to recover from that, and then again looking at the next following year, like, do I want to continue on this path? And grants for creators has been super successful and I'm still not 100% putting all my effort into that. So imagine if I do, imagine if I devote more marketing, more resources, more opportunities, how that's scaling.
[00:23:48] Speaker C: One of the things I like about.
[00:23:49] Speaker B: The grants for creators is a scalability.
[00:23:51] Speaker C: Because I'm doing work once and people.
[00:23:54] Speaker B: Opt in every day. They become paid subscribers or their membership subscription renews every day. So as long as I have a system to send out and find those grants, I'm good.
[00:24:05] Speaker C: I'm Gucci.
[00:24:06] Speaker B: So there's like, again, you nailed it. There's just a lot of pieces. But again, I have to be true.
[00:24:12] Speaker C: To myself and I'm really looking forward.
[00:24:14] Speaker B: To seeing what happens as a result of me putting it out there now and seeing what community members will step.
[00:24:20] Speaker C: Up and continue this moving forward. I love that.
[00:24:24] Speaker A: And again, just appreciate you for sharing because I think there's a lot of tendency to not want to talk about the things that are hard as a creator, especially when on the outside, things are so great. How could you complain or whatever. So thank you for that. Thank you for joining me here today. I think that's a beautiful note to end on and I cannot wait to see what happens next.
[00:24:45] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:24:46] Speaker B: Thank you for creating a safe space for me to feel comfortable. But I also, like you mentioned, the transparency is so important. I've had amazing highs this year, amazing and also devastating lows. And I was talking to my husband.
[00:25:01] Speaker C: Yesterday and he mentioned, just like, despite.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: The setbacks where you're taking steps back tomorrow, you have an opportunity to take a step forward.
[00:25:08] Speaker C: So that's why I'm just continuing.
[00:25:09] Speaker B: Like, I just need to take one.
[00:25:11] Speaker C: More step one more step to continue moving forward.
[00:25:14] Speaker B: And I think that's been helpful to kind of ride those unpredictable waves of creator entrepreneurship.
[00:25:20] Speaker C: Yeah, I know.
[00:25:21] Speaker A: I don't know if you watched Ted Lasso, but there's a part in there where he's know what's the happiest animal?
[00:25:26] Speaker C: And it's like a goldfish because its.
[00:25:29] Speaker A: Memory is not great. And I think it sounds so corny, but that's kind of the mindset you have to have as an entrepreneur, because some days are going to be absolutely rough, and then the next day you could be like, wow, I just run a $20,000 grant. Everything's great. Exactly. And you have to kind of ride that wave.
[00:25:47] Speaker B: So true. I need that $20,000 grant. So, yes. Sign me up for that. Sign me up for that, please.
[00:25:54] Speaker C: I love it. I love it.
[00:25:56] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:25:56] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:25:58] Speaker A: That's all for this episode.
[00:25:59] Speaker D: If you enjoyed it, please give us a five star review on your listening app, like this video. If you're tuning in on YouTube and subscribe for more episodes, I'll catch you.
[00:26:08] Speaker A: In the next episode.
