Launching and growing a podcast | Chris Hutchins (All the Hacks, Wealthfront, Google)

yes there are four million podcasts however there are only about 150 000 podcasts that have had 10 episodes and have published in the last 10 days so the easiest way to be in that top five percent ish I don't know I don't know what the math is about three four percent is to just stick to it like if you just do an episode a week for 10 weeks you're now in the top four percent of all podcasts that anyone has created welcome to Lenny's podcast I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products today my guest is Chris Hutchins Chris is not only a former product manager founder and investor he just this month went full-time on his podcast and the independent Creator path when I was looking for advice on how to build a podcast Chris shared this awesome Deck with a ton of great advice that he's built throughout his journey and so I thought it'd be fun to spend an

episode talking about all the things that you should know about launching and growing a podcast Chris's podcast is called all the hacks covers all the ways to financially optimize your life and it's one of the biggest business podcasts in the world Chris has also been on to Bear show actually interviewing Tim Ferriss he's also head of a new product strategy at wealthfront where he took some big bold bets within the company which we talk about Chris is awesome and I am excited for you to learn from him I bring you Chris Hutchins after a short word from our wonderful sponsors this episode is brought to you by notion if you haven't heard of notion where have you been I use notion to coordinate this very podcast including my content calendar my sponsors and prepping guests for launch of each episode notion is an all-in-one team collaboration tool that combines note-taking document sharing wikis project management and much more

into one space that's simple powerful and beautifully designed and not only does it allow you to be more efficient in your work life but you can easily transition to using it in your personal life which is another feature that truly sets notion apart the other day I started a home project and immediately opened up notion to help me organize it all learn more and get started for free at notion.com Lenny's pod take the first step towards an organized happy team today again at notion.com Lenny's pod this episode is brought to you by vanta helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate growth if your business stores any data in the cloud then you've likely been asked or you're going to be asked about your sock 2 compliance sock 2 is a way to prove your company is taking proper security measures to protect customer data and builds trust with customers and partners especially those with serious security

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than a third of the time that it usually takes for a limited time Lenny's podcast listeners get one thousand dollars off Banta just go to vanta.com that's v-a-n-t-a.com Lenny to learn more and to claim your discount get started today Chris welcome to the podcast thanks for having me I'm excited this is gonna be a pretty unique episode I think you're a product manager and we're going to talk about some of the things you've learned being a PM on some really killer products but what I want to spend most of our time on is talking about how to launch our podcast you've built one of the most popular biggest business podcasts in just like a year and a half you've taught me some stuff you've helped other people with their podcast and so I just thought it'd be really helpful just to talk about just like the skill of building a podcast and all the things you should know how does that sound sounds great you just did an

episode about growing a newsletter business which I was like this is awesome because I have a newsletter and I want it to be bigger and I think anyone that has knowledge to share I talked to a PM yesterday who's like oh I've got all these product ideas maybe I'll start a podcast so totally this is fun awesome that's exactly how I've been thinking about it first we did the newsletter and then podcast maybe the other things I don't know what's left YouTube channel we go I I I don't know if you feel this way but YouTube tube I feel like just putting a podcast on YouTube isn't enough I need to learn the skills of YouTube yeah all right I gotta get Mr Beast on that's the next goal to um set a little foundation for folks to give them a little sense of your background and some of the things you've done in your career can you just talk about some of the some of the biggest things you've done your career which

you've been up to and then what you're up to now and also about your podcast I'm kind of like a happens dance product person I uh I basically really liked startups but I didn't know what job I could have as a non-technical person and I joined my first startup probably 10 years ago and was like I will do anything and they're like do business development but it turns out we didn't have anyone who also was doing products so they were like uh what what should we build that people will buy so I was like well I gotta figure out how we turn this API we were building for location services into a product left that to join other startup with a few people we co-founded did the Jack of all trades role at a startup and then quickly were acquired by Google about a year in and I went through the interview process and they were like you're a PM and I was like oh great what does a PM do like I didn't really totally know I'd never

worked as a PM went through Google's kind of like week of training and got thrown into it and I think I've now learned with a lot of time that being a PM is awesome being a PM at Google when we were working on Google Plus was not awesome a transitioned pretty quickly over to Google Ventures did venture capital for three years left to start another company trying to make Financial advice more affordable more accessible grew that for about two two three years and we ended up selling that company to wealthfront where I'm Ryan a new product strategy I most recently just left that role after three years and started going full time on all the hacks which is my effort to help everyone upgrade their life their money their travel I'm the spreadsheet for everything Optimizer and do all this research to try to help people live better happier wealthier healthier lives and and I have a podcast where we share all the hacks to do all

of it amazing for while we're on the podcast we're going to dig into this stuff more where can folks find it it's called all the hacks anywhere you listen to list the podcast right now search all the hacks you can find it all the hacks.com uh I'd be surprised if someone listening to this is is more of a newsletter reader than a podcast there but you know all the hacks.com email is the newsletter too oh newsletter I love it all right coming back to your last gig at wealthfront from what I understand your title was new product strategy and Andy Ratcliffe who was the CEO for a while kind of this legendary figure he co-founded Benchmark he's just like this brain that I listen to him every time I hear him on a podcast he basically pulled you into wealthfront and specifically wanted you to focus on figuring out new business ideas new business lines new product Lines within wealthfront is that right yeah so we had

an engineer at the time who came up with this idea called self-driving money I was like gosh what if you could automate and optimize your entire Financial life and you didn't have to you know rely on human financial advisors and we heard from our customers forever that they pay us to not talk to someone like our demographic doesn't want a bunch of humans in the mix and so we had this idea but we didn't really know what it was so Andy was like gosh you've been spending time thinking about financial planning and software and you know as an entrepreneur could would you come in and help us build self-driving money and I was like what is it they're like wow we got a bunch of like ideas from an algorithmic standpoint about how to do it but what exactly is it so it was thrown into let's do a bunch of customer research let's talk to a lot of people and let's try to come up with as audacious of an idea as we could for how

you fulfill the promise of automating and optimizing someone's entire Financial life to the point that they don't have to think about their finances on a daily basis and they know the right things are happening when I think self-driving money I'm picturing money just driving around like a Tesla money meets Tesla yeah the vision I had was what are the core pieces of financial life that are stressful it's like I gotta move money I gotta contribute to these different accounts I want to make sure I have enough to pay my bills and so what we ended up with was a product called autopilot that would monitor your core banking account whether it was a checking account at wealthfront or or not at wealthfront or whether it was an account at wealthfront and we would say let's make sure we leave a certain amount of money and you could tell us that much and then we would say great now we had basically a series of things

to fulfill with any excess it was like let's make sure you keep this much as a three-month emergency fund max out your Roth IRA let's make sure you max out your 529 for your kids and let's put the rest in your kind of taxable just brokerage account and we would just periodically say oh you got extra money let's sweep it over and do what we need to do with it so you don't have to think about it can you talk about the impact this had on the company and also just

like how long of a Endeavor this was within Wolfram it was a quick Endeavor to try to start talking to people like this was like just throw in the mix I have a very poor sense of time but let's say somewhere between like six and 12 months maybe before we kind of put something like really in front of someone that could execute on all the features there was a lot of prototype UI testing I think you know Andy is legendary if anyone listening this wants to learn about product Market fit Andy is your guy I believe he coined the term he teaches the class at Stanford and you know the lesson was like really find something people are reaching over the table want and make sure you have that validation and so we were putting things in front of people clickable full prototypes and I remember we got to one where someone was like can I go get my husband like I need to show him this and then I created this thing

which I'm sure is not that new but I would start pretending that the product existed in the interviews only to find out you know at the end people was like oh it's not out yet and they're like what I want to use like you could really feel they're like no no no this has to be out I want to start using it so we found this thing that a small number of people were very excited about and we knew that a product like this was going to be a high risk bet because people don't automate their financial lives today people drive to go pick up fast food and if you could with a push of a button bring it to their house you're making a thing that they do much more efficient right now it's like well technically they do this manually but trusting software to do it is something that we knew would be a higher risk bet and I think the takeaway I would say the impact on the company was not as high as we had wanted in that it didn't become

this wild type of funnel right like I think it's similar to Tesla's autopilot it's like nobody goes and says I just want to buy this car because of this feature I'm sure some people do but once you're in the ecosystem it had huge impact on making it easier for people to start saving more making it easier for people to be more confident in their finances and just automate all that behavior so I would say the the letdown was it wasn't the big you know huge top of funnel thing where people like oh this is all I've ever wanted even though if you interview people and you're like gosh would you like a product that could just automate all this stuff they're like yes I would love it then you hand it to them and you're like do you want to use this thing and they're like well you know it's very hard to test that and so what we found was it was a a win in terms of it it moved a lot of metrics for saving

more money increasing you know contributions and that kind of stuff but it didn't become this growth Channel which Andy would say product Market fit is exponential organic growth so I would say by that metric we didn't have product Market fit but as a tool to make a system of products so much better we have the cash account with all the checking features we have an investing account we have retirement accounts so this really brought it all together and that was super valuable awesome so here's my big question what have you learned you spent a lot of time thinking about big bets big Innovations working within a company to come up with something totally new what have you learned about how to approach that within a larger company and I said successfully innovate how to think about launching big bets how to structure teams anything along those lines I've learned a few things and I think some of

them I've learned came naturally being a Founder before being a PM but you know you think that customer research is all you need to build a product at a company but figuring out how to create excitement internally and get buy-in from other teams because you know they're the ones that are going to build it they're the ones that are going to help market like it's it's all a team effort sometimes you get caught up as at least I found as a PM of like oh we got the customer insights we did the testing it's all positive and then you show the you know the ratings you got from some survey or the you know engagement or some clips and that's not the end of it the end of it is creating this compelling vision for what you're building and then the thing I learned from being a Founder is gosh you have to State your vision and your mission and why you're here like every all hands like it seems so crazy because it's core to you why we

would build this what its purpose is why it's amazing but as a Founder I was like every week I was like hey everybody before we get started like this is the mission we're on this is why we're doing it this is the thing we're doing in the world and as a PM sometimes they're like well I told people three weeks ago and I put it in that email that I sent out to everyone and like it was in the top of the PRD so like why hasn't everyone like understood why this product exists and I realized very quickly that that same thing is true so if you want to make a big bet if you want to make a you know a big impactful product you have to bring people along with you and your ability to speak publicly persuade people build influence within the company like those things are all as important as your ability to identify a user need and build a product that solves it awesome this reminds me a lot of Airbnb where

the founders every All Hands shared the vision and the strategy that they came up with that year like every single all hands and is always like yeah yeah we know we know but it's your point it's so powerful and important and some people don't know like some people we're not paying attention that one all hands we're kind of missed it out skip all hands like often there's just you need everyone to be able to in and this is a little segue to podcasting and we'll come back to it but I start my show with saying hello and welcome to another episode of all the hacks a show about upgrading your life money and travel because I just want everyone to know this is exactly what the show's about so when their friend asks them a question they're like this exactly what it is and the same thing is true about a company's

Mission a product Vision anything you want everyone to really understand it be able to talk about it succinctly and just have a very cohesive narrative in their head that's a really big one I think the other one is just understanding the customer not just by talking to them but just like being in the mix playing with all the products something I asked a few of my colleagues before this like what are what are things that I've particularly done well and they were just like gosh you I feel like you understand what's happening outside of the walls of our business better than a lot of people and maybe that's talking to a lot of other people who are founders talking to a lot of other people starting companies going to read all the comments on new Financial products on product hunt like really just trying to understand people Beyond just customer research and so that was another thing that I think I you know as

a Founder you're always looking for product Market fits you're always trying to learn sometimes at a company it's really easy to get caught up in the research you've already done and the customers you've already talked to and you forget to kind of step outside and and go talk to other people and see what other people are doing and I'd say don't get caught up in what competitors are building and like try to feature parody them but just understanding the space outside of outside of the walls of your business one thing I'll add to your point about reminding people of the strategy in the vision is if you can also help them understand how their team and project connects up through that like create kind of a little tree of here's all the teams what they're doing here's all connects to the pillars of focus and themes and then here's how to get next to the North Star metric and to our vision mission that kind of adds

another wrinkle of like oh wow I get it I get why this team's important there's a great analogy I'm sure if I send a link you can put in the show notes or something about a football team and it's like you know the GM's goal is to like sell out the tickets and win the conference Championship and it actually like tears it down it's like well there's a defensive line coordinating I'm not even that big of a sports person but it's like the defensive line coordinator's job is just one specific thing but they they kind of explain how it all levels up to this one North Star metric for the company or two in that case and I think that's just so important and when you're talking to people at your company and with your colleagues it's not just what it does it's like this product will automate people's money movement so they don't have to move their money and it happens automatically and that's cool but it's

equally as important to remind everyone and then they don't have to worry about their money every week and then they don't have to worry that their contributions might leave them without enough money in their checking account to pay their rent there's these two components of it which are what does it do but like what's the feeling you want someone to have and that gets into like product Vision versus just the product feature set and whenever we've written product Visions David's about things we're building it's like imagine a world

where someone can feel this way about their money and it's like and then this thing will do that that's the product strategy is like how you execute on it so reforge has this awesome product strategy kind of product Vision roadmap that levels them all up which I really like as a another resource go reforge I just recorded another podcast this morning morning actually in which you just said it reminded me of it where a lot of people focus too much on features and not enough on benefits and the stuff you're talking about is just like think about what are the benefits of the person versus like here's feature one feature two feature three the last little skill and I know you you've talked about this but I think it's something that I was fortunate enough to not care about which I think is when you focus too much at a company about like oh I want the promotion you get caught up in this world where you're

like oh I if I want the promotion I need to do what my boss wants and I had this fortunate benefit of like my last job I was the CEO I didn't care about my title I didn't care about leveling up like I came in and I was like I want to continue trying to execute on this vision of this thing that I wanted to do what that actually meant was my only metric I cared about was impact and like trying to build a product that would work and I think in any job in any company it turns out you think that doing what your boss wants is actually what's going to get you promoted but the people that I've had worked for me or I've worked alongside that seem to always be the outperformers are always the people that are just solely focused on having the most impact on the company I think the thing I learned which thanks to Andy Ratcliffe for teaching me this is when you push so hard for your ideas

and you have really strong beliefs you have to also make sure you state your intent because sometimes people think you're acting out of self-interest I'd be like oh we should delete this feature and build this crazy thing it's going to be amazing and people like oh Christian thinks his idea is better than everyone else's and so he taught me he's like you know it would go a long way if before you said that you said hey guys I've got some crazy ideas but before I say them I just want you to know that all I care about is that the company is successful and I think this idea will make the company successful and that's why I'm so excited about it I don't need to own it I don't care who owns it I'm just really excited about it and when you state your intent you give people a little bit of ease in thinking you know what it might be and even though I'm sure half the people listening work at a company where their culture is like

assume best intent is one of the pillars it's still our nature to assume that if someone's shooting down an idea we have that maybe it's out of their own self-interest and I've learned that when you have crazy ideas and when you're pushing back against a lot of people if you can make sure you constantly remind them why you're doing it and what you care about it goes a lot further than if you just kind of come in there with sharp elbows and try to push for crazy things it reminds me I think Andy is the person who on a podcast once said that every year he picks like a we're gonna bet the company on this idea kind of project is that I would say we've done that a few times I think the thing that I always told people that I wanted to work on is like I want to work on a project that if successful makes everything we do as a company today feel like it's not that important because we did something that

was 10 times bigger than everything we're doing today and what we're doing now is just 10 of the company like those are the kind of crazy ideas I like to work on they're very hard sometimes you're like oh I've got one and then it just doesn't work you know sometimes you do one and it takes a turn but I think that when companies find those things they're so powerful but if you don't have the buy-in for management that that's your goal Andy's a very he always talks about slugging average not batting average he's like I don't care if you hit the ball every time if one in ten times you hit a home run that's better than someone who hits it every three out of ten times but you know gets out a lot he thought about that and the balance he's written a lot internally about the balance between kind of working on iterative improvements to current features and then taking big bets and trying to find you know the balance

amongst it all but I think he does believe there is always exploration necessary for taking big bets and and trying to take you know swings that could have outsized impact you got to

balance it because you're often wrong and I think that's something that I was like that's the thing I want to work on as someone who who was kind of running a company when you get to go to a big company you're like now I can solely focus just on this big product bet I don't have to worry about hiring and recruiting and like all these other things so that was fun speaking of being solely focused on something uh let's talk about the podcast so this is kind of the new thing that you're going to be focused on full time just left wealthfront and you launched the podcast maybe a year and a half ago correct me if I'm wrong about a year and a half ago the podcast is like top 30 top 40 business podcast it's probably gone a lot higher at some points and so there's a bunch of questions I would ask about just how you launch this thing and build this thing but broadly what did I miss about the frame oh yeah that's it um it's about 18

months old you've been doing gosh probably about almost 100 episodes not quite there weekly show and you know I I went on Parental leave part of the last 18 months and I tried to balance family and like just grinding on this and it's been a passion project on the side and I'm very excited to see all the different kind of legs and tentacles that the brand and and the content can have what kind of benefits and good things have come out of having a podcast and launching a podcast and running a podcast I think we all run into people and you're like gosh this person's really smart I wish that I could just pick their brain for an hour and sometimes you can just email them and be like hey could we schedule some time in a month and we could just chat but that sometimes just feels like a weird thing to ask the podcast gives you this great platform you're like well I have a podcast and so I would love to invite

you on and help you amplify your message and spend an hour trying to understand everything you know about topic XYZ and sometimes it's like really nerdy and nuanced and sometimes it's you know broad but being able to have a reason I think one of my first episodes was with a guy named Morgan housel who wrote a book called psychology of money I was like I read the book I was like this is a great book I have so many questions but like when I randomly email this person I don't know and say hey I loved your book can I just ask you questions for 45 minutes I would never do that but I randomly emailed him and said hey we've never met but I have a podcast I don't even think it had launched it's launching next week but I'm really excited about it could I pick your brain and he was like sure so I would say the biggest thing is it just gives you a platform to explore your Curiosities on things you know provided that you can

really focus the thing that you talk about on one vertical Niche something so that people learn what it's about because the hardest part about podcast growth is there's like 4 million in podcasts and you've got to find a way to stand out in a sea of many podcasts let's actually talk about that I was going to ask you about that there's like four million you said that seems right it's probably four million launched a

day also if you're someone that's thinking about should I do a podcast should I not do a podcast do you have any advice for just like signs that this might be a worthwhile Endeavor with your time versus signs you probably should not do this do not even I'll give you two perspective so one is yes there are four million podcasts however there are only about 150 000 podcasts that have had 10 episodes and have published in the last 10 days so the easiest way to be in that top I don't know five percent ish I don't know I don't know what the math there is about three four percent is to just stick to it like if you just do an episode a week for 10 weeks you're now in the top four percent of all podcasts that anyone has created now that doesn't mean you're in the top four percent of the 150 active podcasts so what I would say to that is I mean maybe you have a massive platform already in which case

you know just go start the podcast but if you don't already have a massive platform it is unlikely statistically that this thing is going to work so absolutely do not start the podcast if you wouldn't do it for free making no amount of money in perpetuity or as long as you want to experiment with that that's one thing I'll throw out there is you are most likely going to start a podcast and it will not take off and be wildly successful however I've met plenty of people who have you know hundreds of listeners and hundreds of episodes and they stuck at it because they truly loved the thing if you don't know if you love the thing it's very easy which is what I did to say I'm gonna have one season of Eight Episodes and I committed to record eight interviews and put eight interviews out in the world that was it all I committed to myself and I said if that doesn't work then I will be fine and say here is

season one and there's just not a season two and I was I would be okay with it so you can commit to see if you like it before you do it but chances are and I you might have found something similar when you started creating contents like for the first six nine months like there's no Revenue coming in it's a lot more work than it seems everyone I know that has no podcast and goes to having a podcast like oh my gosh I thought this was just like once at one hour a week I just talked to somebody it's like wow I have to prepare for it I gotta write up show notes I got to make sure it's edited properly I gotta recruit people turns out you reach out to 10 people to reply one is really into schedule this week like there's just a lot that goes into it so I'd say only do it if you're excited to do it even if five people are on the other end talking about the time investment how long does it take you per episode hours wise and

then how long did it take you to kind of prep launch this has evolved a bit yeah as the podcast is generate enough Revenue to hire other people but in general I would probably spend depending on how well I knew the topic or the person

anywhere from two to ten hours preparing for an interview if someone wrote a book at the beginning I was like I gotta read the whole book I gotta take notes then I was like well if I read the whole book and take notes then I kind of know everything so I'm going to read a few chapters you know I wanted to listen to everyone on different interviews some people are really hard some people have only talked about one topic and you want to get them on another topic I interviewed Carrie Walsh Jennings who's a three-time gold medalist at the Olympics for beach volleyball I listened to every interview she'd ever done because only like three percent of each interview was about not volleyball stuff and I was like well I don't want to talk about volleyball like I want to talk about performance and how you can train she won a gold medal while she was pregnant like dude this is like a serious level of physical and mental

preparedness that I wanted to dig into so that's one big piece of it after it's done then it really depends on the style of show if you have this NPR style editing where it's very narrative driven it could take you a long time to go through the editing for me with interviews style I think it takes me about an hour to go back and listen to it at a little speed it up speed up pace and then go in and be like ah this thing wasn't worth keeping in or we had to repeat something and let's cut that out or this person you know stumbled on their words fortunately there's some amazing software now I use a piece of

software called descript which basically Imports all the audio transcribes it to what's called like 95 accuracy and then you can edit the podcast like you would edit a Google doc it's crazy like you're just like oh let's delete all the ums control f um ignore all ums and then you listen through it and you're like oh that that um was really necessary let's put it back in and like little edits like that but that tool makes the editing process really easy from the get-go I had an audio engineer who would actually like mix and master and add in the music and that kind of stuff so I would say each guest is probably at least 10 hours plus you know probably two or three hours of coordination and Outreach to three or four people that you reach out to in order to get the one now I've since hired someone who helps do a little bit of research so they might go listen to two or three episodes read a couple chapters of a book and put

up some notes with links to those various places so I can then take that and take my time from 10 hours to three hours I'll share my experience briefly it's a little different which is really interesting to hear your experience so I launched the complete opposite of your advice which is I just launched big with like I will do this forever this is my new thing I have like 40 guests lined up here's who they're gonna be and I think it's partly because I already went through that initial period of uncertainty whether I can keep this up with a newsletter which you said eight to nine months which is exactly how long it took me to do the newsletter every week to get to a point where I'm like yes I can keep this up for years let's start adding a paid plan so I think I was just more confident that I can keep at it and then I actually planned to monetize right from the beginning I think partly again because I had the

newsletter already and I will say so I don't edit them myself I have a production group that's like a game changer so you can save a lot of time and I I don't know if you've gone to produce or anything but I feel like most people eventually do I've now switched to someone who was like wet back listen to the first 20 or 30 episodes and said oh I get what you like to cut out of a conversation and I'll end and say hey take that 90 minute conversation and I think there's probably 20 minutes to cut out and they do a very good job of getting pretty close and you know to the point that some episodes I'm just like I don't even look at it it's just recorded and done when it comes to launch I would

say one of my suggestions is to get a few things in the bag like line up you don't want to launch and then be like scrambling so I tend to think launching with two or three episodes either all at once or in a week is a really valuable strategy you talked about in the in the intro you're like sometimes it's been a higher ranked but top 30 you know I think I've been top 100 in the business category all the way to top five in the business category maybe top ten and just all the way in between and the reason for that is that the ranking charts are all driven by different variables than you would imagine they're driven a lot by momentum of new subscribers at least on the Apple charts than actual downloads so I have a friend who launched a podcast and had a huge following on social media and so out the gate was able to Garner a ridiculous number of new subscribers to the point that she was the number two podcast

overall all podcasts in the world but now it's crazy for like a week or two a woman named Erica kohlberg she has a podcast called Erica talk yeah and um but it's not number two anymore because it's so driven on the momentum of how often you can get new subscribers she's still in the top hundred of business podcasts but you know to get to the number two spot overall it's all about number of new followers per hour and if you can get a ton of traffic early on you can drive that and I will say the value of doing that is now you've got this screenshot of like look I was top 10. and by the way she did the same thing I did the moment I was top 10 like the second I was in top 10 I immediately took all those guests that were on my dream list and I was like hey I've got a top 10 podcast like you know you go look at it right now and see that it's in the top ten so you kind of you can always say that forever after it happens once

you can always use those things so capitalize on that so you had the newsletter before I had a a newsletter I'd written on casually for various things throughout my life and for my last startup and so I kind of put it all together to try to carry a big launch so that we really Spike the rankings maybe qualify for Apple does this like new and noteworthy thing and so there's a lot of

stuff you can do to build momentum at launch but at the end of the day all the momentum in the world doesn't matter if your content's not good so I try to like content for me is like product Market fit for you know building software it's like you need to have a good podcast and so if you launch big one of the downsides is you're like you don't really get that moment of like tweaking and testing and seeing how it is and you know I will say I listen I did five episodes in the fifth one I was like this is number one like this the first one I recorded came out I know fifth but the fifth one I recorded came out first because I just knew it was episode one and the guess that I had on we talked about travel hacks a guy named lero and he's come on twice it was just like this awesome energy episode about everything you want to know about travel hacks all the hacks.com one save yourself the need to scroll through the whole list

but if your content isn't a unique perspective you don't have a unique way of saying it it's gonna be really hard to stand out in the sea of podcasts so I always say be you be authentic try to be someone's favorite don't try to be everyone's okay podcast like you know I remember Tim Ferriss was saying uh I got a chance to go on Tim ferris's show and interview him about podcasting and he's like look I did an episode about like how to I think it was like how to make violins or something and he's like what's so fascinated about this 80 of people were like what is this episode but 20 of people thought it was one of the best episodes I'd done that year and I think half of his top 10 episodes of all time are people you wouldn't recognize so I would focus on what gets you excited not focus on what you think will move the metrics because every time I have a guest room like I really think this person's gonna move the metrics

it's like it doesn't and then I interview someone who no one has ever heard of and I get these emails like wow that was such a good episode can't be oh man I'm so glad you did that one I was like you don't even know this person is very similar experience in many ways across a lot of the things that you said something that you didn't mention that you shared previously with me is and this is advice that I've thought about a lot is you should be somebody's favorite

podcast that's like a sign that you're doing something right can you expand on that you know there's this whole idea of your build your thousand true fans and I think anytime you're creating something in the world you want people to be your advocates for it because those are the people that are going to share it those are the people that are going to write the reviews those are the people that are going to send you the ideas those are people that are ultimately when you make a call out on a podcast like hey I'm looking for someone to help build this company or this you know Enterprise that are going to reach out and want to work for you I find it so valuable to build that relationship with people and it's even more valuable with podcasting because podcasting is such an intimate medium like you're in someone's ear and they're actively listening to you while they're you know going about their life they're

going on a walk they're doing things but you're right there and I I get so many emails they're like I feel like I'm just sitting on the couch with you while you're talking to me and like you create this really close relationship and the more you can create for those people and be their favorite time of the day their favorite thing someone once told me like make sure you're consistent with the time you release because you'll get people that are like it's Wednesday morning where's my episode like this is how I it's become a ritual in my life and so I don't know I just think it's so valuable to build that early kind of excited user base and and those thousand true fans that I always try to put something out that someone's favorite and I actually surveyed the audience about 50 episodes in and asked which was your favorite episode and there were every episode except one was someone's favorite

there's one episode that no no one's favorite so I'm still waiting maybe next time I survey someone will be like no no that one was my favorite but every other episode of 50 episodes was someone's favorite and it was like the coolest feeling knowing that every episode was someone's favorite that's exactly what happens with my newsletter I get a reply with every newsletter and someone's like this is my favorite one yet okay somebody really likes this one so interesting yeah are you hiring or on the flip side are you looking for a new opportunity well either way check out lennysjob.com Talent if you're a hiring manager you can sign up and get access to hundreds of hand curated people who are open to New Opportunities thousands of people apply to join this Collective and I personally review and accept just about 10 of them you'll find a better place to hire product managers and growth leaders join

almost 100 other companies who are actively hiring through this Collective and if you're looking around for a new opportunity actively or passively join the collective it's free you can be anonymous and you can even hide yourself from specific companies you can also leave anytime and you'll only hear from companies that you want to hear from check out lennysjobs.com Talent how did you pick your topic for your podcast and then did you have just like advice for folks for how to pick the topic for their podcast this is an interesting one so my podcast actually started as a parenting podcast from the perspective of dads and you know I was doing all this research I built this like probably 75 page notion doc all about parenting it was like I had a kanban board for all the things I needed to do in each trimester of the pregnancy and then the fourth trimester after the baby was born I had like all these checklists I had a

stroller spreadsheet that had at least let's call it 15 20 different features that you could filter on Dimensions you know cubic volume of when you sum up the dimension like everything was crazy and I was like I'm so obsessed with this and I was like nobody's really taking this kind of crazy optimized approach to processing parental information except a few people Emily Oster by the way if anyone out there wrote A Few books I really loved her like pragmatic science approach but I just didn't see a lot of this and I especially didn't see as much content coming from dads I was like I'm so excited and then we had our daughter and I was like for some reason I was like I love her but like the the topic of parenting and optimizing every aspect of it just wasn't what it was before we had the child as after I was like well but I I bought this microphone and I figured out how to use all the editing software and

I'd never even recorded an episode and it just ended up that I was like that topic just wasn't right for me and I went on another friend of mine's podcast guy named Kevin Rose who was a co-founder of a company we started he started dig back in the day and in the middle of it we've been talking about this I've been brainstorming ideas and in the middle of his podcast he's like hey tell us about your new podcast and then I was like Kevin I don't I haven't nailed down what it is and he's like yeah it's fine why don't you just record a response to that question and email it to me before this episode goes live and you can just tell everyone what your podcast is about and then I was like okay I'll think about it and like the next day he was like dude I need this by Friday I was like oh man so I have like two

days to figure out what my podcast is and I talk to a lot of people and they're like what do you love what do you love talking about I was like gosh what question someone said when you're at a dinner table what's the thing that you talk about where you notice that everyone at the table is like leaning in and like trying to listen and pick your brain on and maybe sends you a text after and I was like it's probably all the hacks I have for traveling for free for you know getting upgrades for saving money for shopping online for optimizing my health or anything house hacking saving money on my rent and every time I bring those up people like I like saving money I want to travel for free and they're like leaning in there which credit card do I get is this one bad what about this one and I couldn't come up with a name I had hundreds of names it was like life upgraded optimize your life but every

time I described what it was I just said you know it's life upgraded I'll teach you all the hacks to do this and then some someone I can't remember who was like what about just all the acts and then I looked and I was like is all the hacks.com available it's like what it's available it's like oh get the domain and then I very quickly recorded a response to Kevin's question which was like yes I'm watching a podcast called all the hacks it's you know like here's what it is and I had to go create a trailer and upload it all in like three days and I I think I was fortunate that I just had the time pressure that I had a thing to get out so I'd say one what do you love talking about at the dinner table what gets you excited what do people reach out to you for expertise on what do you spend your time going down deep rabbit holes on the internet on because all of those things are going to be part of your life as a creator

and then two if there's any way you can force yourself to just have to make a decision because I get stuck in this analysis paralysis that's great so you know find some friend of yours that's like I'm tweeting about your podcast on Friday or I'm going to include you in my newsletter next month and you know give yourself an artificial deadline or even a real deadline to kind of just put a stake in the ground and you can change the name you could pivot the topic you could pivot the style of content all those things can happen after but just get started because you know you'll get to learn whether you like doing it whether how it feels and and you can always this is another Fun hack you could create a podcast and make a private feed and people can add a private feed to their podcast app so if you want to get some feedback you can just send people a URL and say hey paste this URL in the Apple podcast player and

listen to a couple episodes and let me know what you think before you kind of make that plunge to send it to the whole world awesome I actually heard that interview with Kevin Rose back in the day and I checked out the podcast I think I actually subscribed and it felt very natural so nice job yeah little did you know that it was inserted in post-production recorded on a separate system yeah so people listening to this may feel like hey I don't have Kevin Rose announcing my podcast how do I how do I get started how do I get my initial Traction in my podcast you have any advice there for people that are just launching things they could do to get their initial set of subscribers and get the word out and get some kind of traction without a friend with a huge platform yes I interviewed a guy named Nick Gray and it was a fun conversation because he wrote a book called The two-hour cocktail party and it was all

about how to like build Relationships by throwing the best cocktail parties it was very like tactical guide but one of the things he does is he has a friends newsletter and he basically created a newsletter and every time he meets someone that is a friend of his he you know sends him a note says can I add you to my friend's newsletter people say yes and he just shares like here's some cool articles I'm reading here's uh you know a cool thing I'm doing in my life here's a picture it's like a instead of waiting till the holidays to send your holiday card to everyone you know that's like here's what happened this year or maybe now we've that's what my grandparents did now it's just like here's a photo of the family he just sends it out I don't even know what the Cadence is it's just like every now and then I get an email and it's like oh that's what Nick's up to this is pretty cool anyone can

subscribe to it and he shares all these great things he's like I was thinking about a virtual assistant here's 75 things that I like dreamed up that I could send to a virtual assistant I was like that's really cool here's how I tweak my calendly and I said to calendly to you it's like I added a few little things in it that I you know he had suggestions to just make it a little more friendly make it a little more comfortable at the one I loved was like if I'm not arrived within two minutes of the start time here is my cell phone number like I just want to make sure I'm prompt and people know that and so one thing is before you even get started find a way to just build an audience of your closest friends family colleagues and throw stuff out in the world you don't have to do it weekly or monthly you could just send it out every quarter every six months it doesn't matter but start to build something so I started

with a new uh I think it was a MailChimp called life updates and I think I sent like five of these out 10 years ago and I hadn't really sent one out in seven years but I still had this email newsletter with like you know 1100 people on it that I just collected from life and so that was one thing look you can always go out and try to find other creative ways to partner with people so you have a newsletter but you don't have a podcast could you you know use your newsletter to promote something could you find someone who has a platform that

you could trade your services for promotional things I I yeah I can think of it a couple examples where there's been something where I've been really excited to use and I'm like hey could I talk to my audience about this thing and then you could let me use this so if there's anything whether it's consulting services or anything you could maybe trade those services for other people with an audience to to share and promote you I think that happens more often than not but again it all matters if you have good content so I'd say the first thing the most important thing to grow a piece of content is just have it be good and it's hard to know what's good put it out in the world see if people like it may maybe get your reps in before you even try some of these growth things I think you know I was fortunate to have done some public speaking before so I felt a little more comfortable but if you you

mentioned Mr Beast earlier he's very public about the fact if you go back 10 years and look at his YouTube videos they were not exciting like they are now and it took him a long time and I think that's the reality with content is for almost every person that you see out there and you're like wow they have this huge audience it's so awesome you go back 10 years and you're like oh well their first episode wasn't that awesome it was actually kind of crazy or it wasn't that interesting and they got better over time they learned what Their audience liked they built a following so those things are all there find communities if you're talking about a very specific thing I never forgot Gary vaynerchuk's lesson oh gosh he probably told me this 13 years ago he was like when he was starting Wine Library which most people don't maybe even know that that's what he was originally known for he wanted to build this business and so

he went on Twitter and he looked for every single person that asked a question about wine and he at replied them back and so a tactic that I think could work really well is for me I'm like I love travel I love points and Miles I can just search Twitter and find every person on Twitter every person on Reddit every person on a forum whatever that's asking a question about the thing my podcast answers and go in and try to be a value-add to them I guarantee that if you have a podcast and your favorite thing is Quilting and in your bio on Twitter maybe Twitter's not the right platform but let's just go with the analogy right your bio says like top quilting podcast and you go find everyone that's asking questions about quilting and answer their questions with strong like good answers they're gonna look at your bio and be like oh my gosh this person knows their stuff about this topic let's go see what they do and you

you have these Advocates they share in their communities and it grows over time I'll come back to one more tactic which I didn't do but there's no built-in distribution engine in podcasting Tick

Tock you make a tick tock video Tick Tock sends it to like 100 people and if no one likes it it does but if like a few people like it they send it to more people and more people and YouTube does the same thing Instagram reels does the same thing podcasting doesn't have that and so it's just a slow growth effort and you just have to be okay with that but what I didn't do early on which you can do is you can make clips of your podcast and you could put those clips on these channels that do have that built-in distribution and if those clips do take off you know they could build a massive audience and so uh there's a guy Danny Miranda he has a podcast and he launched didn't have a huge following but he created clips of every single episode lots of Clips he didn't know what was the most interesting piece of content so he made a clip for everything he built millions and millions of views on Tick Tock and Instagram just by

creating content from his podcast that drove downloads over to his podcast helped him build his audience and he built an audience on social faster than I have and bigger than I currently have out of just being all in on Distributing his content on platforms that had growth engines built into it now last point is interesting because what I've been hearing and I've actually experienced it so I have Tick Tock Clips I have YouTube videos and YouTube shorts and I find

they drive followers within the platform and downloads and Views but I haven't seen any actual impact on the podcast and maybe people can measure it or maybe they can tell something's happening but from what I hear what I've seen it I don't know if it actually drives a lot of downloads but it's still really useful still really useful to have an awesome Tick Tock account an awesome YouTube account he said look I don't know if it drives downloads but it drives brand awareness for me yeah and he's had multiple guests be like oh yeah I'd love to go on your show one of the clips he made you know like he made a clip talking about Ray dalio and Ray dalio was like reposting his clip and so he was getting a lot of Engagement with people that would be very difficult to reach out to saying I have this many downloads but because he was getting thousands or even millions of views across a platform it gave him the

credibility to do a lot of things that he might not have been able to do now then he's gone and translated that into well let's go bring some of these people with really really wide distribution of their podcast onto my show and let's do an interview with them then for the most part people are like oh let's distribute you know that content to my audience that you had me on one thing he did that was so good is he did all of his videos in person so he would fly to someone record in person and the quality of the video for an in-person video was just so much better than you get doing a remote thing it's a lot harder it's a lot more work and it doesn't even impact the audio but he would make the best quality clips and Erica Colbert does the same thing and she would deliver them and he would deliver them to the guests and now the guest starts using those clips because he spent so much time trying to

come up with the best Clips the highest quality best produced that made his guests look amazing and then those guests were much more likely to share those in their audiences and all of a sudden you've got a lot of momentum does that translate to downloads I'll give you a little shout out Danny has a paid newsletter on sub stack where he actually breaks down all his downloads and all his tactics on how this is all working for him uh and it's fascinating it's called in the DM because he did a lot of his early uh recruiting with guests and in DMS on on social media but it's to be seen whether it can how much of an impact it can have on your podcast but it certainly builds other things that are I'd say like indirect attribute there's no direct attribution but that doesn't mean that things aren't overall going up and then the last one is finding other podcasts that you can go on as an expert in some area so

hopefully you're starting a podcast

because you believe something is exciting in the world you love it you have a passion about it you're an expert in it take that thing and go present yourself to other podcasts and they all have listeners that are listening to podcasts they're like it's the best medium because yes someone who likes short form 60 second videos is maybe not the best Target demo to listen to a one hour Audio Only thing like those two are very different behaviors but if you can find something you're really good at and present a value add to people to come on their show then that could help you build your audience while adding value to Their audience and I think as someone who gets a lot of pitches from people to come on their podcast I will only caveat it with do the work to make sure you're really presenting a compelling pitch you're going to get a lot of no's that's just how it works I've pitched myself to go on lots of shows and sometimes I get

no's also many times I get notes but I never send an email that's like someone would read it and be like this person obviously doesn't know what they're talking about but I get so many they're like I'd love to have my client come on your podcast uh they love talking about building a business and I was like well I don't really interview people about that you know like if if someone came to me was like here is a tactic to improve your life that I think your audience would benefit from and here's why my expertise makes me the best person to talk about it I'd be much more open to it because they actually understood what my show is about yeah I get at least one email a day with one of these pitches and I know exactly what you mean I generally don't reply because it's just not even worth trying to convince them they're not a fit yes shifting gears a little bit I want to talk about your stack your podcasting

stack what do you use on the software I would use the hardware my headphones what do you recommend on a mic I started out with the ATR 2100x I think it is a great entry level mic it's under 100 you can use like old analog XLR cables if you want but it's also a USB that mic got me through 50 episodes I have since upgraded to a sure sm7b which is like the XLR compatriot to I think you have a sure mv7 yeah I have the USB version if that's what yeah exactly and those are two great kind of upgrade mics that I think have you know I like the sound quality a little better but every time I'm traveling and I'm like not sure if something's going to come up if I can make a recording if I have to record the intro do a remote interview I still carry the ATR 2100x because I just think it's an easy thing to have and it works really well I record everything on Riverside I put everything into dscript I plug my XLR mic into a focusrite uh

Scarlet 2i2 which is like an audio interface I would say I've gone a little bit overboard with video so we were talking right before this started I have like a a Sony a7c which is like a mirrorless full-frame camera behind a 60 Amazon teleprompter so that I could make direct eye contact with the camera while an iPad that's I don't know it's like 10 year old iPad sits under it and projects as a second screen for my computer yeah if you're using this you're not watching this YouTube you got to check out the YouTube video at least for five seconds to see Chris just staring at you I've never seen this on a podcast video before yeah it's the future so I have that set up using a iPad running an app called Duet display I don't do the editing I've worked with one editor that uses audition and one that uses Pro Tools I don't have a strong opinion there oh my favorite of all my friend of mine Brendan Mulligan started this

company called podpage and so for people who don't know a lot about how podcasting works there's a hosting platform I use Simple cast I liked that they were one of the only hosting platforms that has a really affordable self-serve option but also has a really great Pro all the features that you would want in the future for monetization everything so that you wouldn't have to switch not to say that you know you couldn't switch easily it's pretty easy to switch how it works is you upload an MP3 file you write out all your show notes the title of the episode everything and they create an RSS feed for you you could literally just create an RSS feed right you that's all it really is and you could host everything you're on your own on AWS or something but they make it really easy for not that much money and then you go distribute that RSS feed to all of these different players so the Apple podcast

app Spotify Etc and and one of the things that's amazing is this site pod page you submit the RSS feed to this website and they go in and say oh here's the description of the podcast here's each episode here's the cover art you submitted for that episode here's the title here's the show notes and they just auto-generate a website for you and then they give you the tools like a WordPress style set of tools to go and change the header change the descriptions like you could go in and tweak things but every night on Wednesday or I guess Wednesday morning at 2 A.M my podcast goes live and at 205 podpages already noticed the RSS feed is up to date and that site is posted I don't have to do anything they even monitor for the like slug like the URL slug I put in as a check out this podcast at this URL and podpage says oh that's the URL you want them to check out we're going to inherit that and put

it in so you don't even have to give us any information and we'll just know the URL that you want to set this episode up on I think that is a super simple way to build a podcasting website the only other thing we didn't talk at all about analytics at all but I use chartable for analytics and podcast analytics are a little crazy because you don't have a lot to go on but chartable is a really cool analytics platform that becomes really interesting when you start to Cross promo with other shows or run ads for other shows or do anything like that because they basically can track IP address of downloads and I say track like I don't know who's listening to what from where in any kind of very specific way but what I do know is if I'm doing a Cross promo with another show where I'm saying hey check out a podcast I love and they're saying check out a podcast I love it actually says oh

how many of the people that downloaded this episode actually went and listened to this other episode so you can get direct attribution of podcast listeners going from one podcast to another so that is a really important tool in my kind of running a podcast toolkit but it doesn't matter as much until you start focusing on growth and and doing promotions and stuff like that awesome I I host on sub stack as maybe one difference I use pod page for my site my producer editor people actually use the script slash dscript also that's kind of what they use for editing professionally so it's good for Amateur hour and good for professionals as well I I use charitable some things up with my charitable I think I've told you where it doesn't count my Spotify downloads so it's kind of a pain in the butt but it's still which is funny by the way because for anyone listening it doesn't know Spotify actually owns

chartable so like the one platform your your chartable doesn't get good download data from is the one that it it is owned by yup I do not understand what is going on uh I've talked to them and they don't know what the fix is it doesn't matter anyway I get enough analytics other places there's one other site I'd recommend called pod status that just gives you a quick access to where you're on charts every day gives you these cool line charts which chartable sort of does but it's like a lot simpler on pod status but otherwise awesome all the same stuff one other question real quick say someone launches their podcast what would be like a good download goal to aim for when you're getting started that's like maybe this is working you have like a sense of a threshold to try to hit I wouldn't think of a threshold to hit because you could launch with a huge audience and have a terrible podcast and you

might hit 10 000 downloads and it would be crazy right like you would feel really good so I would care more about the direction than about the number because even the Apple charts they're momentum driven you could have one download but if you you know the next week you have a lot more and a lot more and a lot more you would actually rise in the charts faster than someone whose podcast is kind of stagnantly doing X number of downloads if you have 3 000 downloads an episode or something like that you're in the top one percent or something so you know you don't have to get to crazy numbers to be in the top of the charts I would say heard a similar number three thousand the top podcasts are doing you know millions in episode but like that's like top 10 top 20 top 30. the next tranche of like the top 50 are doing probably hundreds of thousands of downloads but outside of the top two 300 it's in the ten thousands of

downloads per episode and this is a little bit variable if you have a daily show or a weekly show or something but I would say if you cross 10 000 downloads an episode you are now taken seriously by a lot of people so I had conversations early on with networks like iHeart media and like you know different podcast networks that wanted to bring in the show and would you know do all that and that that all started at like 10 to 15 maybe 20 000 downloads an episode but by no means would I expect anyone to get there right away even I didn't get there right away it took time even with a few you know friends to make announcements and stuff it took time so forget how many downloads you get on your first three episodes because you're probably gonna tell everyone in the world and you're going to use all your Social Capital to boost those and then look at how many downloads you get on your fourth and

fifth and sixth and does it go up does it stay stagnant apple and Spotify actually give you really cool data about how long people are listening do they drop off halfway through uh you could start to be like oh you know do people stay for the whole episode I will say I haven't found a good site for benchmarks but it's like you know I the average podcast I think probably has less than 50 percent of listeners by the end so don't be don't be turned off when you say wow only 40 of people made it to the

end like that's not horrible like I think my best episode it might be like 65 or 70 of people made it all the way to the end it's not 99. what I like about those charts is you can see what percentage of people skip the ads and then just keep continuing it's like a bump the mid roles and it's not as it's not as high as I thought 10 20 depending on maybe 15 it depends yeah not bad at all yeah any last words of wisdom on the world of podcasting starting a podcast continuing a podcast yeah I've got three things for you one this is a little bit of a financial outlay but I think it's really interesting there's this podcast app called overcast and it's not the biggest in the world but you can run ads in it and the thing I like is that the ads are much more reasonably priced than a lot of other places and they're very Dynamic so I would encourage anyone listening to like watch it for a few weeks if you have a podcast and you

want to experiment because the same ad could be 200 one week and seven hundred dollars the next week depending on how much demand there is for that category so you can wait and hold out but what I like is they take your art from your podcast and then you can rewrite your description and they tell you how many people saw the ad how many people tapped on it and how many people subscribed to the podcast after seeing the ad and technically they could also listen to the trailer they could listen to an episode and they even give you benchmarks of what to expect so for a few hundred dollars you could go in and run an ad for your podcast now I would say in all of the experiments I've done with them I've probably garnered I'm looking at some numbers like hundreds of subscribers not thousands and I've probably spent maybe a thousand dollars podcasts you know the average cost to acquire a podcast listener if you're

doing paid marketing is about anywhere from three to ten dollars depending on the appeal of your show what kind of audience I'm sure could go way over that for a business show and by business I mean like B2B focused kind of show so let's say let's call it five dollars so it's not going to be the best way to grow your audience at some point if you're at enough scale that you have ads in your show and you know how much a customer's worth like maybe it makes sense to pay five dollars because your LTV of a podcast listener is seven dollars but getting it started that's not you what you can do is say okay what was my click-through rate on the ad which will tell you if someone doesn't click it's either not a good description or it's not a good set of content or your cover Art's not good so you can kind of think about okay I actually need to figure out the podcast before I even have content and you could run this ad

with a trailer before you even record anything and then it's like okay well people tapped on it how many of them subscribed and I like to use this as a way to say okay well the Benchmark said I was going to get about 50 subscriptions for this ad that was going to get a thousand Taps and I got seven so these aren't people who weren't interested these are people who read the description like this is interesting and they didn't subscribe that means my content probably sucks like that means someone listened to a trailer or an episode or something more than the description and the the image and decided this is not for me maybe they looked at your episodes I don't know but if they don't tap on it if you're supposed to get like a two percent click-through rate and you get 0.5 then it's like actually the topic or the way I describe it or the cover sucks and so I like that as a way to for a few hundred dollars get a good test I've

even thought of running like an A B test of the same like podcast with two different descriptions I wish you could do it with two different cover Arts so I don't know that's like a cheap way to do a little bit of testing one other thing that I'll share is I just try to share the podcast everywhere so you've probably noticed that in all of my emails at the bottom it's like oh great talk to you Chris and then it says hey want to upgrade your life money or travel check out my podcast and newsletter like I'm taking every opportunity I can to let anyone know about it because you never know it'll happen and my favorite example especially when it's written like that it doesn't come across like a big bulky signature was we bought some floor mats and one of them didn't fit and I was going back and forth with the customer service person and they actually replied and they were like oh thanks for sending

me that podcast I really appreciate it like they thought I was just randomly telling them hey like if you want to upgrade your life check this out they didn't know it was my signature so I got a new listener from customer service from a floor mat company which by the way here here's one hack that I also learned from the floor mat company come to my show for hacks but if you're ever trying to get a deal on something that floor mat company I just pulled up the live chat and just asked and I said hey I'm looking at these floor mats you think you could give me a discount you know I'm trying to it's a little expensive and he was like yeah refresh your card it'll be 15 off so you know we're not going to talk this episode's not about all the hacks but there's one cool one we need more hacks I think we'll get to that at the end keep going and then the last is I think it's fun that podcasts you can experiment I

started out doing guests and then I did some q a episodes from questions listeners asked me and then I recently did some solo episodes I was really interested in the idea of all the ways you can rent and Swap and exchange your home to stay in vacation homes around the world so I just researched it for like I don't know two or three days and just did a 45 minute episode of me talking there was no guest there were no questions it was just me talking and that works I'm gonna start another series of episodes where instead of interviewing people about an expertise topic I'm going to interview people who are really dialed into a country so I've got a guy who's written a handful of the Lonely Planet guide books for Japan and is in Japan right now for three weeks getting dialed in what are the latest cool stuff he's going to come back and we're just going to record an episode about everything you need to know about

going to Japan and I'm going to add on about 15 minutes I think at the end without him where I just talk about all the tricks for using your points your miles deals and discounts like there's this new airline in La that's super cheap to fly to Japan but it comes with some caveats so it'll be like two-thirds guide to going to Japan one third guide to getting there for cheap and like there aren't a lot of businesses or ideas where you could just have all these things that you can experiment with and then you could do them so fast yeah yeah if I interview you which I'm doing right after this so anyone listening to this that wants to hear a little of Lenny's Story come check check out uh all the hacks and and for 20 minutes we talk about some topic that's a little off topic I've sometimes just taken that it's submitted it as a bonus episode on Friday 15 20 minutes you know it's not my regular show but you could just

there's so many ways you can experiment and find out what you like and then you might say wow you know what I really like doing the solo things or maybe you have a co-host on for a week and you're like Ah that's so much better so I just love that it gives you a good opportunity to experiment with stuff find the thing you love because I think my big takeaway is once you find the thing you really love to talk about all of that it just makes everything so much easier because it's natural and you would do it for free and you know the harsh reality of this whole game is like there's probably going to be a number of months or years you have to do it for free before it takes off so if you don't love it that's gonna be a painful few years to build on that I find the same thing with a newsletter same with a podcast the last thing you want to do is create a job for yourself that you hate and so picking a topic that is just not

interesting to you picking a medium that is like painful to you there's no reason to do that like you may become like a tick tock star and and you hit a viral video but then you have to make viral videos for the rest of your life that's no fun you have to think about like do I want to do this for years and years and years and you can stop but then becomes hard if it becomes a really good source of income so that's something to think

about like just don't create a job for yourself that you just don't don't want yeah with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round I don't know if you knew this account was coming so it'll be extra special real quick easy whatever comes to mind let me know and then we'll see how it all goes does that sound good that sounds good what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people recently or in life in general two I Love Actually this could be three happy money is a fantastic book all about ways that you can spend your money to optimize for happiness it's like a collection of a ton of research about the happy science of happier spending that's one vagabonding by Rolf Potts who I had the pleasure uh the last two I've had the pleasure of interviewing recently it's like a guide to long-term travel but it's just kind of a different perspective on travel I would say if if

you're at the point in your life where you now have kids it's it's probably going to be hard to live up to that but I have gifted that book to so many people who are like I think I should take a trip for six months I'm like go read this book my wife and I traveled around the world for seven months and that book was like instrumental to us taking it and how we lived on that and then the last is called die with zero by Bill Perkins and that book probably had the biggest impact I haven't gifted it to anyone I've recommended it heavily the last week because it had a huge impact on me and the fundamental premise of the book is that this isn't very lightning round response but instead of optimizing for money which is so tied up in American culture of how do I make more how do I get promoted how do I earn more money how do I save more money we should really be optimizing for the net fulfillment in life and we shouldn't be

trying to save all of this money we should actually be trying to allocate it over our lives in the most optimal way to increase experiences increase fulfillment increase happiness and sometimes that means saving less when you're younger and you're more able to do things like backpack around the world for seven months or go bungee jumping and when you build those experiences early on the memories of those experience pay dividends the rest of your life good choices what's a favorite other podcast other than your podcast and my podcast I love Animal Spirits if you're into markets life and investing and uh you know they always have good recommendations at the end also on podcast TV shows books movies that kind of stuff so that's one I really like what's a favorite recent movie or a TV show that you've really enjoyed a show that I love which I think is kind of like a version of a show called Silicon

Valley but not it's called Mythic Quest on Apple TV and I haven't heard enough people talking about this that I felt like maybe it's a Hidden Gem maybe I'm a monks company of of watching the show but it is just I think it's a funny show it's light-hearted it makes me happy and hopefully at least a few people haven't checked it out but it's like a startup life show but just dragged out to the extreme like Silicon Valley was what's a favorite interview question that you like to ask on your podcast I like to try to ask people about their favorite misconceptions in a space yeah I like to kick things off usually with what's a thing that you kind of have a contrarian take on or you think most people get wrong about the thing that you know best awesome final question what are your three favorite money hacks that listeners can take action on soon okay one that has paid dividends and literally I've had people on a podcast

telling them right back to me guests that are like I just saved money so go to your State's unclaimed money website every state has one and you can go put in your name state or city you don't even have to give your address and you can find whether there are people that owe you money and oftentimes they're businesses like you moved and Comcast couldn't figure out how to get you the you know final part of your prepaid uh month and I had someone message me the other day and they're like I just listened to you talk about unclaimed money on a podcast and I just found 136 dollars I've never gotten paid to listen to a podcast people have saved hundreds some people thousands I always say if you're going to dinner party you now know someone's address you probably know their name instead of bringing a bottle of wine or in addition just check if they have unclaimed money I brought over a bottle of wine to someone's house and

said also by the way did you know that this pharmaceutical company owes you 200 and I showed him how to go claim it and boom free money what a great conversation for the dinner table so that's one great one I love another great one you can't use it right now unless you have a trip planned but anytime you're booking a hotel book directly with the hotel and email the hotel in advance that hey we booked we're really excited to stay with you if you're celebrating something let them know and if you can't get the email address just call the front desk ask for an email address follow up a couple days before you get there let them know you're coming and I would say you've got a 50 chance of getting an upgrade getting a bottle of wine getting some comp something getting a better view one person uh wrote Into Me letting me know that the hotel had their initials embroidered on their pillow which I thought was kind of a crazy thing to

have happen it's never happened to me personally I'd rather have the bottle of wine but you know I'll take that for what it is and for people who like the points game I'll share something just give you a little tease of how I kind of love finding all the points and miles optimizations if you have a credit card that pays you know multiple points three four five x points on things like a grocery store or an office supply store anything like that drug stores that's great you probably don't have a card that pays any multiple of points on Home Improvement store Home Depot Lowe's so what I like to do to make sure I get the most points I can instead of going to Home Depot and paying with the card that's going to give me one point per dollar at Home Depot I like to take I have a 4X grocery card I like to go to Safeway and I just buy Home Depot gift cards I get my 4X points on the gift cards then I go buy stuff at Home Depot

knowing that I got Forex points but you also have some cards that give you three or four x points if you go to CVS or other pharmacies or drugstores you can do it there you could do it at office supply stores if you want to take it to the next extreme if you have an Amazon card you could buy Amazon gift cards and get your get your 5x or 5 back on the Amazon Prime card so I'm a little crazy like that I you know my favorite is if you're trying to buy something at a store always shop online for coupons if you Google like Lowe's Home Depot Crate and Barrel coupons there's all these websites my favorite one is a save and it the letter deals.com you could buy Home Depot and create Barrel coupons online for a couple bucks say 15 so stack up and then the cash back portals you know I'm going to buy something I'm like how do I get the cash back portal how do I get the most points per dollar on my card and how do I get a discount

maybe from asking in the live chat or going in and buying a coupon so I go a little crazy on that stuff but you know I love getting saving money and and just feeling like I got a good deal amazing what an action-packed episode we had we got money hacks we got big bets we got podcasting we got self-driving money what a conversation Chris this was amazing two last questions how do folks find you online where do they find your podcast and then how can folks be useful to you all the hacks wherever find podcasts are are produced for your ears search or go to all the hacks.com or check out the newsletter just all the hacks.com email or you can find it on the website that's it how can you be helpful to me check out the show let me know what you think let me know what you like let me know what topics you want me to focus on optimizing in the future you know I mentioned I'm always trying to make stuff that's someone's favorite so

if there are things you want to hear me go deep on let me know I'm just Chris at all the hacks.com and I try to respond to everyone in in some reasonable amount of time and and if I haven't responded in a couple weeks you know nudge me and remind me but I'd love to hear from you I'd love to produce more content for you and I'm excited that we have this conversation and I'm excited to record one with you right after this oh my God here we go Chris thank you for being here yeah thanks for having me thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode