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On June 1, 2017, We celebrated the 1-year anniversary of our podcast launch and I want to share the key lessons we learned in growing our podcast from 1,253 downloads in June 2016 to 21,414 downloads in May 2017. We grew our monthly podcast downloads by 1,609% in the 1 year since inception.

What worked:

  1. Do Not water yourself down

    1. A lot of the times, when starting off, we have a tendency to defer to those who are already established in a field. I did the same thing with my podcast. Early on, I just interviewed the authors in a way that anointed them as the expert and me as someone who was just the interviewer without any real value to add. I minimized what I said … because I wanted the audience to hear everything the author had to say. I tried not to add any of my own ideas, stories or feedback because I thought that my audience just cared to hear about what the author had to say. So, I would just ask a question and let the author speak on until I moved to the next question.
    2. However, very quickly I got feedback from people that the interviews where the authors did most of the talking were boring. The content was good, but my audience wanted back and forth discussion. They wanted more interaction. They wanted to know my opinions and stories. They wanted to know me. The light bulb went off in my head … I just had to be ME! I just had to be the person who loves talking about books and ideas to anyone and everyone. I just had to be the same person on-mic as I was off-mic. I just had to own myself. I did not have to be Mani Vaya the interviewer. I had to be Mani Vaya as I was in that moment of time – Mani Vaya the entrepreneur, the physicist, the engineer, the friend, the son, the sailor, the rock climber, and the man who truly wants to improve his life every single day.
    3. By not owning myself I was doing a huge dis-service to the world. You see, I am my audience. And I am the voice of my audience. You, my audience have entrusted me to get deep into these ideas just like you would have wanted to go if you were trying to understand those ideas.
    4. Don’t sell out
    5. Less corporate and More you
      1. I wanted to create it such that I could be replaced.
      2. Turns out I am the business … people tune in because of me
  2. Be Extremely Selfish – Do what you enjoy

    1. Don’t do it just because you saw someone else succeed with a certain format, show length, etc.
    2. When you do what you like, your audience will feel the passion and respond to it.
    3. Author interviews were fun – but not enough.
      1. I felt that I was stifling the voice inside of me while giving them the platform
      2. The investment in time was not worth the results…. every episode took 1 day of my effort
      3. However, I can probably produce 30 episodes in 1 day when it comes to doing podcast episodes by myself.
    4. I initially started this podcast as a show where I would exclusively interview authors and talk about the best ideas from the book. Not only that, I limited the amount of time I spent talking
    5. Early on, as I was looking for authors to interview on this podcast, I was ready to interview anyone who had a business/self-help book to their name. However, a lot of those books did not inspire me or excite me … but I did those interviews for the sake of building the business. Or so I thought. When I listened to those interviews to edit them, I quickly realized that those interviews were useless because they had no energy, inspiration or excitement in them. There was no way I would put out interviews like that into the world. So, I had to throw away a large percentage of my early interviews.
    6. Then I made a conscious decision to only interview those authors whose books I personally thought were outstanding. If their book helped me build my business or helped me in my personal development journey, I would invite them. Otherwise, I would not. So, in some ways, the podcast episodes are a very selfish thing I do. I interview authors from my vantage point. I try very hard to go as deep as possible so that I can learn something that I can apply in my business and life today. Reading those books and talking to the authors about those books is something I genuinely love doing.
    7. The other thing I enjoy doing is creating video summaries of the books where I talk about the ideas from the books directly to the camera. At one point, in order to test, I decided to share the audios of those videos on the podcast. I was not sure if people would respond well to them because they were not author interviews as my audience had come to expect. However, to my surprise, my solo episodes have gone on to become some of our most downloaded episodes. That experiment told me that my audience wants to see great content – irrespective of who is talking. It doesn’t matter if it’s the author or if it’s just me. If it is great, engaging content … they want more of it.
    8. If you are doing a podcast just because you think it will help you grow your business, think again. The audience will only reward you if your passion shines through in your podcast. If you are not passionate about the topic or if podcasting is not the medium that excites you, I would recommend you stay away from it.
    9. Put in More of you
      1. That is why people tune in
      2. Build a bond with your audience
    10. Passion
    11. Listen to your intuition/gut/heart
      1. It already knows what you want
  3. Consistently build your “Body of Work”

    1. I was initially skeptical of putting this in the list of lessons learned because it is not something you can control, but what I realized was that this is indeed a very important part of the whole puzzle of growing your podcast audience. As Thomas Jefferson said: “I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more luck I have.” Every great podcast has had that growth spurt because the podcast was promoted by someone who had a big audience.
    2. Now the key to understanding this X Factor is that there is no way of predicting it … but you can and should be prepared for it.
    3. When my show was mentioned/promoted by an unknown influencer, I got 8,219 downloads in one day. However, when I dissected the download numbers, what I found was that no single episode of mine accounted for more than 197 downloads. So, the 8,219 downloads were actually distributed over 106 episodes.
    4. So, what would have happened if I did not have a body of work – If I only had 20 episodes in the bank instead of 106 episodes that I had? More than likely, my podcast would not even have been mentioned by that influencer because 20 episodes is not a big enough body of work worth recommending. Not only that, even if I was mentioned/promoted by that influencer, I would not have gotten a big enough bump in my download numbers because the audience who came looking for my podcast would have found a measly 20 episodes to download instead of the healthy 106 episodes.
    5. I am the first one to admit that I got lucky. But I also understand that I got lucky because:
      1. I was consistently putting out high-quality content that finally got the attention of another influencer.
      2. I had built a body of work with 106 episodes and that was worthy of recommendation
      3. I had built a body of work that ensured that I got maximum benefit from the recommendation and the spike that ensued.
    6. Keep doing it
    7. You never know when you will get a spike.
      1. But your body of work will ensure that you get maximum benefit from the spike.
        1. Could have been 200 downloads
        2. Instead turned out to be 8000 downloads because I had 100 episodes in the bank and those visitors downloaded all of them
    8. Stay consistent
      1. Twice a week – every week. No matter what
        1. Some weeks had even more… but never less than 2 episodes a week
  4. Get on other podcasts

    1. This is by far, the fastest way to grow your audience. Not only does this grow your audience, it also builds credibility and establishes trust with the new audience very quickly. You are effectively borrowing the trust and credibility the host has with his/her podcast audience.
    2. Here is the story of how one of my podcast guest appearances unfolded:
      1. I ran into Marco Santarelli, the host of Passive Real Estate Investing Podcast at Traffic and Conversion Summit in San Diego in March 2017.  Until this time, I had never met Marco, but we had talked about a potential real estate deal that I was interested in.
      2. As we began talking, Marco and I quickly realized that we were both big fans of each other’s podcast.
      3. Marco suggested that we should do some joint effort on our podcast and I suggested that we could review a book on his podcast – a book that would truly resonate with his audience.
      4. We picked out “Think and Grow Rich” and we recorded a podcast episode for his show where we talked about some of the most fundamental ideas of Think and Grow Rich – especially how it relates to real estate investors.
      5. The podcast episode was very well received and it actually got me a lot of new listeners and fans.
      6. Not only did I get new listeners, I also found that the listeners who came in a result of hearing me on Marco’s podcast already trusted me and were happy to do business with me.
  5. Get Feedback and iterate very Fast

    1. For an early stage podcast, one of the most important things to do is to be able to figure out what it is that your audience truly wants. Now, this is something that can only be figured out through trial and error – so the faster you take in feedback from your audience, make changes and iterate, the faster you will be able to resonate with your audience and make progress.
    2. One of the things I did very aggressively was to seek out feedback. Getting feedback from people is not always easy, so here is my process for getting feedback from people:
      1. I pick out a friend and think about which episode would resonate the most with them (It’s important to know what they are working on/struggling with right now).
      2. Then I send them a message saying: “Hey man – I wanted to share this episode with you because I know you are currently working on building your network. I recorded this summary of Keith Ferrazzi’s Never Eat Alone and I think you would enjoy some of these ideas. Take a listen and let me know what you think of it”
      3. Most of the times they will listen and respond with some generic feedback like: “That was really good, Mani! I enjoyed it.”
      4. Now is the time to dig deeper. Here is what you say: “Thanks, man! I really appreciate it. BTW – How could I have made it better? What would make it so good that you will tune into future episodes as well?”
      5. This is when they will respond with detailed feedback
      6. When you get the feedback, tell them that you would like to schedule a quick 10-minute call so that you can really understand their feedback
      7. Now get on the call and listen closely 🙂
    3. The key to iterating very fast is to be able to take in feedback and figure out the 80/20 of it. What is the 20% effort that will give you 80% results? Once you figure it out – It’s time to go and implement these changes ASAP.
    4. As a result of your fast iterations, you will find that some of your old recordings are now outdated or useless. That’s OK. You will need to throw away some of your old recordings, interviews etc and that is something you will need to accept as part of constant and never ending improvement.
    5. Constantly seek feedback from your listeners
      1. Only way to pivot and improve fast
      2. I tried all sorts of things
        1. Set up Skype calls
        2. Feedback on email
        3. Feedback from friends and colleagues
  6. Don’t be afraid of trying new things

    1. Try New formats to see what really resonates with your listeners
    2. Try increased frequency
    3. Try shorter formats
    4. Try longer formats

What I would have done differently:

  1. Market it much more aggressively
    1. This is a lesson I learned much later
    2. Coming from the world of engineering, I was under the notion that if I had a high-quality product, people would gravitate towards it. But that’s not how the real world works
    3. I thought that the authors would help promote the episodes. However, the most promotion authors do is tweeting out the episode show page to their audience. That is very small audience growth especially if you are only doing 1-2 episodes per week.
    4. I should have marketed each and every episode much more aggressively – using all the channels available to me.
  2. Launch Sooner & Iterate faster
    1. If I had to do it all over again, I would launch it much sooner
    2. I would seek feedback and iterate much faster
    3. I would listen to my intuition more often
    4. One of the biggest mistakes I made was to wait for everything to be perfect in order to launch. I was under the impression that the only way to get an initial growth spurt is to get on the iTunes New & Noteworthy charts in the first 8 weeks of podcast launch. So I spent over 6 months perfecting everything about my podcast so that I could get on New and Noteworthy when I launched. However, as soon as I launched I found out that iTunes New and Noteworthy was broken and was not updating. Even a year since our podcast launch, iTunes New and Noteworthy is still broken and continues to show the same “New” shows as a year ago!
    5. This was a  very costly mistake because I banked on one tactic (which was completely out of my control) to make my show successful. I should have instead focussed my effort on launching the Minimum Vable podcast ()
  3. Beware of the voice inside that says: “It can’t be that easy!”
    1. Easy is amazing
    2. Easy is fun
    3. Easy and simple is the ultimate growth factor
  4. Believe in what you are putting out there….
    1. When you are starting off, you don’t believe your product is good enough
    2. So you hesitate to put it out there
    3. you hesitate to toot your own horn
    4. You hesitate to share and put yourself out there
    5. You hesitate to market it
    6. You hesitate to ask your guests to market it
    7. One of the things I struggled with early on in my podcast days was the belief that my content and ideas were not worth sharing JUST YET. So I hesitated to put it out there and market it aggressively. When I talked to people I was hesitant to ask them to check out my podcast. I never really shared anything about it on my personal social media channels.
    8. However, that was not helping the growth of my podcast at all.
    9. Now that I truly believe in the content I create, I feel sorry for those who do not tune into 2000 books podcast or youtube channel. I know my book summaries are some of the best in the world because very few people have read over 1000 books and have the depth and breadth of knowledge that I do. Most traditional book summaries are done by cookie cutter employees, not by an entrepreneur like me who has read over 1000+ business/self-help books and who lives and breathes these ideas every single day.
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