Phase I of Podcast Growth: Going From 0–100 Downloads/Episode

This is part two of a 5-part series on the Phases of Podcast Growth.

You can read the previous installments covering the overview of the Phases of Podcast Growth here.

Prior to launch, every show is developed based on a series of assumptions.

As a creator, these assumptions cover everything from your:

• Market: Is there existing interest in the topic you can tap into? Is it enough to sustain your show and/or business? How can you stand out from the competition?
• Idea: Is it as compelling to others as it is to you? Does it have legs? Are you communicating it effectively?
• Concept & Format: Is there a clear hook that draws people in? Does your concept explore the topic in a unique and compelling way? Is it fun to both create and listen to?
• Potential Audience: Who are they? Where/how can you find and reach them? Does what they want align with what you can provide? Can you build your business around them?
• Strategy: Is this show the one that will most effectively nurture customers/clients or achieve whatever other goal(s) you intend it to do for your business?
• Self: Do you have the bandwidth to produce this show consistently? Can you sustain long-term interest in the topic? Does this show make the best use of your finite creative energy? What about you and your story, quirks, and curiosities makes you a uniquely compelling host for this show?

Depending on your level of prior experience in business, marketing, content, and podcasting the accuracy of each of these assumptions will vary.

Regardless of experience, however, you should fully expect that some of your assumptions will be correct and some—perhaps most—will be somewhere between a little bit off… and flat-out wrong.

And it’s these misguided assumptions that will keep your show stuck in place, no matter how exhaustively you market it.

As such, your goal during this early phase of your show's existence is not in fact to grow or market it.

Instead, it’s to do the necessary research that will enable your future promotion and marketing to be effective.

So how do you do it?

Phase 1 Challenges

Before diving into specific tactics and practices, it’s worth clearly identifying the challenges facing you in the Validation phase (Phase 1).

As the name suggests, this phase revolves entirely around validating the assumptions your show is built on.

But it’s also about doing research and collecting feedback which often isn’t easy to do before your show has launched.

So what exactly are you looking for?

In short, your goal during the Validation phase is to validate (duh) a handful of specific assumptions about your show that will entirely dictate its ability to succeed.

Specifically, your challenge is to validate your assumptions around:

• Demand: Is there (verifiably) sufficient interest/demand in this topic to achieve your goals around the show?
• Core Idea: Is the core idea interesting/resonant to your target audience? Or, if you’re coming at your show from the Art side of the Content-Art Spectrum, can you identify an audience that finds the core idea interesting/resonant?
• Audience Access: Assuming there is an audience for your idea, are there existing congregations of them that you can consistently engage with?
• Messaging/Pitch: There’s almost no chance you’ll truly lock in your messaging until you’re 100+ episodes in (if ever). But in this early stage, you want to find some of the core themes and phrasing you can use when talking about the show that gets people’s eyes to light up.
• Personal Obsession: After getting into the production flow, do you find the show personally energizing? For the show to succeed, you’re going to need to keep it up far longer than you can keep up with willpower alone. The show should pull you forward rather than you having to push it.

Note that these are far from all of the assumptions we initially discussed.

The other assumptions are important and will eventually need to be addressed as well. But for the time being, this limited number of assumptions is enough to prove to yourself that the idea has potential and is worth pursuing further.

So how do you actually validate them?

Phase 1 Tactics & Practices

It's tempting to use analytics as the primary gauge of your show and marketing’s effectiveness.

And at some point, data and analytics will be wonderfully useful tools in your marketing toolbelt.

But during the Validation Phase, they’re pretty much useless.

What’s much more valuable is 1:1 interactions with existing and potential listeners.

In fact, these types of conversations—whether virtual or in person—are the only way to truly validate your assumptions about your show, especially when you don’t have a large audience.

The good news is they’re not hard to initiate (though the first couple do take some courage).

The easiest way to get started is by integrating yourself into an existing community.

Community Integration

Almost every topic imaginable—no matter how niche—has an existing community that has organized itself online.

And when you’re in the Validation Phase, these communities are your single greatest resource.

Integrating yourself into an existing community (as opposed to starting your own) allows you to skip the years of work required to attract the community members.

It also frees you from the hefty ongoing workload of facilitating a community, while (if you do it right) getting access to many of the benefits of community building.

The first step is to pick your community.

Online communities exist in a couple of distinct forms including clearly defined communities like those found on:

• Facebook & LinkedIn Groups
• Reddit
• Forums
• Paid Communities

But looser, less clearly defined communities also exist, such as:

• Communities that form around specific Instagram, YouTube, or other social accounts where you see the same people engaging on a regular basis.
• Communities that naturally organize around topics on more open, fluid platforms like X (Twitter) and LinkedIn.

Either type of community works during the Validation Phase of your show.

What matters is you have regular access to engage with a large collection of people who are already discussing your topic.

My recommendation is to try out a couple of communities and then pick one to spend all of your time in.

The goal at this phase is to develop a small number (~10) of deep connections in your space, not get exposure to anyone and everyone who might be interested in your show.

In fact, you’re goal during this phase is not to promote your show at all.

Instead, your primary goals are as follows:

• Make connections & build your network: With people who are interested in your topic. This could be with other creators and potential collaborators, but it’s more likely (and perhaps more valuable) to focus on building connections with people who represent your ideal target listeners.
• Set up regular connection calls: As you begin to make connections in the community through comments and DMs, make a point of regularly setting up connection calls over Zoom to chat in more depth with people you feel represent your ideal listeners. Note that the goal here is not to promote your show but to learn more about them and their experience with your topic. In any discussion about your topic, your show will almost certainly come up naturally, which will give you a chance to assess the resonance of your show idea, messaging, and format… and often result in a new listener!
• Participate: This might mean starting conversations in the community. But it’s often better to be a regular contributor to the conversations other people are starting. Set a goal to contribute at least one thoughtful, helpful comment to a community discussion every day.
• Listen & learn: This will come naturally through participation, but it helps to go one step further and keep a document of the language people use to describe their problems, pain points, desires, and objections (excuses), as well as notes on other content they consume, how they describe themselves and more. This document will go a long way to setting up all your future marketing for success.

Over time, a number of benefits to this type of community integration will begin to play out.

For one, the more real relationships you build in the community the more listeners and advocates you will create.

In fact, almost every host I’ve ever talked to that has grown a million-plus total download show says that the first few hundred (or in many cases few thousand) listeners came entirely from making personal connections in online and in-person communities such as these and mentioning their show when relevant… along with making sure their social profile made it unmistakably clear that they had a show that was a perfect fit for their target audience.

This is the manual legwork work that everyone wants to skip but is unavoidable if you want to build a foundation for future growth.

Beyond growth, ongoing community integration will naturally bring your content, messaging, and even show format into closer alignment with what resonates with your ideal audience members.

Finally, it’s hard to overstate the amount of the friction of listener-acquisition that is reduced by permeating a community to the point where everyone in it has at least a general awareness and recognition of who you are and what you do.

The result is a huge boost in efficiency to all of your future podcast marketing activities.

General Validation Guidance

As you’re participating in your chosen community and having conversations with potential audience members, keep in mind:

At this phase, you should be worried less about your show itself and more about the idea.

The show can always be tweaked and improved, but if the core idea behind it doesn’t resonate with people, there’s nothing you can do with the show from a technical, production, or marketing standpoint to make them care.

The best way to gauge resonance is through visual, real-time conversations.

People generally want to be nice and will regularly tell you your show sounds interesting and they’ll “definitely check it out…”

What they mean of course is that it’s not interesting and they have no intention of ever checking it out.

Over a Zoom call, however, you’ll be better able to catch any genuine “Eyes Light Up Moments” that arise during the conversation, a clear indication of interest, either in the show or a specific topic.

A real-time conversation also allows you to muddle your way through what is almost certainly at this stage some less-than-ideal messaging until you (hopefully) stumble upon some phrasing that piques their curiosity.

Like it or not, this is the only reliable way to test and improve your messaging, and the more real-time conversations you have, the faster you’ll find the messaging that resonates and the easier growth will become.

Closing Out The Validation Phase

If you’re stuck in this phase of 0–100 dl/ep, the most likely reason is that one or more of your key assumptions about the show is wrong.

And until you find out what it is and correct it, there’s literally no way to market yourself to growth.

While it might not always be visible, every show has to go through this phase before it can gain traction and grow.

For many network and studio-produced podcasts, this validation takes place over (often) several years before the first episode ever drops.

So while their first episodes might seem to hit all the right notes immediately out of the gate, that finished product is the result of a long process of focus groups, demos, testing and tweaking—often with the benefit of an experienced team of producers, storytellers, and marketers.

For most of us, this type of process isn’t realistic.

And that’s fine.

In fact, it’s much faster to work through the Validation Phase when you’re actually building the show in public and can make tweaks and updates on a week-to-week basis based on feedback and conversations.

As you work through this phase, you’ll naturally work your way to one of two outcomes:

1. You validate or correct your assumptions and quickly pass the 100 dl/ep mark and graduate into the Traction phase.
2. You work through the process outlined here and realize that the show you want to produce is incapable of growing to the level you might have hoped.

This is a hard realization to face, but personally, I’d rather have all the facts on the table and then be able to make an informed decision about what to do next.

In some cases that might mean continuing to produce a show you love but lowering your expectations around audience growth.

In others, it might mean deciding that the show isn’t worth the ongoing effort and it’s better to sunset it to make space for something else.

The truth is that there are no guarantees that there is a sufficiently large audience for every topic, and none of us are entitled to an audience, simply because we’ve put in the work to create something.

Building an audience almost always requires some form of compromise and adjustment to our initial strategy, and it’s not until we’ve recognized and made those adjustments that we can graduate to the next phase of growth.

Tomorrow, we’ll explore this series by digging into Phase 2: Traction, which is all about building momentum and going from 100–1,000 dl/ep.