How I grew a podcast that peaked 3rd on the charts.

“1 Foot In” season 1 is 16 episodes long, and with this week's episode we are ending the season.

I wanted to take the time to share about the journey creating the podcast that has peaked on:

• Apple Careers Charts at 3rd position
• Spotify Business & Technology at 63rd position
• Spotify Top Podcast Charts at 141 position

Who we are:

To those who are unfamiliar with this podcast, “1 Foot In” is a podcast that introduces the listener to a graduate who have made 1 foot into the doors of the top/fastest growing company. We ask these graduates to detail their journey; from explaining their resume from school to internships, providing tips to leap-frog their failures, and industry/job insights on their role.

Our listeners are split quite evenly between fresh graduates and university students across all stages.

We are a team of 3, me and 2 amazing interns that make up the content team.

Our journey so far:

Our journey started on Feb 6th with the release of our 1st episode “How I made it into Grab as a Product Manager”. We had about 14 downloads then, and that made me question if anyone is really interested in what we were producing. I thought maybe it will pick up after the week.

We started approaching other veterans in the sector and asked for some mentorship along the way. E Hueen from “The Startup Climb”, and JJ Tham from “#TheLearningPodcast” showed me that not all glitters is always gold and chasing these metrics such as downloads week on week is not sustainable. It really does not matter what you get then, just trust in creating the content and work on distributing like you always do and the viewership will come when it comes.

What I learnt today is that > 80% of our downloads occur after the week of airing, and it continues even today – I guess the episode really does pick up after the week.

I was also greatly humbled by Reggie Koh from “The Financial Coconut” (the top business podcast in Singapore) who showed me what standards looked like, and how the creative process works.

The benefit of learning from someone great also meant that we would not fall too far behind; Season 1 ended with listen through rates averaging around 60% (The Financial Coconut is at 70 – 80%)

Reggie Koh also showed me clearly that consistency matters, and proved it with over a 100 episodes in.

I tried living up to these standards.

The 16 weeks that followed took approximately 20 LinkedIn Articles, 32 LinkedIn Posts, 35 Instagram posts, and a whole bunch of event features to get us there. Along the way we found partners/features from NTU OEP, InternSG, TalentTribe (and WerkWerkSG), Singapore Internship Opportunities, and Kinobi.

Our podcast would have been nothing without everyone’s help.

Final Thoughts:

What we are practicing as a podcast is

“the numbers do not matter”

And what this means is that we should not over design just to drive viewership and listener through rates up. They are used to evaluate strategy, which ironically also means

“the numbers can matter”

Because while the design is to share a story that matters, to an audience that cares it is important to hold ourselves accountable by using the numbers.

And why this matters to us is because an interviewee which is busy with a full-time job has taken time out to speak to a listener that genuinely wants to learn

As such we try our best to ensure as many ears have heard the interviewee in hopes that their time spent with us is not wasted. We also try to keep the podcast as raw as possible for the listener so that they do not miss anything about the conversation.

I would like to say thank you to all the followers who have joined us so far, the listeners that have popped in and out, as well as the interviewees who have taken their time out to share their knowledge.

With season 1 over, and season 2 on the horizon I am truly excited on the content that we will bring to our current & future listeners.

If you have reached the end of this page, thank you for reading all the way. If you are a working professional who wants to give back, I would like to reach out to you and have you as guest ??

Thank you!

See you in Season 2 in H2 of 2021!