Whatspodcasting

Things are blurry rn but not so bad we can't see. Last month, Whatspodcasting started making some extra cash. Um, I will say it was not a bad month; it was one of those times when I could breathe in and see this going in the right direction to a degree…

I reached out to an old friend and asked her to join me as a social media manager to see how well we can grow Whatspodcasting online. The experiment was simple; it had stage one and stage two. [I will skip the details] For stage one, we were to post at a certain rate for the next one month and see if that would grow the podcast. Yes, it did, The podcast has grown slowly but well!

For stage two, which is supposed to have started as I write this and it's yet to start, well... it required a little more work, and right now the team is not in the best place. In this regard, what I will say is, now I get why some companies won't hire husband and wife, or brother and sister in the same office, because when something goes bad at home, you will be losing the attention of two teammates instead of one. That is not good for business at all.

Teamwork:
I lead a team of 3 young people, all below the age of 21, and still in college.
One is an audio editor, the other an assistant writer and researcher (Pearl, you know her if you read the newsletter), and J, the social media manager. These people have provided value for the team since we started to work together, and I love the energy they bring to the team, that I must say.

I have learned one thing this month and had one thing to think about.
Firstly, what I have learned is, as much as your teammates are looking at you as the leader and will do their best so you can see and acknowledge them, as a leader, you have to also show them you are working as well, especially if you are not paying them well enough or at all. The only incentive they have to keep working is that they believe in you, to take the business up. They believe in you first before the business, no matter what they say.

Secondly, something I am still thinking about is this.
When your teammate is making good progress and you can see the growth in their personal life and career, as much as that makes you happy, it also brings in some confusion as to where you lay in their own life, because if they are spending so much time on their personal work, then yours will take less priority which then means you will one day receive their resignation.

It hurt more especially if you really like their work and like working with them. It also leaves me with questions, like now that they have this thing, where do they place the work we both work on their scale of getting things done?
Should I address this or not and if so how? If you have something to say on that, please do. Thank you!!

Growth:
This is a hard one. I have come up with different definitions of growth for Whatspodcasting, but every time it changes.

So yeah, my main focus is still on raising revenue for the business; that's my major focus at the moment. If we can secure 3 customers paying me x amount a month, I will be happy. Right now, we have just 2 constant clients and the pay is not where I want us to be as a team. And this month of March, we haven't done so much in that regard.

I don't have any other metric for growth… yet. I just have revenue to raise, that's all. Again, if you have any ideas on how a podcast managing company can raise revenue, please let me know.

Still on growth because I don't know where else to tell this update, I sent out some pitches to a couple people who were hyped up, and they reached out to me to set a meeting. Specifically, 3 people reached out out of 6 cold pitches sent.

One said no because they did not need our service and told me not to reach out in the kindest way possible, “Do not send us a mail; we will reach out to you.”

The second person firstly did not have a budget we could work with, after a new proposal, said indirectly the number in terms of percentage of growth I was promising within a month was too low for them.

The last one… We just had our second meeting. Well, I will tell you what's up next time I write to you.

Revenue:
Just like I mentioned, we are still a bit lower than I wanted us to be. The second newsletter is still making money; none of the monthly paying subscribers have unsubscribed yet, so I am happy for that!

But then, in terms of revenue from editing and managing an actual podcast, no, we're not there yet. We still have our regular paying customers (2). I wish we had more.
Oh, I got played by an old customer lol I will not say much (it is the cost of doing business I have learned).

Future Plans:
I have gone into the bag of ideas and started to work on something else, something I believe will help create a catalog of work done. Because one thing I have noticed is some people don't want to use my own podcast as proof of concept; they want the one I have done for someone else. I set out to do more collaborations with tech folks in the tech space and companies in this space as well.

When it comes to finding customers, I have hacked a technique on how to get them to meet with or listen to me, or care about what I have to offer. What I can't yet do is how to close a deal with cash in my hands; that is the stage where I want to get to. (if you have ideas Please send them my way I need them, thank you.)

Make more interesting newsletters that feel like a story more than just a list of podcasts to try and see if it works. Make more short videos where I recommend podcast videos for people to see. I have done that on X for a month, now I want to do that for LinkedIn and Instagram

Conclusions:
I don’t think I fear many things anymore. I am learning a lot about life and business as I build Whatspodcasting to $1 mill in revenue annually.

Lastly, this is one of the most interesting experiences I have given myself, ngl, this is hard! annoying!, and can be sad! but overall, this is fun!!
https://whatspodcasting.substack.com/

The newsletter, as a branch of Whatspodcasting podcast management agency, started generating revenue.

Hi again, my name is David; you can call me Drounz. In the last month, January, I mentioned some things I had done to help grow the newsletter to a degree organically, like:

• Twitter threads,
• Going to events, and
• Something I tried on the first week of March (more on that later).

But in regards to the deal of the day, paying customers.

In the middle of February, just before the 14th, I asked 5 close contacts who were in the tech space, business-oriented, and busy, if they take notes from the podcasts that they listen to, and they said something interesting. I went on to ask them further if they read their emails, and they said “Yes, every day.” The last question was, do you read newsletters "Would you mind me taking the notes from this podcast for you? But it will cost you the price of one shawarma filled in with one sausage?”

And they said yes to all the questions, except for the question on if they take notes from their podcasts that they listen to which the answer was no.

It felt like I just struck gold. For 2 minutes, I stood up and danced like Ted Lasso. Then I did the math of a certain amount times 300 people, times 500 people, and it made me smile even more.

Here's the actual deal: I had taken my old notes I kept from one time when I listened to a podcast, and I typed it all out and started a closed newsletter called “The Builders Notes.” formally was called “Milky Moments”. [https://whatspodcasting.substack.com/s/the-builders-notes]

It's a simple newsletter where I send out bite-sized notes from strictly high-level business and entrepreneur podcasts.

I know the next question is how much did I charge for access, right? I will say it, but what I think is the more important question is how did I get the payment to work? Let me explain.

If you live outside Africa like the US or most places in Europe, all you need is to set up a Substack or pay for Behivee account, and you are good, right? Substack will block free subscribers and grant access to paid ones. When a user pays, they use Stripe and they are good. You connect your stripe, and it works.

As someone living in Africa where all these services don't work, the flow has to change, and now that's where the difficulty comes in. The question is, how do I set up a flow that allows me to control who sees and who doesn't see and also this flow should allow me to send emails to the paying subscribers via email? Well, I will tell you this answer directly, and now, there is none.

Yes, there is for real no way you can run a closed paid newsletter from Nigeria if you don't have the funds to build a customer website for it (a business idea I will work on later on). So what is next, what do I do now?

After days of searching and testing outflows with my friends, this was the flow I came up with, and this flow requires manual active and passive labor:

• First, the users will see part of the content on Substack. I will publish it but stop halfway and leave a message saying, “Ouch, the remaining part of this content is gated for paying subscribers only,”* and this is where the next step comes in.

• Payment, I used Paystack (which is owned by Stripe but doesn't work outside some African countries), and by setting up the payment link on Paystack that allowed me to add a button on Substack that lets people click to pay. Now when they pay what next, right?

• Paragraph, you see Paragraphs is the name of a web 3 tool that is effortless and so useful for sending email that you would doubt it free, it has its faults which I will get to but it's always a huge help in writing and sending out the actual email containing the notes the users just paid for. For the fault, I will say, you could not make a public site private to only signed-in email, which will really make the process of users getting to use the site easy.

Wow, that was a lot. Some other times I will go into details on how to set up a paid newsletter if you are an Indiehacker from West Africa that has no access to Stripe and your users don't use USD or Stripe.

But for the month of February, that was the major highlight. We currently are charging readers 1,200 NGN per month. we have an annual plan and a quarterly plan, some users have 2 months free, others have none, but we were able to raise revenue and are currently at roughly 15k Naira MRR for the Whatspodcasting newsletter.

Feels good to have closed in some funds at least.

Conclusion.

I did notice something during all of this time. My aim for starting this company is to help make remote podcasting for busy folks easy. The newsletter is an external arm for content distribution, and its aim was to help the podcast management agency (main business) get an edge during negotiation with podcasters as we will offer free promotion to podcasts we work with and manage.

Now, it feels like I may be focusing more on the newsletter more than the main aim of the business. And that leads me to what I want to start developing more of in the month of March. I want to position the company as a business for podcast management.

As of the time of writing, I have started working on some contents and reaching out to more potential customers. I will keep you updated but while you wait, kindly read or subscribe to whatspodcasting.substack.com. you can chat me up on twitter at D_rounz

Thank you so much.

In a very unfortunate turn of events, I had to let go of the accounts (for now) I used for writing my regular weekly newsletter recommending podcasts for people to listen to (whatspodcasting.substack.com). I was forced to see it slowly die or start again (well, there is a reason why we are here, lol).

Staring at a blank screen with no template to start with, just the imagination of what it looked like, “Should I just go back and do the same thing or...” The previous newsletter had about five sections, and sometimes, as I recall, it could be a pain to find content for each of the five categories.

Focusing on the main goal:
”Wait, this newsletter is to tell people about interesting podcasts to try, so why not just do only that for a start?” That's exactly what I thought and exactly what I went on to do. I did not add anything else; I just listed out three podcasts, wrote a few lines about them, and sent it out (period)!

Spoiler: This is not a story of how it grew to become 1k subscribers in such a short time (blah, I wish), but more about the courage to start again and what sort of clarity it can bring.

Upon starting again, I thought it would be almost too difficult to try. I had spent time and energy on the other platform, and now I would be moving to a new platform without access to my old content or even the newsletter. 'How hard can it be?' It can be really hard!

However, when you do start again and focus only on the main goal, churning out the noise and other things you thought were important, it gets easier.

Starting again allowed me to return to the main goal, which was “to share the most interesting podcasts people who work in tech, geeks, nerds, and weebs will love.”

Starting again has been... fun! The newsletter has grown organically to about a hundred new and some old subscribers, and we have grown an open rate of 38%-45%. So much so that the speed is very similar to the first one (whispers... faster growth!).

I have seen that the readers engage more than before, they like, comment, and repost (I will say because there is less noise now, I think). Starting again has allowed for more narrowed-down and niched collaboration with podcasters. Some podcasters are open to writing one issue of the newsletter per month (a new idea that came with starting again).

Lastly, an open, unsolicited piece of advice: If you're deep into what you are building, pause and imagine yourself starting again, and see what you will do differently. Or say, just start again, and your brain will automatically refocus your goals. It worked for me.

What I kept saying to myself was, confidence comes after you have started, not before.

If you listen to podcasts or want to try out some new podcasts, kindly check out and subscribe to [whatspodcasting.substack.com]. Thank you for reading