What does it take to get to 100 podcast episodes?
In his book, Shoe Dog, Phil Knight describes his emotions upon starting the company that became Nike, as a crazy idea. When describing how he felt, he realized that many of the world’s greatest achievements started as crazy ideas.
Watch corresponding Youtube video here.
What seemed like a crazy idea for us 4 years ago, has turned into more than we could have ever imagined. We recently shared about what motivated us to start the show in our review of FINCON.
In this episode, we’re pulling back the curtain, as we reflect on our 4 year journey to episode 100. We discuss lessons learned, surprises we encountered along the way, and mistakes we made. We also reveal some of our favorite episodes and you’ll also hear what’s next for the Financial Symmetry show. But this exciting milestone wouldn’t have been possible without you!
We were fortunate to start our passion project at a good time. The strong tailwind of meteoric growth for all podcasts propelled our show to a 600% growth rate in downloads since our first year. Most of our listeners find us on Apple Podcasts currently, but we included an article below discussing the growing popularity of Spotify as a podcast deliverer. Podcasts also allow for listeners that would otherwise never hear about us. To that point, 20% of our listeners are in California. The magic of a technical tool that will continue to expand and grow.
We’ve enjoyed using this medium to share our views about unique financial planning opportunities and uncover risks that our listeners may not be aware of. We’ve also learned how much fun creating a podcast can be. After overcoming the difficulties of getting started, we were reminded that consistency is key.
Mistakes are inevitable part of any journey. The key is to use them to propel you to be something better. Our podcast was a treasure trove of bumps in the road when getting started. Just dial up our a few of our first episodes, especially if you enjoy hearing someone reading directly from a blog post. Thankfully we learned fairly quickly to ad-lib and play off of each other.
Listening to yourself, also provides a great opportunity to critique your communication style. Inviting other experts in the firm, added a nice potpourri of voices as well. I’m sure our listeners appreciate the fact that we have learned to use an audio editor to improve the quality of our material. A key truth that translates to many areas of life. Bring your expertise to your specialties and find experts in other fields to do the rest.
Inevitably, some episodes are better than others. Regardless, our aim is to always provide you with content that plants a seed that might motivate you to dig a little deeper on a specific planning topic. But we also try to present the content in an entertaining and engaging way. A few of our favorite episodes include episode 20 where we drew comparisons of common financial planning conversations to one of our favorite movies, The Usual Suspects. Another favorite was episode 27, where we broke down Mike’s top 10 investment lessons he’d learned just after turning 40. We share a few more along with the top 4 most listened episodes since we started.
We’re continually learning how to improve our content and provide you with material that you can learn from and implement. We are excited to make better use of an editorial calendar to plan future episodes. Is there a topic that interests you that you think we should cover on the show? Let us know what you would like to hear by sending us an email with your suggestions.