Meet The Marketing Genius Behind A $100M Podcast | ZOE’s Rich Willan

36:19It's all good. You know, so it was like, it was so funny for the, for the things to be reversed there. You weren't begging them anymore. No, it was the other way around. They were like, this is awesome for our platform. And then the second thing that happened was. So that's the advantage really of like building a relationship or prioritizing one platform. Yeah, totally. And then I think the other thing that was really interesting that happened super early on was. So we have press monitoring happening. and almost from the start there would be stuff coming in and have a snack would be like hey look at this this journalist has just written up we didn't do anything they've just written up the podcast and it's in the telegraph and the way that they were doing it so you know it was it became so big it was kind of everywhere and i feel like a lot of journos listen to podcasts they're like oh wow this is obviously the go-to health podcast and so oh and we were also releasing the transcripts Yeah.

37:12And so what you're providing a journalist is like an article with credibility that's pretty much already written. So they can just listen every week and be like, cool. And we'd also like, you know, we'd link to the transcript. And so they could just jump in, pull it into an article. Health is a high performance topic. So it's in their interest just to lift the whole thing and then write articles. And so it happens, honestly, it happens on a weekly basis still to this day that the podcast is its own press engine. And so I think... What other articles are they writing? It's just like health trend, this health trend or this thing explained or...

37:50It's like world leading expert in dietary fat says you need to eat more healthy fats, not less. Right. Or something like that, you know. Yeah. Yeah. So it's writing itself basically. Interesting. But it's just there. It's easy for them to pick. They probably stick it in chat GBT now and just... Probably. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the lesson and the tactic there, not that we sort of had thought of this before it happened, but it just was, was that obviously making the transcript really accessible makes their life way easier. And also, again, it ties back to leading with credibility. So they want to make sure that they're sharing something that's legit.

38:32and so we're that's what we're about as well and so they've got the easiness of lifting the whole thing and then they they've got pretty good good instinct that it's credible so it's it's great and that yeah just that happens all the time it's just feeding the machine none of this works though if the the content and the the podcast is not really good product exactly you do intros you have these quick fire questions at the start i know you think about the slippery slope yeah these kind of concepts to game retention and create open loops and things like that and yeah increase viewer satisfaction listener satisfaction what what would be the the 80 20 of of that this is the idea that basically you kind of you win buy-in through sort of sunk costs so if you hit someone with you need to hit be really interesting initially and then with every minute that things pass, like you've got them, you've got people bought in and they're more likely to stick around for the, for the course of the episode.

39:32So I think that's a really good fundamental, right? So that then you're just thinking my headline needs to be amazing. The first five seconds of my, my podcast needs to be like bang on and, you know, demonstrate exactly what value people are going to get. And then that first five minutes is key. And then, you know, just really thinking of this sort of slope of, of, of like obsession with excellence that starts, that's kind of weighted towards the beginning. Does that make sense? Yeah, 100%. And then, yeah, so digging into some of the other ones. So the quickfire questions and signposting. So signposting I mentioned before, and then we do these quickfire questions, which are another form of signposting.

40:14So what we'll do is we'll, again, inform by what people are interested in. We'll ask these questions that you can only say yes or no to. and that is implicitly like i need to know more well there's i've i've watched the like cold therapy ice ice baths and saunas i've watched that one and so an example would be the questions are uh are ice baths good for you is it good for your for your uh fertility yeah like a bunch of a bunch of questions around that trend yeah and they're they're all like require a very short answer right? It's like, yes, no, maybe. Exactly. And often you'll get someone response to be like, no.

40:58And then you're like, oh, there's a story there. There's tension there. And Jonathan, okay, well, we'll dig into that. And so, you know, just in that one response of no, you're like, there's more, there's more coming. And so that's a retention play for sure. Both your intro and your quickfire questions, they do a great job of just speed to value. absolutely and a sense of i'm going to get value from this show and winning that trust very quickly so with the ice bath and sauna one i quickly get six seven questions answered um you create open loops because i don't get the full context yeah um and it creates more questions but i get a sense of like i've quickly got something some questions answered and i'm not waiting for someone to get into loads of value or give long-winded answers to something, the trust bar in me is pretty full.

41:52Yeah. And I'm feeling pretty content and I probably am willing to wait five minutes before I get my next full bar of trust. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then I think, yeah, again, all under this slippery slope tactic, or actually it's probably not a tactic, is it? This slippery slope approach that we controversially have different audio and video intros which has its own downsides actually it can be it's annoying for like spotify and stuff like that yeah we just really believe that the the experience needs to be different in the in each of those contexts and we're not willing to make that trade-off and we luckily are in a position to be able to make to do the extra work to do so what's each of them what's the the core difference there yeah they're totally different actually so if you watch one of the videos it's like a kind of you know your classic kind of stephen bartlett style intro yeah and then the the audio intro is completely different it's scripted storytelling with like lovely sound design it's it's kind of longer it's like slower paced and yeah it's um it's really nice and we're not willing to you know to change that and why is that is that just because you think it's a better experience on each platform to go that way yeah i I think honestly that style of trailer for YouTube in audio is mostly it just sucks really.

43:13Yeah, because the effects don't transfer as well, do they? No. And it's weird without the it's just not optimal at all. Yeah. The other thing is your audio listeners are probably coming back every week. Yeah. They're more valuable. They're probably loyal and probably been listening to the show for a while. So they probably don't need the kind of maybe slightly more over the top stuff, which is more about grabbing attention quickly. They're less in that mode of needing to be sold to. So I think that's another thing that people have got to contend with. But it's really tough to do, right? That's expensive.

43:52It's expensive, yeah. Although you could argue, you just reminded me of something that's maybe quite an interesting insight, that we think it ROIs. wise because I've got an amazing analytics team at Zoe who did some like really deep digging and we believe uh that an audio listener for us is actually worth about three times that of a YouTube listener interesting in terms of converting to actually buying the product interesting so it kind of makes sense when you think in those terms to not make trade-offs for the audio yeah for video but do you think your audience discovers you through youtube and then comes to the yeah audio yeah that's a really good point so we have a lot of conversation like it's a bit more of an art than a science right trying to understand the full funnel of everyone you can't really you know it's not super easy all the time actually if if someone is like i run a company that makes it easy or i know exactly how to do that please tell us like yeah um but basically yeah we have a lot of conversations with listeners and um yeah a lot of them come across it on youtube and they'll watch like maybe one or two and then they'll convert they'll go dig out on audio because it's just more convenient and i think a lot of the people that are in our profile they're more of your long-term audio listeners they do it like again we've done we've actually done all the research customer interviews and stuff to see when surveys to see where people are listening a lot of people are listening while, I mean, while driving, obviously, I think number one is while, number one is while driving closely followed by cooking and then not, and then followed not too far down by gardening.

45:29Interesting. Which is interesting. So in all of those contexts, video is just suboptimal, but you do need to find them in the first place. And a lot of them do come through from YouTube. So what's up guys? I hope you're enjoying this episode. I'd love to grow the show and I know that this episode can help someone that you know. So if you're enjoying this episode and you think it could be useful for someone that you know or in your network, then please just take out WhatsApp right now and send them it. Hopefully it can help someone that you know. It really helps us grow the show and it really helps you help someone out.

46:03So it's a win-win. Now let's get back into this week's episode. What would be the split of like YouTube audience versus audio audience? Would it be 50-50 or is it more like? It's about 60-40 audio. 60-40 audio. And your age of listener? Yeah, the dominant age is like 35 to 55. 35 to 55. So they are probably more likely Apple Podcasts? Yeah, and then Apple Podcasts totally dominates. Yeah, because when they go to type podcast on their phone, Apple Podcasts comes up first. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know how unique that is. It's been ages since I made another show. I don't know if you experienced that.

46:47I think Spotify is young. Spotify is definitely really catching up now in general. Spotify is a big fit for the younger shows, definitely. Right. Okay. Yeah. That's what we see. Apple is like older audiences. Right. Okay. Spotify younger. Yeah. And YouTube is huge for the TV audience, people watching on TV. Yeah. And for Discovery, like you say. and then they'll probably discover it there then or on social and then come across yeah to listen to the rest of it on their drive or their commute or yeah yeah we definitely see the odd um outlier which is quite interesting where we'll get say we do an episode that's of interest to an older audience we'll see like a massive outlier that's a i don't know if it's 65 upwards or something on youtube i can't remember exactly what the age range is but the oldest age range they're all watching it on TVs and because of their, their older, I think the sort of pain point effectively is more acute and they're watching it on TV, probably in the background somewhere.

47:49We sometimes get, get the odd outlier off that. It's kind of interesting, I guess. Yeah. What have been the other big unlocks? I think sharing it's the number one most shared show in the UK. How does that come to be? Is it by accident or do you engineer that? Yeah. So there's something really interesting here right so you know when you launch a show i think something everyone always does is say all right we'll put in a cta that says yeah subscribe on wherever and share with a friend yeah so we didn't do that for ages because jonathan the ceo was like no this is pure brand it's all value we're not making any requests yeah it's just give give give and i was like really yeah fine let's do that and so we did that for like age i think it was like maybe nine months or so yeah so we hadn't we hadn't asked for anything and then i persuaded him or for some reason he changed his mind and so we put in a cta that said if you've got value from the show please share it with a friend basically that was it and honestly it was like a cliff and to have a data a set of that size and not ask anything until quite late is is pretty rare i think so it's a pretty cool insight so just over that one week we just saw if you think of the graph going like this it just went boom hockey stick up like that yeah and then yeah just and then i think it sort of steepened for a bit afterwards so yeah ask people to share and they will it's wild but people do stuff when asked, especially when you're given loads of value.

49:24Where do your CTAs come in? Do you, do you have again, like a formula? So we've got four CTAs per show. Yeah. They're at 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%. Yeah. Like how do you position them? Yeah. So I think a really interesting piece on this is, um, and shout out to Sam actually, um, Zoe, who did this bit of research. basically we need to deliver on value just before asking for something. And this is actually known by psychologists that if you basically give someone something and then you ask just afterwards, the amount of stuff that they will give you or their likelihood of saying yes just skyrockets. There's like a famous experiment with a can of Coke in a doctor's surgery if anyone's interested in that kind of stuff.

50:17But basically what we worked out was if we deliver on something in a really sort of punchy short way and then we ask, our conversion from, in this case, view to subscriber, which we measure, just shot up. And so what it specifically is, the final quickfire question is you get, so Jonathan says, you have a whole sentence for this one. And then he asked the question. But just before the episode starts, we basically say, right, we're going to give you a one. We're going to say you have one sentence for this one, but you have to answer in one sentence. And like, we're not messing around because, and here's what, you know, we're explaining.

50:54Basically, it leads for more people to subscribe. And the reason is, is that we're making a prompt all in a short space of time that they won't have forgotten in the time that they hear the CTA. Yeah. So we're saying it's going to be a one sentence answer. The guest then delivers a one sentence answer. So we made a promise. we delivered on the promise. So when we ask, we're in a stronger position. Yeah. And it's so crazy that that's measurable. It's significant and measurable on YouTube. Wow. Subs to, views to sub, subs to view. Wow. So that's when you ask them to subscribe to the channel. Exactly.

51:28Yeah. So straight after that value question has been delivered. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Make promises. And do you do that? What CTAs do you actually do in your episodes? Is it a follow at the start? Yeah. Because that's nice and easy. Yeah. Yeah. And then do you have like ad slots and then a share thing at the end when, when they've got to the end of the episode? Like, how do you think about? Yeah. So we've got a, we've got the CTA. Yeah. Subscribed CTA at the beginning. A buy the product CTA. Cause we think like there's a few different, there's a few different theories behind why we do that, which maybe aren't that interesting.

52:03Maybe they are. But basically, yeah, you do an easy one first. Yeah. And so then someone said yes to one, one thing potentially. and then the other thing is arguably further in they've been engaging for longer than you ask for something harder which is like to buy something um so you'll put that two-thirds the way through and then we do a similar one at the end um in the outro on um on audio we do that on youtube we're actually doing abrupt ending because you know that's better for retention and stuff so we think just abrupt ending yeah um and then the other thing we do and i would definitely recommend this to people is we swap between lead magnet and selling.

52:43And actually we should probably do more lead magnets, honestly, because giving someone something for free converts incredibly high. Surprise, surprise. And then you can get them in the email funnel and then you can nudge them more. And email is like a great way to sell stuff. So we mix it in with that. So we'll be like your ultimate gut guide for 2025 or something. You can download that is where then we've got their email list and they've subscribed to marketing options. And, you know, cool. Let's talk about the other growth tactics that you've built into the system. Yeah. What would be another high value one for people to look at?

53:25Would it be the thumbnail testing that you've done? It's kind of an interesting story. actually discovering that initially was when the CEO of Zoe was kind of grooming me to come over and do this, you know, as my only thing. I'm not sure if it was part of the same tactic, but got added to a chain with Stephen Bartlett who said, hey, you know, it's in our interest. So he's an investor in Zoe. And so saying it's in our interests now that you guys know everything we know. And so we went and hung out for the day at the DOAC studio and hung out with those guys. and it was awesome. And it was funny because a lot of the stuff you're like, yeah, yeah, we know this, we know this, but there were like, you know, a couple of tidbits.

54:04And I think that the big one was, um, was thumbnail testing. And so this is pretty widely known now. Um, but essentially the thumbnail is the highest point of leverage, right? It's the first thing that people see. So if you can get more people to click, you know, it's a massive opportunity to, so you should put time into getting that right so before things go into youtube we'll do 10 or so different thumbnails and they will go out as ads on facebook which say you can you know you can look on our facebook library if you want and they say you know episode coming out next week and then actually when you click them it'll take you to a splash page which asks you to subscribe to the youtube channel so we're not losing you know we only spend a little bit of money so i I think we spend like a, is it like a fiver testing each one?

54:54So we spend like 50 quid a week. Yeah. So it's quite small, you know, small, but the impact is absolutely massive. Do you put the same spend on every one pretty much and then go off click through or? We go off click through rate, but we actually do it with, so Meta post a couple of years ago, changed this kind of AI model where it actually allocates the spend itself. So we used to do it the pure, which is probably slightly truer way, but it's quicker to do it. that way and i think it probably comes to the same conclusions in fact we tested it and it does all the time so yeah yeah yeah um yeah so that's the nuance if anyone knows how to use meta business manager which is a bitch it's funny because uh jonas is sat behind the camera there and he swears by the old school method still i keep telling him no ai is good man ai is good well i rate jonas for for that but um yeah we have actually we want to be yeah we're robust we're robust in our scientific approach yeah good yeah um yeah no i i don't know that makes any difference so what did you find there did you find anything in terms of developing the thumbnails from what they were to what they are now um yeah make the so the the big one was faces really matter okay yeah so after sort of doing loads of different like headlines and stuff we're like okay what if we just do the same you You know, the same ones, but then we, so same headline, but then we do an extra set with a slightly different expression on the face.

56:25Massive. Yeah. Also how, how much you zoom in on the face. So you want your face to like take up a big portion of the thumbnail. People are just drawn to faces. Eyes connect with eyes. You just can't help it. So the bigger you make them, the more powerful. I'm sort of of the theory. I don't know if this is like true or backed by data or whether it's just my like belief, but I feel like. keep it like five or six words is pretty as far as you want to go. Yeah, definitely. And I think it's because of the way, if you almost think of someone's brain having a frame rate, I feel like I can read six words in a thought, but any more than that, it's like I'm having to do another thought, you know?

57:09It's got to be scannable. Yeah, for sure. Just a quick one for me to say, I love building this show and I love building this community of listeners to Creative Playbooks. but I'd love to hear more from you. So please drop a comment. Let me know what you think of this week's episode and who you'd like to hear from in the future. And I'll make sure I respond to every single one. I'd love to hear from you. We've also found that images on them. If you look at Stephen's the last couple of weeks, he's now found that. Okay. Having like an image there as well, just to support the story. And then with some clients, we've also found having the hand in there.

57:48um well have you got that i know about that one yeah yeah for sure so that's that's actually we we were suggested that early on from one of our performance marketers yeah it was like trust if you want to win a yeah win on meta ads just put a hand in there and so we yeah we'd experiment with a bit of that yeah for sure agreed have you done anything else or anything that hasn't worked that's gone wrong yeah actually um interestingly Interestingly, on that day that we spent with Stephen, there were two takeaways. One was the thumbnail testing, which was an absolute game changer and amazing. The other was this tactic, which was to send spend from Meta to the YouTube video in the first hour.

58:37Because the idea being that, you know, on YouTube, a lot is dictated when you launch the video, if it starts to get early traction, then YouTube's like, oh, this is good. Show it to more people. And so the idea being that if you then engineer that from Meta, it's like pouring gasoline on the fire. Anyway, we spent about 10 grand doing it. It doesn't do anything. Basically, I think it's a really good story from Stephen and that, and it actually definitely worked for them once, but there was detail and nuance in the... I'm not saying the story's not true, to be clear. there's just a lot of nuance in the story.

59:14So when they did it, it was a guy in South Africa. It kind of found an audience of people in South Africa, which you wouldn't have found before. And so that was really, we didn't understand that nuance. We just thought, okay, chuck a thousand pounds at it. It will probably help it pick up. It doesn't work. But I guess the core principle is just always be running experiments. Absolutely. Do you do that? Do you have like one experiment you're running at a time or? one area that you're trying to improve constantly or like how do you think about that process of continuous improvement in the team and experimentation yeah so you know what we used to be so much better than this than we are and then my my scope really expanded in the company and then everything got bigger and i think we've we've got you know we've like honestly we've definitely got worse at it but yeah we um and i've yeah we've just got people have been put on other stuff but yeah we we used to always do that and so we would just have a weekly meet we We have a weekly team meeting, which is, I think, again, it's the kind of stuff I find interesting.

1:00:15Don't know if anyone else does. But like if you run a company or any kind of thing, I feel like your weekly meeting should be like your. It's like the engine room, right? Yeah. And so on one of that, just one of the items that we'd hit every single item. Steve Jobs does the same thing. He never allegedly never let anyone else take over organizing the Monday agenda. Yeah. He would never let that job because he was like, this is this is the engine room of Apple. so he owned that forever um and one and you just bash through every item and you make sure you never miss one and one of the items was just like what's the experiment for this week and yeah like that that spawn things like that that cta thing sam who used to be in my team he used to he's great at this kind of stuff so he would he would take away you know have a hypothesis how do we prove it let's see and then come back and just have like a you know deck or something next week and we'd like wow cool and then we and then we build it into the machine again systemized to optimize right so then we go in and we tweak the sops like the software to say okay we built that step in and i love this stuff very very cool yeah any other growth stuff yeah experiments things that went well things that didn't go well that you'd recommend people try or avoid yeah so i think something that's um that worked super well um and we still do and just like i'm not affiliated with this company i totally should be actually i'm now thinking maybe i can then i'm thinking that we'll get the affiliates sorted i'm just yeah before it comes out yeah no worries yeah so currently not affiliated with this company maybe i will be before this comes out um pod roll all right yeah yeah so what they do is they place in other shows episode two will be your show interesting yeah so so if someone jumps onto their spotify feed um for say peter is here and then they like they look at that and then the second one is like it's kind of clearly an ad but it's in the context of um of the feed episode two will be one of our episodes interesting um yeah so it's like a kind of like an in feed swap but automated and and yeah it's wicked it's really good um and we've done a lot of paid experiments um and that is by far the cheapest way to get new audio audio listeners in terms of paid so i would definitely recommend that for sure interesting yeah so you're basically just doing feed swaps there and then yeah i guess again if your core infrastructure in the episode is set up to get them to subscribe yeah then you've got an organic engine of sorts they're paid but like then you're making sure they actually convert through the content um that's cool exactly and then you can pick what kind of it's really nice because you can pick your kind of audience vertical you're like well people in that podcast are gonna they gonna like what we're selling and you know yeah it's really good let's talk about the zoe funnel and how this fuels the business yeah how do you think about it is part of it just building that brand connection and awareness with existing customer base and is the other side of it bringing new customers in yeah yeah so it's definitely both so if we touched on already always talk about um i use the term of a trust unlock and it's like the idea of if you have trust all things become easier yeah and so i feel like podcasting is unrivaled in terms of like the trust building like medium i think it's the one like there's no other opportunity to have such a long time with people and in a human way conversations like there's also kind of releasing oxytocin as well people are properly bonding with your brand effectively yeah over really long spaces of time so building trust and then building brand as well so brand is like hard to build.

1:04:14And then if everyone's going, what does that mean? I like the definition of saying like, it's the thing that people say that you are in an elevator. So if, you know, if asked, might be a more pithy way to say that, but so yeah, building like positioning yourself as who you are. And so then at that point, maybe down the line, when someone thinks I've got this need and your product fulfills it then they know where to go because you've imprinted on their mind forever and i think that's like one of the main differences between brand versus product and performance marketing so like with yeah with like performance marketing you're trying to get someone to convert like with the thing right now but with brand you're you're um building mental availability in people's minds and then so at that point of of a decision of like i've got this need and your product being the solution you're there your trust is top of the top of mind basically and so we're yeah building brand and building trust and then so the yeah that's so i've sort of dug into the building brand side and then the trust thing is why i think it's really important not to take all the all the credit with like um with sales is like ultimately it's probably the performance marketing that's getting them over over the edge but the fact that they've built so much trust through the podcast makes the whole thing work better and ultimately reduces your your acquisition cost um and actually in um i know you had alex or moses marketing guy on here a while ago in one of his books he talks about this time when he decided to pivot his organic strategy to do something new and his organic strategy he's kind of famous for like a high volume of stuff yeah so it's quite a big machine and he pivoted like the objectives of that and the kind of the content the comms objectives to be something about something else and all his facebook ads flopped and you know and they were like what the hell's happened and they put pointed it back and you could tell like um our old cmi cmi used to say marketing is a team sport and i love that because it is like you build a machine with loads of touch points and and like more touch points working in unison is better than fewer and this i think is an interesting one as well in terms of psychology you're more likely to trust something you you see in a few different contexts yes so it feels more believable um yeah if you see a billboard you hear a thing you you know you see an ad on facebook you feel like wow this thing is up it's like it's everywhere it must be massive it must be like something to trust and so yeah marketing is definitely a team game is there any metric that you're tracking or the business asks you to track yeah um to prove the conversion or prove the value of the podcast are you tracking lead magnet sign up so you're tracking um conversion pixels yeah like things like this it's the latter yeah so we use um we use a thing called magellan ai i think there's a few of these around now yeah um but we're tracking sales modeled and that is basically a pixel tracking situation um that's as deeply as i understand it yeah so basically it's tracking who's listened to the podcast and then followed through to convert on the site.

1:07:45Exactly. Yeah. By their IP address, I think. And it's quite an expensive product, isn't it, Zoe? This is like a premium product. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really good point. I think that's what's a big part of why this is so valuable is the product's like 300 quid. Yeah. And we're causing a lot of conversions there. So yeah, it generates a lot of revenue. I guess that shows that if you build a premium content product yeah do you do you think that of the podcast as part of the funnel or as a product offering it from the business like how does it how does it sit for you so it sits as a product okay for sure however that doesn't neglect that it's part of the funnel but in terms of like what's being you've got to like use the terms and the frames that are useful.

1:08:34And yeah, for us, it being a, it's 100 % a product. It's one of our free, free offerings that we give people. And then, you know, those free offerings deliver value and build reciprocity and trust and build up to people thinking, I'll buy, I'll buy something from you as well. This podcast is produced by 7x content, which is my full service podcast agency. We work with the world's leading brands and creators to create incredible shows. And you can check out our roster at 7xcontent.com if you'd like to make an incredible show or take your existing one to the next level we'd love to hear from you now let's get back into this week's episode one thing we haven't touched on is short form yeah how do you think about that is that important to you for the show or we use short form on instagram um yeah we've got a big instagram as well um we're we're posting clips every single week um you know it's without doubt making a making a significant impact on um on the growth of the podcast no doubt um have i done a very good job of measuring it not really and the other thing is what's i guess interesting thing that we don't do is shorts and so when we were considering this um a while back and caveat out that we actually maybe should start to reconsider this now but at the time we did a big deep dive into other channels in the health space yeah to see if anyone was winning on shorts and there was a lot of the people where we were sort of serving a similar audience or having a similar value proposition it just wasn't working and i think it's it tied in with other things we know that this is people's health so they're actually willing to put in the time to read longer stuff to listen to longer things so shorts are just something we decided not to do and you know actually yeah university it looked like there wasn't much there just wasn't much um appetite for it um now the other thing that we do do is like 10 minute clips yeah um and they they can work pretty well and i think there that's like a you find a different audience for sure there were a load of i've spoken to just you know like n of one type beliefs i guess like speaking to friends who say oh yeah i only listen to clips on or i only watch clips on youtube a podcast i'll never watch a podcast on there so it's kind of interesting like okay so there's some people there and yeah we put those we put those on the channel and actually we've just transitioned a couple of months ago you might be able to speak way more to this because i think we were kind of late to the party here of we've got a new channel which is we're mostly putting clips on 10 to 15 minute clips but we're also probably going to put some other stuff around the same time frame yeah i get you but yeah we the the clips don't perform they definitely have value and a few of them perform but in general we believe that having it on a separate channel is going to work a lot better yeah so i don't know if you have an opinion on that yeah i think they're very like like you say they're very valuable for hitting people in a more easy to consume 10, 15 minute chunk, which works really well on YouTube.

1:11:47It is the dominant format is 10 minute clips. Um, so it works, but as you say, it can confuse the channel because if you want your main format to be these one hour episodes, then if you start piling up your feed with these 10 minutes, then you may be confusing the purity of who's subscribed so can make sense to have it on a secondary channel and i think the other side of it is it is more of a volume game right so people like lex friedman will be creating like 10 20 10 minute clips from an air from a from a show um and just churning them out and i think that's because it is it is a bit more of a volume thing um and it's more shots on goal yeah the only person who i think does it really well is chris williamson because he will use it as a promotional tool yeah so he'll get his guests to talk on a wide topic and then release two 10 minute clips before that episode comes out yeah on the same channel on the same channel and it drives a lot of awareness of the fact that a big guest is coming on.

1:12:59Okay, yeah. But he specifically chooses the topics to be big open topics that he expects to do well in that 10-minute format. Amazing, I'm going to go and listen to one of those when I get home. Yeah, he does a nice job of it. And I think another nice thing to think about is maybe like thinking of that 10-minute thing as an adjacent piece of content before the show or alongside it. So the overlap, they do quick fire questions with a guest walking around outside before the main interview. So again, it's like an easier point of contact for you to come across the episode and then go and listen to the full thing or get excited about it.

1:13:40So, yeah, but it, yeah, it's a, it's a tough, it's a tough format, I think, to have on your, your main channel. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about the team you need to produce a show like this. how do you set up your team so yeah let's talk about the structure and we won't i think we've probably not got enough time to talk about the nuances of getting amazing people that's definitely a bigger topic but in terms of how to set it up yeah um the structure that we have and that i've found overdoing you know quite a few before is we basically have so you have a production coordinator um and so they kind of own you know they've got like the kind of core kpis of like is the thing going to go out at the right time every single week um ultimately that's like the final thing so they own that and so all of the bits in between are kind of their responsibility to um take hold of so yeah i have the production coordinator and then we have the um long form editor who spends about two and a half three days a week um then we have and you know we we have two different edits as well as we met two different intros but also two different edits so the long form video one happens first and then we we actually do another edit because you can chop a bit more in audio without kind of jittery video so do a second one deliver that as well and then we have the um video trailer editor does about yeah two days a week as well people always mind blown how long it takes but you know well it just there's no shortcuts at the moment And then we have the mix and sound designer.

1:15:17And then I think that's probably, I'm from like an audio mastering background, so I'm a little bit obsessed with that stuff and I am not willing to, you know, make trade-offs again. So yeah, so that person does the sound design of the audio intro mix, you know, mix volume levels and the same on the video one. He actually doesn't do the sound design for the video, the trailer editor does that, but then the the mix engineer does the the mix basically so but what about so like in terms then the actual people putting out and distributing it yeah do you have like a youtube producer or like a producer who is in charge of the titles thumbnails that kind of thing and then like a social person who does the social channels or is that all one person or so putting it out in headlines and thumbnails that's all the production coordinator yeah then we have a social person yeah um and then because we sort of think of social as a slightly different unit um yeah our social media manager owns all of that and yeah all the processes are interlinked but yeah she owns all of that would she make the clips and everything as well yeah she has she has a freelancer to help her who sits under her and the production coordinator comes up with the titles and thumbnails yeah yeah interesting yeah and actually that's a very collaborative thing with um uh with me throughout because because i'm kind of like so i'm head of content and so it's a more of a strategic role however um obviously when we're coming up with our content strategy that ultimately is kind of saying how are we going to package this which pretty much means headlines and thumbnails and like the topic of the thing and so yeah it's um very collaborative that it's very high impact, high leverage kind of work.

1:17:04So yeah. And would you come up, I presume you come up with that before the show, before you record the show? Yeah. So we've got a really beautiful template actually for how we, how we create our pitches. So from headline to what's in the episode to grading the guests, the frameworks, whatever. Um, and I guess actually I could share that with you as a, something to download in the show notes if people are interested. Yeah, that sounds great. Really interesting. So yeah, when we're, when we're kind of thinking about these and like we, we bring in, you know, and these kind of, when we're thinking like plan for the, for the quarter, for example, we'll bring Tim in, we'll bring Jonathan in, we'll have these massive brainstorms and then we'll sort of then get more tactical as things go on.

1:17:49But essentially you've got that kind of core like production team. Yeah. Then, and then kind of just sitting above it, above it is you who's kind of maybe thinking about the higher, more higher leverage decisions. And then you're doing planning every three months with the hosts the hosts and just thinking about what the next slate of episodes are going to look like and the guests you want to have on and things like that yeah yeah exactly do you have a guest booker that's the production coordinator as well wow yeah yeah this person does so much but i mean like this comes from the model of in our old you know when we had a you know a podcast company with loads of shows yeah we found that one production coordinator could do could run two shows and they're just yeah they're they basically piece everything together and yeah they book guests as well yeah it's pretty easy to book guests in out so you hear from other you know other shows that all this like these stories of of hustle to get this guest i took so much whatever we're just like often these people are scientists right we're like hey do you want to have an opportunity to like speak to a million people they're like yeah yeah pretty easy so it doesn't take that long yeah you know it's not celebrities it's not kind of like relationship based it's more yeah just yeah just straightforward we do have a lot of relationships but it's not hard to put guests ultimately in our in our case awesome rich i've learned so much we'll definitely get a hold of um a couple of your documents as many as you'll give away and we'll we'll give them away as a lead magnet yeah uh in the show notes but thank you so much for doing this.

1:19:21You've shared like so much wisdom, insight, frameworks, hard earned as well. And it's a phenomenal show. I listen to it regularly and I can see why it's so successful because it's not just the product of all these frameworks and growth hacks and all the rest of it. It is just great content. So yeah, congrats on everything you built and thanks for sharing it with us. Mate, thanks for having me. It's been awesome. Yeah, I really enjoyed this. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, why not check out two of my favorites? One with Grace Andrews from Diary of a CEO and the second with Daniel Priestley on building a personal brand.

1:19:54These are two of my absolute favorite episodes and I think you're gonna love them. Let me know what you think in the comments and I'll see you next time.