I can say from experience that working as a solo creator is really hard. What are the main benefits of partnering with other creators as you have done?
There are lots of benefits, but I think the main one is having other people to be accountable to and bounce ideas around. We actually have a group WhatsApp which is our main way of communicating, and that's active every single day, whether we're discussing a major story that's just broken or working out whose turn it is to do the newsletter. It also helps to have others to share the load with, both in terms of work and also the bigger vision. We each have our strengths and are really lucky as a team that they complement each other. There are challenges too, but having others involved is a really great motivator to keep going and developing.
How did you go about finding sponsors for your sponsored episodes? Did you just create a spreadsheet of all the companies that service the media industry and start cold pitching them?
Actually we get a lot of pitches from vendors for podcast guests, so we use that as a starting point to go back and say, 'We usually don't have vendors on our main podcast, but we do have this product for you'. Most of our current Conversations episodes have happened that way. However, we have now got a proper salesperson doing some work for us as sales is a really weak point for the three of us - it's early days but I'll let you know how it goes!
Can you talk a little bit about your process for your narrative documentary episodes? How do you map out the narrative? How much more time do these take than your episodes that focus on a single interview?
These are still quite new to us and we probably each have a different process for doing them. With the one I did on newsletters, I chose interviewees based on the different stages they were at in their endeavours. After I'd got all the interviews, I put them into our transcription software and then planned it out a bit like an article - for me this meant I could see all the points in writing and could make sure it all made sense, as well as plan what I was going to say as narration. Then it was just a case of extracting the audio and sewing it all together - because I had the transcripts, I had the timestamps too so this was quite straightforward.
Hi Esther, thank you for sharing your audience growth tactics. I just launched an interview series (https://www.foolishcareers.asia) which has a newsletter and podcast, and thinking about this as an ecosystem of products is useful.
My question is: Is Media Voices something you see as a great side hustle or do you have dreams of turning it into your main or full-time gig? If the latter, what do you think is needed to get there?
Hi Timi, you're welcome! I'd love to eventually build Media Voices into my main gig - probably never full time as I love doing other things alongside it. Part of the challenge for us is that because three of us do it, we'd need to be making enough to pay all three of us - we couldn't just have one person taking the money out as we all put a lot of work into it in our spare time. For now, it makes a nice little bit of extra income for us - we split some of the profits every couple of months from things like the Conversations episodes, workshops and awards. We're hoping eventually to build the awards up into something that provides the bulk of the revenue, but that's a little way off yet with Covid.
I can say from experience that working as a solo creator is really hard. What are the main benefits of partnering with other creators as you have done?
There are lots of benefits, but I think the main one is having other people to be accountable to and bounce ideas around. We actually have a group WhatsApp which is our main way of communicating, and that's active every single day, whether we're discussing a major story that's just broken or working out whose turn it is to do the newsletter. It also helps to have others to share the load with, both in terms of work and also the bigger vision. We each have our strengths and are really lucky as a team that they complement each other. There are challenges too, but having others involved is a really great motivator to keep going and developing.
How did you go about finding sponsors for your sponsored episodes? Did you just create a spreadsheet of all the companies that service the media industry and start cold pitching them?
Actually we get a lot of pitches from vendors for podcast guests, so we use that as a starting point to go back and say, 'We usually don't have vendors on our main podcast, but we do have this product for you'. Most of our current Conversations episodes have happened that way. However, we have now got a proper salesperson doing some work for us as sales is a really weak point for the three of us - it's early days but I'll let you know how it goes!
Can you talk a little bit about your process for your narrative documentary episodes? How do you map out the narrative? How much more time do these take than your episodes that focus on a single interview?
These are still quite new to us and we probably each have a different process for doing them. With the one I did on newsletters, I chose interviewees based on the different stages they were at in their endeavours. After I'd got all the interviews, I put them into our transcription software and then planned it out a bit like an article - for me this meant I could see all the points in writing and could make sure it all made sense, as well as plan what I was going to say as narration. Then it was just a case of extracting the audio and sewing it all together - because I had the transcripts, I had the timestamps too so this was quite straightforward.
Hi Esther, thank you for sharing your audience growth tactics. I just launched an interview series (https://www.foolishcareers.asia) which has a newsletter and podcast, and thinking about this as an ecosystem of products is useful.
My question is: Is Media Voices something you see as a great side hustle or do you have dreams of turning it into your main or full-time gig? If the latter, what do you think is needed to get there?
Hi Timi, you're welcome! I'd love to eventually build Media Voices into my main gig - probably never full time as I love doing other things alongside it. Part of the challenge for us is that because three of us do it, we'd need to be making enough to pay all three of us - we couldn't just have one person taking the money out as we all put a lot of work into it in our spare time. For now, it makes a nice little bit of extra income for us - we split some of the profits every couple of months from things like the Conversations episodes, workshops and awards. We're hoping eventually to build the awards up into something that provides the bulk of the revenue, but that's a little way off yet with Covid.
Thank you, Esther, that’s useful to know.