The Five Biggest Mistakes I Made With Starting My First Podcast
If you’ve ever thought of creating a podcast, learn from these mistakes before you start. It could save you a lot of time and money.
There is a running joke nowadays:
Everyone and their grandma has a podcast.
I don’t necessarily see this as a problem.
I personally think everyone should have a podcast. It’s just like having a social media account in the new decade. A new way to build an audience, create a community and make money. It’s also really fun.
And just because everyone’s got a social media account that doesn’t diminish other people’s ability to have a social media account.
In this day and age, everybody can start building their own form of digital leverage from blogs, podcasts, and videos. Your digital leverage is then redeemable for financial assets. But that’s a topic for another article.
I’m here to talk about the mistakes I made in creating my first podcast. I plan to podcast and write forever. The name might change, the platform might evolve but the activity will remain the same.
If you’ve ever thought of creating a podcast, learn from these mistakes before you start. It could save you a lot of time and money.
Mistake #1: Not Building The Infrastructure To Own Our Audience
We distributed our podcast through Anchor, which is a platform owned by Spotify.
Anchor is great. It’s free to use and makes our podcast available on most podcasting platforms, provides great statistics, and even allows you to monetize through audience subscriptions and ads.
But while distribution is an asset, we didn’t create other ways to directly connect with our audience. We had a generic podcast email address but no real infrastructure for the audience to be part of our community.
Just remember, if the platform is free, you’re the product. And the audience you build is owned by the platform, not you.
If our Anchor account ever got deleted, we would be saying bye-bye to our audience.
We had quite prominent politicians listening to our podcast, but we couldn’t leverage this connection at all.
For instance:
Author’s Own Image
So while we had people listen to our podcast, there was no other meaningful way for them to engage with our brand.
What I would do next time:
Create an email list via ConvertKit and have a lead magnet (i.e product or offering) to encourage people to subscribe via email.
Create a private Facebook, Slack or Discord group that listeners could join to form a community.
Host in-person or virtual meet-ups every month to keep engagement high with our audience.
Leverage the momentum you generate from a viral podcast episode. You never know when you might get this opportunity again.
Mistake #2: Not Finding A Sponsor Right Away
Once you’ve got a mission or vision for your podcast, try to stop it around to brands or organizations that align with your brand.
You might think you need an audience first but I’ve found that you can get funding or a partnership deal with just a concept or idea.
It might not be a lot of money at first, but it provides momentum and validation for other brands to get involved with you.
We managed to get $30,000 of funding with only a few episodes but a strong vision for what we wanted to do.
We leveraged that attention and our podcast was covered by a local paper, which then attracted even more sponsorship.
View the full story HERE
Nowadays, many organizations are looking to partner with individual brands to target specific demographics. Naturally, as young people, our audience is mostly made up of the highly 16–27-year-olds.
You can charge a premium for access.
What I would do next time:
Articulate a vision for the niche you’re targeting.
List 5–10 organizations and brands you can approach.
Prepare a one-pager and an email template that outlines your vision and mission.
Approach many organizations. Tap on existing networks. Be prepared for rejection.
Mistake #3: Not Revinesting The Money We Got
Money is the lifeblood of any business, including your podcast.
Once we started getting money, we started to pay ourselves. And while it felt great to get paid, it hamstrung the growth of the podcast.
We could have invested the money in getting the podcast professionally edited or getting a video podcast set up. But we didn’t invest enough and the growth of the podcast stagnated.
Don’t be too eager to start paying yourself. If you can wait 1–2 years and mature the business, you can reap the rewards for much longer.
What I would do next time:
Reinvest, reinvest and reinvest some more.
Mistake #4: Not Getting Professional Help or Advice
Good advice is worth its weight in gold.
But only get advice from people who have achieved what you want to achieve.
When we first started the podcast, everyone and their dog had an opinion on the topics and theme of the podcast should be.
Asking advice from too many people means you will get contradictory opinions. Ask enough people and all the advice turns to zero. Listen broadly but also learn not to take most people’s advice.
Stay away from people who are negative or mock your podcast. I’m very selective about who I talk about the podcast with. For whatever reason, people just won’t like that you put yourself out there.
Some people will give you a hard time, question why you even have a podcast and just won’t like you. Don’t waste energy trying to convince negative people. Focus on your supporters and fans.
What I would do next time:
Find a podcast coach or mentor. Pay them if you have to.
Buffer against negativity. Screen out people who don’t believe in you.
Use YouTube to pick up useful tips and tricks. I basically taught myself how to edit high-quality audio via the internet.
Mistake #5: Not Allocating Enough Time To Learn
When you have a podcast, you essentially have a start-up media company.
Start-ups take a lot of time.
You need to be constantly aware of the latest happenings around the world and in your niche.
You need to be learning new skills and abilities to improve your practice.
You need to be iterating on your business model and value proposition to your customers.
Your podcast will only be as good as the number of iterations you go through.
Change your CoverArt, tinker with your episode titles, and test different marketing strategies.
Spending 10,000 hours on your podcast won’t make it great but making 10,000 iterations will.
What I would do next time:
Allocate a non-negotiable weekly amount of time (i.e 3–4 hours) per week.
This allocation needs to be both on the business (processes and systems) and in the business (creating content, recording, etc).
Embed a build-test-learn mindset to continue iterating the podcast.
Closing Thoughts
Overall, starting a podcast taught me a lot.
The experience of starting a business from scratch strengthened my resolve to create digital businesses that require low capital and no inventory.
Getting to speak to interesting people widen my perspective and empathy and expanded my network.
Interviewing someone, especially a stranger, on your podcast is intimate. You develop a different type of relationship with the person. Many of the people we’ve interviewed have become my friends or close networks.
I also got used to putting myself out there in a public way. This was scary at first. I had thoughts of judgment and suffered from imposter syndrome.
Now I know I have value to add to people’s lives and have more confidence to produce other forms of digital content.
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