I've been publishing podcasts on and off since 2015, mostly audio first, and mostly video streaming since 2020. Thoughts for those thinking about similar ideas.
My main Ice Cream for Everyone podcast has been on a hiatus since the pandemic; at the moment I publish these conversations with my friend James D'Souza. We call them our creative sessions.
During the first pandemic lockdowns, James was making efforts to create and share interesting video classes for his pupils. He was about to give his class an assignment about marketing a board game business, and reached out asking me to record an interview for his class.
That reminded us how much we enjoyed chatting, and given I'd just began teaching as well, we came up with the idea of answering recurring questions from his high school pupils, and my advertising communications students.
That was Teaching Tangents and we made two seasons of it before feeling like we were repeating ourselves. We wrapped the show up, and looked at what was next, and came up with what might be an unusual mix.
We really like having a frequent chat sharing what we're up to, I find them generally encouraging, inspiring, and agreed we might want to keep talking somehow.
The last show wound up partly because we didn't care to spend too much time to formalise, improve, or promote it.
That said, the idea of being live streamed was appealing.
We like doing it and occasionally (surprisingly, even), someone of the average 1-10 viewers per video comments and says they enjoy it too.
I guess it's our own dance like no one's watching version of Wayne's World.
It's just us talking and geeking about books, movies, games, personal knowledge management, note-taking, technology, music, meditation, coaching, work, play roleplaying games, etc. It's pretty random.
Yesterday we talked about the Tales from the Loop tabletop RPG, inspired by Simon Stålenhag's art, which also led to a series on Prime Video I haven't seen just yet. We also talked about note-taking apps: Logseq, Roam Research, Evernote, Obsidian.
I'm sharing this because we both hear about students' (or clients) aspirations to publish videos, or podcasts.
Just as an example, Youtube has 2.6 billion monthly active users, and only 4.4% of them have created their own channel. Around 321,100 channels have over 100k subscribers ; around 32,300 have 1M, and only 5 over 100M (source).
The piece of advice I read most often as I was planning for my first podcast seems correct; the most important is to find something you enjoy doing even if few people see or listen to it - which is what's most likely.
It begins with making something and publishing. Keep it simple and get out there to begin with.
As the old French Lottery slogan used to say: "100% of winners gave it a chance" (100% des gagnants ont tenté leur chance).
