I’d rather have my face exploded with dynamite
Anyhow this is stuff I have to think about being the owner of hyperfixed and its parent LLC, and I see no reason not to share with you all the realities of it. If you have any questions I’m happy to answer
Another thing that works well is to feature a celebrity with a big platform on your show. So if you know any celebs with problems I could solve for them, I’m happy to give it a shot.
So maybe I can do that again. There are a lot of shows I’d be happy to collaborate with. Independent of that, the big viral episodes helped a lot. But the podcast space is so saturated right now. When’s the last time you heard about a viral podcast episode?
We were lucky early in RA’s existence (first 50 episodes) to have two stories appear on This American Life and one on Radiolab. Each one of those episodes brought us between 30-50k new listeners. Also discoverability on podcast apps is terrible so that’s the best way to be seen.
This would put me at $240k in the hole at the end of a year, assuming I end up needing all of that. I don’t want to be in debt, but I’ll just keep my salary low until it’s paid off. The real question is how to grow the show to 200k listeners.
I am also currently @ $60k in the hole in terms of starting this thing up. ($40k of my own money/$20k of loan. As the show grows, to ensure I will be making the necessary amount of money, I have the option to continue borrowing money to the tune of about $15k a month for a year.
These first couple episodes got us @ 14k an ep, which puts me about 7% of the way to the goal. My goal is to get to 200k listeners in ~18 months. How does one do this? The easiest way we found on Reply All is to have our stories appear on other shows.
I have calculated, based on the average number of premium subscribers to a show (between 5%-8% of audience) and ad sales estimates that I need approximately 200k listeners in order to staff up, give people full time jobs and raises, and offer health insurance.