The Transcript

No. 022 What Craft Beer and Food Trucks Can Teach Us about the Power of Collaboration

Jerod Morris: This is Rainmaker.FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker Platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at RainmakerPlatform.com.

Welcome to The Showrunner, where we have one goal: teach you how to develop, launch, and run a remarkable show. Ready?

Welcome back to The Showrunner. This is episode number 22. I am your host, Jerod Morris, VP of Rainmaker.FM, and I’m joined as always by my co-host here on The Showrunner, Jonny Nastor, defender of humanity, host of Hack the Entrepreneur, and now freshly relaxed and ready to go from his vacation. How are you doing, Jonny?

Jonny Nastor: I’m doing excellent. I’m doing very well.

Jerod Morris: Good. I am, too.

Jonny Nastor: It was good to have what I called a holiday from my vacation.

Jerod Morris: A holiday from your vacation.

Jonny Nastor: See, because I’m on a vacation for the summer in Vancouver. Then we left here for a few days and took a further vacation from that. It’s been a stressful summer.

Jerod Morris: Yes, yes. It sounds very stressful.

Jonny Nastor: How was Florida?

Jerod Morris: Florida was phenomenal. It was absolutely incredible.

Jonny Nastor: I love that place.

Jerod Morris: Went kayaking, went snorkeling, went parasailing for the first time.

Jonny Nastor: Wow.

Jerod Morris: My eight-year-old nephew was with me. I’ve done a lot of those things before — not the parasailing, did that for the first time — but it’s fun. I don’t have kids yet, so doing all these things again almost for the first time, seeing them through the eyes of an eight-year-old, made it really exciting. It was really fun, and now I’m relaxed and ready to go again as well.

Jonny Nastor: Nice.

The Value of Meeting Your Listeners in Person (and How to Make It Happen)

Jerod Morris: There’s something I’ve been thinking about, and I was thinking about this before I left for vacation. I’m thinking about it now. After our experience at Podcast Movement, which we’re going to talk just a little bit more about in this episode, and just being here in Dallas and going to a few more meetups, that kind of thing, is the value of meeting with your listeners in person. This is actually something where I followed your lead, because I saw you doing this — making time to go have coffee with listeners, or on your travels, realizing that a listener lives in a city that you’re in and stopping and meeting them.

Obviously, the value of podcasting is being able to speak to many people at one time. Right now, I’m talking, and thousands of people will hear this at different times in different places on different dates in different moods for different reasons.

There is something really valuable, I am finding, in one-on-one conversations with listeners. I got to do this at Podcast Movement, again, have gotten to do it in other situations, and I really find it helps keep me in tune with the reason why I’m running the show. It keeps my enthusiasm up, and I always learn something really interesting about the audience, about the way they’re using the content, and about why it’s important to them.

I guess I just wanted to open this episode up with this, because I think it’s going to fit the theme of what we’re going to talk about. For people listening to this who maybe have had a show go for a little while and who have the opportunity to meet one-on-one with the people who actually listen to you, I really encourage you to take those opportunities. I think it can really enrich what you’re doing as a showrunner, and I have to think, Jonny, that you agree with my stance on this.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah, I absolutely agree with it. It actually used to frighten me, obviously, the idea of it.

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Jonny Nastor: I am more introverted than extroverted, or at least I think I am, but I’m actually pretty good at going out and meeting people. It’s really easy, and it’s super rewarding, and it’s just a lot of fun getting to meet somebody who has listened to you over and over and over again. I say it’s easy because they know so much about you already.

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Jonny Nastor: They really do. Every time I meet one of my listeners now, it’s literally just me asking them a whole bunch of questions about themselves because they don’t have to ask me What have you been up to? or What have you ? They know what I’ve been doing for the last six months, because they’ve been listening to three episodes a week.

It’s shocking in that way. That actually put me off at the beginning the first time I met somebody because I was like, “Wow, it’s so weird.” She was like, “I feel like I know everything about you and you don’t know anything about me.” I was like, “That’s true, isn’t it?”

It makes the meeting easy, though. Then you just get to truly understand your audience and why they’re listening to you, what they’re up to, what they’re getting from it, what they’re not getting from it. You can’t, obviously, make a deeper connection, either.

It’s just the ultimate reward, I think, for sitting in your closet or your office or your basement or wherever you’re doing this from and actually getting real people. Downloads are one thing, but it’s just numbers on a screen. Emails are amazing, and Tweets are amazing, but sitting down and — I was going to say sharing a coffee, but you’re not sharing the coffee. We each have a coffee.

Jerod Morris: That would be an awkward first meeting.

Jonny Nastor: I think we should share this coffee. We get two straws and You know what I mean. It’s amazing. It really truly is. To me, it’s the best connection, the best part of it, the best result of putting in this time.

Jerod Morris: I agree. I do find, as you described, that it’s a lot more asking questions and listening, which I really like. That’s the whole reason to do it is to get to really know the listener, because as you said, they know a lot about you, but they can also ask you specific questions that they have, and you can reveal additional, authentic parts of yourself that help them.

I will say, as we wrap up this part before we get to the main topic, people may be wondering, Okay, how do I do that? How do I even start that process? I would say to just make that a call to action. If you live in a certain city, say, “Hey, if any of you live in Dallas, let me know. Send me an email. Send me a Tweet. Let’s get together.” Or, “Hey, I’m going to be traveling, and I’m going to be in Vancouver. If any of you are in Vancouver, let me know. Let’s grab a coffee.”

It can be that simple. Then, let people come to you with it. If they’re really interested in it, they’ll let you know. They’ll reach out and let you know, and meet with them. It doesn’t have to be this pressure-filled thing. For people who do want to take us up on this advice, any other suggestions you would give people for how to actually make it happen?

Jonny Nastor: Just simply make that your call to action at the end. That’s literally what I did when I was heading across from Ontario to British Columbia through the northern United States, and I ended up meeting listeners across the US and then up in Vancouver.

I said it over about five episodes, just nonchalantly at the end, because like you’re probably thinking right now, listening, it’s just like, There’s nobody out there listening that’s going to live there or want to meet. That’s what I thought, too, so I thought, I’m going to just put it out there without doing anything physical. No links, nothing hard. Literally just say it at the end of a few shows. If nobody says or hears or cares, then that’s fine. I’ll just be like, Whatever, I tried. It was shocking. Whoa, emails! Tweets! That’s amazing.

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Jonny Nastor: It’s really just that. I didn’t think anybody would. I honestly didn’t think anybody would be living in those cities and that also wanted to meet me, and they did, and they will with you, too. That’s part of creating this content and this connection. Just make it your call to action at the end. It’s really not that hard, and it’s just totally, “I’ll take you out for coffee,” is all I said to people, or a beer if it was later in the evening.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, or maybe just an email with the subject line, “You, me, one coffee, two straws.”

Jonny Nastor: Just for you, Jerod. Just for you.

Jerod Morris: All right, let’s go to the main topic for this episode. We are going to break apart another quote from Podcast Movement. The quote involves a curse word, but we’re not going to use the curse word. Check out what the quote is next on the main topic of the Showrunner.

Why Cooperation Not Competition Is So Crucial within the Podcasting Community

Jerod Morris: Okay. We’ve spent a few episodes, Jonny, talking about lessons we learned at Podcast Movement. This will probably be the last episode where we do this, but frankly, there was a lot to learn. There were so many great speakers, so many great experiences there, that we took a lot away from it. We’ve got one more episode where we want to talk about something we learned from Podcast Movement. Do you want to introduce this quote that we’re going to talk about today?

Jonny Nastor: Sure, I’d love to. It’s a quote about podcasting, but it goes greater than that, I think. It’s something that I’ve thought and a philosophy I’ve had for the last few years just working online and creating products and services. It’s a great extension, and it was used specifically for podcasting by a brilliant podcaster, Roman Mars.

He said it during his keynote, and I can’t remember exactly how he brought it up. It was something about how podcasting is getting really, really popular, and that’s what we all talk about as podcasters, about how 30 percent of the population in the US has now listened to a podcast, but that still 70 percent hasn’t, is the main thing. Us, as podcasters, we never talk about that. We only talk about the 30 percent.

And most of the world really doesn’t know what we do. They just don’t. And they don’t care about what we do as much as we do as podcasters, meaning that we should really focus on helping each other and helping podcasting as a medium grow larger and get exposed to more people who are not into podcasting rather than fighting amongst ourselves and trying to be the most popular podcaster right now.

Jerod Morris: To be specific he said, “Ninety-five percent of the world doesn’t know what the blank we do,” just for emphasis.

Jonny Nastor: He did. Okay, that’s exactly what he said. I didn’t know how far we wanted to go.

Jerod Morris: Blank is okay.

Jonny Nastor: Sometimes our listeners don’t like that. They also don’t like us talking, but we have to talk. We were going to just play music but

Jerod Morris: It s very hard to host a show without talking.

Jonny Nastor: It’s an excellent thing, especially because there’s 1100 podcasters there. There’s John Lee Dumas, and there’s Pat Flynn, and there’s Marc Maron, — they’re all superstars, and you get this jealousy about, They have all this success, or I want that, or I deserve that. His whole thing was just like, We are such a small community.

Jerod Morris: Mm-hmm.

Jonny Nastor: Literally, we’re just tiny. Most of the world does not know or care what we do, so let’s not fight amongst each other. Let’s just try and help each other and each other’s shows grow and build big audiences and expose podcasting and this new form of on-demand audio content to more people outside of us. Let’s help each other do that.

It’s not like if somebody listens to Pat Flynn’s podcast that they also can’t listen to my podcast, because they do. They listen to both. That’s just the way it is. People who listen to business or entrepreneurship podcasts, they listen to a lot of them. They don’t just listen to one. Somebody who listens to a podcast on podcasting even, they listen to numerous ones. That’s just the way it works. That’s how we devour content.

Even with magazines — if I’m into fishing, I don’t just buy one fishing magazine. I probably subscribe to three or five of them because I want all of it. I don’t want just one. That’s just how people are. When we get really passionate about stuff, we want more of it. There isn’t competition amongst us as podcasters, and we should all try and push each other forward.

Of course there’s going to be, I wish I was as successful as that person. That’s natural within us as humans. We should try and deal with it and be aware of it, but don’t make it stop us from trying to push all of us forward and the whole medium forward into more years.

Unlikely Parallels between the Craft Beer and Podcasting Communities (and What You Can Learn from Them)

Jerod Morris: We were going to record this episode about a week ago before we left on vacation, and we couldn’t because there were some audio issues. I firmly believe things happen for a reason, and I think it’s a good thing that those audio issues happened, because while I was on vacation, I actually read this really interesting article that is perfect for this topic. It illustrates exactly what you’re talking about, but actually outside the realm of podcasting. But it’s a perfect parallel. It’s with craft beer.

Look at the way that craft beer has grown in the United States, for example. Over the last six years, basically the demand for beer has stayed really stagnant. Yet craft beer has increased by 22 percent, so they continue to gain market share, which obviously isn’t good for the Anheuser-Busches of the world and the big guys.

What’s interesting about this is why the craft breweries have grown, and it’s because of the spirit of collaboration that they have. An example of this is how they deal with trademark issues. A lot of times, these breweries will come up with beers, and they all have unique names, but they’ll be similar names.

These two breweries both came out