Jonathan and Peter look back on the first season of The Bcast. Listen in, skip the stuffy MBA classroom, and get information and advice that will actually help you grow your business today.
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Listen to Episode 16:
Audio transcript:
Peter: Episode 16, this is it. Season one was meant to be 15 episodes.
Jonathan: We have come 16 episodes.
Peter: Meant to be 14 episodes, we bust it up to 15, broke it out to 16.
Jonathan: Bonus.
Peter: This is the bonus episode so don’t expect much from us, gentle listeners.
Jonathan: Right short form.
Peter: Don’t expect a lot here. We are going to look inward into ourselves.
Jonathan: Introspection.
Peter: We’re going to do some soul searching here.
Jonathan: Get that mood music on.
Peter: I think as a way of divining some feedback. We want to know from you what can we do to improve this podcast. If we were to use the lead methodology and apply this to this podcast, we first of all should have measured along the way, revised a long the way. Let’s pretend that’s true.
Jonathan: I think it’s mostly true.
Peter: Then here comes the big measurement and revision…
Jonathan: Take time to stop and analyze.
Peter: Yeah. What’s the ask, Jonathan? We want people to do something for us. We want you, listener, to think through the last 15 episodes and give us some feedback. What’d you like. Do you like the guests? Do you like the quality of the guests, do you like the quality of conversations? Do you enjoy us talking about recent events? Do you prefer one section to another? Would you prefer shorter, longer?
Jonathan: We have roughly 30 minute episodes, some less, some more. Is that a good length? Would you prefer an hour? Would you prefer 10 minutes? What’s a good fit for you?
Peter: Jonathan, where did all this come from? Why are we on a budget? I don’t even know. I don’t do any of the work. I show up after 6 whiskies and I start yapping in this mic. I have no idea what’s happening.
Jonathan: Yeah I don’t even know if you know what’s happening right now.
Peter: For our listeners’ benefit, this is fun to know. Jonathan shows up, he’s got the microphones, he’s got Nathan in tow, our esteemed executive producer slash intern, we’ve got a mixing board of some sort with a guy running on it, DRI logo on it. We’ve got all sorts of great things in here but I don’t know what any of this is so how does this work Jonathan ? How does making a podcast…Where does podcast come from?
Jonathan: Let’s unpack this because maybe our listeners are thinking that they wanted to start a podcast and they could get listeners and have a great time promoting listeners for their podcast.
Peter: They should think it through, right?
Jonathan: Think it through.
Peter: They should plan.
Jonathan: Right.
Peter: Plan the podcast. So what’s the first step Jonathan ? What do you do?
Jonathan: We got a blue snowball mic, we set it up in this room and we thought at least, let’s come into the first episode with some kind of a format.
Peter: I do remember that. 16 months ago or whenever we started, there was one microphone in here. It was an intimate setting.
Jonathan: We sat side by side.
Peter: It was intimate.
Jonathan: We thought about the format. We thought, what could we start with? What’s an easy way to jump into podcasting? Well we have bplans.com, lots of business advice articles, how to do things, how to run a business, how to start a business so great starting point with content. What else can we do? We know quite a few people who are experts in some subject matter. Let’s interview them and put that together. Some thing we don’t really do too often on bplans.com but we’d like to do more of is lets talk about things that are happening right here, right now. I think one of our first discussions was about the Apple watch when it came out.
Peter: That was a good one.
Jonathan: It was a good one.
Peter: Who has their own Apple watch? I never got that reason I was looking for. Give me one reason to own an Apple watch other than the fitness, I guess that might be all right.
Jonathan: I still don’t have one.
Peter: So how are we measuring this then, Jonathan? Are we going against our own principles here, what’s the deal?
Jonathan: We had to first figure out how do we produce this thing and how do we distribute it? By doing some internet searching, figuring all that out and we kind of figured that sound cloud was the best option for us because it has that free level options and some pretty inexpensive paid options for getting this stuff out to iTunes. Soundcloud gives you listening data so you can see how many people are listening to the episodes, to the current episode, you can see some regional data where that’s coming from but really not too much beyond that.
Peter: That is one of the major things so one of the ways we can really learn what we’re doing, what we’re doing well is not only the volume of responses but also just the nature of them. Does this appeal to you and you listen every week?
Jonathan: Yeah, that’d be a good one.
Peter: Just by saying something simple like, “The quality of the episodes has declined dramatically, especially that of Jonathan.” Great because you’ve now listened to many episodes so that’s actually useful feedback and quantifiable feedback for us. Jonathan, what are we calling it a bogus episode, a fake episode?
Jonathan: A bonus episode.
Peter: Bonus, got it. It’s a faux episode. We really wanted to again, solicit that feedback from listeners. Thanks for those that have been replying all along, thanks for those giving us feedback. In fact, we appreciate the critique. I think some people out there are not liking all of our guests. Not the fans of every single guest.
Jonathan: If you have constructive criticism, feedback to give, give us it.
Peter: If you don’t like one person over the other, let us know. It might now change how we dial in people but we appreciate your insights. We appreciate you thinking you’re better at something than one of our guests. Honestly, this is real. Let us know what you think but also we might have some plans in the future. We might have some Jonathan and Peter world tour? Some you tube videos?
Jonathan: Yeah, I think we signed on for a TV show, right? Isn’t that in the works?
Peter: It airs only on Bplans.
Jonathan: I guess this is technically the end of our first season. That’s how we look at it. We’re going to take a hiatus over the winter break.
Peter: Jonathan ‘s going to go into a hibernation for a couple of months, store up some energy. Burn off some extra energy and we’ll be back swinging.
Jonathan: Better than ever. So in the meantime, while we’re on break…Just to let you know, we’re not going away forever, we will be back. We are willing to try some other formats, try some different things but really that depends on you, the listener giving us feedback. What are we going to ask them to do? Go to …
Peter: Yeah, this is like the NPR drive thing where we ask for money. How much money are we asking for?
Jonathan: Where can listeners go? How can they give us the feedback?
Peter: I’m going to start the URL and you finish it. Bplans.com/…
Jonathan: Podcast.
Peter: That makes sense.
Jonathan: Yeah, pretty easy. Bplans.com/podcast.
Peter: Do we have pictures of ourselves up there?
Jonathan: Do you want pictures of ourselves up there?
Peter: Not really.
Jonathan: Just a picture of me, not a picture of Peter. You’ll be able to listen to old episodes, you’ll be able to follow us on social media. While we’re at it, send us a shout out on twitter @bplans. Of course, what we’ve been using all season long is our email address that’s bcast@bplans.com. You can email us your feedback too. Final thoughts on season one.
Peter: Final thoughts on the podcast?
Jonathan: Yeah.
Peter: I enjoyed our guests. If people give us feedback that they hated all our guests, I’m going to reply to them and say I disagree.
Jonathan: You’re out.
Peter: That’s going to be my whole reply. I liked some, if not all of our guests, I thought that was fun. I think we can learn a lot more. I think there’s a lot of very specific stuff out there that I think we can dive deeper into. Maybe that’s a season two idea?
Jonathan: Yeah, maybe.
Peter: Maybe season two happens on you tube, I don’t know man.
Jonathan: Maybe season two is mostly just our listeners talking to us and answering questions from them. I noticed you didn’t say that one of your favorite parts of the podcast was spending time with me.
Peter: Waking up every morning, thinking of talking with you face to face or earlier, with one microphone, shoulder to shoulder. I think in season two, what we’ll do is we’ll spend some time to part, come back together and we’ll see that magic rekindle.
Jonathan: Definitely.
Peter: Episode 17, episode 18, season three.
Jonathan: Listeners, we’ll see you in a few months. If you have a question you’d like for us to answer on the show, send us an email at bcast@bplans.com.
