Pivoting Life and a Podcasting Business with Daniel J. Lewis

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. Welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. This is JLD and this show is brought to you by the HubSpot. Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like This Old Marketing. Today, we'll be breaking down, pivoting life, and a podcasting business. To drop these value bombs, I brought Daniel J. Lewis into EO Fire Studios. Daniel is a Christian father, podcasting educator, advocate, and innovator, multi-award Hall of Fame podcaster, host of the Audacity to Podcast, pod-gagement inventor, and international podcast day co-founder. In today's Foundation, we'll talk about catastrophe, how to react.

0:39We'll talk about podcasting 2.0, AI and podcasting, and oh so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Daniel and our sponsors. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lance, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. AI technology is transforming the way we do business, and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. The internet's best converting checkout is here.

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1:37Daniel, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Well, the last time I was on the podcast, I said something for my success quote that was a scripture verse. I'm going to tie back into that. Here we go, full circle. I think that true success comes from following God's principles in the Bible. You don't have to be a Christian to be successful, so I'm not saying that. But the people who are successful are following those basic principles that work and apply differently to different people, but they work. Fire Nation, today we're focusing on pivoting life in a podcasting business.

2:16And we're going to start with catastrophe because we need to be honest with ourselves. Catastrophe, it hits us all at some point. If some of us haven't experienced it yet, it's probably in your future, I'm sorry to say. And those that have experienced it, they know that it's a very difficult time. So let's talk about rebuilding both a life and a business after your specific catastrophe struck. Yeah, it's crazy that the two biggest changes in my professional life have resulted from changes in my personal life. And the latest one was from, unfortunately, an unwanted divorce. and that just shook me to my core and made me question so many things in my life and in my business and just changed what I was able to focus on.

3:05And so I love your acronym for focus, following one course until success. And that's what I had to refocus in my business is looking at what am I able to do now that life has significantly changed, like looking at being a full-time dad and what is my availability to work on things? What's my availability to travel? How many things can I really think about and juggle at the same time? Or like I like to put it, how many sticks or how many hands can I have in fires? Because I don't have the energy or the resources or the margin that I used to have. So what can I still do really well? And for me, that meant that word that was very difficult to say.

3:54After saying so many yeses to things and seeing great success in many things, I had to start saying no to some things and really focus in on what am I able to do? What can I really focus on to grow the most? And that would still enable me to have the life that I want to have for myself and for my son. I love the fact that you appreciate the word focus and this acronym follow one course until success. And I will say the fact that you appreciate it is even more kind of meaningful because I look at you as somebody who actually has displayed unbelievably high focus for a long time. I mean, I take myself back to 2012.

4:37I mean, you are a guy that I learned from in the podcasting space. I mean, with the audacity to podcast, I mean, that was like a show that I would just consume at a high quantity because every show was just packed with value, packed with learnings for a newbie podcaster like myself. And then to see the different things that you created, they were within the podcasting space. They were solving problems that podcasters had. You became known for that because of that focus. And then I love also what you were sharing about, you know, saying yes. Like I get it, Fire Nation. It's exciting to say yes to things because it's like the opportunity, like you're opening doors, like what's behind that door?

5:14I don't know. The grass is always greener. But when you say yes to one thing, you're saying no to every other thing that you could otherwise be doing or have done in this place. And that's a huge revelation for someone like Daniel and myself to have made at some point because I was a yes person for sure for the first couple of years. And I think it's okay in the seasons of your career to be a yes person, to learn and to fail and to succeed and to network and connect. But when you say no, you're opening yourself up to having the space and capacity to say yes when finally the right thing comes in front of you.

5:49Now, I do want to go back to you being a full-time dad because I'm a full-time dad right now. I mean, I have a one-year-old son. His name is Bo Arthur Dumas. Those initials, Fire Nation, bad. I get it. We're looking forward to it. We've already owned up to it. So I'm a full-time dad. I mean, obviously, Kate, my wife, is a full-time mom. So we're in this together. We're doing it every day. And we often say to ourselves, you know, man, when Kate was first pregnant, we were like, I kind of hope we have twins to just knock it out. And now we look at each other, we're like, oh my God, thank God we didn't have twins because we love being able to tag team this.

6:26Like she's on, I'm off. I'm on, she's off. How did you handle being a full-time single dad while running a podcasting business? It was a struggle. It really was. Because like you were saying, yeah, I didn't have the teammate there. and during all of this there was also the emotional pressure of the whole divorce and custody stuff and and i i want to say this on a personal level to anyone listening if at all possible save your marriage fight hard to save your marriage if that means giving up some things of yourself that means changing yourself cutting out some selfishness or whatever if you are in the wrong fix it save your marriage.

7:09It is so worth it to save it. Unfortunately, mine just couldn't be saved. So I had that emotional weight of all of that, plus this professional weight of the level of, we'll call it perfection, perfectionism. That's maybe a better way that I reached a certain level of being able to produce things at a high level that fed my sense of perfectionism. And I wouldn't say those things were perfect, but they were very good because of the amount of time I could put into them. I couldn't do that anymore. So what I had to do while I'm juggling being a full-time dad and trying to run my business, saying no to those things that I couldn't do as well, and also changing my expectations for myself, realizing that I simply don't have the capacity to make certain things to the same level anymore.

8:02Now that doesn't mean compromising quality, but it does mean changing expectations. Like instead of being able to record hour-long podcast episodes, maybe I need to narrow it down to what can I say in 10 or 15 minutes that's still as valuable but will not take me as much time to prepare, to edit, produce, all of that stuff that's around that. That kind of thing, changing my expectations as well as being creative with my time and my energy and my focus. And stuff like, well, while my son is awake, I need to be able to be interruptible or just outright focus on him, especially when he was younger.

8:42When this all started, when he was around a year old, I really needed to focus on him because those were extremely important years for him. now that he's older and in fact homeschooling, he can work on things and focus on his own work while I can do my own work, but I have to choose what work I do during those times. So while he is awake and doing his homeschooling, I have to be able to be interruptible. So that during the day is when I choose to do my more interruptible work because occasionally he'll need to ask, how do you spell this word? Or he wants to tell me something that he learned or anything like that.

9:24And so I need to be available to that because my top priority is him. My business exists so that I can be a dad to my son. I do my lower priority, interruptible work when I need to be interruptible. Then I save the focused work where I really need to be in the zone for something. I save that for at the nighttime after he's gone to bed, or I could flip things around to the other side and do it in the morning before he wakes up. But that's when I can get that really deep work in when I need to be totally in the zone, focused, absolutely no interruptions. First off, thank you for being transparent and thank you for being vulnerable because not a lot of people are able and or are willing to speak about real life because this is real life.

10:10This is happening all the time. I mean, I always like to share with people whenever I'm having an interaction and they're talking about somebody, I'm like, you know, do you really know, though, what's going on in their life? Like they might have just had a loved one diagnosed with cancer or they may be going through a health scare themselves or they may have had this business issue or they may have had that. Like it could be a million things. And, you know, as humans, we're so much like taking things personally, judging every little facial tick of everybody when we're talking with. listen, that individual is potentially living a quiet life of desperation.

10:46And we need to understand that and to have understanding and empathy for that. And, and also some space for that as well, because that is just a fact. So I appreciate you sharing that Daniel, because I know there's listeners that are going through something difficult right now. I've gone through difficult things over the 12 years of this business, not to mention that the 44 years of my life and my time in the military and Iraq and other things. I mean, it's just, it's part of the life experience and the life journey. And when people can talk about it, it can be so helpful. And Fire Nation, we are now going to shift into a little more podcasting focused stuff as soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors.

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14:33If you're interested in learning more, head over to author100.com and sign up for a free call with me. That's author100.com. Dan, you are back, and my podcast reviews was originally announced on Entrepreneurs on Fire back on episode 549. This is back in 2014, which is crazy. Over 10 years ago. And by the way, Fire Nation, my podcast reviews, that's not mine. That's Daniel's business that he had created. That was his product that he created, my podcast reviews. Talk about its revolution to pod engagement. Yeah, well, you just demonstrated one of the reasons why I needed to change the branding because to say my podcast reviews, that word in there, my, starts to make it a little bit confusing.

15:20You know, if someone wanted to say, according to data from my podcast reviews, well, wait, are you quoting data from your podcast reviews or from the service? So I realized it had a branding change that needed to go into place. And the product needed to grow, too, because when I first announced it and started it way back 10 years ago, it was the first service of its kind to gather podcast reviews from nearly 200 places. Like when you look at your podcast in Apple Podcasts and look at the ratings and reviews, you're seeing that from only your country. So if you're in the United States, you don't see ratings and reviews from Canada or from the United Kingdom and vice versa.

16:00That was the core problem that my podcast reviews was created to solve. And it's been doing that well for all of those years. And let me jump in here before you continue, because when I installed and started using that, I was blown away because I was like, wow, I'm now seeing these Canadian, these Australian, these England, these Indian reviews. And what was really interesting and important to Daniel's point here is that I was seeing and getting different kinds of themes and reviews from different countries that really did impact how I approached the show because it wasn't just me seeing the USA reviews.

16:36It was now much more comprehensive. So thank you for that, Daniel, and continue. Exactly. And what you were getting from that was engagement with your audience because there is a myth out there that you need certain ratings and reviews numbers in order to get featured or rank better. That's not true. Ratings and reviews do not affect your ranking in Apple podcasts and other apps, but they are fantastic for the value you can learn and then improve what you deliver to your audience. So it's really about engagement and thus the branding shift that I started making for my podcast reviews to pod gaugement short for podcast engagement because ratings and reviews are just one way to engage your audience.

17:20I wanted to build a product that would help podcasters engage with their audiences in more ways, like collecting feedback from their audience, written and voicemail feedback, because it is so fun to include your audience's voice, their literal voice in your podcast and share that with your audience. And that gets other audience members involved too. And when they get more deeply engaged with your podcast, when they feel part of the community and part of what you're doing, then they become super fans and want to promote your podcast to other podcasts and other audiences out there and get other people listening so that then you grow from that.

18:01So I really wanted to focus on the engagement because even if you're not interested in growing your podcast, one of the most rewarding aspects of doing a podcast is that connection with your audience and that comes through engagement. So I started building a product way back in 2019, rebuilding my podcast reviews. And initially I thought I want to make this start tracking the charts because back then Chartable had just come out and I realized this is something that I want to do too. And I'd been planning to do it. So I finally started learning how to code myself instead of hiring overseas help who did a great job programming my podcast reviews.

18:39I wanted to build it myself this time. So I learned how to code. I started building it, started making the system to track all of the charts, 33 ,000 charts every hour. And I've been tracking that for five years and I started building this product to do it. But along the way, I discovered other data, I discovered other cool things and started building other products instead, while I've been collecting these gigabytes of data over the years. And then when I launched Podgagement, it was with that new shift of focus of this is no longer only about ratings and reviews. It's about all of these different ways that you can engage with your audience and track that engagement with your audience.

19:25So now with Chartable having closed a week ago, it's exciting to see that Podgagement can fill in that gap for podcasters who maybe they want to see where do they position in the charts in Uganda or the United States or what categories have they been featured in. They can see that data now with Podgagement as well as all of the other tools engaging their audience so that they can grow their podcast and if nothing else, so they can build a tighter relationship with their audience. Without going too deep down a rabbit hole, I will say that engaging a podcast audience, it seems impossible to many podcasters because, you know, a lot of people are listening when they're listening, when they're running, when they're biking, when they're driving in a car and maybe they're listening to an episode that was a week ago, a month ago.

20:12So they don't necessarily feel like they have like this direct connection with the host in that moment, like potentially like a live show might, for instance. So maybe just give us one way that you would really want to share with our listeners who are podcasters and just content creators in general. How do they increase engagement with the listeners? The biggest thing is whatever engagement you have right now, use it. Even if it's just a simple message from someone just saying, hey, I really appreciate your podcast. use that share it with your audience because here's what happens it's really viral in a way when someone else hears another audience member mentioned thanked and praised and they get that shout out and maybe some of their message is read on the podcast many other people start to think oh that's really cool he or she is actually listening to us i want to send something to too, there's also the pride aspect of it, of I want to be featured.

21:13I want to hear my name in the podcast, too. I want my feedback read and considered. So it's really inspirational to other people to get engaged, too. So that's that desire factor that really gets them interested. And when they want to engage, that will make it a higher priority for them to do so. So if they are listening to a podcast while they're out running or if they have their hands busy, maybe they can save that podcast for later so that they can pick it up and remember, oh yeah, I wanted to send that feedback. And some of the tools that I'm trying to build would be to make it easier for someone who is engaged in something else at that time while they're listening to the podcast, but make it easier for them to send some feedback, a voicemail, a text message, or different things like that so that they could send that thought in the moment that they have it.

22:06What is podcasting 2.0? This builds on top of what podcasting has already been. And this ties in so well with this idea of engaging your podcast audience. So podcasting is based on RSS as a technology, and that's based on some other programming stuff, coding languages and such. Podcasting for so long has done pretty much the same thing. You put out episodes, people download those and watch or listen, and that's it. So podcasting 2.0 builds on top of that with all new features that help the audience to engage with the episodes more or help the podcaster to better monetize or monetize through different ways.

22:47It makes the episodes more engaging. So here are some actual features and benefits that you could get with it. For example, chapters. We've had chapters inside of MP3 files for a while. And those can be where you could jump to a certain question that's in an interview or a certain guest or a certain segment of an episode. But to change those chapters in legacy podcasting 1.0 land, you would have to edit the MP3 file and re-upload that. But then none of your audience who's already downloaded the episode would get those corrected or new chapters. podcasting 2.0 moves the chapters into the cloud so that you can edit those after the episode has already been downloaded you can do more things with those too like changing the images or changing the chapters like if you have a special promotion and you want to display an image when you're talking about that promotion in your podcast and maybe that promotion expires well you could change the image after the fact so anyone who's listening could see that new image that says this offer has now expired, but here's a link to somewhere else you can go to get our new offer.

23:55You could do that kind of thing on the fly because it's hosted in the cloud. Other exciting things in development with podcasting 2.0 are cross app comments, where someone could be listening in one app, comment on the episode inside their podcast app, and someone in a completely different app can see that comment and comment as well or respond to that comment so you get a more community engagement with this as well and there's so much more like helping podcasts be more discoverable more accessible transcripts are made possible through podcasting 2.0 there's a special transcript tag where if you upload a transcript in an srt or a vtt format which are specific formats for transcripts.

24:40You can upload that and modern podcast apps can read that. And even Apple podcasts now supports this podcasting 2.0 feature that you can put your transcripts in there. So that makes it more accessible, more memorable, more understandable. Even if someone doesn't have accessibility issues, they could quickly turn on the transcript to see what you actually said. So maybe they could copy and paste that quote it, say, Hey, you gotta hear this podcast because they said this awesome thing. There's so much that can be done. And this is just the surface of podcasting 2.0, but it's really that next generation of what can a podcast do?

25:17How can an audience engage more with it and benefit more from podcasts through some of these technical things that we can build to make the technology actually disappear, but be more engaging for everyone. Daniel, your thoughts and opinions are someone's who I've really respected since the day I started podcasting and got into this industry. So this is kind of a personal question that I added on, which is about artificial intelligence, because it's what everybody's talking about now. It's what every business is trying to figure out how and if it plays a role into what they're doing. How do you see AI factor into podcasting?

25:57There are two ways I think it comes down to. And one way is good, one way is bad. First, I'll cover the bad. We could call it AI slop. I've heard that repeated by Adam Curry, the guy who created podcasting and is leading podcasting 2.0. AI slop is basically the stuff that AI generates for you. You can see this on YouTube if you try and look up review videos about certain products. You'll see all of these videos that use just an AI-generated voice. And all the video is really doing is they just looked up what are the top most reviewed products on Amazon. And they're just promoting affiliate links.

26:34They haven't actually tried the products. They're just using AI to create a video to try and promote affiliate stuff. Which is actually kind of against the terms of service with the Amazon affiliate program. but that aside that kind of content doesn't really engage with the audience it's not giving them what they actually want which is which product is actually better not just what does the ai say but also with creating content for a podcast some people are turning to ai to either create their outlines for them create the content or the script or sometimes even voicing the podcast for them like what we see with google's notebook lm service and how there are these podcasts out there that are purely AI driven, that's the AI slop.

27:17That's the bad aspect. I do have a quick question on that because you did bring up Notebook LM. Can you submit a podcast to Apple in your knowledge and to other platforms that is just Notebook LM's recording? Yes, you can. And I do think there is actually a place for it that could be legitimate. And that is consider it like a website that all they do is they write content. They put it out in written form and they just don't have the resources to record a podcast. So Notebook LM could be used to turn their written content into spoken content. But that really leans into what I think is the good use of AI.