Doing a podcast listener survey

I've wanted to do something like this for a while, but haven't gotten around to it yet. The closest I've come was this Twitter poll.

One thing I've been doing as an alternative in the meantime is finally diving into listenership stats provided by podcast players. Spotify in particular makes it easy to see how far people listen through each episode, where they drop off, etc. iTunes has similar features. Sure, it's not as qualitative or as immediately insightful as surveys, but with a little work, you can learn some things.

My process is that I'll find episodes where very few people dropped off, listen back to them, and take notes on what I thought was good or distinctive about the episode. I do the same with "bad" episodes where people dropped off very quickly. Then I compare all my results and try to extract some learnings. I've done this twice, and it took a few hours both times.

Here are a few of the things I've learned:

• Listeners consistently drop off at higher rates when the guest has an accent.
• Solo founder episodes do much better than when I interview people who have teams.
• Interviewing multiple guests on a single episode tends to perform poorly.
• Listeners love episodes where experts come on and talk about their expertise, moreso than my typical founder interviews.
• There's usually a sharp drop-off in the first minute of the episode. Cutting out my intro hasn't really changed that.
• etc.

I'll probably do more Twitter polls in the future, and maybe I'll eventually set up a survey for podcast listeners. But I do feel like I can make lots of improvements just from analyzing the stats I've got.