How a Solo Podcaster Got 500,000 Downloads in One Year, with Jay Clouse

There's an adage about entrepreneurship that I've basically been obsessed with lately. I've heard it countless times recently on podcasts, in courses, even from my own business coach, and it's something that's both frustrating and kind of freeing at the same time. It's frustrating because it calls for more discipline from us, which is hard and uncomfortable. But it's freeing because it makes it clear that as entrepreneurs, we probably already have the knowledge and the know-how that we need to succeed. Now, you may or may not consider yourself an entrepreneur yet. Maybe you are, but it's also possible that you still have your day job and you're working on your podcast nights and weekends. Either way, if you've decided that you want your podcast to be a growing, thriving business, you are an entrepreneur, and this idea applies to you. And the idea is this. We need to be reminded more than we need to be instructed. Now, that quote is actually from the 16th century, but put more clearly in our own terms, in order for you to reach the next level of your podcast, you probably need to be reminded of the basics of things you already know more than you need to learn new information, new tips, new tricks, new strategies. Now, that's both frustrating and freeing, right? For me, this has been a major theme of the past year. This past October, I launched my second podcast, this podcast, Grow the Show, and in its six months of existence, it's gotten over 10,000 downloads and it's driven over $125,000 in revenue for my coaching business. My other podcast, Philly Who, has been on hiatus and returns in a few weeks on May 4th. That show has also surpassed six figures in revenue and that one's passed over 200,000 downloads. So, given that, you would think that right now, I'm focusing on higher level, super nuanced, advanced growth tactics, right? No, the challenges I'm facing today are the same ones that you're facing. How do I improve my consistency? What content should I make next? How can I get more listeners than I have today? How can I make a better podcast while spending less time and making more money? And the secret to getting where I am now and the secret for me to go from six figures to seven figures is the same, nailing the fundamentals, consistently doing the basics and being reminded of what I already know, rather than seeking out new information. Today's episode of Grow the Show is going to help both of us with just that. That's because today's episode features a podcaster who has successfully grown and monetized two completely different shows. His first show, Upside, has been around for years and is a staple of the venture capital and startup world of podcasting. His second show, Creative Elements, just launched in 2020, yet has already surpassed 500,000 downloads. And while that figure is impressive, what's even more impressive is that J-Clouse has grown that show to half a million downloads in just one year has a one-man operation while growing and exiting a completely separate business. His podcast doesn't have a huge team and he doesn't use fancy tools, but he does CRUSH the basics, the fundamentals. He makes an incredibly creative and well-produced show, he gets more listeners on the reg and the show is fully monetized and profitable. Today, J-Clouse is here to share his story and to take us inside his production process, to remind us of what it takes to succeed and to give you the tools, the know-how and the reminders you need to make an amazing podcast in a fraction of the time. Let's roll it. This is Grow the Show, the podcast that helps you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland and my mission is to help you the independent podcaster to grow your audience and monetize now, so you can have a thriving podcast business. In today's episode, we're visited by J-Clouse, a two-time podcast host who has taken his most recent show, Creative Elements, past 500,000 downloads in just one year. And today, you're going to hear how he's managed to do that all by himself as a one-man operation. So if you're looking to learn how to be more efficient with production while making an even better show, then stick around for this episode of Grow the Show. J-Clouse is a two-time podcaster, a freelance coach and an entrepreneur who has built a career off of serving other creative entrepreneurs like himself. But like most of us making a living off of our creations, J didn't exactly plan to get into coaching and podcasting. So I got into entrepreneurship kind of the same way a lot of college kids get into entrepreneurship, which is to be like, smitten with the idea of startup culture. The raise money, get into tech crunch, sell out, make a ton of money. That was what I thought entrepreneurship was, which is a pretty narrow lens of entrepreneurship. So after graduation, he immediately jumped right into the startup world and he co-founded a ticketing app. It was a really intense, difficult business because I had to be on all the time. All events are on like nice and weekends. So if I'm in charge of making sure that people are getting safe access to events, I have to be on all the time and it was just exhausting. We did the path, we did the accelerator, we raised a little bit of a seed fund, we sold in 2015, but it was rough. So I took a step back after that company. I was kind of burned out and I didn't have my own idea of what I wanted to do. So I took a product management role at a healthcare startup here in Columbus, Ohio. He worked there for a while, but it really wasn't where he wanted to be long-term. So Jay made a plan to quit after just a few months. But then, in the midst of that plan, the company announced a hard pivot, which would involve a new product, a new management structure and a lot of learning. Since Jay was already mentally checked out at that point, he decided to instead leave immediately rather than wait a few extra months as he had originally planned. So I was suddenly out in the world unemployed, fun employed, not having a clear plan yet. He didn't have a plan, but what he did have was a solid network of startup founders in the Columbus, Ohio area, and he was noticing that other people found his network super valuable. In around 2015, 2016, companies here in Ohio were getting a lot more attention from coastal VCs. VCs are venture capitalists. Venture capitalists are people who raise millions of dollars from investors and then try to invest those millions into startups that they think might be worth billions someday. Most VCs are based in the major coastal cities like San Francisco and New York. And those VCs were looking for people that could connect them to these opportunities in Ohio and kept finding their way to me and saying, hey, we want to start looking at companies in Ohio, we want to invest in the Midwest. Can you introduce us to some of the founders there? And of course, I was going to do that because those people are my friends and absolutely how interesting my friends who are probably fundraising right now anyway. But it felt like I was leaving something on the table because if these people are my friends and I know their companies and I want to support their companies and now VCs are coming in saying we want to back them financially, I just started saying like, man, it'd be nice if I could invest in my friends. So Jay connected with another friend who worked in finance and he asked him about the process of starting a small VC fund. He asked me if I had ever read the book Angel by Jason Calcanus who is one of the early investors in Uber and the Airbnb, I don't know, he is a wildly successful angel portfolio. And this book he had just put out of the time was his handbook of how to do angel investing. And there's a chapter I've titled, do you have to be in San Francisco to be an angel investor? And the entirety of the chapter is just the word yes. But neither Jay nor this friend Eric Hornig who lived in New York City wanted to leave their homes and move to San Francisco to try to start a venture capital firm. And having successfully built and exited a startup himself, Jay knew that there were plenty of great investment opportunities outside of California. Still not being in Silicon Valley would create a huge uphill climb. And as first time fund managers like it would be really difficult to raise that fund. Still Jay and Eric wanted to learn how to be angel investors and to get better at identifying solid venture investment opportunities. So we thought okay, what if we took the posture of an investor on a podcast and instead of talking to founders and then giving them money, we're talking to founders, we're asking the same questions, we're getting better and better at identifying opportunities and in learning if this is a company we would invest in, but we just don't have money to give. We're giving them media exposure instead. And that was kind of the thesis. We took Jason's framework of how he talks to founders, which is do independent research, talk with the founder, and then write down basically a deal memo about what you liked about the company, what you didn't like about the company, why you would or would not invest. And we turned that into a three part framework for our show upside where the first five to 10 minutes was independent research in the company that we interviewed the founder and then Eric and I would talk the two of us about what we thought about that opportunity. With that unique premise, Jay and Eric launched upside, a podcast about startups outside of Silicon Valley. We didn't have any expectations of any audience size or anything like that, like this was purely a vehicle for us to learn this process and maybe start to build some credibility for the way that we think. We just wanted to get practice and we wanted to have a reason to meet founders, but we had no expectations that it was going to make us any money. And while they didn't have any expectations, they did have something that very few startup VC and entrepreneurship podcasts have a unique premise. Most podcasts are literally just two people talking. There's no editing, there's no boundaries, no guidelines, no premise. It's just a conversation. This isn't interesting. It's not creative and it doesn't give listeners a reason to get excited. Upside, on the other hand, was different. And because of that, it worked. And when a show works, it often presents opportunities to monetize. We realized that people who are interested in getting in front of our audience were actually also interested in getting in front of our guests. And those were like high value client services companies, namely a law firm that works at startups and a search firm that works at startups to help them find talent. So we started working with those firms and realized, okay, this actually generates a little bit of money. That's pretty nice. With some early success and some money coming in, Jay and Eric realized that they were on to something. So they started to explore other ways to grow the show. And we reached out to this guy, Jeff Umbro, at the Pod Glamoret, to see if he could help us with upside and grow that. And he was incredibly generous with his time and also super candid. And it was basically like, look, it's a big risk for me to take on shows onto the network with the model that we operate here. And I don't really take that risk unless we can be with the show from the start of it because there's so much more opportunity to launch the show and generate some some marketing buzz from the launch and upside was a year plus into the journey at that point. Now at the same time as launching and growing upside, Jay also had another business that he was growing and learning from because while upside was doing well and was making some money, it wasn't making enough money to fully replace the startup job that Jay had left a while back. Now like most podcasters who build a thriving podcast business, Jay had another income stream working for him the whole time. That income stream actually started before Jay left the startup job when he was only just considering what his next move would be. I had a conversation with a friend of mine and I told him that I was thinking about leaving my job and he said, if I were you, I would think about facilitating mastermind groups because you have a really great network. I know that the business owners in your network would benefit from it. And I think that like it would make you a good amount of money. A mastermind group is when a bunch of entrepreneurs pay to be a member of a community of peers who are all learning and growing their businesses together. The Grow the Show podcast accelerator is an example of a mastermind. We have over 60 podcasters who are all growing and monetizing their shows together and by coming together to trade notes, share feedback and learn lessons, they're all able to grow much faster than if they had just tried to go it alone. I, as the founder of the accelerator, make a living by bringing these high potential individuals together and by facilitating and leading the community to go farther as one. Jay was going for something just like that. I started the first group. I found five people. I said, hey, there's no cost to this. Just humor me. Meet with me every week for 12 weeks. I'm going to help you put some goals into place and put some plans into place. And we'll see if this actually like helps you make a lot more progress than you would on your own. And that became like the financial economic engine to support me. And I thought that my clients would be startup founders because that was a lot of my network at the time. But when it ended up happening really soon after like the initial launch of that program, the people who were coming to me and who were having the best experiences were client-based business owners because they were incredibly talented. They could deliver a really good product, but they didn't have much experience or sometimes even interest in learning how to run a business and they needed that type of support. That mastermind business is called Unreal Collective. At the same time, I had begun doing courses for LinkedIn learning. And I talked to my course manager about the work I was doing with small business owners and freelancers. And I said, actually, we want to update our course curriculum here on LinkedIn for freelancers. Do you want to take a pass at doing one of these courses for us for freelancers? And I said, sure. So I did that. And I looked at everything I developed here and basically said, I have a lot of really great content here. And I'm also reinventing the wheel a lot with this high touch type of coaching program that I'm doing for freelancers. I should wrap this into its own sort of brand and offering. At first, I thought I was going to sell those courses underneath the Unreal Collective brand. And I thought this would just be like another offering underneath of that. But I had just discovered that the dot-school domains were available for sale. And I thought it was pretty cool. So I bought freelancing dot-school simply to just be like a landing page for these courses. And over time, it's just kind of evolved into its own platform, thank goodness, because it just makes a lot more sense out on its own. And all along, I was doing Upside, I was doing Unreal Collective, I was building freelancing school. All these are serving business owners, most of them working online. And it was this portfolio of projects that I was building because they were all interesting to me. Business owners are my people, but also very practically as an entrepreneur and solar entrepreneur myself, I needed to make enough of an income to sustain myself while I was playing around with all these things. And it took all these different projects together to kind of hodgepodge a net of an income for me to make that all work. That brings us back to the moment that Jay had the conversation with Jeff Umbro of Pod Glomerate. Remember, Jay was asking Jeff whether Pod Glomerate could help Upside grow. To that, Jeff said, look, it's a big risk for me to take on shows on the network with the model that we operate here. And I don't really take that risk unless we can be with a show from the start of it because there's so much more opportunity to launch the show and generate some marketing buzz from the launch. That got Jay thinking. I realized that I wanted to keep getting into podcasting deeper and deeper, but I wanted to do that in a way that was more aligned with my core business. And I wanted to grow a show that I felt like had even larger market opportunity. And so I was trying to think of a show that worked in my realm of creators and also played to my unique strengths. And would be something that frankly, Jeff of the Pod Glomerate would be interested in working with me on. And I don't know how it all came together, honestly, other than I realized over the years, I've built really good relationships with people that are successful, pretty well-known people. And this seemed like a really interesting way that I could talk with them, learn from them. And all of them were doing this thing that I wanted to do. But when they would go and talk on shows, they would talk about their thing. You know, James, James Clear would go on to podcast and talk about habits. But like, I wanted to hear from James, how did you get to do this full time? Like, how do you get to just write a book for three years? And that, like, sustain you, or how can you sustain yourself while you're doing that? That question is the core question behind Jay Klaus's second and most recent podcast, Creative Elements. Creative Elements launched in spring 2020, and it features big name creatives, such as Pat Flynn, Seth Godin, Tim Urban, and many, many more. In just about a year since it launched, Creative Elements has accrued over 500,000 downloads. So what has Jay learned the second time around? After taking a show from zero to 500,000 downloads in just a year, what advice would Jay Klaus give to other podcasters who are still trying to find their growth inflection point? Well, unlike previous episodes of the Grow the Show podcast, this episode won't be sharing a three-step framework that'll totally change the way you think about something. This episode's three tips are a little bit simpler. You might have even heard this advice before, but in entrepreneurship, in order to grow, we often have to be reminded about things we've already heard more so than we need to learn about new things. So today, Jay has three simple reminders of ideas that won't blow your mind, but they will grow your show. Idea number one, edit. The original version of Creative Elements was pretty, it was a lot lower on the production side. It was meant to be very conversational, same like overall subject matter, but very conversational and low edit. And he basically said, there's definitely a show here. If people you're talking to are interesting, and the subject matter you're talking about is interesting, but you could really stand to edit a bunch of time out and do something a little bit more unique. Initially, Jay was hesitant about this advice, but he gave it a shot. I started to realize that it was actually a new unlocking of potential because I was no longer bound to how well I performed the actual interview because every interview you do, there's going to be some places where you sound like an idiot or you miss the question or you have this super long lead up to the question or you like fanboy over the guest a little bit before you asked the question. And for the listener, none of that stuff is interesting. And you can go in then and actually just cut the question. You may not believe it, but every single show you admire, that sounds super polished and tight and that makes the interviewer sound super smart and articulate actually does a ton of editing to make it sound that way. I don't sound like this when I interview guests. More often than not, I sound like this. So I think I was just saying like there are so the echoes here, the way that what you just said, okay, hold on. This final product sounds a little better than that. That is the lesson that Jay learned. I realize that I can make the show better by not depending on my performance in interview and having some time to sit down and think and script something that is more narrative. Not only does this allow you as the creator to put forth a much better product, but it also allows a failsafe for when there are technical difficulties because often times when you're recording, okay, I lost my audio. I know. I think it's my headphones. Are you still lost me? I may have to stop recording for a second so that I can change my audio. Okay. It may seem trivial, but these things happen to everyone. Even the biggest shows in the world on the best recording platforms in the world. Your job as the creator is to make your show sound freaking awesome so that your listeners are blown away no matter what the original recording sounds like. Anybody who says that they don't edit because they want their show to sound authentic and real is just being lazy. Besides, this show is edited like crazy. Wouldn't you say that it's authentic or real? This is as authentic as it gets. Lesson one, edit your freaking show. Lesson number two can be summed up a little more quickly. I should not be doing audio engineering. Okay. More specifically, lesson number two is that task delegation can be incredibly valuable, particularly if those tasks require a certain set of skills. We at OutSource Act in the beginning from upside and return on that is so high. It's talked to so many people who are starting a show and they're just like, well, I don't think I can budget for that yet. It's like how much do you value your time? Because honestly, you're going to spend so much time mucking around in Garage Band. You have an hour-long raw audio file that's going to be at least 90 minutes to just listen through it and make basic edits. How much do you value your time? You can find a really great audio engineer for 20, 25, especially if you go up towards like 40 or $50 an hour. Well worth it. So for me, I told you that I don't want to touch audio engineering, but I have not yet found my way out of editing. And I look at that as how I actually lay out the story and the narrative and the audio of the episode. If you've heard episode five of Grow the Show, you've heard me and my top audio engineer, Max, break down how we separate the word engineering from the audio engineering. Jay's process is actually very similar. So the first thing I do is I take my audio file, the guest audio file, I send it to my audio engineer. He mixes that together into one single interview file where he removes the arms, the arms, the filler words, mixes sound really good. Then I take that single file into GarageBand and start doing the actual storyboarding. This in theory is how I recommend doing it too. Make decisions about the words that should make it into the final episodes and have someone else do the audio engineering and make decisions on what sounds make it into the episode. You can do it like Jay does, bounce it back and forth with your audio engineer, but there is a tool that I think makes it way more efficient and way easier. I have to ask, have you ever tried Descript? I tried it way back in like 2018 and I tried it on Christmas Eve and had like a horrible tech issue and couldn't get a hold of anybody to help me. But it looks like it's made some huge improvements and would probably be worthwhile. It is worthwhile. If you're like Jay, you gave Descript a shot and you gave up on it, I implore you to try again. Use the link in the show notes to give it another shot. I won't make a dime from it, but I truly truly believe that it'll change your world as a podcaster. My whole production process revolves around it and now it takes me personally about an hour of time per episode to produce the extremely highly produced narrative you're listening to right now. That's it. That's because I've hired a trained writer and journalist to do the bulk of the word engineering. I pop in for an hour, mold it all to my voice, and then I send it off to a 30 year veteran of audio of sound to make it sound amazing. I can do all of that myself and I can do it better than most people, but I'd rather hire specialists who are better at it than I am and can do it faster than I can so I can focus my time on growth and monetization. Anyway, I'm off the soapbox. Let's hit Jay's third and final reminder, give yourself some breathing room. If you have a healthy guest pipeline of schedule interviews and even recorded like raw interviews, that takes so much pressure off. And I think you know, we learned an upside that we can really batch a lot and make it not a huge time commitment week to week. If it's like, okay, this week, we've got four interviews. That's a month's worth of content raw that we just recorded. And then we can batch record the intros and the outros. And so instead of having like this constant fire drill of book the guest, interview the guest, mix the interview, it's kind of like week to week. We have just a little bit to do because we got ahead. This is something that actually takes a ton of discipline to achieve because there's no external forces forcing you to stay on schedule. You have to rely completely on yourself, which is hard. But if you can do it, you remove all the stress that comes from taking each episode down to the wire. And you allow yourself to have the time and space to make much, much better decisions and a much better show. So let's combine those three creative elements. We save time by delegating highly skilled tasks to highly skilled people. We save even more time by batching our interviews and giving ourselves a four to six week buffer. And then we use that save time to thoughtfully edit our interviews into amazing episodes. In the end, we're actually spending the same amount of time on our show, maybe even less. But the final product is incredible. But let's actually talk a little bit more about that last piece actually editing a raw interview into an amazing episode. What does that process look like for Jay? Take my audio file, the guest audio file, I send it to my audio engineer. He mixes that together into one single interview file where he removes the ums, the ums, the filler words, mixes sound really good. Then I take that single file into garage band and start doing the actual storyboarding. I will work through from beginning to end in real time that episode. I put a script on one screen, and I put garage band on my other screen, and I'm following along the script along with garage band. After every question and answer, I cut the audio file and I name it. So I know what that audio segment was. If you're thinking, boy, that sounds like it takes a decent amount of time. You'd be right. But that time is a front end investment that will make your life a lot easier and end up saving time later in the editing process. I should know because we do something very similar when we produce this podcast and my other podcast, Philly Ho. Now, we do it in Descript, which uses software to combine a lot of the steps that Jay just mentioned, but you could do it whichever way you like. Either way, here at Grow the Show, we call this step indexing the interview. Before we do our in-depth edits, we go through the raw interview and we mark up the script to reflect what was being discussed. This essentially gives us the granular building blocks of the conversation, which we can then completely rearrange. Now, how do I want to tee that up to make this seem like a really cohesive part of the narrative? I will literally say like, okay, today I'm talking to Sarah McAllister. She is the creator of the Instagram Go Clean Co, which now has almost two million followers, which blew up during the COVID-19 pandemic. Then I might just cut my narration there and go straight into Sarah talking about that moment. Instead of telling her story, I like to illustrate their story with their actual audio. That's a very immediately immersive experience because this is my way of telling you why I'm having this person on the show and why you should care, and not only am I telling you from my perspective, I'm weaving through the highest of highlights from that interview so that you're interested in listening all the way through. It's just kind of this this way of staying immersed inside the experience. You don't have to get that crafty with your edits by any means, but you should still do something. So to reiterate, the three reminders that Jay Claus has for us after taking his podcast past 500,000 downloads in only one year. Number one, edit your freaking show. You don't have to go crazy, but you shouldn't be lazy. Number two, delegate the highly skilled work to people who can do it better and faster than you can. You can find a way to do that that fits your budget. You probably won't, though, build a thriving podcast while teaching yourself GarageBand. Not long-term anyway. And number three, batch your tasks. Next week's episode of Grow the Show is actually going to dive way deeper into how to do that well because it's that important. But for now, think about these three reminders that Jay has shared with us today and think about where you can improve your own production process so that you can make an even better show while spending even less time than you are now. And as you come up with those ideas, feel free to bounce them past me in the free Grow the Show Facebook group. The link is in the show notes and we have just surpassed over 500 growth oriented podcasters that are there waiting to help you take your show to the next level and to grow your show into a thriving business just as Jay Claus has twice. I hope to see you there. The link is in the show notes. Grow the Show is a Q9 production. This episode is produced and hosted by me with associate production by Catherine Nails, post-production by Max Graham and a huge, huge thanks to today's guest Jay Claus. For Grow the Show, my name is Kevin Schmidland. See you next week.