A (3:20)

So, interestingly, I think actually you don't know this, but I think probably the seeds of the report were somehow rooted, at least in part in your retros in the lab. And so one of the things that you track every month is my month over month growth rate. And I was doing this for myself across a number of platforms. Back in those days it would have been Twitter and LinkedIn and podcast and email list. And you might have had some others in there as well. Those were the ones that I was really looking at. And I was really interested to always see your podcast growth metrics from month to month. And I tracked a lot of my clients metrics, but it was kind of dependent on them giving them to me. And I didn't have access to everybody's dashboard when I ran my agency years and years ago, I had more access and I actually did go back. I still had access to some of my clients accounts. They would every so often ask me questions about analytics. So I still had their like login saved and they'd reach out even though we didn't produce their show anymore. And so I went back and looked at like historical data and I was like, okay, I've got like 25 or 30 shows that I can see what is a typical podcast month over month or year over year growth rate. And the reason I was curious about this is because unlike YouTube or most social platforms, nobody really has access to that data unless you choose to make it public as a podcaster. And so if you're a podcaster, you have no idea if your growth rate is good, if it's bad, you're kind of just like most people, I think, assume everybody is way better than them, when actually a lot of those people are doing pretty well. And so it really started with this question of like, okay, for my clients, who I'm coaching and consulting on helping them grow, how do I even know if what we're working on together is outperforming the average, if it's underperforming and also, you know, just getting that Number down so that you know, they can kind of track against themselves. So that was really the root of it was just like that information is not available. I was curious about it. I had a few data points but I didn't really have enough to say. This seems like the standard against which we should measure ourselves.

B (5:11)

So this is a fact finding mission. You wanted to serve your clients, you wanted to scratch your own itch a little bit here. When did you decide, you know what, I'm going to flip this and make it public Facing what were your expectations and what actually happened?

A (5:25)

Yeah, well it was a bit of a ramp up. So I started by getting my existing community. I would every so often with my one on one clients, I'd get them to submit their data. And then I started to think, actually I became more curious and I was like, well okay, I should do a report or I don't know that I even thought about it as a report at that time. I thought I should collect some data from the people who are in my community. And so I thought, okay, I can put together a pretty simple survey and I'll send out and just get them to look back at their past six months or year and just give me the growth data every month, how many episodes to release and how many downloads did you get that month and I'll be able to do some calculations. Then I thought, okay, well I guess like that's easy, they'll give that to me. At least enough people will that I'll have some data. And then I thought, well if I'm already making this survey, I guess I could send that to my email list as well. And I had probably at that time 7, 8, 9,000 people on the list and so that'll actually help me get a lot better data. And then I kind of thought, well, if I'm sending it out to my list, like probably they're going to want something, they're going to want to know what this is. So maybe then that becomes some kind of report. And then I started thinking like, okay, and if I'm already making a report then I guess I know all these other people in the industry and I'm pretty well connected so probably I should just like ask if they would share this with their lists as well and then I can like feature them on the landing page for the report and everything. And like then it just kind of snowballed into this much bigger thing almost as this kind of like I took one step and I was like, well I guess it's not that much more work to do one more thing and then one more thing. And eventually it just kind of snowballed into this phenomenally huge project that took hundreds of hours to do, which was not my intention from the start. And really, by the time probably I think I started the collecting data in February, and I released the report in November, the first year, I had actually planned to release it in May. And I became so overwhelmed by all of it because as you may know, I have a tendency to kind of like, once I commit to doing something, it must be like really well done. And so of course I couldn't kind of like half ass it. And so I got in, I started doing it, I hired a data viz person, and by the time I was launching it in November, it was at this point where I was like, okay, this is. If I wait any longer, the report's no longer relevant. Like it's going to be the 2023 report. And we're almost at 2024. I kind of need to release it now or never. And. And so I kind of like hit publish on it. And I was like, oh, I am so glad that that is off my plate. I am never doing this again. And then as soon as I released it, it was just immediately positive response. It got shared all over the place. I got asked to guest on podcasts and it got cited. People did podcasts about it without me kind of analyzing it. It got picked up in some media in the podcast and creator space. Then I started thinking basically the same thing. The cycle repeated and I was like, well, I got the templates now for the report and the website. Like, it wouldn't be so much harder to do it the second year. And so that's kind of how it. It got started and how itself.

B (8:06)

Well, for people listening to this who are kind of interested, but now have heard phenomenally huge hundreds of hours of work, it sounds like for you to continue doing this, either you've found a way to reduce the amount of work or the upside of doing it is so much greater than the cost.

A (8:26)

Yeah, there's a bunch of upsides that I was hoping for, and there's some upsides that I was not hoping for and that have probably been more beneficial than what I was hoping for. And I want to say again, the typical person would not have done it like I did it. Like, the typical person would have done it in like, let's just say a hundred hours all in. And part of the reason it took so much more time is that it actually spun off a whole podcast which is. Has Actually been one of the best things for my business. I think the podcast has done more than the report itself. And not that the report hasn't done a lot, but that the podcast basically unpacks the report each year. And that's been like a really, really valuable piece of my business. But like, yeah, like I said, I take things to an extreme with almost every project I take on. And so a typical person, most people I know who do reports like this spend way less time. And it's just that I am wired that way, so this is not the only way to do it. So some of the things maybe that I was hoping for going in the more I talked to people when I was kind of floating this idea, there's a certainly an SEO play where you can get a lot of backlinks back to your website, back to the report. And so I was thinking, oh, that's an interesting thing that I wasn't really thinking about. First of all, I was kind of just thinking that I want to collect this data so that I can create content around it and I can advise my clients also kind of as a PR piece within the industry. And so I was kind of already decently pretty well known and well networked in the industry, but I hadn't really produced anything public facing like this other than blog content and some podcast stuff like that. So I would say that the main thing I was really looking at was kind of like PR opportunities coming from people linking to the actual report, the inbound, like those links leading to SEO increase for my website and then also the ability to pitch kind of like, hey, I did this report, can I come on your podcast to talk about it? And things like that. So those would have been some of the initial things and then with a secondary, this was probably at the back of my mind, not really clearly stated, but a little bit of a shifting my positioning in people's minds as towards this kind of data driven rigorous marketing rather than maybe just like trying stuff out and see what works. I think there's space for both. But that was one thing that was in my mind.

B (10:29)

I would imagine as time goes on, if you were to just do the same report, the amount of time would decrease. You've probably changed your process, found ways to improve this, so it might be kind of static. I'm interested to know three years forward, are there diminishing returns to the benefits or do they continue to compound?

A (10:49)

Yeah, this is something I've been thinking a lot about this third year. And so the second year it was almost like there's so much that it is analogous to starting a business in a way where you do a project in the scrappy way the first time around, you realize you made a bunch of mistakes with it or things you do differently. So you kind of reinvent a lot of stuff, even though you build on the same framework. The second year and then the third year, this felt like the year that I was actually building all the systems. And so now going into the fourth year, I'm like, okay, I have all the SOPs written. I know who I can hand things off to. And so this year was already a massive reduction. I probably spent a third of the time, and I expect next year will even be less. And so now it's kind of getting the point where I'm like, okay, I can see myself continuing to do this, but one of the things that I've been kind of grappling with a little bit is how much needs to be reinvented for it to stay relevant. And part of the assessment of that question or the analysis has been a little bit of, like, how much value does this provide to my business and in what way? And as I've been thinking about it, I think there's a way for me to much more coast on this and still get 90% of the benefit out of the report. I think really the brand of the report, there is something valuable of doing it multiple years, where now you start to get comparisons over the years, and so you get all this data, but now you can actually start to get. It's like, more so than asking new questions. I think that that's something that I do want to insert some of those each year. Like this year, there was a lot about video and podcasting, which is the big topic, and AI has always kind of been in it. But this year I wanted to get more information on how are people thinking about video. And so that was a new section that we didn't really have that much about before. There'll probably be some stuff next year, but I think it's really like, now that the brand is established, that's almost the core value, and I become associated with that. And so I think actually way less work needs to go into it to get the same amount or nearly the same amount of benefit.

B (12:36)

From a quantitative standpoint, it's actually probably better to be pretty consistent with your questions year over year, because then you do have this unique proprietary data set of trends over time, which is actually one of the things that's stressed me out and given me pause from doing more efforts like this. Because that puts a little bit of pressure then on survey design up front.

A (12:59)

Yes.

B (13:00)

Is that something that you sought help on? Would you recommend that people seek help on that or. I imagine this is one of the most important elements to doing this in the first place.

A (13:13)

I did not seek help on that. I mean, I did not seek professional help on that, I should say. I asked a few people around who are in the podcast industry and who I know and trust their opinions, like, what would you like to see in a report like this? And it was basically the same stuff that I was curious about. I think one of the things that's been interesting doing the report multiple years as well, is seeing which questions I ask that I am curious about, but don't ever go into the report. And so now, kind of three years in, even after the second year, I was like, I don't think this is worth asking. Like, I don't know what to do with this information. So I think that that's been one of the interesting things is. And this is, I. I think I often counsel people when they're collecting data about their podcast, creative platforms, anything. It's kind of like if the data will not help you make a decision and do something different, there's probably not a lot of reason to collect it in the first place. And I love data, I love looking at it. But a lot of times I'm like, huh, that's interesting. But I don't know what that means. That's not going to affect my decision making in any way. That. And so there have been a bunch of questions there that it's kind of winnowed down over the years to be some of the more kind of like, well, this is the stuff that's going in the report. This is the stuff that will actually help people make better decisions. And I think I, the first year could have done a better job of that, for sure. And so that's something that I now use that lens of, like, now I know what I actually, you know, put in the report and what I don't. But also just thinking about for myself, like, how do I advise people? And if this doesn't help, then let's not ask it.

B (14:35)

It's interesting that you make this completely accessible, ungated. Whereas there is a model where somebody might think I should at least gate this with an email address, or they might think there's actually a freemium opportunity here to make a lot of it free, but then have some of the information behind a paywall or just an email gate. How did you come to this decision.

A (15:00)

I thought about that model a lot when I was first doing it. And a huge, huge part of my ethos is doing the opposite of what other people do. Like, and this is just like so wired into me about so many things. And the funny thing is like, I have all kinds of lead magnets that you have to sign up to get. But there is something about the report model where I was just like, I just want to make this open. Everybody else gates the reports. I want to make this like completely open. You don't need to sign up for it. Anybody can access this. And I mean it's free anyway for the email. And I think I was kind of betting that like, I think it will get shared more that way. I think there's also something about just engendering goodwill and this just felt something that like, I have enough kind of gated stuff anyway. I think I want more of this to be a brand building tool. And that was kind of my angle on it. So I did think about it. I actually continue to think about it every year of like, is there a supplemental piece that I can add? And part of it's just like, oh, I don't know that I want to set up. Like, what is that then? Is that a PDF that then I have to get formatted? And so it's kind of like this seems to be working for me. I'm just going to stick with the model even though I know there's opportunity there.

B (16:03)

What about sponsorship? Sometimes when people create these reports, they have it sponsored by some organization. They take money into this. It helps subsidize the work. I know you have partners on this, but I don't think you have sponsors and I'm sure you've considered it. So how did you land on that?

A (16:17)

Yeah, so I actually do. So this year was sponsored by our mutual friend Harry Morton and Lower street. And so they actually. There's actually a bit of an interesting story here. So I did get sponsors the first year and so the first year I had podcast movement kicked in a bit for sponsorship. Alitu and the podcast host, they're kind of two companies under the same ownership. And then also Transistor did as well, which Justin Jackson, the co founder is, is my co host on the podcast. So they all chipped in for the first year and it wasn't a ton, but that was kind of like a proof of concept. I was like, okay, that's kind of cool that I got, I don't know, maybe it was 5 to 10,000 in sponsorships. For not having anything yet, which I think there's an interesting lesson. There is, is I'm a huge believer in, and this is something you've talked a lot about recently as well, is like premises and concepts. Whether it's for podcasts, which is generally what I help people with, it's like the main thing, whether it's your business as a whole, but also with the report, if you have a premise that is really clear and enticing and people can see the value in, you can get sponsors for it where they're like, oh, this data doesn't exist. We can see that this is going to be useful, we can see that this is going to get traction. And you're kind of. I did some mock ups in Figma of like, here's how it's going to be laid out, here's what's going to be included and then you're basically selling that vision and they're kind of putting their trust in you and your ability to execute on it. So I did get sponsors the first year that helped offset some of the costs of the database person that I hired, which then I was able to run with those designs in subsequent years. So there was kind of less cost there. But I basically, in the second year I went into it and I was kind of like, I don't want to have to communicate with people about it. I kind of just want to have total ownership and be able to do what I want. The delay in the deadline, the first year also made me kind of like, I don't want to like under deliver to sponsors. And so I kind of wanted a little bit more fluidity. And then coming into year three, I was again not going to do sponsorships. And then Harry reached out at some point and he was like, hey, would you be interested in partnering on this? We can kick in and we can help with promotion and some other things. And then I was kind of like, oh, okay, interesting. Like now it's at the point where other people are seeing enough value and that there's inbound and I'm not even trying to pitch it. And so I've had a few conversations since this one's come out of other people already kicking the tires. And so I think, yeah, there is a big opportunity and there's, you know, you're signing up for more work doing that as well in terms of reporting and all these things. But I think with the right partners, there's lots of opportunity for something like this. And I think the specific thing that I could do a better Job selling is like what Harry was reaching out is he wanted specific data that they could use with their clients and build content around for their own positioning. And so they submitted some questions and we're going to do a subsequent report and there's a bunch of stuff that we're spinning off that's going to be much more like they get to build some thought leadership without doing most of the work. They're tapping into this thing that I'm already creating.

B (18:55)

That's super insightful. I was going to ask what you thought the value prop for sponsors are because there's. There's a bunch of different things.

A (19:00)

Right.

B (19:00)

I know some people like we've had Richard Vanderblum on the podcast. We'll link to that in the show notes. He does a big LinkedIn algorithm report and every like 10 to 20 pages in this PDF document, there's a sponsor with. It's basically like a print ad, right?

A (19:14)

Yeah.

B (19:15)

So that's one way to do it. But you're doing this on page for SEO, so I guess there's probably some backlinking possibility. There's brand awareness. But I love this idea of if you partner with a sponsor who wants to create their own content from it, they can submit questions into the mix that aren't part of the main report that now power their content. That's a really smart strategy.

A (19:36)

The other part to that too, in the top tier package is that I share the full data set with email addresses and everybody like they're a true partner. And so we share anybody who submits the report. So there is email collection there and so then there's more data for the. The tier down. I don't include personal information, but if you're a true partner in it, then it's like you get all this information as well. You can kind of mine that data set for yourself. You can make correlations seeing like, okay, these shows are in these industries that are relevant to us and we're able to extract our own trends that don't really make sense to put into the report. But especially with. I mean, I've had limited success with AI, but I bet some people who are better at using some of those AI data extraction tools could get quite a bit out of that raw of hundreds of submissions. So that's a big opportunity for people too. And I mean, especially then you're also adding to your list. Some of those people may be relevant to the right sponsor, some of them not. But yeah, would you look at the.

B (20:29)

Sponsorship opportunity as if you had your way or you're counseling somebody. Should we look for like one major headline sponsor who can hit a home run with the budget or should I try to cobble together like 5 to 10?

A (20:44)

I mean my ethos in all of my business and with this is like aim for the big wins and then fill that out with smaller ones. And so actually in none of the years have I got the first like the actual headliner spot. And so in each of the years I've had like some of my what I called like the silver tier sponsors. And so not that true, like co presenting, full ownership, kind of joint ownership over everything. That is something that I would love to fill. That would make it a lot easier. And for transparency I price that at $10,000 for the, the gold tier. And I would have to look at my sponsor pitch deck. I think silver's probably like five grand and then there was like some 2500. I think I had three available and then I think I also had some thousand dollar for. I would rather work with fewer people at a higher price and a more joint ownership. And I think to me also the thing that I would really look for in a big sponsor is the ability to get it out in front of more people. Both the finished report as well as getting more submissions. And so I think the income is kind of nice. But I treat this as bonus money and I put so much personal time into it that it's kind of. I mean I don't really think about it as paying for my time in that way, but I do have like my BA helps on this stuff. I had some design help this year and in each of the years. So it's kind of offsetting costs. But I do think there is a world where if I chose to, this could become a actual like full business. If I really wanted to go into this, I think this could be a very kind of consistent and high income generator. But I would have to actually treat it as such.

B (22:11)

Well, in a second I want to get super tactical and kind of go step by step through like a hypothetical report that we could put together. But just to put a fine point on this first part where we're kind of talking about why do it? What are the benefits? What are the costs besides the time investment and the cost to hire help? If you find that you need to hire help for some of these aspects, are there other downsides to doing this?

A (22:35)

I have not experienced. For me the time has been the big thing and the mental bandwidth of it. I think some of the other benefits that I would say that we didn't really discuss yet. I personally, if you are able to interpret data and like going through data, this has been such a sharpening of my understanding of podcasting as a whole and podcast marketing. And it's not about looking at the data and finding the answer. It's about trying to understand the data and asking the questions of like, huh, why could this be? And you're just presented with so many questions that you're kind of trying to think through. You're putting the analysis in the report and you're like, well, I don't know for sure. Nobody knows for sure. But looking at this, this is what it's making me think about. And I suspect this might be the reason. And so that's been one of the huge benefits that's come from this. But I think, like, if you did a poor job of the report, that would obviously be a downside. I wasn't really too worried about that. But I think the big one is time cost has. It was not a lot of costs for me. So it's really like, is this a big project you want to undertake and have the ability to execute on? Would be the main thing I'd be thinking about as the kind of dissuading factor.

B (23:43)

After a quick break, Jeremy and I will continue discussing how to create one of these industry reports. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. My business has grown an average of 75% per year for the last five years. And the reason this is true is because I have just continued to put myself around creators who are a step ahead of me. That's it. I can track all of this back to 2020, when I joined a Mastermind and one of the creators in that Mastermind was earning $40,000 per month. I was stuck at $10,000 per month at that time, and I just couldn't believe what this person was doing. But because I could see it, I knew I could be it. And by continuing to put myself in the room with people a step ahead of me, I have learned to ask different questions, make different decisions, and all of that has led to an increase in revenue. This is why I built the Lab. I wanted to give creators the experience that I had in that Mastermind group. I wanted to give you a place where you could be around other people who are doing things so that you can see it and you can be it as well. Members of the Lab receive access to our always on, always available community forum, access to all of my courses, including build a beloved membership podcast like a YouTuber, the newsletter masterclass and more. Dozens of workshops, most of which were never made publicly available for sale. Creator hq, which is my operating system for creators, a trusted partners directory. These are professionals that our community has hired and vetted for things like ads, design, legal, finance, et cetera. Access to our offline events, our mastermind matching process that happens twice a year, and weekly live sessions. We have members who have now renewed their membership four years in a row. I wouldn't push so hard if I didn't believe in this membership. Learn more and join us at creatorscience.com lab. That's creatorscience.com lab or follow the link in the show notes. And now back to My conversation with Jeremy ends. Well, let's, let's just walk through like a hypothetical and maybe it's just easiest to take my business and we can walk through this. If I like this idea and I thought, yeah, I want to create a seminal piece of research. How would you start thinking through this? Because I have some assumptions and I'm happy to share those if you want, but I kind of don't want to lead the witness. I would say, hey Jeremy, I, I think maybe I should create a report like this. Where should I start?

A (26:00)

So I think it actually comes back to premise and concept and positioning. I think that one of the things that because this is going to be shared broadly, it's going to become associated with you ideally and your brand. That's one of the big, I think, non obvious benefits of doing a report like this. But actually I think to me has had the single biggest impact that's been the most positive thing is that I get so many clients who come to me and they're saying, oh, I read the report, I read the report every year and I know you know what you're talking about when it comes to podcast marketing and data and I don't understand the data, but you clearly do. And so you can help guide me. So I would really think about like how do I want this report to reflect on me? And so I guess throwing it back to you. When you think about like your current positioning of creator science and or Jay Klaus in relation to the creator economy, let's say, where would you like to strengthen your positioning?

B (26:49)

Well, the thing that I come back to with a lot of ideas is I'm in a competitive space, right? Not only does that make creating things challenging, it makes creating things less fun sometimes. So there are certainly players in the space who have created their own reports. Linktree makes one like every year. Kajabi Kit. And so I would be thinking about what is the unique data set that I can collect. Because a lot of times I look at these reports and it's extremely reflective of a segment of the creator economy. You know, like linktree's report is going to be pretty skewed towards short form vertical video creators, mainly Instagram. Kajabi is a lot, of course creators. Kit is probably the most balanced of those. So honestly my biggest question would be how would I differentiate my report from Kit? And there's honestly probably a third door here which is like, maybe I should collaborate on a report like this with Kit. But I do think that my audience is extremely varied in the platforms they operate on. They're often like extremely cross platform. They have a wide range of revenue models. So I would say out of the box data analysis is core to the brand as it is. So I would be looking at what can I glean from the people I view to be professional cross platform creators and get unique data in that way.

A (28:22)

That's exactly where I would think about it for you. Because you know, kits report, they have a section about professional creators and they reference that a lot. But that's not really the framing of the report. And I think that there is something, the name and framing matter so much. And so I think like actually, you know, we were talking before about what's the benefit year over year. I think being associated with the name of the report does a huge amount of the lifting in terms of positioning. And so if we hear creator science and the professional creator report or whatever it's called, people don't even need to read the report. You've already strengthened your positioning in that way quite a bit by associating yourself with that idea and knowing that your business really runs on helping people and connecting people who are already professional creators and helping people get to that stage. I would firmly plant it. Yeah, I would want the report to be in the professional creator space. And then it's looking at how do we get more specific, like what are we not getting in the kit report that I'd like to see more data on. Like they've got a bunch of stuff in there, but I bet you could go way deeper if you dedicated a full report to that like one section of theirs.

B (29:22)

What's also interesting about this is I had this thought when I was looking at your report. The data you bring into this matters, who you query matters. So in a lot of the creator economy reports, there is this super wide range of creators who are just getting started and People who are professional. And so maybe the opportunity, we're actually doing this inside the lab now in a way, but maybe the opportunity is to say, this is a report for full time creators and we're gonna ask some questions that allow us to rule out data from folks who don't meet some threshold and actually focus on the data set from people who have crossed some threshold that makes this useful to professional creators and not just kind of interesting about the creator economy as a whole.

A (30:10)

Yes. Yeah. And so a big part of my report, there's some stuff that I collect from everybody who responded and I present that in the report. But then there are certain things that partly it's because to get good data, like you just need the full. So I asked people to submit the full 12 months of the previous downloads. And so basically to count any of the comparisons between, like, different growth rates of whether they're like high growth or low growth or whatever. We don't need to get into how I determine those. That's on the report. But I basically said this is only for people. We're only comparing people who have submitted a full 12 months of download data. And so that eliminates a whole bunch of people. And now we're looking at, at this point, they're at least a year into podcasting, so they've already surpassed, you know, that cutoff point or the drop off point where so many people don't make it. And so this is now a different kind of set of people than just the broader pool. And so I think that data is more interesting to the people I work with who are, you know, they've been podcasting 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 years, and it's like they're looking to understand more about, okay, the, the other people in my space at my level, what are they seeing? And so, yeah, I think there's the, what you put out and there's also what you take in matters quite a bit.

B (31:15)

Yeah, this is interesting. And I love the frame of not only the premise and the concept of this, but what is the purpose of this? And I think if I were to create something like this, I would do it for the purpose of practicality rather than just like passing interest, you know, which is kind of the result that I see in a lot of these polls where it's like, this is where the creator economy is heading. I'm more interested in, like, for people who've been doing this full time, do things feel harder for you right now in the middle of 2025, or do they feel easier? Do you Feel like your market is more willing to buy right now or less willing to buy, because I think that begins to pull some insight and help or very tactical things. Like we're doing this internal report in the community right now and I'm asking questions like what platforms feel like you're winning right now and what are you doing there? And of course that's going to be very time specific and say that you'll want to do this maybe more frequently and ask fewer questions. But I like the idea of a report where the information is useful or actionable maybe is the word.

A (32:25)

I like to think about it on all sides. There's actionable for the people who consume it and there's also actionable for you. And I think that if you can do both of those, the report is like you're putting the same effort in either way. Maybe you're being a bit more thoughtful about the questions that you put in and whatnot, the framing. But some of the things that I've put in in subsequent years after the first one, I have certain assertions that I make in my business based on my beliefs about podcasting and what it takes to be successful. And so I want to find stories that will kind of corroborate those assertions. Sometimes the data turns out it's murky or it contradicts them. And then I have to say, okay, well, I guess I was wrong or I'm wrong in some instances. And so I'm not going to use that data to support my argument because the data doesn't show that. And so you have to be kind of careful about, like looking to prove out your own conclusions that you've already kind of made. That's a, you know, a danger that you can certainly get into at the report. But I also think, like, I feel that this is true. I don't have a way to prove it. I wonder if I can find out. And so like, one of the questions, one of the whole sections that I was really curious about in this year's report was just around the creative process and habits of people. And I wanted to see like, okay, from a marketing perspective, do we see that the people who are higher growth or have bigger shows think more about packaging of their shows? Do they think more about competitor research? How many listener clarity calls have they had? And so they've had surveys with their audience. How do they think about the importance of concept and all these things? And the data came back that basically supported all the things I was feeling, but didn't have any real proof other than to make kind of logical arguments in my marketing of like, well, if you think about yourself, which of these two shows would you choose based on their cover art? And now it's looking at like, oh, high growth shows. They tend to spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff. And they've been through iterations and they've had, you know, the average show, over 10,000 downloads an episode, has had many, many, many dozens of conversations with their listeners. And the lower growth shows and smaller shows haven't. There's other reasons for that too. If you have a small audience, it's harder to get conversations with people. But that's been another piece where it's like, I can use this in my marketing and it gives me more content to create around. I can use it in my trainings and things like that. And so I think that especially for educators, if you're doing any kind of education in your business, I think having data is one useful tool in your tool belt to sway people over to adopting the method that you know is going to be best for them.

B (34:36)

Here's a very quick aside for a moment. Since you were just talking about this data, do you think this show would be more successful if I had my face on the COVID.

A (34:47)

That is a good question. If it were me, I wouldn't do it. I've never had my face on the COVID It's interesting because you do have more recognition on YouTube, that there's potentially an opportunity there, but I'm just generally not a fan of faces on cover. It's data.

B (35:02)

If it's not a clear yes, then I'm not interested. But my assumption was human biases would be that maybe seeing a friendly face would make me more interested in clicking. But I'm like you, the show's not about me. And so I don't really want to make the show a cult of personality and I don't want to put my.

A (35:17)

Face the COVID Yeah, I'm generally not a fan unless your face is a marketable asset like Conan o'. Brien. You see Conan, you don't need to read anything else. You're like, that's Conan's podcast. And I think the other thing that I'll just add very quickly is it depends who the podcast is for. The face on the COVID is kind of assuming that it's for people who already know you. Whereas if there's not a face on the COVID it's kind of like that may be a better attract new audience type of COVID is how I would think about it.

B (35:41)

I agree okay, okay, so let's, let's assume that I have my concept, my premise for the report nailed down. What happens next? And first year doing this, how much time do you think I should assume this will take front to back?

A (35:56)

So I started it, I started planning in January, ran the survey in February is one month from like being opening to close date. And that's when I was doing kind of partners getting them to send people to it and promoting it myself and whatnot. So that was a one month period there and then I assumed it would take three months to kind of crunch the data. I also in the first year had to like find a database person, had do revisions on that. I ended up needing to actually do a whole bunch of extra work on the database stuff for various reasons, partly because my budget was lower. And I think there was just not probably the ideal communication with the database person. Probably she shouldn't have took me on as a client knowing my budget and my expectations. So I had to do a bunch of extra work that I wasn't anticipating, which is a big reason why it took longer. The design piece is really one of the tough things, I think. And so I am highly skilled and competent in Photoshop and Figma when I have assets to work with. I'm a pretty good graphic designer for my own brand and can come up with a lot of stuff. But coming up with data viz, I did not. I would not have been able to do that myself in any kind of reasonable amount of time. And so I know a lot of people who run initial scrappy reports the first year and they just take the Google Sheets graphs so you can do a very simple version. And I've found reports like that that are valuable, that I'm like, the data's good. Like, this is not the prettiest thing I've ever seen. And that's fine. So this is one of the other kind of bets that I made at the time with the first report is things are better now. But even three years ago there was so much bad design in podcasting and a lot of the reports were just ugly. And like, for years this has always been one of my frustrations with the whole industry is just like, design is terrible. The websites are boring, it feels dated. And so I was like, this is going to be slick. Like, I want it to look modern and like really well designed. I want it to reflect well on me. And so I kind of boxed myself into doing a lot more work with that by taking that approach. Design is like a value of mine. I like Design. I like studying design. I read design books and blogs and all these things. So, like, that's part of my brand. That's not true for everyone. And so I think when you think about your ambitions for like, how good is this going to look? How much is it about the presentation and the shareability and the impressions versus actually getting useful data? You could do this much faster than I did it. But I again, complicated it for myself by wanting certain things out of it. So I would say most people could do a report and I would say minimum three months probably. If you limited the number of questions that you did, you limited the design that you were looking to do to the point where you could get Google sheets information and a somebody off of upwork to do a PDF or simple website, or maybe you can do that yourself. I think you could scope this down and it'd still be really valuable for your business. And then you could reassess and say, okay, now that I've got this piece in place, I've got that foundation I can build on, and maybe next year I hire an actual designer to help with some of these things. Maybe I get some sponsorship next year now that I've proved the concept out. And then that offsets some of the other costs. So I would say three to six months is totally reasonable. It could take longer if you're very overly ambitious or like to overcomplicate things, as in my case.

B (38:59)

Okay, so we've got our concept, we've got our premise. What's the next step?

A (39:02)

So then I think it comes down to thinking about the premise is what are the questions that go into that? And so you've already listed some of the things that you would be interested to know about and that are some of the things that you're already looking at in the lab survey, the internal survey. But kind of like for me, a big part of it was just led by curiosity. I started with the questions and then thought about what's the frame for this? And then some of those things kind of adjust within that. But I think I would not undertake, I would not go into a report if I didn't already have curiosity. And so I think that that's probably a good sign that this is not going to work out so well for you. And that might be one place where the report could reflect poorly on you if you're not actually driven by wanting to know the answers to things. And having that curiosity is. I've consumed many of these reports that are clearly just this, like, content schlock that's like, oh, this is a tactic. And I approached it as a tactic. And there's no care or craft into it. And so there are a lot of reports like that. And so I think that that doesn't really probably do much for you, and it doesn't really engender much goodwill. And so I think probably you're going in, you already have some questions that you want to know. You already listed some of these. And so then it's just seeing like, okay, what would make this feel substantial enough? That it's finding the balance between, like a substantial enough report for it to be valuable but not overwhelming people with the number of questions. And you can kind of do some things to help incentivize people to complete if you have a lot of questions like I did. But I think that those are the two things you're operating within. And I would actually suspect most people will have more questions than you'll want to include in the actual report.

B (40:30)

Yeah, I feel very fortunate that I spent a lot of time as a product manager talking to target customers and learning a fair bit about survey design, which I take for granted, but strikes me as a super important aspect of this. And the number of times I see surveys where I'm like, this is not good. It reminds me that this is a skill that I know. There's a report that asked me to contribute, they hired an outside firm, and then they asked me to look at the questions from the outside firm they hired to come up with the questions. And I still was like, I don't know about these. So a tenant that I have and happy to hear additions to this or disagreements. If you have any multiple choice or Likert scale rankings as often as possible with this makes analysis a lot easier, easier to compare year over year. And it's also cognitively easy on the part of the person taking it, which is the big important part. If you want people to actually complete the survey, they need to be willing to invest a fair amount of time. And it feels like less time and less cognitive effort if you're not just throwing them a bunch of open text fields. Yes, I guess probably about the long and short of it. I think you can have more questions if they are easy to answer as multiple choice or rating scales. And I think there's a good and bad way to rate multiple choice questions. I think a good multiple choice question is also you read the first answer and you kind of have a sense for what the other answers are. But if your multiple choice has like four responses that are full sentences and it's not obvious what each one was. It's still cognitively difficult. So reducing cognitive effort, I think is.

A (42:15)

A core part of this that is a hundred percent true. And I generally, I think there's maybe five long form questions in the whole report and they're all at the end. And so they're kind of like, once you've answered everything else, you've got momentum, you've kind of got sunk cost. You know, there's the in type form, there's like the, the bar, the progress bar that shows you you're almost there. And so it's kind of like, then I ask a few questions. Those are all optional. You don't need to fill those out. They're kind of just bonus. And they are like. The other thing is, in the first year's report, going through it, it's like, oh man, when you're analyzing those and you've got five or six hundred responses, you're like, am I actually reading through all of these and am I trying to draw something out? Like, there is a lot of good anecdotal data, but it's not maybe going into the report. It's more for personal kind of consumption. I think for me, I do feel.

B (43:02)

Like we are in a magical time for data analysis. With ChatGPT, I've been able now just to take CSV exports of people who have applied to the lab, or profiles of members who have joined and just be like, can you help me make sense of this? Find some trends, do some quantitative analysis of this. And it's been wonderful. So helpful even to find patterns in sentiment and anecdotal stuff.

A (43:32)

I'll be very curious next year to try again. Some of the things that I wanted ChatGPT to help with was kind of numerical kind of stuff in analyzing, like, okay, in these written responses, how many people mentioned, let's say Instagram and the numbers were always wrong. I tried prompting it so many different ways and it would be. And I eventually just went through and I just flagged them all. I just did command F in sheets and I was like, I can clearly see that in this column. Instagram shows up 216 times. And ChatGPT is saying it shows up like 176. And then it's like, oh, sorry about that. It's actually 430. And you're like, okay, I guess I'll just do this the hard way. So I think that is going to be obviously getting better. I'm hopeful for next year. But yes, there, there are some things that I found it to be very useful for. And then there's been other things that have been kind of a little bit. I was very optimistic and was underwhelmed.

B (44:19)

Ah, okay. That's good to know. Always, always run a check and even ask it, like, how confident are you in this? Yeah, it's funny, the folks who have built these machines, there seems to be a consensus that the machines actually perform better when you threaten them versus when you're very kind, which is, like, really hard for me to do. I'm always like, hey, can you please, if you have time.

A (44:41)

Yeah, I'm the same.

B (44:44)

So we got our premise. We've thought about our curiosity. We know what information we want. We've structured a cognitively approachable survey.

A (44:55)

Now, what I'll actually add on two quick things about the structure. In addition to leaning into multiple choice, the other thing is I use a lot of conditional formatting. So people just skip a lot of responses that aren't relevant to them if they answered something early on. So there's tricks you can do with that as well so that people are only answering relevant questions to them. And for some people that can cut a lot out of the survey, such as for people who produce their shows for their business, I don't need to be asking hobbyists like all these business questions. So they skip 15 or 20 questions there. And so that is another trick. And then the other thing that I do is because. So I do incentivize it, there's like a draw for everybody who submits. And the really annoying questions, that is really the heart of the report is going to your podcast hosting platform and submitting all the data. It's like finding month by month, what are those numbers? And that I know is really annoying. And so I basically said there's a cutoff point or a branch in the survey where it's like, you get to this point, you're about two thirds of the way in, and it's like, okay, you can choose not to submit your month by month data and you'll keep your one entry into the draw here. Or if you want five extra entries in the draw, you can submit this data. And then there's a bunch of annoying questions to answer. So that's one other thing. If you do have things that are like, this is really the whole. This is what the report was built around. I needed to get that data. I would think about, like, what are the incentives and how do you work them in and what's the flow of that? So that's one More piece there that I'd add to the structure.

B (46:19)

Super smart. And I do want to double click on something you said earlier, which was sometimes you ask questions and you're not even sure what to do with that data. So before I sent this out, I would really look at this list of questions and interrogate it and be like, what will I do with this data? Because every question you can deem as not useful is going to have a non insignificant impact on the number of completions.

A (46:42)

Yep. So once you've got that sorted, then it's really thinking about the promotion and it's interesting. So I've done a lot of affiliate marketing. Usually when I used to do my cohort based course, I would have a free workshop. It was often a multi day workshop that would lead up to the course and I would get affiliate partners to promote the free workshop rather than the paid thing itself. And so I actually had a lot of relationships from that, a lot of people who I knew were aligned. I already had my list of people and we'd had a good working relationship for the past several years. So for me I was kind of already set up to say, okay, here's this report that I put together, this survey. This is the only. At the time it was like the only marketing report in podcasting. And marketing was like the biggest question mark for everybody. And so it was a very clear win win because everybody wanted this data. And so I think that goes back to your premise as well, is like coming up with something that other people will see value in is going to increase their likelihood that they're going to help you promote the finished report as well as the survey itself. And I think that that is an important kind of thing to consider is like, how am I going to get this out to people? And if you don't have. So I mentioned I had my like person email at the time. I knew I could get enough responses for this to be worth it on my own, but I wanted to get more beyond that. And so if you have a smaller audience, I think you need to really think about like how am I going to get buy in from other people to get them excited to share the survey. And we can always expect that other people promoting the survey for you is going to be a lower response rate than your own audience. And so trying to think about how many responses do I need to make this worth it for me to do. If I can only get 20 people, that's not a very good report. And so maybe you're saying like, I really need to get at least a couple hundred people for me to have any confidence in this data, for this to be useful, where am I going to get those people? Do I have that audience myself? Do I need to incentivize that or do I need to get in other partners and then making that list of people who have some kind of stake in the outcome of the survey and thinking about getting them on board in some way.

B (48:37)

How have you thought about this in terms of number of responses that you want to feel good about your confidence in the data?

A (48:43)

I mean I have been perpetually maybe over ambitious. My goal has always been a thousand each year and I've never hit that. It's typically been around like 550. The first year was like 5:30. Second year was 550. This year was actually less. It was interesting. This year I think was like 350 or something like that. But it seemed to be way more advanced. Podcasts, like a lot of big network shows, like shows that had tens of millions of lifetime downloads, which I was like actually I would take that data over. You know, that's interesting for me to look at some of these shows that have huge audiences and have been around a long time or a short time or whatever. And so I thought that was, you know, equally valuable. But I think one of the things in podcasting as an industry that's not true for every industry but probably will eventually affect everyone is like there's been more survey fatigue. I think where when I started there was not that many surveys. There was Edison Research, did one sounds profitable. Does some around really around the advertising side of things and there was a couple others out there doing like podcaster surveys. And now it feels like Spotify is getting into the game and Sirius XM and there's like all these like big players that are also doing surveys. So I think it's becoming harder to get people to take them. And that could just be. This was the, the first year that was down. I'll be curious next year if, if it goes back up or if it's similar or if it declines further. But I think that that is something that I was a little bit disappointed this year. But the other piece of it I think that actually ties into this collaborators side of things is this year there's a couple people who, they committed to promoting it and they had in the past and like in the first two years there was one partner who sent like 100 responses each year and they didn't promote it this year because they had a product launch at the same time. And so that actually almost makes up for the whole. Yeah, and so, you know, when you play the partnership game, if you don't have the audience, you're kind of at the whims of, you know, their own release schedules and what they've got going on and so on.

B (50:33)

How do you think about picking the right partners so that it makes your data set cohesive?

A (50:39)

Yeah, I mean, in your case, I would be much more. So this, the survey we've kind of mapped out for you, where it's like we're looking at professional creators. It's like we need to find people who have that audience. And, you know, I think for you, there's some obvious ones you'd have to think about. How do you position this against Kit? I think that's part of their positioning now is really the place where professional creators kind of build their businesses. And so, you know, they'd be a great partner, but they've got their own survey, so maybe there's other places. So I would be looking at that. I think for me, I have wanted this, at least at this point, to be very open to just the general. To get a sense of the general podcasting landscape. Like, my data skews way more advanced. Even when and when I don't filter for people who've only been podcasting for a year or more. Every year, the typical, like, the average number, the median number of downloads an episode is somewhere around like 450 or something like that, whereas the actual industry median is like 120 or something like that. So it's people. And I think the median amount of time people have been podcasting is like three and a half years. And so that's certainly like, my audience is more advanced. I do like that. But really, I think like most people in podcasting, I don't think like most brands, most hosting platforms, educators, people who have audiences of podcasters, there's not a lot of, like, really narrow segmentation. And so I'm kind of happy to anybody who would find this data useful sharing it with your audience. And I think just the nature of taking a survey this long skews to people who are more invested in the craft and the medium of podcasting. So I have not thought a ton about that on the partnership side, other than, like, who do I know whose audience would find this valuable? Who do I already have relationships with? And we'll reach out to them.

B (52:18)

We'll be right back from Jeremy after one more quick break for our sponsors. And now please enjoy the rest of my conversation. With Jeremy ends. So we collect these responses. We've got hundreds of them now. What comes next?

A (52:36)

So export, I do everything in type form, export that to Google Sheets. And then this is the part where I have learned a lot on the fly. So I have read a lot about kind of data analysis. I have no training in it. I like data, I like looking through it. I find it interesting. And so I think I have that going for me. But for me it was kind of just looking at, I knew kind of what I wanted to find out from the report. And so then really the first year I was trying to train myself of like, how do I interpret this? And what am I correlating? How am I breaking this up? I'm sure people who have certainly degrees in data science and analysis would laugh at my attempts and it could probably be be done way faster. But for me there was a lot of kind of like figuring it out on the fly. A lot of times it's duplicating Google Sheets into like subsheets of just this data set. And so it's like only the people who've been submitted their last 12 months of data, now we're just looking at those and we can ignore everybody else. And then I would make different sheets, like ranking them in terms of different characteristics. And so sometimes one of the ways I sliced it was between categories of shows that had above 10,000 downs an episode, 1 to 10,000 downloads an episode, less than 1,000 downloads an episode. And so I'd have one sheet that was just looking at that kind of as my main anchor data point and then analyzing other traits related to that. And then the other main one that I did was related to growth rate. And so there was like the median growth rate of the whole data set. And then there was, I sliced that into shows that doubled, that shows that outperformed but didn't double the median, shows that grew but underperformed the median, and then shows that shrunk. And so I had that sheet to look at those. And so really from there it was just like looking at, breaking down into these discrete data sets and looking at what am I trying to get out of this? Looking at, okay, how does shows that doubled in size, how did they use social media differently than shows that, you know, underperformed the median? And you can make those connections pretty easily when you start kind of separating it out into looking at it in a certain view that is relevant to what you're trying to present.

B (54:27)

I hadn't considered the first step being identifying different cohorts within the data set and then separating those into their own unique data sets so that then you can compare them side by side. That makes a lot of sense and probably saved me and a bunch of people a lot of time from doing the inverse.

A (54:45)

Yeah, actually there's an initial step. I probably didn't realize it initially, it came later. But depending on how you set up your survey and how many people respond, you're going to get a bunch of troll responses. So for me, a lot of times you can see it by, I mean sometimes there's just like mean language, which this is hilarious to me that people go through this whole survey just to like, I don't know, like, be a jerk.

B (55:07)

What are.

A (55:08)

Just to be a jerk.

B (55:09)

They find all the time like that they're being a jerk make it so obvious that they're being a jerk. So it's a complete waste of time.

A (55:15)

Yeah. And so some of those are really easy to find. And then in my case, when you're looking at numbers, oftentimes the telltale sign is just copy paste of numbers across all the numerical entry fields. So for me it's that 12 month download data. If you see the same number every single time, that's usually a flag. I'm like, okay, this is kind of fishy. Let's look at their other responses. And there actually it takes a little bit of time but like maybe in an hour you can get most of it depending on how much, how many responses you got. But that was something that in the first year and really every year it's kind of been like, I'll spot something later. And I'll be like, ah, I already had, I had pulled out this, this number and maybe even got like the graph designed or something. And I realized like this is being really skewed by something that shouldn't be in there. And so if you can get those out early and probably you won't be able to figure out what, what the signs of those are until you actually spend some time with the data. But make sure to look out for those because those can really change things, especially if you don't sometimes for me, the shows above 10,000 downloads an episode, that's always going to be a pretty limited number of shows. And so in a given report it might be 20 shows let's say. And so one or two people who just, they put in 10 million downloads every episode and that's there, they're just like, if you don't catch that, that's going to skew it quite a bit. And Ruin that data.

B (56:26)

So we do the data analysis. I'm guessing the next step is data visualization.

A (56:31)

Yes. And this is where for me, and I assume for most people you are still, even if you've already gone through all your questions beforehand, this is where you're still going to winnow it down further. And part of this, if you're working with a data viz person, probably you're going to turn this over to them and you're going to say, these are the things that we want to visualize. They might give you like based on, you know, whatever you're hiring them for. They might say, okay, we'll do 20 graphs. And so then that was in my first year, there was a constraint like that. And so then you have to think, okay, what are the 20 most important graphs that are worth visualizing here? And they'll be able to take that and visualize that in an interesting way. Probably there's some design process where you go back and forth on visual styles and themes and the feel of it. So there's going to be some kind of exploration there and then they're going to make those graphs and maybe there's some revisions. If you're doing it yourself, then you're going to have to figure out, okay, I've got all this data in Google sheets. Maybe I'm going to want to make separate sheets to just like visualize things here, play around with graphs. One of the things that I did well before this, when I was just thinking about the project before it even began, I made a swipe file of all these industry reports and just seeing like, okay, what's the vibe? What's the feel? How do they represent data? And so I kind of had a sense of like what the options were. And this was helpful for the conversation with the data viz person and then also just helpful for myself seeing like, okay, we got, you know, the pie graph and we got the line chart and whatever and you got these other more interesting ways that you didn't learn in, you know, high school math that there's like other ways of displaying data that you can kind of look at for inspiration. So I would certainly familiarize yourself with those. But I think if you're doing this the scrappy way, I would start with the basic stuff and I would just think about before rather than committing to the most interesting way to explain the data visually, like thinking about how readable is this? Can somebody look at this? And it makes clear the relationship between what I'm trying to say here. And I think that that's what good databiz does is it shortcuts some of the need for exploration that you can just see, oh, this piece of this area chart is really small compared to this big one. And it's like that's a clear relationship between two different.

B (58:34)

This is another thing that if you are worried about data visualization or feel like you want to be extra scrappy and can't afford it. I did an essay about the gumroad acquisition of Small Bets and I did some number crunching and I had ChatGPT visualize this data and I was able to customize the colors and tell this is what I want in the key. And it did a really good job. Of course, again, as always, check it. But if you're giving ChatGPT the actual data itself, it seems to be pretty good at then visualizing this in a very readable format. Although it's, you know, it's pretty utilitarian.

A (59:09)

Yeah. And I mean, this would be something that I may have done this entirely differently if I was doing the first report today versus, you know, three years ago, almost four years ago now, when ChatGPT was not reliable and didn't actually even have those image generation capabilities. So there's certainly some of my experience that has been replaced. Probably there's way faster ways to do.

B (59:28)

It now even more scrappy. So we've got the data visualization. Seems like we have what we need to pull this into a final report in whatever format. You know, we discussed this earlier. Whatever format makes sense. What are the major considerations as part of this that we haven't already touched on?

A (59:44)

I mean, we talked a little bit before about is this gated? Is this not. Do you need to sign up for this? I think that that potentially makes your decision for you in terms of format. I think if you're delivering this as a lead magnet, then that means it's probably going to be a PDF. And so people come to a landing page and then they sign up and sometimes there's no data on the landing page. I've seen a lot of reports like that. It's like you can get the report, there's a couple screenshots and you sign up, you get the PDF sent to you, or if you want to make this publicly available, then you can, you know, build a website around it. And there's, you know, everything that goes into building a webpage, a big, fairly complex webpage, will, will go into that. I think the one other thing that is worth talking about here is the narrative, which is something to consider Is that I think a good report has some kind of narrative sequencing that it's building on itself. It introduces certain things first to help give context, and then moves into a natural next topic and probably gets a little bit more complex as people go. And so that would be something to think about. And a lot of that is because I'm a writer and just think that way anyway. And, like, narrative, like, I like to think about that. There's certain things that I'm going to reference later, but I. There needs to be an anchor earlier, so that means this stuff has to go up. And then thinking about, like, overall sections of the report, that was kind of like. For me, it's the. The chunky narrative is like, okay, we got intro about the respondents, then we got benchmarks, then we got this section, then that section, then the closing. And so I was like, okay, these are my broad segments that the data falls into. And then we can sequence the actual things within it and tie it together with some, like, reflection and narration almost. I would think of it as, like, giving additional context to the graphs. Or what I would do is I'd. In some places, I'd have like, here's how we did this, the methodology behind it. And in other places, there'd be a kind of, like, here's something to think about, or here's a key takeaway. And for me, that was a big thing that I wanted to insert in here, was that the data is accurate, but the interpretation is up for interpretation. And so I'm kind of looking at this, and I talk through, like, this is one of the things that this makes me think. In this year's report, there was some stuff around episode releases and consumption in the month of November and December last year, which was in the US a presidential election. And so I kind of thought, you know, there might be something. Podcasting played a huge role in that election. The data doesn't really tell us what this is, but could it be that episodes published per month was down because, you know, maybe people were just feeling fatigued, or it was actually the. The episode consumption from listeners was way down in November. So October was high, December was even higher. November was way down. And so it's like, maybe people are just tuning out of alt media because they were just overwhelmed. And so that's kind of the fun part for me is being able to say, like, I don't actually know. Here's an idea. I'd love to hear your ideas as well.

B (62:20)

Yeah, I always appreciate reports that do draw their own conclusions and then give like, everything for people to draw their own. But it seems like this does two things. One, it explicitly puts you on the stage that you've created for yourself, ostensibly to create authority and say, let me step into this and tell you my take on it. Two, oftentimes it feels like those front of the report, here's what we're seeing as trends and our interpretations. That's often the most shareable bit because people don't have to think about it. They just parrot it back and they're like, new podcast marketing trends report was just released. Here are the biggest finds. And they literally just copy word for word what you've said, which honestly is like behavior that you would want to encourage.

A (63:08)

Yeah, and I think there's like a meta piece for me as well is like part of my underlying strategy behind a lot of my marketing and messaging, is helping people feel that marketing is more approachable to them. So I teach marketing, but I work primarily with creators and also like founders and business owners who are scared of marketing and don't really want to do it. And I think, you know, if I think back to my younger self, I thought there was right answers to marketing and I was just dumb because I didn't know what they are. And so, like, I am perpetually. And this is kind of, you know, one of the whole ethos behind creator science is like, nobody knows we have this data here, but we have to draw our own conclusions and run our own experiments. And then we have to decide what does this mean for us and how am I going to act on that. And then I make a decision, I run an experiment and I adjust my approach. And so that's something that I just perpetually want to instill in people that I am quite an expert in a lot of these things, and I still don't know about any of this. So there's no reason that you should have all the answers either.

B (64:01)

I want to linger here a little bit on not the packaging of the report per se, but the act of getting it out in the world. Because ultimately, and this is true of content that we create, we can spend a ton of time making something, but ultimately it just doesn't matter if we don't get it in front of people. So how do you think about setting yourself up for success, for getting this out to the people that you want to see it again?

A (64:29)

For me, the first thing is I have my own audience, and I'm in a fortunate position where a significant portion of my audience is podcast industry people. So if I send something out to my newsletter. I know that there's probably people at NPR who are reading it. There's people at any of the major, like, well known podcast companies. I think I have people from Apple and Spotify on my list. And like, it gets out to people in the industry as well as, you know, a lot of my peers who are also building audiences around podcasting. So that's not something that everybody has the advantage of, but it is something that has worked for me. And then on top of that, I'm reaching out individually to basically all those same people, not necessarily Apple and Spotify. I think I did reach out to them in the first year and just never heard back after several responses and was kind of like, okay, well, I'm not going to chase that for too long. But for me, like, there's Pod News is the daily podcast newsletter. And James, the editor, I know him, all right, and he's always looking for news. Like it's a newsletter that reports on industry news. Most industries have newsletters or something like that that is worth submitting a press release to them. It's worth emailing them. They're actively looking for stuff to share. And so I think if you can get that out in some of these key places, often then it gets picked up by other people who are in the industry and it can kind of go up from there. And a lot of times you'll get more inbound requests than for quotes or to guest on a podcast or contribute to an article or something like that. And so finding some of the hubs of your existing industry who this is relevant to, that's where I'd be focusing the majority of my attention. But the other thing is that when you reached out to all those people to share the survey in the first place, like now, this is a natural follow up. Like, what those people really wanted was the finished report. And so they're probably more than happy to share it with their audiences now. And so you've kind of actually done a lot of that work earlier. And then it's just saying, hey, remember that thing we did a couple months ago? Well, the report's ready now and here's a couple quotes you can use to share it in your newsletter. Here's some of the key takeaways. And so I kind of put together a little notion page with some of that, like the highlights of, like, here's how to talk about it, here's the link, whatever, all the stuff they need to make it really easy for them to share.

B (66:28)

I think this is an area where there's a lot more leverage and possibility than most people go to do. Because I would look at this, I've seen this with product launches. The more anticipation I build, the better it seems like most people who release reports like this, unless you took the survey, you're completely unaware that it's coming. And even if you did take the survey, you often don't know exactly when it's coming. I think because you're already probably creating a bunch of visual assets for this, I would tease it for weeks ahead of time and use it as some sort of lead magnet to say, hey, here's a takeaway from our upcoming Trends report. This is something that we found. If you want to get the report before anybody else, you know, pick how long in advance you want, go sign up here and try to create kind of a launch list for this. Because I think the other tendency a lot of people in this space would have is to send it out dedicated email, whatever, maybe a dedicated piece of content. Otherwise then start to integrate it into their ongoing communication, but probably only promoting it like a tenth or less of what they could and should do.

A (67:40)

I always think about the April Dunford quote. I think this was in a conversation with Rob Fitzpatrick around book launches. And her quip was something like, a launch isn't a day, it's a year. And I always think about that for launching anything, anything enduring like this. And you think an annual report actually has legs for quite a while and it also actually precedes the actual launch. And this is true, like it's actually very similar to a book launch where you can release excerpts, where you can kind of take pieces of the report. And this is, again, we're talking about the narrative on the website. I've basically written blog posts in, you know, little 300 word blog posts that are on the website. Kind of this key takeaway of this thing that can be content for LinkedIn for email. And the other thing that I've I've done in the second and third years is starting to ask for contributions from other industry peers and saying like, here's early access to the report. If you want to write me a like 250 to 500 word analysis of something here and your take on what this means, we can tease that beforehand. I'll write an email around it that goes out to my list with your name and link back to your site as well. In some cases we've included that in the report. And so you can kind of get some of that stuff ahead of time, which also increases the likelihood that they're going to share the report when it actually comes out because you're kind of promoting them already in advance. So that's something you can certainly do in the lead up. And then, you know, I mentioned before the podcast spun off of this, which is in the long tail kind of benefit of this report, is being able to do a show with my co host, Justin, where we are both. We've been in the podcast industry for a long time. We're both smart marketers, I would like to think, and we have kind of different takes on it as well. And so being able to pick apart some of these things and saying, like, okay, we're starting off with the data, but let's look at, like, what's actually going on behind this. What's the, like, what does this mean for a creator? What's the more human and sometimes even like philosophical kind of nature of this? We had some very interesting philosophical discussions about algorithms and YouTube and how that impacts humanity and how are we as creators, like, playing into that. And so that's been a fun way to extend the shelf life while also pointing people back to the report and then getting people, like, keeping them in the loop for when the next report comes around as well.

B (69:36)

This is so good. This reminds me of a talk I did at Craft and Commerce a couple years ago now, based on, like a 2018 tweet by Jack Butcher that said, sell your sawdust, you know, and the idea was create something extremely valuable, high quality, dense. In the process of creating that, you're going to have stuff that doesn't make the cut. It's on the cutting room floor, you're going to have little pieces of it, and that becomes your short form strategy. And doing something like this is so good for short form. And meanwhile, most people are so caught up on the treadmill of short form, they're spending all their time creating short form content, which doesn't quite add up to a bigger thing in the same way a report does. But if you do it from this direction and you're doing it because you want to build credibility and authority in this space. There's just so many downstream use cases for all the pieces and the assets that came out of this experience.

A (70:29)

One of the other things with the podcast is it's reduced the pressure to fit everything into the report because some things I kind of like, want more time to sit with or I just feel like overwhelmed by the amount of data analysis. And I know there's a big thing, like one of the things that was totally manual in the second year's report was I got everybody to submit their links, while everybody did the first year. But I went through manually and I rated everything, their cover art and their titles on a number of criteria. And I was trying to figure out, like, do shows with big shows, do they have faces on the COVID what are they more like, designy or are they more text based? There's all these things that I was like, this is a whole report in and of itself. I just don't have the energy to make that whole report and it's too much to fit in this. So I kind of like punted on that for six months. And then we covered it in the podcast we did a whole episode on. Then I crunched the data and I looked at the titling and cover art and like, what are the trends there? That's even almost better in some way where there's something new now that the EU collected the data initially, but then you actually released it later. And that's something I'm getting more interested in doing with subsequent reports, is actually bite sizing them out where there's like a big one and then there's follow ups on kind of more narrow, specific things that each can kick off their own kind of PR cycle and promotional cycle rather than just the big one. But it's all still from the same data collection initially.

B (71:41)

I have one closing question, but before we get there, do you feel like we covered the experience front to back? Do we miss anything major in that? Step by step?

A (71:50)

I think the one other thing that I briefly mentioned that is worth kind of drawing some attention to here is I work with a lot of people who use podcast guesting or various other types of pitches to get in front of new audiences. And I think there is a huge value. You know, this is like one of those classic marketing pieces of advice is like, do interesting things and tell people about it. A report is one of those things that gives you a pitch that is really easy to say yes to for somebody to invite you in front of their audience. And so I've done a ton of podcast guest interviews that are the easiest pitches I've ever done. I've tried so many pitches for podcast guesting over the years of like, around the idea of like teaching, you know, what's working now in podcast marketing, sometimes that works. But something like I interviewed or I got the data from 500 podcasters and I can tell you what's working now, and only I have that data set that's a much more compelling pitch for anybody to invite you onto their podcast, doing guest posts, live workshops in front of audiences. Like, I've done all these things based on this one annual thing that I do once. It is a lot of work, but then it actually gives you this leverage to promote yourself and pitch yourself to other people.

B (72:54)

So now that we've given people the playbook for how to do it tactically, I think maybe the final hang up for a lot of people is who am I to do this? Do I even have the authority to do this in the first place? What would you say to that?

A (73:12)

Yeah, I mean, this was my. This was one of the things I'd thought about a report like this for a while. And I have no background in data. I am not that good with calculations. I'm good at math, but not like coming up with complex calculations of crunching data. This is something that ChatGPT is super helpful with when it comes to Google Sheets. It is. I don't think I could have done it without chatgpt there. And so I didn't do it for a long time. And there's also, for me, there's a couple of big actual survey companies in the podcasting space that very prominently report at the big conferences every year. They are professionals in the space. And so I felt that way for a long time and, and eventually I just kind of got fed up. I was like, for years, I was like waiting on every one of these reports to have this kind of podcast growth rate data that it all started with. And I was like, well, if nobody else is going to do it, then I guess I'm just going to have to go out and collect this myself. And still nobody else has done it. And so now I've got the only report that has that data and a bunch of other stuff, and I've got zero blowback on it. I think I did a pretty good job, but I'm guessing there are mistakes in the way I analyze things. Those wouldn't be obvious to anybody unless they actually went in and looked at the whole data set themselves. And so I, I think if you go into this with good intentions and you are careful with thinking about it in a logical way, I think the likelihood of there being any kind of blowback is actually pretty low. I think, like, there is some complexity to it. If you're, you know, data inclined, if you like data, I think you can figure this out even if you've never done a report like this before. And once you get into it, your. Your curiosity is going to lead you into interesting ways and you can like, the beautiful thing here is that again, like, this was not so good in my first year. But now with ChatGPT, you can say, I have this data set. I'm trying to find this. How should I think about this? And they can give you a formula, they can give you a process, they can tell you when you're wrong and you're thinking about this the wrong way. And so I think that the ability for most people who are a little bit data inclined to run a report like this is certainly within reach.

B (75:09)

If you enjoyed this episode, you would enjoy hanging out with Jeremy and I in the lab. Learn more@creatorscience.com lab if you haven't already left a rating or review for this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, now is the time. I read them. I love them. Please help us get to 500. Those reviews go a long way. Help us grow the show. If you learn more about Jeremy, Visit his website, podcastmarketingacademy.com There's a link to that in the show notes as well. Otherwise, thank you for listening and I'll talk to you next week.