Setting the Stage for Season 4

[00:00:04] How you been, my friend? Been good. How about you? Your shirt? Your shirt is messing me up. Because on my thing, it shows Rob Dunwood, and then it's got the loading thing. And so every time I look at you, I see that it's loading. And I'm like, is he paused? And then it's obviously not.

[00:00:26] No, I just need a shirt. So speaking of shirts, have you seen me, have I worn my, and I have several of them, my shirt that says, ask me about my podcast. Have I worn that? Yep. What we've been on? So man, not my idea. I saw the shirts on Amazon, so I just bought a couple. That is one of the best ways to get people to ask you about your podcast.

[00:00:55] You know, we've talked about this in the past, that in order for somebody to know about your show, the best way is to tell them about your show. But you never want to feel like that guy that is just, hey, let me tell you about my podcast. Hey, let me tell you about my podcast. Even though we probably should do that more than we do. But that shirt, it kind of breaks the ice because if somebody reads it and says, hey, you got a podcast, tell me about it. They have given you permission to have that conversation.

[00:01:21] That's a really good segue into what we're going to talk about today. So Rob, what I was thinking was, I mentioned in our chat that I was going to record this and we'll put it out to patrons. But I was thinking what we'd do is we would record maybe two or three minutes of where we're at on season four.

[00:01:40] So I don't even think I told you this, but one of the things that led to me even because we were off for darn near a month, which is not the first time that's happened. But usually that happens like over the holidays. So for just being the, you know, clearly it's the beginning of the summer. You know, you were gone. I was gone. There was a holiday in there. The schedules didn't line up.

[00:02:05] So we went like three, four weeks without having a conversation. And over that time, I read something that I read every June. It is, and we've talked about it on this show before, but it's basically 1,000 True Things. And it's just a, it's called a manifesto, but it's basically what this white paper talks about is that if you have 1,000 people who are rocking with you,

[00:02:32] that you ultimately can make a really nice, you know, middle income from 1,000 people who are truly rocking with the content that you're creating. And reading that and then coming back to, we're about to build a course. And I kept wondering in my mind is who are we building the course for? And, you know, Bodie, one of the things that I struggle with is like, I'm able to give people advice on podcasting and say, you know, look at someone's podcast and say,

[00:03:02] here, here's an issue that you might want to address. I'm able to do that very, very well. I've been doing it for a long time. You know, I'm very effective at doing that, but it's hard to do that to your own stuff. And I think that's kind of the case for everything. Like, you know, you'll find that like people who do like home organization generally have the messiest houses. People who have, you know, people who clean the best generally are, you know, are, you know, the messiest is kind of, it's kind of like that.

[00:03:29] So for me, it was, okay, I give this advice, but am I taking the advice? So I felt like we were building a course and I think that you and I, because we've been both have been doing this so long, we would have come up with, you know, 80% of what somebody in the position that we were presenting the course for would have wanted.

[00:03:51] But wouldn't it be better to actually have an audience just telling us, hey, we want this as compared to building something and then trying to go find an audience for it?

[00:04:00] That that's, that's one of the areas that I was coming to from this, that I felt like we were maybe building something that we didn't yet have an audience for as compared to building an audience and then figuring out what the audience wants and then delivering something to them that they actually have told us directly or indirectly that this is something that I'm looking for and need help with.

[00:04:22] I did not have an audience for as eloquent thought process as you did, but I was kind of in that same boat is if we build this and there's, you know, handful of people who get anything out of it.

[00:04:34] It's great for that handful of people and I'm not against building something for a handful of people, but ultimately I would rather build something that is like you said, is got, is going to, is going to be super helpful for a handful of people versus building something that would be kind of helpful for a lot more people.

[00:04:56] You know, the, the, the, the goal here is to put out a quality product and something that the folks who are in this community can actually utilize and, and, and do things. So, and we don't want to sometimes I'll give you an example, Rob, I mentioned before, this is why I'm all dirty right now. I was in my laundry room doing a remodel, right? And I'm hanging a cabinet and I got the cabinet rail and I went on the internet. I looked at the instructions, went on the internet.

[00:05:26] I was like, I'm going to make sure that I hang this rail correctly. Cause I don't want to do this more than once because it's a very tight space that I'm working in. And, uh, I get in there, make measure, measure multiple times. Every like the, I cut the rail to the right size. Everything's going great. I go to hang the cabinet and I was like, what is going on? I hung the rail upside down.

[00:05:50] So even though I did all of this planning, even though I double checked my work, even though I, I took so much extra time that I probably didn't need to, to make sure I hung this right. When I was two feet away between a washer and a wall, my brain was like, this is the, this makes sense. This is the way we hang this. And I hung it wrong. I had to go back and refill all the holes. I had to go back.

[00:06:16] So even with the best planning, when you're too close to something, you, you don't realize unless, until you zoom out. And I think that's what we're trying to do. Is that a good example? Cause that's something. No, it absolutely is. Um, so angry yesterday, but yeah, I definitely get it. And, you know, just, just to add to that, one of the things that I've, I've been saying this literally for years, uh, and I've been saying it for so long.

[00:06:42] That as I, as, as people age and, you know, our audiences get younger, the reference doesn't make any sense, but there's a really, really good Kevin Costner movie called filled dreams. And there's something that is in that movie that if you watch it, it's like, if you build it, he will come.

[00:07:00] And what I say about content creation, particularly about podcasting, but this goes to, you know, whether you're creating a podcast, whether you're creating a YouTube channel, whether you're, you're, you know, creating a newsletter, just creating it does not cause anyone to come. So I say, if you build it, he will come only works in the movie filled dreams because in the real world, it doesn't work.

[00:07:21] So one of the things that I tend to caution people against is don't go build this whole thing that you think people want. And then when you get it done, you're now trying to figure out, well, who do I go put this thing in front of? Because if that is the case, you may have missed the mark.

[00:07:41] You may have missed a lot of cues because you were hunkered down building this thing that you thought people want as compared to actually having conversations with people and building an audience, building a following first and finding out what the people actually want. And, you know, one of the worst things that we can do as a creator when we do have a bit of a following is to ask, you know, to ask permission for something and say, hey, I'm thinking about building a X, Y, Z. Who would be interested in it? People tend to try to please you and give you what you want.

[00:08:10] So people are going to say, yes, I absolutely would want this. But so you get that little bit of positive reinforcement. Oh, yeah. People said that they would be interested in this course. Let me go build this course. And then you build it and then you try to offer it. In our case, it's not even something that we're selling. It's something that we're giving out there for free. You know, that you've come up with. And it was because you asked the wrong question.

[00:08:39] You asked for permission as compared to asking for someone to sign up to something. So I think that one of the things that we, you know, you know, that we are going through right now and having these conversations is that let's build the community first before we try to build products for our community. Let's build the community and let the community tell us what it wants based off of the expertise of years and years of podcasting that you and I have both done.

[00:09:05] That kind of leads us into our next thing is this part that you're listening to here is for the folks who are not patrons. So what we're going to do is we're going to ask you what kind of things you're interested in, what what what it's a good way to put this, Rob. Like, how can we make the show better for you? Is what kind of things do you want to know?

[00:09:33] What kind of things are you struggling with so that we know where to target our efforts? And then Rob and I are going to come up with some strategies of our own that we're going to record just for the patrons. So what do you think, Rob? What's a better way of asking that? Well, I think, well, here's here's one of the things that we can do, you know, is kind of let folks know who we are and what we've done.

[00:10:01] So between the two of us, Bodie, we we are pushing 30 years of podcasting experience, you know, specifically. You know, we've we've both been doing this for quite a while. We both have shows that get, you know, fairly sizable audiences and we kind of know stuff. And I think a lot of times that we may even run into, you know, expert blindness to where we just kind of assume because, oh, this is just something that I've been doing for so long. I assume that everybody else who's doing the same thing that I do also does this because it works.

[00:10:31] We just make those assumptions. So I think that one of the things that we can do is just say, hey, folks, we have a lot of content creation experience, you know, in the way of podcasting and an email newsletter writing, you know, from my standpoint. For folks who have questions about those kind of things, particularly our patrons, ask those questions. And we are more than happy to answer them.

[00:10:55] And I think that by the questions that we ultimately get from our audience will kind of dictate maybe some of the some of the things, some of the some of the programs we might put in place for our audience that we ultimately that would ultimately help them. So we want to kind of create the content that's going to meet people where they are as compared to creating the content that we think where people are, because those two things could match up. But you're taking a chance.

[00:11:17] So I think what we're doing is let's figure out what our audience wants and then let's create programs around, you know, around those ones. So, as I said, we you know, between the two of us, we've got, you know, a couple dozen years of podcasting experience. We've been on some shows currently are doing shows that, you know, are in the top one percent of shows. So, you know, that being said, ask your questions. You know, what do you want to know?

[00:11:47] And, you know, the multiple ways we can do that, you can do that right in our Patreon. But, you know, as we go forward and this is kind of a, you know, kind of a building a public thing, I think we're going to create a space where folks can easily have conversations, you know, with us, whether that be inside of Patreon or whether it be inside of, you know, you know, some type of community based system. We'll figure that out as we go along. But we definitely want to elicit questions from the community so that we can ultimately put better programming in front of you.

[00:12:15] So, Rob, I think that's a good place to kind of halt here if people want to join the Patreon. And you can be a free patron, too. Sometimes we'll release things for everybody, not just the paid patrons. Where would they go to find that? Beyondthepost.fm slash Patreon. Perfect. So thank you, everybody, for being patient while we're putting this season together.

[00:12:45] We're trying to tune the show, make it more efficient and make it more useful. So shoot me an email. It's Bodie at Beyondthepost.fm. Or Rob with two Bs at Beyondthepost.fm. Have a good one.