Launching the New Podcast: Come Alive Creator

After several months, it finally happened. We launched our new company podcast, Come Alive Creator.

What is Come Alive Creator?

This is a podcast about everyday people pursuing their entrepreneurial desires. Basically, I interview people who broke away from the 9-5, “standard” job to pursue something they wanted to do. As of this post, we have 3 episodes live and 2 recorded that are waiting to be edited.

Episode 00 is an introduction to our team and what our company is all about. In episode 01, we interview Rich Mulholland, an ex-Bon Jovi/ Def Leppard roadie turned businessman from South Africa. Episode 02 features a WordPress coder with close to 20 years of development experience. As for the 2 unedited cuts, I interviewed our friend Jamey Stegmaier who was able to take his board game publishing company full-time and I talked with Katy and Zach from the Happy Couple Duo, who are classically trained musicians, party djs, and lighting professionals. And more guests are being lined up now for future episodes.

The Plan

At this point, I plan on 10 episodes. Producing a podcast like this is time consuming (I’ll discuss this in more detail below) and I need to make sure I’m getting a return on investment (ROI). There are multiple reasons I started the cast and why it will benefit our audience, as well as our company.

Exposure. A huge reason why I started this podcast was to gain exposure for our company. For example, I also co-own a board game publishing company. We run a podcast, the Happy Mitten Podcast, that looks at the business-side of the board game industry. We talk to designers, publishers, artists, distributors, convention owners, and more.

We currently have 47 episodes and we have a listenership of over 35,000 total downloads with each episode averaging between 800 to 1,000 total listens. This is huge considering we haven’t even published our first game yet. In comparison to other podcasting genres, the numbers are small but compared to our industry, we’re doing very well.

The hope is to gain an even better momentum with Come Alive Creator. I say this for a few reasons:

1. It’s a larger audience. The pool of business listeners is much larger than the pool of board game listeners. Beyond that, I am crafting the show for a specific target audience: the people who have been sitting on an idea or skill but have been too afraid to act. The people who are tired or bored of their current work situation. I’m basically producing this to speak to where I was just a few months ago, right before I resigned from my career.
2. The style of show I chose to produce performs well. Given, I’m still learning how to effectively produce a show in this way, but I’ve decided to take a narrative/ interview approach. It has similar qualities to shows like This American Life, StartUp, 99% Invisible, etc- bouncing between my interviews, narration, music and audio b-roll.
3. Being professional from the first episode is key. I’m working hard to get fun and interesting interviews starting with the first episode. Also, I decided on a consistent structure as well as set up things like sponsorships already for each of the first 10 episodes.

Learning. I love learning and usually get frustrated when I’m not. This podcast is teaching me in 2 ways:

1. I’m learning how to produce this kind of show. Again, I’m purposely doing a narrative-style show with interviews as the primary driving factor and it’s a little out of my comfort zone. I have a music background and produced 2 different albums plus several singles. I’m good at audio production but this is another kind of beast. It’s tough to always know what to summarize, what to leave, when to use music, which music to use, and so on. For example, I actually had a COMPLETELY different first episode, ep 00. It was about 30 minutes long, had more free-form narrative, full interviews with the team, different sound bites, and more. I had a few blind listeners give me feedback and some of it was brutal. I basically scrapped the entire episode and started fresh. Now it’s a much better, 13-ish minute intro to the company. I’m confident in the quality of the casts and I’m sure my audio journalism “sense” will improve with each episode.
2. We all learn from the interviews. One of the best parts of having a podcast is I have an excuse to talk to amazing and intelligent people from all over the world, many who I may have never met otherwise. It’s really the best of both worlds because I get to ask the guest everything I want to know and then I edit it down to the best information for the audience. Everybody wins.

Income. The fact is I run a business and my time is worth money. Come Alive Creator isn’t just a passion project. It’s part of my business plan. We have 2 ways we plan to make a return:

1. Our target audience is closely linked to the types of people who might need our services. Young entrepreneurs and business owners often need help with logos, promotional materials, websites, and more. So the projection is that the podcast will drive people to our site and convert into service-based business.
2. As it grows, the podcast itself will increase in value. The more listeners, the more we can charge for ads. There is a lot of freedom in how you decide the details of ad spots but the averages I’ve seen are typically $50/ 1,000 episode listeners for a 15 to 30 second ad slot. I’m really grateful that we already secured sponsorships for the first 10 episodes, especially when there are no numbers to base our listenership on (huge props to Steve and the OSTraining.com team for taking a risk on us).

Where You Come In

Once we hit 10 episodes, we’re going to evaluate the numbers. If the podcast is making the projected gains, we’ll keep it going. If not, it’s on to the next thing. Many podcasts exists. This is our test to see if we can fill a need or want for enough listeners.

The fate of Come Alive Creator is up to you. You can listen here- https://comealivecreative.com/come-alive-creator-podcast/ or on itunes here- https://comealivecreative.com/itunes. Please subscribe, review, and share. Those are the main ways for me to know you enjoy what we’re doing. Hope you enjoy!

Location: My new place of employment
Music: 5 years time by Noah and the Whale
Beverage: About to have coffee-time with the wifey