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Looking at my calendar, I saw that this podcast actually started in June.

It’s felt like a long time. A lot of things have happened while creating this podcast. I met some incredible people, collaborated with geniuses, and made my connections with my friends unbreakably strong.

Other than that, a total of 15,000 people have downloaded the podcast, averaging 215 listens per episode. For me, I’m happy with this.

So in this episode I just wanted to really flesh out the events that made this podcast for what it was today, and how it slowly transformed. From the independent website, graduate student series, to why I am changing some of my questions, I want to tell you just how fun it was making this thing and where we’re planning to go next.

Let’s being

Beginnings

Have I told this story before? Maybe only to my guests, or with my friends.

When I first moved to Phoenix, I became obsessed with Podcasts, almost about the same time I started hating my job, which you can listen about in episode 60, which was around the time I wanted to find a way out.

I noticed that sure, listening to music was fun, but it wasn’t productive. So I started listening to audio books which I borrowed form the Phoenix library. Soon it evolved into podcasts.

My first podcasts I listened to often were Smart Passive Income and Entrepreneur on Fire. I’d consider these entry-level because they are indeed inspiring stories with a little bit of tactical knowledge. This went on for about a year.

In maybe January 2016, I read an article by Tim Ferriss about how he started his podcast. Through his write up, I found it was pretty easy to do. For example, the equipment was dirt cheap, and the barrier to entry is pretty good.

About a month later, Nicole posted the fated article about how the food industry is hiring people at a declining rate and everything kind of clicked.

The lesson here is really about this simple equation, that opportunity + preparedness = luck is something that resonates with me when I do projects.

If I didn’t listen to podcasts, or read how to do them, I would never had had the opportunity to work with Nicole. There are many other factors in how this started up that made it worked as well.

For example, Foodgrads was a startup, so they were flexible and willing to support me in this venture. Though they didn’t give me initial capital, the power of just getting a thumbs up is more than enough justification to get started with the podcast so I set aside $1000 dollars and went to town. I would provide the episodes, and they would provide the website that I could post on.

I bought equipment recommended by Tim Ferriss including this microphone. I downloaded Audacity, and then I bought a course called Podcaster’s Paradise. This course was created by John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneur on Fire. I subscribed for about 3 months and learned a lot of technical tidbits in not only on how to use Audacity, but how to structure my podcast from getting guests to sending thank you notes. It also gave me some amazing tools such as calendly.com and libsyn.

I also found the facebook group they had extremely supportive and that’s also where I met Kim from Peas On Moss, who started her podcast the same time as I did.

So starting that, I now had to get guests. First up was Nicole and Juliette from Foodgrads as they were the ones hosting it on their website, so it just seemed right. Then I got Trevor Fast, Brian Chau, and Taryn Yee, while on a work trip to California. I literally scheduled time to meet and record. It was really fun!

I remember doing the dumbest thing while doing Trevor’s interview. I thought the room was too noisy so I thought we could do it in the office. We ended up doing the interview in a cramped, noisy room where chocolate was being refined. Editing that was a pain.

So you keep going. Episode 6 was my most valuable guest being Dr. Howard Moskowitz in more ways than one. This one was a stroke of luck I had no idea how I got him on the show. I just connected on linkeidn, he sends me a bunch of stuff and I asked him to be on the podcast. That’s so cool!

I realized then, that the ability to ask someone to be on a podcast is an extremely valuable tool. For one, it gives you a very legitimate excuse on inviting, and talking to people you want to talk to, and

I would say about 70% of my podcasts have guests I personally contacted, 10% are from people who sign up to be interviewed randomly and another 20% are referred to by either previous guests or friends.

My biggest tips for finding great guests is pretty simple, especially for people on linkedin.

For one, if they post a lot, it’s more likely they would like to be on the show. There are only a few exceptions I’ve had with this.

People who are going to launch something, whether it’s a book or new product, are especially willing to talk about it as well. This is how I got Ali Bouzari on the show, for instance.

Connectors, whether self-proclaimed are not have their perks too. Rochelle Boucher, for example, knew a ton of people and supported me in huge amounts getting guests that came to her Miele location. I returned the favor with my own resources.

After my recent talk with Alex Oesterle from Food Marketing Nerds, I found that he has a very different way of contacting. A bit more professional, which I might want to dive in the future.

He goes through PR firms or PR departments to get amazing guests from the marketing department. I’ve only had a couple of guests been blocked by denying permission, which I actually find kind of, a strange and outdated practice, but I understand.

But the method I use works, I have absolutely no problem finding guests and I actually realized that I don’t need big shots on my podcasts. I actually really enjoy interviewing fresh, inspiring graduates. Some recent examples like Jon Weber and Louis Edmond, who both just got their jobs, were extremely satisfying to talk to just because of their passionate outlook in life and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

So this brings me to another topic about what you want your podcast to represent. This means knowing your audience, and catering to that audience.

Overall, the message and structure for My Food Job Rocks is a pretty simple one: explore different food jobs, dive in a little bit of their history, and explore their viewpoints on current events such as technology or current events. At the end, we cool down and talk about books, quotes, and favorite foods.

The questions we’ve designed for our show is pretty standard, but testing certain questions has made the process a lot of fun.

One of the questions I’ve changed was “what is a standard day like?”

I used this question in the beginning, but all I got was “every day is different!” So I changed this question and worded it in multiple different ways. Sometimes I say “what’s the most exciting part of your job?” or “what’s the worst?” some of my personal favorites include asking the process of how to make a certain food such as with Jocelyn Ngo or Haley Richardson. By diving into a subject filled with enigma versus a standard routine, in usually generates more excitement.

One of the other questions I’ve had a good time playing around with is “what do you think are the important skills you need in your job?”.

My favorite answer to this question is from Tiffany Tong from Canada’s Smartest Kitchen, where she said adaptability. After she did a beautiful explanation of the word, I dug deeper. “How do you become more adaptable?”

I guess the trend and evolution of the questions I ask is more about “how can I make this podcast more exciting/unique, and what type of tactical and actionable advice can I give to my audience?”

Next topic is in regards to why we split off from Foodgrads initially, around episode 16:

Well, I wanted more control and a certain person who was there at the time didn’t want that. Eventually, they had to approach to let me go.

I’m bad at assuming things, so I’ll leave it as: I grew too big for their nest so I had to leave. With a mix of disappointment, support from...