← End of All Hope
End of All Hope
A Message from 7 Lamb
00:10:39
We’ve been getting a lot of emails asking if we are still making podcasts and wondering why things are taking so long. Well, here’s a little explanation of what’s been going on behind the scenes.
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Robert M. Lam
Hey everyone, Robert M. Lam here, creator of seven Lamb to give some updates on upcoming projects. We are posting this message to all our feeds so people can get a better understanding of where we're at as a company and what's going on behind the scenes. Now, the stuff we talk about here won't be anything new to people who follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, but we realized that we needed to reach our entire audience. Although real quick, if you aren't already, follow us on all Those platforms at 7Lamb podcasts if you know 7Lamb, you'll know that we just became a true business a year ago, but we've been releasing podcasts since 2017. It took us that long to finally make enough money that I could quit my day job and do this full time. Last year was my first year just working on podcasts. Before that I worked multiple jobs and did the podcasting on the side. Most of the money I made working those two part time jobs went to funding the podcast. I spent thousands upon thousands of dollars to get this business going because I was serious about doing this full time. So it took a little over five years of working 15 hours a day and thousands of dollars to finally build up enough of a following to make enough money through advertisers that I could quit. By the way, when I say I worked 15 hours every day, that's not an exaggeration. I worked every single day, Monday through Sunday, usually 8am to until about midnight, sometimes later. Usually it was about five hours a day at the day job, sometimes eight, and then the rest went towards podcasting. The only breaks being travel time to and from work or when I ate breakfast, lunch or dinner and sometimes an afternoon power nap. I probably realistically only took about 60 days off in those five years. It was rough, but I was determined and now I'm happy to say that I'm full time. But that being said, I I'm the only one who is. Other people who are part of this business, like Jack Austin, voice of a ton of characters, has been helping me along the way. But Jack works a full time job. So does Amber Simpson, an editor friend of ours. So does Amy Larae and Brian Messick and Hope Ennis, other friends who voice several characters. In fact, tons of voice actors are close friends of ours, many of which worked for free for those first four to five years because they were helping me achieve my goal. They knew all the money I made from my day jobs went to editing, hosting other voice actors from Reddit, music, sound effects, computers, soundproofing, and other equipment and so on. It wasn't until just recently that many of my friends started making money. Not much, but I was able to pay them some. The reason I'm mentioning all of this is because sometimes we think people don't realize we are a very small operation. The reason why we produced so much content was because for five years I didn't have a life and I have a ton of friends that were willing to help me out. I understand it can be infuriating waiting for the next episode of your favorites like Tower 4, end of all Hope, Paralyzed Atlas, having a beat, and so on. But even Now I work 10 to 12 hours six days a week. I now take off every Sunday since I have a girlfriend and I want to spend some time with her. But I'm still here working and so is everyone else when they can. The problem is everybody else has a day job, so we have to schedule around those jobs. And when you have so many characters and so many podcasts going, it can get cumbersome. And that's one question we get a lot Are you guys still working on X Show? The answer yes, we are still working on all of our shows and we don't plan on stopping anytime soon. Another question we get a lot. Especially now. Why do you do so many shows if you can't keep up? Well, the answer is it took five years of that many shows to get it to where we made enough in ad revenue that I could quit. One show by itself just doesn't make enough. Plus, we never know what show is going to take off. When we did Tower 4, we didn't know that would quickly have a huge following. If we knew that, we would have started earlier. Also, there's a creative aspect to it. Right now I am the only writer. I love writing, but I cannot for the life of me write 10 episodes of one show in a row. I need breaks. I hit writer's block one day, I can wake up and want to write horror, the next day comedy. I feel the worst episodes I've written are the ones that I force myself to write to keep up with demand. I don't want to do that anymore. Oh, also, there's an issue with writing multiple seasons of shows. It gets harder as it goes on. The story expands, the cast lists get larger, and since we've been adding mid rolls ads in the middle of our shows, we're trying to make episodes longer for our fans. The first season of End of All Hope was way easier to create than season five. There's other aspects as well, that have slowed production. Ad revenue is not always consistent and sometimes we have to take on other contract jobs to make up the money. That takes time away from our shows, but helps us fund them. Also, ad revenue is not so great right now. We've heard that from multiple podcast producers and we've seen it firsthand. Basically, we have to be more strategic now more than ever because this is my full time job. The moment we don't make enough money, then I'm going to have to get a part time job and we're stuck releasing even less. And that's something we don't want to do. We don't want to move backwards. Some of you may say why not release a ton every month? Like just release podcasts. Well, we would love to, but like previously stated, I already work 10 to 12 hours a day. One episode can take 50 hours, sometimes up to 80 hours to complete. I know it only takes 20 minutes or 30 minutes to listen to, but I mean it really is 50 to 80 hours. And some of our longer episodes, like the finales, can take over a hundred hours to produce. So it's just not possible for us to release more right now. But trust us, nothing would make us happier than releasing weekly, which hopefully we can get to at some point. So right now, when people ask when is a specific show coming out? We really don't know. And that's the honest answer. We're trying to produce as much as possible, write, edit, record, but there's a lot of other stuff that comes along with running a business. So it's just been pretty hectic. And like I said, I'm the only one who's full time. We used to post schedules, but they're always hard to keep up with. So we've backed off of that a little bit. Right now, most of the time we aren't sure. And since we aren't able to pay our friends a ton of money voicing characters, we don't rush them. Same with the editors. If an editor for Paralyzed says they need more time, we give it to them, even if it's a month or two. Because if it's not our friends doing the work, it's someone we outsource to and we still aren't able to pay a ton. Like I said, ad revenue fluctuates and right now it's not so good. We do have several editors helping us out right now, but that's not always the case. And for nearly two years I was doing majority of the editing. I still do a lot of the editing I edited every episode of Tower 4, but when I'm editing, I'm not writing. And that's when we get behind. It's a vicious cycle. We're trying to work on it. And this is not a message to scold anyone who's complained about our releases. This is also not a woe is me posting Host. I'm lucky to be able to do this full time right now and I love doing it. We are not looking for pity. That's not what we're trying to do with this message. The fact that people want more means we're doing something right. We just wanted to make this message so people can get a little glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes. And everything I discussed so far was based in production and ad sales. But there have been other issues as well. Along with contract jobs, we've had voice actors get married, take vacations. There's zoom calls and answering emails. Jack just had a baby. Amber got a promotion at her job where now she works more. Hope just moved. I just moved in with my girlfriend. We got hit with a hurricane, you know, six months ago. Studio equipment has died. We fixed up our studio, which is a two car garage we work out of. We have business taxes now to keep track of and plenty of us have gotten Covid or the flu. It rains a lot in Florida and when it rains we can't record. There's just a lot of issues that come along with producing this content. Basically, we just want to say thank you for everyone who listens. We understand the concerns. We've been getting a lot of emails asking when the next shows are coming. Most people are cordial about it, which is nice. But we have not stopped working on any of our shows, even Chair of Swords and Cop Doctors. We just need some time to get things in order and regroup. But we think people will be happy with the longer episodes when we finally do get them out. And remember, everything we release is free. And if Stranger Things can take three years to make a new season, when they have a huge budget, multiple writers, and Netflix charges $16 to $20 a month, we just ask people be a little easy on us. One full timer with some friends working out of a two car garage. That's how we operate. While I hate posting schedules, I will say this. Our aim is to have new paralyzed and Tower 4 out before August. Again. That's tentative, but that's what we're aiming for. We're also working on a couple more side stories for Patreon. We really want to push our Patreon by no means does anyone have to donate, but we do have a Patreon where you can donate as little as a dollar a month and it really does help us out. In fact, we have such a great following and so many listeners that if everyone who listened to our shows donated $1 for the entire year, just $1 per person for the year, we would make enough money to fund the next couple of years of shows easily. Just to put things in perspective, we have a ton of fans, but ad revenue makes it so we make just enough right now so I can remain full time and still pay all of our expenses. Hopefully that doesn't change, but who knows? Again, no one has to donate, we just care that you listen. I remember talking to Jack a little while ago about wanting to make sure we are as transparent as we can be with our business and production, and that's why I decided to finally post this message. Hopefully it helps people understand our struggles and if not, if there's still some people who are really upset with us and how we release, we're sorry, but we're operating at our full capacity right now and until we get more people on the payroll and more people are able to do this full time, we're just not going to be able to release faster. But we are trying and hopefully we can. Hopefully we can release longer episodes quicker and get more seasons. Out of all your favorites, thank you to everyone who does listen, everyone who follows, everyone who's listening to this right now, everyone who has given us a good review, and everyone who has reached out with something nice to say. It's really nice to get good emails of people who understand how much work this stuff takes. We appreciate you all, we appreciate you listening and hopefully we will have some new content out real soon.