How I Made $8,000 per Month Podcasting, and Why You Probably Don’t Want To

This is a rather personal episode. We have no guests this time.

It’s just you and me.

New listeners might not know that for about one year, Disrupting Japan was sponsored and was my primary source of income.

So today, rather than diving deep into a specific aspect of startups in Japan, I thought I would share the history of Disrupting Japan itself, about my decision to go pro (and then go amateur), my visions of a podcast empire, and how it came crashing down.

I'd like to tell you the story behind the stories.

Leave a comment Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan. Straight talk from Japan's most successful entrepreneurs.

I’ve got a special show for you today. There will be no guests, no beer, no playful banter about making, marketing or monetization. For the next 20 minutes, it’s just you and me.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a solo show, and these solo shows tend to be some of the most popular. So today, I thought it would be a good idea to share with you some of my thoughts about podcasting and to tell you the story of Disrupting Japan itself. Why I started it, how I grew the audience, how I turned the show into over $8,000 a month in income, and how I started to put together Japan’s first podcast advertising network.

And, most importantly perhaps, why I walked away from all of that and returned Disrupting Japan to the non-commercial, sponsor free format we’ve all grown to know and love. Our talk today will explain why a number of more unusual things about Disrupting Japan are the way they are.

And you know, Disrupting Japan has been growing even faster since we went commercial-free. Today we have over 10,000 listeners in 160 countries. Including one listener in Vatican City. Now, I have no way of knowing for sure who exactly that one listener is. I mean, sure, it could be anybody, but I like to think … I choose to believe that Disrupting Japan has listeners in very high places.

But it wasn’t always this way. In fact, Japan is a very hard place to launch a podcast.

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I’ve built a few startups in Japan, and the podcast was supposed to be me just talking with my founder friends about startups and innovation in Japan; about what it’s like to be an innovator in a culture that prizes conformity.

I christened the show Disrupting Japan, and launched to decidedly little fanfare in September 2014.

The podcast totaled 42 downloads that month. I thought that was great. How Not to Grow a Podcast My audience rose steadily each month, and after six months I had about 400 listeners. At this point, I decided to invest in growing my show, but most of the common sense marketing and production approaches I tried either had no effect or actually backfired.

I rented a studio to improve production quality, but it made my guests uncomfortable. Most simply could not relax in the unfamiliar environment and spent the whole interview looking at their mic rather than at me. I tried this with three different guests and didn’t get a single usable conversation.

It’s obvious in retrospect, but few things make people more nervous than shoving a microphone in their face.

So I gave up on the studio. I started going to their offices and using a pair of small lapel mics. The sound quality was lower, but after a few seconds, my guests forgot they were wearing these little microphones and we could talk like two human beings. Showing up with a couple of beers also helped my guests relax and made the recording less if an interview and more of a conversation.

It turned out that sacrificing a bit of production quality and so-called “professionalism” for more personal, honest conversations was one of the best decisions I made.

Marketing my show proved counter-intuitive as well. None of the “foolproof techniques” everyone uses worked for me.

I’ve had good results using social media advertising for some of my startups, but it was worthless for podcasting. I poured money into multiple campaign strategies on Facebook and Twitter, but I saw no real increase in listeners. These platforms reported lots of so-called engagement with my ads, but whatever form that engagement took, there was no significant difference in site visits or downloads between the episodes I advertised and those I did not.

Appearing on other podcasts is also supposed to be a great way to grow an audience, but it didn’t work for me. I really enjoy the conversations I’ve had with other podcast hosts, but my appearances never resulted in a noticeable bump in listeners.

The other problem I ran into here, was that most of these podcast appearances are expected to be reciprocal. I’ll go on their show and tell my story, they’ll come on mine and give theirs. Well, the obvious problem here is that Disrupting Japan is a show about startups and innovation in Japan, and if you don’t have meaningful experience in that area, it doesn’t really make sense to bring you on the show.

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Most of the podcast hosts said they understood and polity withdrew their request to have me on their show. Two were clearly irritated and since their listenership was so much larger than mine, I should be grateful there were even giving me this opportunity. And of course, a few said they didn’t care and just wanted me to share my thoughts with their audience.

I appeared on all of those shows. I enjoyed it. I had some good conversations, but these appearances didn’t really impact my download numbers.

Now, these techniques do work for a lot of podcasters, and if you are starting a podcast, they may work for you and are certainly worth trying. But they clearly were not working for me, and I finally realized why. Disrupting Japan was addressing a very small niche — innovation and startups in Japan — and there were simply not enough existing podcast listeners interested.

I would have to build an audience from scratch. So what really worked? At least for me. The most effective way I found to grow my audience with was via interaction.

Online, this meant finding the handful of Facebook and LinkedIn groups interested in Japanese startups and then joining the discussions. Most groups welcomed my contribution.

However, it was my offline efforts that made the biggest impact. I sought out any event or seminar where I could speak about Japanese startups and innovation. Every time I spoke, I saw a small uptick in listeners and email subscriptions.

That email list turned out to be more important than I expected for two reasons. First, casual surveys indicated that about 25% of Disrupting Japan fans were not subscribing to the podcast, but going to the site and listening from the browser or simply reading the transcript. Second, people seem far more willing to engage over email. Even today, when an episode is released, one or two people may comment on the site, but around 20 will reply to the email announcement.

Disrupting Japan fans were, and still are, extremely engaged. Most guests tell me that they receive a lot of positive feedback about their appearance. September of 2015 was the show’s first anniversary, and 120 Disrupting Japan fans paid a $20 cover charge to watch a live podcast and to meet and hang out with each other.

Things were going well for the show, and I had never really considered making it anything more than a hobby or a side project.

But in May 2016, the startup I was building blew up, and at that point Disrupting Japan had about 3,500 listeners. Three friends urged me to try podcasting for a living. I had no better options, so I gave it a try and wound up becoming Japan’s first professional podcaster.

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God Help Me. I’m a Media Company! My first problem was that there were no ad agencies serving podcasters and no sponsors who understood the medium. There was a lot of work to do.

The Disrupting Japan audience consists of startup founders, aspiring founders, and others interested in innovation in Japan. That’s an important and influential group of people. So I sat down and brainstormed what kinds of companies really wanted to connect to this audience. What specific companies really needed to reach Disrupting Japan listeners, and who I would feel good about recommending. After a week, I had a list of 50 likely sponsors.

Of course, almost none of these companies had ever heard of me or of podcasts, but that could be fixed.

I began sending emails, making phone calls, knocking on doors and pitching in Powerpoint. It was tedious, but the feedback from potential sponsors was invaluable in crafting my final sponsorship package. It turned out that my sponsors didn’t really want what I thought I was selling.

Direct response advertising, where every click and impression is measured, dominates podcasting in America, but it’s a losing game for most podcasters. The industry focuses on CPM rates (the rate advertisers pay per thousand listens) because that metric is easy to standardize and measure, but with standardization comes commodification. If you ever buy into the idea that you are simply selling impressions or downloads, you resign yourself to competing with a nearly infinite number of other podcasts.

This is a terrible situation to be in. Because there are a limited number of advertising dollars but an almost infinite supply of podcasts.

The secret to making real money with a small podcast is helping companies build their brand.

With this in mind, I crafted sponsorship packages that combined podcast ads, banner ads,