Speaker 0 00:00:00 Hey everyone. Welcome to Creative Architects by Casto. I am your host, Angela Hollowell, and I'm joined here today with Jeremy s who is the founder of the podcast Marketing Academy, an incredible community and creator education school for podcasters.
Speaker 2 00:00:24 What am I gonna teach that people can't get from Pat Flynn? He's got a bigger audience, he's got more credibility. He's been doing the podcast himself. I mean, like, I've been working with clients, but like, I don't actually know what I would teach that people can't find just as good elsewhere.
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[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. So I learned about you through your newsletter, the Scrappy podcast marketing newsletter. So talk to me about how you went from one revamping the newsletter, right? Because that was kind of your initial entry point in to now kind of, you know, having an incredible host of, what is it, 3000 subscribers now to your newsletter?
Speaker 2 00:01:38 I actually have two newsletters. Um, I started the first one Creative Way Finding, which was initially under another name. Uh, this is actually maybe a, a perfect story for this. I hadn't actually thought about how this ties in, but I, in the start of the Pandemic, like many people, I started a newsletter and I had started many newsletters in the past and they'd all, they'd all been like a thing that I thought I was supposed to do. And so I never created a newsletter that I actually wanted to create. I created the one that I thought people would want or that, you know, was supposed to fit into my business in some way or another. So first lesson there was that those types of newsletters and any creative project are usually unsustainable. I've learned that lesson multiple times with <laugh>, many different creative projects and now kinda exclusively only create anything that I'm like actually excited to create myself, which is a, a good starting point.
Speaker 2 00:02:20 But, uh, the initial newsletter that I, I started creating in, at the start of a pandemic, I think March, 2020 was called, uh, the Listen Up Newsletter. And I was in podcasting. I had a podcast, production agency. I kind of thought I didn't know what to name it and I was like, well, this is a good enough name. I kind of wanted it to be like positive, uplifting, like really targeting people who were wanting to do good in the world. And so I thought like, listen up, it's gonna be audio, it's gonna be, you know, kind of positive impact type stuff. And I thought it would be related somewhat to podcasting at some point. I didn't really know what the content was gonna be at the time. I was just kind of like excited to write and was gonna figure it out along the way. And I never wrote a single issue about podcasting and it, it was so I was like, this is going to be about podcasting, it's gonna feed into my podcast production agency.
Speaker 2 00:02:59 And I thought, well, it's natural. Of course it'll be about podcasting. But the first one I did just did a kind of like, you know, what I was feeling that week, it kind of welcome back reintroduction to me for the people who are already, are already on my list. And just ended up every week I wrote about something else and that thing was never podcasting and it just kind of turned out that like podcasting wasn't the thing that I was really excited to be writing about at the time. And I was doing a little bit of blogging here and there. And so that kind of just took off on its own kind of like personal creative, you know, whatever I was feeling around doing creative work at that time. That newsletter's actually kind of continued now for, for the past over three years now. But then, uh, scrappy podcasting, that was I think November or December, 2021.
Speaker 2 00:03:40 So kind of a year and a half later maybe where I kind of came back and was like actually feeling a lot of energy around podcasting and kind of, you know, felt the spark to then actually start writing more about that on a weekly basis. And so that kind of came in later in the picture. So now I have two newsletters, one about general creative work and the other one about podcasting. And between the two of them there are now close to 11,000 subscribers. And so they're each around I think, creative way findings at around 6,000 and scrappy podcastings at around 5,000 subscribers now. So that's the, the entire backstory on the, the two newsletters I now write.
Speaker 0 00:04:15 Okay. Thank you for that backstory because what you shared is so very important, uh, create for you first and two, be honest about your goals with any product that you create. So for, again, people who don't know, you did produce podcasts for a long time, so your knowledge about podcast marketing isn't coming, you know, from someone who doesn't have experience. Talk to me a little bit about your podcast production company and how that kind of got started and where that is now.
Speaker 2 00:04:41 I essentially went to audio school way back in the day in I think 2011. I went to audio engineering school and wanted to work in the music industry. So ultimately kind of like went through school, came outta that at the other end and I did do, uh, some internships and things like that at some big, uh, recording studios in Vancouver, Canada where I was living at the time. And pretty quickly within probably a year realized that this wasn't really where I wanted to be spending the rest of my career. And uh, you know, I, I dunno how much ex I think you're a music lover as well, I dunno if you've ever, ever done any work in the music business, but it's not the best industry to make a living in. There's not a lot of money there. And it's essentially, I mean, knowing what I know now, I essentially would've needed to build a freelance career.
Speaker 2 00:05:24 I think I kind of went in thinking I might be able to get, you know, some kind of job working in the industry, knowing what I know now. I probably maybe would've considered it a little bit differently. And 'cause now I, I love being self-employed and being, you know, kind of, I mean, I have a production agency and then kind of self-employed. There's some, you know, freelance elements to that. So now I love building a business at the time, that's not what I was looking to do. And so kind of was looking for other options outside of that. And so, you know, had, you know, was essentially very overqualified for the podcast space and I took a year off, I did a bunch of kind of like manual labor jobs, things like that, saved up and took a year off to go, go travel. Kind of came back from that and was like, man, I, what I really love is traveling and photography and I was trying to think about how can I, you know, make my like photography my full-time business while also traveling.
Speaker 2 00:06:07 So I was looking at ways to do that and kind of after that trip came back and discovered podcasting as a listener. And the first thing I looked up, I didn't even really know there was like online business or anything, this was back in 2014, I think before it kind of really took over. And so I looked up like creative business or something like that in, in iTunes at the time and immediately found like Pat Flynn and Amy Porterfield and all these kind of like OGs of the online business world and quickly fell down the podcast rabbit hole as a listener and was realizing that oh wow, there's this, this whole world here here of people building online businesses that they're able to work from anywhere and all that good stuff. And about six months into that, I started a photography blog and was writing about kind of travel photography and all these types of things and then realized that if I wanted to travel by far, the faster way to do that was going to be by building a service-based business rather than building up an audience in courses and all that other stuff.
Speaker 2 00:06:55 And I realized, oh, like I am, you know, a huge podcast nerd as a listener. I have all the audio engineering skills from school and this is actually, you know, really, really easy for me to do. And there's people who are looking to have that, that job done. And so started, got my first clients on Upwork and kind of graduated out of that, uh, over, you know, a period of a, a few months and started getting clients from elsewhere and referrals and pretty quickly kind of scaled beyond just being a freelance podcast producer into building out a team kind of out of necessity. Didn't really know even what an agency was at the time, but it kind of like just was like, oh, there's more work than I can handle. I need to hire people. And ended up, you know, kind of unintentionally building this agency, which I think a lot of people who can get into agencies end up doing, especially the first time around.
Speaker 2 00:07:36 And, uh, that, so that was essentially started in, in 2016 and have, so I've now had that going for over seven years and it's kind of scaling down the agency side of things. Now. We still have several clients, but have been now kind of, uh, scaling up the education and content side of things, um, as I've kind of gotten more into the marketing side of things and more interested in working, you know, one-on-one with a small number of people, but also working at a, a kind of more like lower capacity, um, in terms of like group coaching programs and, um, self-paced courses and things like that, uh, to help more people there.
Speaker 0 00:08:08 Yeah, you made a very important kind of career trajectory model that I think a lot of people who are now getting introduced to online businesses are not really considering the reality of which is that like, it is far easier to get your first client for a service that you provide a creative service, whether that's photography, filmmaking, podcasting, design, whatever it is, then it is to build an online audience and then try to sell something to them based on experience that quite frankly, you just don't have. So I think there has to be some kind of trade off between like, yes, I wanna grow an online business that allows me to create educational products like you have done, which is awesome, but that has to come from one money because you're gonna need to invest in the time that it takes to create stuff like that and to grow an audience, but also invest in like yourself and your team to help you run and, and, you know, scale something like that, uh, at the capacity that you need, right?
Speaker 0 00:09:02 Because you're, if you're, if I'm hearing correctly, you're running a, still running a prod podcast production company. You have two newsletters, you have the podcast marketing Academy, you have self-paced courses, cohort-based courses, and your consulting. That is a lot for a solo creator <laugh> okay. Like, you know, almost impossible to do by yourself. So it, it just doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen in three months. It doesn't happen in six months. And even if it does, it's hard to sustain because you don't have the infrastructure or the team to help you sustain it. Right? So again, and these are just my 2 cents, but also this is what, you know, other creators are experiencing as well who have been there, like Pat Flynn, you know, Amy Porterfield, they also kind of started in this route. They didn't just start with a hundred K podcast downloads. That's just not how it, uh, works, right? Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:09:50 I, I think like, I mean, I started listening to those people and of course everybody likes Pat Flynn's show Smart Passive Income is all about this idea of of passive income. And I, that's really what I wanted to build early on. And in hindsight it's very clear that I didn't have, that wasn't possible really early on. And I, I think like there are some unicorns who were able to pull that off in a really short amount of time, but I think a lot of times those are people who have this really high level of credibility already based on their past experiences that they can then turn that into an online business that is, you know, that that is sustainable. But even then, I think like audience building takes so long, and also I think back in 2014, that was a way different world than the one we're in now, almost 10 years later.
Speaker 2 00:10:29 So I think for me, like there was no way that I could have possibly created a course, like I wanted to create a course early on. I couldn't have created a course that was actually any good. And I didn't really realize that until many years later, once I built up this agency and worked with podcasters one-on-one for, you know, five years where I was like, oh, now I actually understand what the problems are that aren't being addressed by other people already. And one of the things was, I was, for all that time I was like, you know, I could build a how to launch your podcast course. And I was just always like, especially because I came in through the door of Pat Flynn, I was like, what am I gonna teach that people can't get from Pat Flynn? He's got a bigger audience, he's got more credibility.
Speaker 2 00:11:06 He's been doing the podcast himself. I mean, like, I've been working with clients, but like, I don't actually know what I would teach that people can't find just as good elsewhere. And so I'm actually really glad I never created that course. And it wasn't until I got onto this idea of podcast marketing where I was like, I actually love the marketing side of things and podcasting in particular. There's almost nobody who knows how to do it. Podcasting's a really unique medium to market compared to a lot of other places and a lot of other channels. And so like, there was nobody talking about it. It was the thing that I actually loved and I was like, oh, this is actually the thing I should be doing here because there it's in high demand and there's not many people talking about it, and I actually love it. And so at that point I was like, oh, this, this is the thing I actually feel excited to create, and now I actually have the experience and I have the case studies and all this kind of stuff to be able to actually create something that I feel confident in marketing and selling and all of that stuff. But yeah, early on there was just no way, uh, especially in hindsight that I actually could have done that.
Speaker 0 00:11:59 So since you have lovingly brought up the podcast Marketing Academy, can you talk to me a little bit about what course development looked like for you and what are some of the mediums for delivery that you considered for delivering this course?
Speaker 2 00:12:13 Yeah, so essentially it came out of the agency and I think like a lot of good online programs come out of that kind of one-to-one work a lot of times where I realized that. So I started working with podcast, uh, clients and producing their shows in 20 15, 20 16. And over that time I noticed a shift. So in, in 2020, actually the, the same year, very, uh, similar to when I started the newsletter, I also launched the first cohort of the podcast Marketing Academy. And in that kind of five or six years that I'd been actively working with clients, I had seen this shift in podcasting where a lot of the early clients built up, you know, huge shows, tens of thousands of downloads an episode without really doing any marketing, and their shows were just like, kept growing and they were huge. And then a lot of the shows that were started in, you know, 20 18, 20 19, they were having a really hard time finding traction and they just weren't growing despite, you know, the production level was the same.
Speaker 2 00:13:02 I thought the content was just as good. And so of course they're asking me like, what do I need to do to market my show? Why isn't it growing? And I'm thinking like, I better find out how do I help these clients grow, grow otherwise they're not gonna keep producing their shows and we're gonna be out, you know, a client because they're not getting the results that they were hoping for when they launched. And so I kind of got curious from that perspective and just started interviewing all of our clients. And so I think we had 20 or 25 clients at the time, and I just did one-on-one interviews with all of them and basically asked like, what are you doing? What's working, what hasn't worked? You know, how do, what do you attribute your success to if they have been successful? And kinda just asking all these questions.
Speaker 2 00:13:35 And then I went on and interviewed some people outside of, outside of our client base and, and kind of just gathered all this information. And by the end of that interview process, I basically had the curriculum where it was like, oh, here are the things that seem to come up again and again and again as the things that work here are some of the other things that maybe don't come up quite as often, but they're interesting kind of things to throw in of like, maybe this will work for you would be worth trying. Um, and so some of those were very tactical, others were related to like the content format and structure themselves and then like things like differentiation and messaging and like copy and all those types of things that fall into that content mix as well. And then, uh, community building was the kind of other pillar that emerged out of that.
Speaker 2 00:14:11 And so these were the things I was like, oh, there's, I, I basically had this list of, of research that I had and I was able to categorize that into these four different kind of pillars and realized like, oh, this is basically the course right here and here's all the things that came up from these interviews that seem to be the fundamentals to growing a podcast and what you need to do to be successful. So it was really interesting that I didn't necessarily set out to create a course and actually initially I was thinking I was gonna do an internal course for our clients and that was gonna be one of the perks for signing up to, to work with us as an agency was you'd also get access to this podcast growth course. And then kind of at the last minute I thought, actually maybe I should do this as a public facing course that our clients will all get access to, to, but not like addressing them directly.
Speaker 2 00:14:53 And so basically I came up with this curriculum and then I pre-sold it to my, my email list. I think I had maybe probably like 700 people on the email list at the time. And I was looking for, I think I had set a goal of like if I could get 10 people in and uh, or 12, I think it actually was, and ultimately got 18 people and was like, okay, we're doing this. And so I then started the, you know, furiously like recording as fast as possible and on a weekly basis releasing a new batch of videos, uh, to that initial cohort. And so that initial one was, it was all self-paced, it was released on a weekly cadence, kind of a new set of videos, but they were prerecorded videos, um, for that group. And then since then I've experimented with, uh, cohort-based courses, so like pure, you know, a hundred percent live courses and then also, you know, a hundred percent self-paced courses.
Speaker 2 00:15:39 And I've kind of landed now where there is twice a year I do the cohort-based course, which is a six week live program. And then there's also the kind of, uh, membership, the p m a membership, which has all the self-paced content as well as, uh, live group coaching with me and then a lot of like playbooks and things like that, templates all the, all those other kind of like assets and resources that are helpful. And so people who go through the cohort also get access to the membership, but you could also just sign up for the annual membership, um, as a one-off thing as well.
Speaker 0 00:16:05 So cohort-based courses have gained a lot of popularity and when we think about creator education, right, Maven HQ kind of made it their whole premise. You Demi Thinkific teach will all have some element where they allow you to go live within your, you know, community or cohort and speak directly to people. So talk to me a little bit about what is the difference that you've seen in terms of engagement between the self-paced and the cohort-based courses? Because again, self-paced courses is a lot more akin to passive income because you make it once, maybe you update it once a year, once every six months, but pretty much you make it once and it kind of just you churn and burn basically versus like a cohort base where it's like they are signing up for access to you. Cohort based courses are typically more expensive because of that access to the creator, but can you truly say that you've experienced more engagement that way? Is it worth it to do a cohort? Well, not is it worth it? That's a bad question, but like is it, has it been like for you a better experience to do the cohort based course and obviously it's worth it to, to do it twice a year?
Speaker 2 00:17:07 They each seem to have their place, and it's interesting that some of the, the cohort based course buzz seems to be dying. I don't think like the the medium is, is dying necessarily, but a lot of the kind of like covid inflated, you look at like Tiago Forte from building a second Brain and David Perl from Rite of Passage and Ali Abdal from, uh, part-time YouTuber Academy, like they were all multimillion dollar like cohort launches, which aren't really happening anymore. And I, I know that a lot of them have kind of reported on that, that sales have dropped off as people have kind of reintegrated into to regular life. And so I think like those cohorts where you're having like multiple hundreds of people or even thousands of people in a live cohort, probably that wasn't sustainable, but I think, you know, small groups of maybe, you know, a dozen or 50 or a hundred or something like that, I think that's still still doable.
Speaker 2 00:17:51 And my cohorts have typically been between like six to 15 people. And so I think like that is, is certainly going to be sustainable going forward. So for me, one, one of the reasons, like I, I initially did a really long cohort, the cohort two of my, my course, the first one was basically fully prerecorded self-paced, not a lot of live. The second one was fully, it was like a four month long live program, which was way too long. Then I went fully self-paced and then I, I realized each time, like the pendulum swung back and forth and each was kind of a correction from something with the previous program that I was like, ah, this could be better in some way or like, this was good, but it, it now this fell flat. And so what I realized and eventually why I went the two separate routes was that with the self-paced program, what I was seeing was that a lot of people like the full program didn't need to be live, but there were specific pieces where especially on the kind of foundational marketing aspects, uh, some of the stuff that there's no one right answer to, it's like you have to experiment and decide like, what is your differentiator or unique differentiators going to be?
Speaker 2 00:18:52 Like, what is your positioning going to be? How do you like get messaging that's going to resonate with your audience? These were all things that people in the self-paced version were kind of like either getting stuck in and just like getting bogged down and never actually moving on past that because there is no right answer. So you could just obsess about that stuff forever and never come out the other side. Or they would do the opposite and they'd kind of breeze through it and be like, yep, check that one off the list. And I would, you know, kind of look at it and be like, well that's not gonna attract anyone. And like it's, it's not clear, it's still not clear what the value is. You're not differentiated even though you think you've done the work. And so I was like, really I need, if, if where the live aspect is going to be most useful is in working through this really hard sticky side of marketing that like you basically have to figure it out and I can guide you through that and provide you some frameworks for this, but I can't just tell you just do this.
Speaker 2 00:19:36 Like, you have to figure that out between you and your show and your audience and I'm just gonna provide the guardrails and the accountability to say like, okay, this week we're at least getting draft one done of this and it's not gonna be perfect, but over the six week program we're gonna work through these six, six different steps and you're gonna get the first draft done so that you have something to build on going forward. And so for me, that was in response to what I saw as the big problem with, uh, the self-paced version of my course. And after I started doing that, then I started seeing people have these huge transformations where it was like the clarity of they had about what their show was and where they were, uh, uniquely positioned to offer value to their audience and how they could differentiate themselves.
Speaker 2 00:20:12 It didn't always happen by the end of the six weeks, but over like the next six months, like then they were actually starting to see traction with their shows and the, the people who signed up for those, they were the most committed a lot of times. And they also, most people have basically been through the whole program. So the people who sign up are usually, there's always like in, in every cohort there's like one person who will never show up to any one of the calls and basically everybody else is there, like for all the calls and I've done six and eight week versions. And so the, the completion percentage, if we kind of take out the one person who who never shows up and maybe they watch through it on, on the replay or something, but everybody else is basically a hundred percent. And so that kind of like commitment and completion rate has been, it's, it's really rewarding for me as we're recording this.
Speaker 2 00:20:52 We just did our wrap up session earlier this week for the most recent cohort, which was the, the seventh cohort. And it's just like always amazing to like hear how people are like thinking differently about their shows and themselves and their, their businesses and all the stuff that kind of comes out of that way more intense work that gets done. Um, a lot of times like it's, it's a podcast marketing program, but because we put so much of ourselves into our shows and our businesses and everything, people get a lot of insights about their, the broader kind of businesses that they're running about themselves, the work that they're doing and like where they fit into kind of their world, um, and their and their audience's world. And so that to me is always like the, the really meaningful and impactful thing for me as a creator.
Speaker 2 00:21:30 And I think it also has that kind of same impact on them. So I've been a huge fan of them. They are certainly more exhausting to do, although I would say now seven cohorts in this was the first one where I was like, oh, I didn't actually need to do any huge overhauls on everything. It was kind of the foundation was there and I could run through it on a much more, like I wasn't recreating the slides and the lessons from scratch each and every time. So at this point, yeah, now, now three years in, I'm like, okay, this now feels like really much easier going forward than the previous cohorts.
Speaker 0 00:21:57 Yeah, I love to hear it. I think that's an incredible note to end on, a note of uplifting. Uh, thank you guys so much for listening up, if you will. And, uh, thank you Jeremy for hanging out with me today.
Speaker 2 00:22:08 Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This has been, uh, a lot of fun.
Speaker 0 00:22:11 That's all for this episode. 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 in the next episode of Creative Architects by Casts. I'll be talking with Jennifer fan, the founder of Passionfruit and you won't wanna miss it. I'll catch you in the next episode.
