185 | Podcast Growth Hacks That Actually Work (& Boost Revenue), with Chris Hutchins

Have you ever wondered how to turn your podcast into a seven figure business without selling courses or your time? A lot of people want to do it. Very few have actually achieved it except for today's guest. This is Grow the Show. The podcast that helps you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Spidlin. I am your podcast growth coach and today on the show we are joined by Chris Hutchins, who is the founder and host of All the Hacks, a podcast that upgrades and optimizes your life, money and travel. Chris has successfully scaled his podcast to significant revenue without relying on selling courses or coaching or really anything. In this episode, Chris is going to break down three things. Number one, he's going to share the strategies he has used to grow his podcast audience to about 50,000 downloads per episode. Number two, he's going to share how he uses advertisement and affiliate revenue to sustain the show in his life. And number three, he's going to talk about the importance of content quality and listener engagement and how those two things enabled him to monetize his podcast to the max. And of course, we wouldn't be talking to Chris Hutchins if we didn't hear some hacks. So Chris is also going to share some of his favorite podcast growth hacks that he has come across recently. So if you're ready for all that and you want to learn the secrets to building a massive profitable podcast, then stick around for this episode of Grow the Show. Chris Hutchins, welcome to Grow the Show. So, so excited to have you here on the show, man. Dude, I'm excited to be here. There is very few topics I love nerding out on more than growing a podcast. Yeah. Oh, we're going to nerd all the way out on it. Founder and host of All the Hacks, I'm excited to see what kind of podcast hacks you have come up being the guy who hacks or if there are no hacks, can't wait to hear what you have to say about that. But first, can you give our listeners who haven't heard of you or haven't heard of the show yet, just a quick elevator pitch. What is your podcast? Yeah, the show is called All the Hacks. It's basically about how to upgrade and optimize your life. I am one of those people that has a spreadsheet for everything. I like to optimize it all. I like to go deep. And that is what I do on topics ranging from your health, your money, your travel, your life negotiating your relationship. It's really any area of life could be improved with a little bit of work, but you know, some hacks along the way to make it a little bit more optimal without as much work. Right. 100%. Now recently, I client of mine here at Grosho asked me if I knew anybody who is making seven figures from a podcast and did not sell any course or coaching or anything on the back end. And you were the only person that came to mind. And I texted you and I said, Hey, is this you? And you said, Yes. So is that still true? I'm going to say I'm going to put a little tiny, tiny caveat. Okay. So I think yes, I have done some consulting. So like, there are a few people who've reached out to me. I set up this page that's I think it's Chris Hutchins.com slash podcast consulting. And like, I've had probably no more than one client and generated, you know, single digits, thousands of dollars, but not like it's not a big part of the business. And then I have sold a product, which was a credit card optimizer spreadsheet, but it was not a course. So, okay, those two caveats away. And if you removed all that revenue and include other revenue. So like, we started selling ads, then we started selling ads for other people. And so you have to include that revenue also. So all the hacks as an independent show is not a seven figure business. ATH media, you know, as it exists, it probably falls in that bucket. Okay, cool. At least that revenue, by the way, like I don't know for anyone listening revenue and profit are very different numbers. But if we're just talking revenue. Yeah, 100%. But either way, what's cool about the show is that I mean, I'm pretty sure the show was supported largely by ads, yes, yeah, ads and affiliate revenue are 90% of the shows revenue. Yeah, would you be willing to share how the show is doing downloads wise per month, just a frame sort of conversation we're about to have? Yeah, I would. I can go back. I have a spreadsheet pulled up. If we want to go as nerdy as you want, I'm like, I have downloads per episode dating back to the beginning. But right now I'd say I'm forecasting. We're doing about 45 to 50,000 downloads in episode. Awesome. An episode. Oh, holy crap. Nice job. It's awesome. Numbers that mean nothing to anyone out in the real world. You know, I've been looking at YouTube and retention on YouTube compared to retention on audio. And I'm like, I think a YouTube view is about a fourth of a podcast. Listen, based on the way retention works. Someone gets 400,000 views on a video. That doesn't mean they're making as much or having as much of an impact because I don't know, like 50% of the people aren't there after a minute. Yeah. What's also true is that on YouTube, you get that subscriber count, which is like the cumulative list of all the people who have opted in to see your content on a regular basis ever. Whereas we as podcasters, audio podcasters, we don't get that. We just see how many people downloaded the last episode. It's like as if a YouTuber didn't know how many subscribers they had and they could only see how many views my last video gets. So yeah, although I've backed into a estimated subscriber count for myself. How do you do that? So Apple will give you a subscriber count and Spotify will give you a subscriber count. And Google will give you a subscriber account. And I think overcast is not. So I took those three and I looked at how many unique listeners and how many downloads I was getting from those platforms to try to kind of guess. Okay, well, I get this many downloads on Apple and I have this many subscribers. I have this many downloads on Spotify. I have this many subscribers. How many downloads do I have that aren't on platforms that give me a subscriber count and use a similar number? I have no idea how accurate it is because the Apple and the Spotify numbers are what like we have two times as many downloads from Apple as Spotify or maybe three, but we have twice as many Spotify subscribers as we do Apple. So like Spotify subscribers are much more casual, right? Yeah, we have more subscribers and less downloads by a factor of about five. That makes sense to me because as a user of Spotify, that's what I use these days to listen to shows. If I follow a show on Spotify, I'll never see it again. Like it doesn't come up in the app for me. Like I have to go and find this like search it again. Like following is virtually useless. Like you never see it again. So that's probably what's happening there. Whereas if you follow show on Apple, then the new episodes come up every single time you push notification like totally. Yeah. Cool. So for today, basically here at Grow the show, we have a framework that we call the podcast ladder. The idea behind the podcast ladder is that there's basically four things that a podcaster needs to understand and get right in order to be able to make grow and monetize an awesome show that makes some money. Those four levels of the podcast ladder are number one, your show's premise, who it's for and what it will do for them. Number two is retention, putting out episodes that are actually good that people listen to. Number three is growth. How to get new people to discover the show. And then number four is monetization. How do you then make money from this? So what I want to do with you is I'm going to step through those four things and just see how you think about this. Feel free to challenge anything that I say about it because I'm just excited to hear how you, you know, how you think. So let's talk premise. Who would you say is the listener of all the hacks? Who is your audience? So I think I made a decision that was both the best and worst decision I made when I got started with the show. And that was not picking a niche that is easy to find people in. So for example, if I made a show just about points and miles, it's like you know where those people hang out. You can find them. They're in certain blogs, forums, all these places. But my problem there was if I picked that niche, I thought it was too small to be a really big show. So I zoom out and I'm like, well, my show is for people who like to live a better life. Okay, well then that's everyone. So it's like, it's kind of like an optimizer. But an optimizer is more like a personality trait than a place people hang out, right? I get emails from listeners and some of them are like 60 year old pastors and some of them are like 20 year old college kids. And like they span such a wide spectrum of age, income, geography, everything that it is so hard for me to find them. So I would say it's for people who probably like to optimize their life and and kind of are very, very curious. But again, that's a lot of people. Well, what you're touching on is I think choose your character type challenge of if you go niche, if you go really niche at the beginning, it's going to be way easier to find your audience faster. But you're going to hit a ceiling way faster of well, there's only so many you know points people. Whereas if you do something more broad out of the gate, it's going to be harder to target people. But once you have momentum, you can do something more broad. I mean, would you go back and change the way that you did it or you just kind of admitting that it was harder out of the beginning? I don't think I would change anything and I don't even know if it was necessarily harder out of the beginning. I actually think it's harder now in the middle ground because now I'm like, I'm ready to do more gross things than what works early on and I just don't know where to do them. Like I can't just go target running ads or on shows that you know are in my vertical because it's like, what is my vertical? Like it's all there's so many different things. Got it. Okay. So ultimately your listener is optimizers, people who all over the demographic map, but they're people who their psychographic is, they like spreadsheets, they like to optimize their life, they like to find the hacks. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. And so you have guest episodes of your show. My understanding is your show is mostly guests, but you do some solo episodes. Is that right? So when I started the show off, it was just guests. And I think that was probably a lack of confidence. Maybe if I had to pinpoint it that like, why would anyone want to listen to me talk? Who knows me? I got to go get these names. What I realized over time was big names don't matter. They don't move the needle for downloads. They do move the needle for credibility. So like if I'm trying to convince someone to be a guest, having had big name guests might convince them, but those big name guest episodes might not have done well at all. And I started doing some solo episodes because what happened was I found a few topics I wanted to cover on the show. And I just couldn't find anyone that actually had gone deep enough on those topics to be a good guest. You know, that sounds probably a little bit arrogant, but I was like, I really wanted to do an episode on insurance, like how to shop for insurance. And everyone I found that had done an episode or written about insurance was either like a journalist focused on one type of insurance or someone selling insurance. So I was like, okay, I am going to go and get 40 quotes from carriers, every broker out there for auto, for home, for life, for umbrella, for all the policies. And I'm going to like read the terms, look at the notes, do a bunch of research, actually talk to people. And I just couldn't find anyone that had done that level of research. And it makes sense why? Because at the end of the day, I think I spent 40 or 50 hours on this and like my net savings was like $800 a year. I felt great to know I got the best deal, but like, I was value my time very poorly, but it made such good content. And it wasn't supposed to be content, right? It was just me obsessing over finding the best deal for insurance at an expense of my time. But when I realized that that could just be content and that other people got tremendous value out of me spending 80 hours trying to figure something out and just telling them what I learned. So they don't have to spend 80 hours. I was like, I should do this more. I think for the rest of the year, it feels like we might be at near 50% solo. Wow. So how was your first one received? I'm guessing I got to think your audience loved it. Yeah, it went great. Like people, I find that the solo episodes, I started off doing them as Q&A and like listen to our questions. And I was like, wow, people really like this. They must like me, you know, but you forget for a second that people can go listen, almost any person you interview as a podcast host has been interviewed before. Yep. So like if someone's going to listen to your interview with this person, they're probably coming for you. They're not coming for the gas. Right. Because if they came for the gas, they could go find someone who has interviewed this guest six different times. Right. And once you realize that people are coming for you, then you realize like, maybe they just want to hear what you have to say. I looked at the download numbers and we all the way I look at download numbers is first day. And then because I get some early indication as to like, how did this do? Because we're consistent. We always release on the same day. We always release at the same time. I look at first day. And then maybe I'll check back in after two, three weeks and just be like, how did this compare? And I'll sometimes also go look at the data on Apple and Spotify on consumption percent. And I'll be like, which episodes are people listening through to the end? And which episodes are more people listening to? And the solo episodes were always doing better than the others. So that gave me the confidence to start doing them. And it's been great. It takes tremendously more work to do a solo episode, probably like five times as much work. And obviously, almost no work to book the gas. Right. So like I save a little bit of time because I'm not figuring out who to email and writing these messages. But doing the research is a lot of work. So I can't do it weekly. If that's what you're doing for your solo episodes, it takes more work than a guest. But there's a lot of folks that I've worked with where I'm like, Hey, you have so much stuff in your course or like so much stuff that you teach. And I'm like, guys, just record yourself for 30 minutes, just spit in some knowledge, like you're an expert in this thing. And so with them, it's more efficient. But yeah, if you're doing 50 hours of research on insurance quotes, it might be a little more working guests. I think I open 20 bank accounts to do the best bank account episode. We have coming out this week because I wanted to play with all the features and like see how they worked and move money into them. So, but I agree. By the way, it's everything about podcasting is reversible, right? You want to make a season and then not podcast again. Great. It was season one. You're done. You want to do a solo episode? You want to stop doing it? Fine. That's fine. Like, you can change all these things. So I think experimenting is awesome. You're a little bit nervous. You've sold the ads. You think your experiment isn't going to work. Great. Release it on a different day as a bonus episode. I've done a bunch of those. You mentioned completion rates that you check them regularly. Is there a completion rate that you shoot for? Like, do you have like a KFI for that? So I try. The answer is no. And I would say no because there are always things happening that make the data like directionally good, but not decision making good. And over time, it's really hard to compare like the completion rate in the first five days is different than later. And so I use it more as kind of like reflective like what things really resonated this year. Because right now, I'm experimenting with a new new types of intros. I realize there's like four or five components that you could use to kick off an episode. And so if you have four types of components, right, you can order them in, you know, like six or seven different ways. So like, if I'm experimenting with that, is it fair to also look at consumption? If I'm experiencing with growth and I'm going to send a bunch of new people, well, those people might not complete. So I'm always doing enough experimenting that it's a little tricky for me to target anything. And everyone's measurements are different. I'm looking at Apple and I would say my average consumption, which is just whatever podcast connects says is anywhere between let's call it 57 and 75% for the last few episodes. Tell me about the experiment you're doing with intros. What are you finding there? What are you testing? So no one really thinks about this with podcasting and everyone thinks about this with YouTube. So I think this big macro theme is, where does video fit into podcasting? And I have a lot of thoughts, I guess they're not necessarily opinions yet. But in YouTube, it's like all anyone seems to think matters is how many people are watching at 30 seconds. And like, does the title and thumbnail and first 30 second hook? Do they all like deliver on the promise? And that will keep people sticking around. And because YouTube has like 4,000 times better analytics than anything podcasting has ever seen, people can really start to optimize this and change it after the fact new thumbnail, new titles, like you can kind of tweak things. The only thing podcasting has on YouTube is you can't change your YouTube video and come into YouTube. I didn't know this and I was talking to other YouTubers and I was like, oh yeah, that intro wasn't good. I think I can just swap it. They're like, what are you talking about? I was like, well, in audio, you could just replace the audio file. And they're like, yeah, I can't do that on YouTube. Other than that, audio wins. So a lot of people start their show with like, hey, this is how I did for, I don't know, 170 episodes. Hello, and welcome to another episode of all the hacks. Show about upgrading your life, money and travel. I'm Chris Hutchins. And today we're going to talk about this thing. So you could do that on YouTube. We experimented with what if we made like a little sizzle anywhere from like 30 to 60 seconds of clips that just like highlight what's going to happen in the conversation. So that was one thing you could include. Then I also thought, what if I just recorded like a hook for the episode that was just completely recorded from scratch trying to give people the gist of the entire episode in 10 seconds, right? Not, not longer. So I just did this bank accounts episode. And I was like, okay, if you're not already earning 5% on all your cash, including your checking account, and by the end of this episode, I hope you have everything you need to stop leaving money on the table and simplify your finances. Every episode prior to maybe last weeks started with hello, I'm Chris, like that and like this one was like a hook last weeks we started with a mini sizzle trailer where it was like clips from the episode. And I'll probably keep experimenting with what sounds best works well and in what order. That's fascinating. And so you're talking these are all tests that you're running just on the audio side. Are you doing both are you doing this on YouTube as well? On video, we're running the same test with the hook at the beginning. Yeah, yeah, which I've never tried. Fascinating. Yeah. I've found that I've started optimum because I make both of my episodes the same, right? So the audio in the video, like it's not that different between the two. And I've started lately optimizing my interests for YouTube. And they so far seem to be playing fine on, you know, on audio. Think about audio. Audio listeners are there for you, right? Yeah. The thing I've learned is that on audio, it's just so much more forgiving. Like most people are subscribers. On YouTube, 85% of my views are not subscribers. Right. And on audio, I don't have a way to know this. But if I had a guess, it's 99% are subscribers. So one, they know who I am. So like, why am I leading with, hey, this is all the hacks. This is Chris 99% of you know that. But I also led with that on YouTube at one point. I was like, well, that's silly. Like none of you even know what this is. This is confusing. Right. You clicked on a video about, you know, how to get a better deal on car rentals. And now you have Chris talking to you about who he is. And you don't, what does this have to do with car rent? Yeah. It's funny where I've been testing is less so on the like different types of intros. But more so, how can I make it so that I record something once and it plays in both places? So what I've been doing is I write an intro out that's kind of like a, it's kind of like a hybrid between the hook and the like, welcome back to the show. It's a little bit of both. It has a hook at the beginning. And then I'll say like, if you don't know who I am, my name is Kevin. I've, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, and like give a little bit of credibility. But I have the team only leave that in the YouTube version because what I found is that the audio people get really annoyed when they hear that every single week they hear, if you don't know who I am, if you don't know who I am, if you don't know who I am, and they're like, we know where you are. I've had people write in be like, can you please stop telling me about your back? So for me, I'm like, how can I record this once and try and make it work in both places? But like I said, I haven't, I haven't really, I feel like nailed that yet. Yeah. The other challenge though, I have my audience at least I asked people and I'd say 70% love that we trim so much out. All the filler words, the ums, the likes, the you knows, all it's up. And people love it. And it takes the episode down from like a 50 minute episode to like a 42 minute episode. So that's eight minutes of like time in people's day, not wasted by me saying um or something. That's crazy. But in YouTube, because there's video, if you make 100 cuts in an episode to remove words, it's really choppy because you're cutting the video and you're jumping from one place to the other. So when our YouTube at it, we're not doing that. But I think it looks so bad on YouTube to have like constant jumping. I just said the word like constant jumping on audio. It would just say to have constant jumping in a video, you'd see my head here and then jump here. Kind of weird. But with what's happening on Spotify, what's happening on YouTube, I think we will get to a place soon where you just have to have one at it. And I think YouTube and Spotify are really pushing a few things that are going to make that happen really quickly. Let's talk about growth. So we've talked about level one premise. We've talked about level two, which is retention. Level three is growth throughout the show so far. What have been the ways that you have gotten new listeners? What have been your strategies? Yeah. I've made this presentation for a conference. I think I've shared it with you. And I'm looking at like 50 growth tactic bullets that I've experimented with. Whoa. And some of them I'd say are like, are they really growth tactics? Some of them like really, really worked well, but they were silly. Like my signature in my email always says, you know, something about the show in my email. Someone wrote back to me once. I think it said, interested in optimizing your life, you know, check out my podcast. And they didn't realize that it was like a signature. They just thought I was like asking them if they were interested. And it was with a floor mat company. Like I was emailing customer support. And this person wrote back and they're like, thanks for asking me if I was interested in optimizing my life. I really enjoyed your podcast. So obviously that's not going to scale infinitely. Some of these other things don't scale. I think, unfortunately, because it's just really hard, the absolute best way to grow your podcast is to be mentioned on other podcasts. Mentioned. I've tried to track the conversion from social, from newsletter, from web ads, like everything, the conversion from anything other than podcasts, pales and comparison to the conversion of podcasts to podcasts. I've looked at the data. So I've probably done that I've tracked well, probably like 50 podcast mentions. Now that is not 50 guest appearances. That's 50 times my show was promoted or I was a guest. And I've tracked the conversion rate from that mention to my show. I use a tool called chartable if anyone isn't familiar. And the way this works is if both shows use a chartable prefix anytime someone downs an episode of that show, they're also passing along the information to chartable. And so chartable says, Oh, is the IP address that listened to grow the show also an IP that went and listened to all the hacks. If so, then we can attribute that. However, they also say, but if that IP address we actually saw listening to all the hacks before this episode, we're not going to consider it as a unique conversion because they were probably already listeners. So you can filter that out. And if I look at the data, the all-time best performing time I any one of these was about a little over 3%. So of the 69,000 people that listened to a particular episode, 2,209 came over to my show to listen to it that had never been there before from a mention on another podcast, a specific mention. That one was me being a guest on a podcast on it. So I'm bundling all these together, but the absolute worst one that I see on this list, Conday Nasts Gadget Lab. I thought people that like tech and gadgets like kind of similar, I mean, I know I like those things. So I thought maybe there'd be a good fit. Yeah, yeah. 42,000 people heard a promotion for my show that was read by the host of that show and 87 people came over. Do you see a major difference between the conversion from guest appearances as compared to the conversion of like I mentioned promo? Yeah. All-time best host red promo has done and all these numbers I'm talking about are the new device conversion, not the all-device is just the unique. All-time best ever was like 1% and all-time worst guest spot was probably about 1%. So is your conclusion to focus on guest appearances? It depends on you and I'd say that because one, there are a lot of shows out there that don't have guests. So if you want to reach their audiences, that's not an option. Two, if you don't have a pedigree that's going to make for a guest, it doesn't make sense to try to force yourself to do that. So I think I have both a like jack of all trades background where I'm like, well, I've been a venture capitalist. I've also run some startups. I've also done podcasting. And sometimes that works in my favor and sometimes it doesn't because I'm not the master of one, but I might be, you know, I could probably tell lots of stories, but I'm not the points guy, right? Like the points guys. I am just focused on one topic. I'm focused on everything. Yeah. I suppose you could also consider like it takes your time to show up on other shows, whereas, you know, it doesn't take, I guess, much more of your time to get mentions. So you could, if you really, like if you get 10X dimensions, even though it's got a lower conversion rate, maybe you could get more growth if you just focused on that. Yes, except those mentions usually come from one of two places. Reciprocation, meaning I'm going to mention you, you're going to mention me, which is limited by however much inventory you have. So if you have a small show to get someone to swap with you is going to be really tough if they're cute, right? If someone reaches out to me and says, Hey, I've got a show. I've got a thousand downloads in episode. You want to mention my show and I'll mention yours. I'm like, no, because I'm going to give you 50,000 downloads worth of mentions. You're going to be a thousand. So it just like, doesn't make sense. So if you don't have a big show, it can be really hard to do cross-promos. Obviously you can start small and grow or you can buy the ads and then you're limited by dollars. So the guesting is unique because you can potentially get on a massive show while you currently have a small show and not have to spend a lot of money to do it. So how important is monthly downloads growth to you? So we sell all of our ads on a per episode basis. So all I care about is whether episodes are doing well. So I do care about downloads, but only downloads for episodes, not downloads for a month. That's what I mean. So a show that's where you're at, like, are you shooting for a month over month per episode growth rate or something like that? No. I think the way I look at it is I don't want the number of downloads to be going down. Yeah. But I don't really necessarily have a target. The reason I want to see it growing is because if it's not growing, then the next thing is probably that it goes down. So I want to see it growing because I don't want us to go down. But I actually, you know, I feel like I'm in a place in life where the show can sustain our life and all the costs that are associated with it. And like we're in a pretty good place. And I don't really need to double the revenue for the show. And I kind of like where it's at. So then how much how much of your time would you say do you devote to growth or AKA growth and or I guess maintenance? I would say a decent amount of time because I now view it from more of a business standpoint. I'm like, I know how much money we make. I know how many listeners we have if we doubled those listeners, I don't think we double the money, but I think we'd certainly increase it. So I could come up with a proxy for how much a new listener is worth. And then I can experiment to see can I find a channel whereby I can get new listeners for less than those listeners are worth. And if so, I'll spend as much money as we can. Like, right, I would not be afraid to spend $10,000 on an advertising campaign. If I believed I could bring in enough listeners that would make up for that over a couple years. Before we move on to monetization, were there any, you said you've tested a billion growth strategies? Were there any other ones that were notable or that you feel like we should mention? One thing that I recently experimented with that I thought was super, super interesting and pretty helpful hopefully to everyone listening is that a friend of mine and I we'd done a cross promo about six months ago. So we had the data of how well our shows converted and we had the idea to do a cross promo again, but in the post roll. And so at the end of my show, I promoted his show and at the end of his show, he promoted my show. And the main reason we did it was because our shows were sold out. So we didn't have any inventory to cross promo in the episode. The hypothesis was what if I did this post roll at the end of an episode and if it performed even half as well, well, I actually have like five to seven times as many impressions per month in the post roll because I can put those in new episodes. I can put them everywhere. That was the test. They performed about 95% as well. So I could now instantly seven X the number of cross promos I could do and get about 95% of the performance. And because in chartable, you can see both sides of how you're performing. I'm pretty consistently when I do these cross promos with other shows performing probably like at least five percent better. I think I probably put more research than the average other show does into like listening to 10 episodes trying to find the nugget that I think will help convert. So the only challenges most shows don't want post rolls. So the challenge is I go to a show and like let's do a cross promo in the post roll. They're like, no, we don't really want to do that. I was like, yeah, but it actually converts just as well. I have a hypothesis that it might even convert better and that that comparison isn't fair because we already did a cross promo and I've been a guest on this person show. So you know, they're just saturated the audience enough that every subsequent cross promo is going to perform worse. So I think it may be performs better because people are at the end of a show and now they're like, oh, maybe I'll go listen to that now. As opposed to you hear a promo for a podcast in the middle of the show. What are you going to do? Like stop listening. Yeah. So that is the really interesting thing. So my takeaway is you get more inventory from post rolls. There's a lot of inventory out there that's unfilled, right? There's not people buying post rolls. So if you can be creative, you could probably find a lot of ways to both use your own and take advantage of other people's post roll inventory to grow your show. Yeah, incredible. Okay. So let's talk about monetization. Now at what point would you say in the show's growth was the show making revenue from sponsorship where it truly was impacting your life. So I launched the show May 9, 2021. I met one sponsor and we tested one sponsor in November. So like six months later added a second sponsor in December, but it was like one ad per episode and then it wasn't till April the following year where we started having multiple ads per episode. So about one year in we were doing multiple ads per episode and that almost instantly became, you know, four ads per episode and we've been sold out every single episode since then. Wow. Now one year in what was the show at per episode downloads wise, we were doing about 35,000 downloads after 90 days. Okay. And that's where you really started to sell the inventory. Yeah. So if I look at the growth of the show, I will say slight unfair advantage was because I was such a nerd about credit cards and points and miles, I'd done some press around it when I was running a startup. I did like a video on CNN or CNBC or something, MSNBC and the team from NOS Daily, which has a YouTube and a Facebook channel that made this, they make these videos about people that are interesting. They're like, we make a video about you and I was like, as long as you include a 30 second promo for my podcast, you can do everyone. So made this video and it ended up getting something like 30 or 40 million news and about it was like three minutes long and two minutes in, it was like an overlay of me with a picture of the show art and it's like, and if you want to follow along to get more deals, go to all the hacks. It's a podcast I just launched. So when I found out the day that video was going live because I recorded it before I'd actually launched the podcast. So I decided that day I was going to launch the podcast and I remember we were in Mexico and I was like in a hotel room and I didn't anticipate that when you submitted the show to Apple to launch, like it takes a few days and I was like, you got it. So I like, it came up just in time and so the first few episodes were, like, it were off to a good start. When I was first starting, we had a day one download of like about 5,000. That was like our day one download numbers. And now, by the way, just to where we've gotten now day one downloads are about 16,000. All right. So virtually every single podcaster in the grocery store audience wants to get sponsors. Can you talk a little bit about how much work goes into having a podcast business that's built on sponsorship? So what I've been noticing when it comes to podcast advertisers is that unfortunately over time, there are more shows. With more shows comes kind of a higher threshold for a lot of advertisers to work with shows. And so one of the biggest challenges is I have some advertisers that friends of mine with shows the same size as mine. I said, hey, could you introduce me to them? And they're like, yeah, our bar for new shows is like only shows that are doing 100,000 downloads. And like, I'm grandfathered in because we already started working together, but it's a little tricky. Let's lay the land out for advertising. There's programmatic ads where you could use span or Spotify's ad network and different places where you could just say, put ads in my show. Usually you give up 50% of the revenue and it's all at super low CPMs. So you might make $10 per thousand downloads per ad. So it's not nothing. But if you're doing a lot better, hopefully you can make $40, $50 CPMs at some point. And hopefully you're giving up 20% of them if you work with someone or 30% or maybe if you're not giving that much up, you're doing it yourself and you're doing it somewhat efficiently at the beginning. It was me and then it was me in a freelance guy who was like, any deal I bring you, I'll keep 20%. And now I still work with the same guy and we've been working together now for two years. It seems crazy. So it is a lot of work. I think the thing that has made it not feel like too much work for me is that we just only say yes to brands that I use. If I don't want to pay for this product, if it weren't being sent to me, if I wouldn't want to recommend it to a friend when the mics are off, we just don't work with them. And so there've been a handful of times where having that early on was tough because there'd be a brand that's like, oh, you know, Rosetta Stone, the language learning app wants to work with you. And I was like, I tried it. It wasn't very good. The reviews are terrible. It seems like they're the worst with refund, like those kinds of things. Sorry if you're listening Rosetta Stone. And so that was tough because I was like, oh, I need to spill my ad slots, but I don't work with so we had to get creative and reach out to brands and I'd say, hey, brand, I actually really like your product. I use it all the time. Could we work together? I would say a handful of our advertisers had never advertised on a podcast before they started working with us. Wow. And I think the main difference that really messes with this whole podcast advertising ecosystem is that there are some shows where people don't really come to the host for their opinion about things and products to use and services. And then there are some hosts that like do an ad, but it's not really an endorsement. So let's take delete me. So delete me is a brand that I've worked with for a long time. And it's a product I personally use where they'll basically go and find all the information about you on the internet that's public on all these data broker websites and they'll request it to be removed. So your name, your address or email address, also it's not out there. Some people might read an ad for delete me and be like, delete me is a service that does this thing and you can go find it at this website. And I'm like, okay, well, I only work with brands I use. So I don't need to, you know, do that. I can say, hey, I use delete me. I have used it. I have paid for it. I have paid for my parents to use it. I paid for my wife's parents. Me and my wife did just to be good. But we paid for this service. We've recommended it. We use it personally. I can share how much of my data was out there. I can share why it's important to me. And I can say it in a way that people are like, yeah, I really want to use delete me. What you can do? All the hacks.com slash delete me. Nice, nice. But that's the kind of stuff I'm doing. And so also delete me is a great example. It's coming up in this conversation because it's a product I use. Many of the sponsors I have, I bring up in other places or they just naturally come up in conversation on the show because I've set that bar. And the biggest challenge for other podcasters is that even if I love that product, but I had a show that was basically where I, I don't know, make fun of funny things on the internet. It's like I talk about memes. Well, someone could enjoy that show, but not want to listen to me for my advice about what to do for their identity protection, right? So because there's that whole spectrum of advertisers and hosts out there, if you're the person that like people listen to for advice and you're talking about products, you genuinely love and you're only able to sell at the averages, you're going to overperform and make less money than you should. Now, if you're a show where you don't really care, you'll pitch anything and no one comes to you for advice and you sell at the averages, you might, you know, get terrible renewals, but actually get to charge more than you should. Yeah. So for me, we had to go direct and we had to be able to prove out our performance. And so a lot of times we tell people early on like, Hey, we'll do two episodes for you at, you know, a discount to our regular price so that you could understand how the performance is. Now we just say, Hey, we have a 90% renewal rate. So and we're sold out three to six months in advance. We really love your brand, but if you're not interested, yeah, like we're fine, we're sold out. Yeah, excellent. Okay, cool. Last question before we split for this round. You are talking to somebody who just launched their show for the first time. This is that SAT question at the end, where, you know, we just open it up, talking to a podcaster just launched for the very first time. What's the one thing you wish they knew? I think we live in a society where everyone wants to cheer for you. And so when you launch your show, everyone out there is going to be like, this is awesome. Congrats. I'm so excited for you. And you're hopefully going to be excited about it. At the end of the day, I think this is like 0.1 and 2 for your ladder. It's like the content is the most important thing. We can talk about growth hacks. We can talk about monetization, but if the content isn't really differentiated unique and good, nothing else we talked about matters. And I think it's very hard as someone just getting started to get constructive feedback. Like I almost wish. And if you don't, maybe you know someone that does this, but it's like, it'd be really great if there were a professional person. It's listen to lots of podcasts that you could pay money to listen to your show and be honest with you because there are some people that just launched their show and the reality is their show stops. And like, they just need to be told that, but all their friends are cheering for them, which is great. I like that friends cheer for me, but also like people to be honest with me. And so I think finding out if your content is good early on lets you learn and grow and pivot your content to something that is better. You know, if you launch the show because you thought it was a good time, but it's not actually a topic you care about. That comes across. So my advice is always like, make sure you podcast for free on whatever you're talking about before you even worry about whether you can make money. You know, it's not all the content, but it's the packaging and the content and the way you describe it. And unfortunately, right now there's so many shows that if you're like, Hey, this shows called the James Peterson show, and I interview really smart people about how they became successful. Well, great. There's 7,000 shows out there doing that. And unless you have something that's really unique, it's going to be really hard to break out. And then couldn't agree more. Chris, I hope you're willing to come back sometime soon, because this, like I said, we could go forever. This is awesome. Thank you so much for sharing the data and everything that you've learned so far. And if our listeners want to talk to you, learn from you, whatever it is, get in touch. What should they do? So I haven't actually written as much about podcast growth. I've probably done two or three interviews. So you could search in the app store or the podcast and probably find a couple of those. I'll probably take on one or two like growth strategy monetization clients over the next year. I'll send you the link you could put in the show notes. Otherwise, reach out on Twitter or probably only Twitter is the only place I'll probably respond. But reach out there, ask questions, and I'll do my best to answer all of them. Oh, yeah. Chris Sessions, thank you so much, man. Thanks for having me. That is going to do it for this episode of Grow the Show. Now, I have a quick favor to ask you. If you've ever gotten any value from this podcast and you haven't already, please leave us a five-star rating. And if you're feeling generous, a review in the app you're using to hear my voice right now. It just takes a couple seconds, but it really goes a long way in helping us to share even more valuable growth and monetization tactics here on the show because it helps us land bigger guests and it helps show the world that what we're doing here is actually valuable. So once again, if you've ever gotten any value from the show and you haven't already, please just take a moment. Leave us a five-star rating. Maybe a brief review on what type of value you've gotten and I will be eternally grateful. This episode was produced by me with post-production by Podcast Boutique and if you want your show to be post-produced with quality really freaking fast and if you want to save yourself and your team tons of time working on your podcast, you should chat with Podcast Boutique. Just head to PodcastBoutique.com or click the link in the show notes and set up time with them because I spent no time editing this episode and neither should you. All right, that's going to do it for Grow the Show. My name is Kevin Schmittlin. I'll see you next time.