Chris Hutchins [00:00:00]:
When you run an experiment on Overcast, they tell you how many taps they think your podcast ad will get, and they tell you how many subscribers they think you'll get. Then you can run the ad and see how much better you perform than what they suggest. And if you three x that performance, you probably have a good

Jay Clouse [00:00:21]:
show. Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. Congratulations on clicking play on this episode even though you may have noticed That it is a little longer than usual. But I promise you, I was not lazy in the edit. This episode just contains so much good information that we went long, and I couldn't bring myself to Cut more of it out. Today, I'm speaking with Chris Hutchins. Chris is an avid lifehacker, a financial optimizer, And he's the host of the top ranked podcast, All The Hacks, where he shares his quest to upgrade his life without having to spend a fortune.

Jay Clouse [00:01:04]:
Chris has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and CNBC. And previously, Chris was the head of new product strategy at Wealthfront after they acquired his company, Grove. Before that, he was an investor at Google Ventures, cofounded Milk, which was acquired by Google, And he is also a member of my community, The Lab. I first became aware of Chris on October 14, 2021. And it may seem weird that I know the exact date, but that's because that is the date Tim Ferriss released a 3 hour episode where Chris was actually interviewing Tim.

Tim Ferriss [00:01:36]:
And this is an improv episode. I'm very excited about it because my friend Chris reached out with many questions about podcasting, good questions. He had already read much of what I had written. He'd listened to several interviews, and this is intended to be an updated guide to all things Podcasting.

Jay Clouse [00:01:54]:
Not only did this give a big boost to all the hacks, it created an opportunity for Chris to go all in on podcasting. Previously, as I shared, he was really in the startup world, but he recognized that his ability to learn and master certain skills would serve him as a creator too.

Chris Hutchins [00:02:10]:
That's always been my MO. And so nothing it was no different when I was like, I'm gonna launch a podcast. And it's like, well, I want it to be big, and I want people to love it, and I want it to make enough money to support me and my family. So let's treat it not just like a side project. Let's treat it like a company. And in my past, I've started a few companies, raised a few $1,000,000, and and sold a couple of them. So I'm like, let's treat this like a business, like like a True business that I'm going to grow into an empire, and I realized that so few people were doing that in podcasting that it just kind of became a a cool opportunity.

Jay Clouse [00:02:45]:
Over the last couple of years, I've gotten to personally know Chris, and I am so impressed and inspired by the way he approaches whatever he sets his His sights on. He goes fast. He digs in deep, and he applies a scientific lens to his work. As you'll hear during this episode, he has a real experimentality.

Chris Hutchins [00:03:02]:
A entire episode as a guest could be 10 to 40 times better at converting listeners to your audience than joining doing a cross promo and having the A host read an endorsement for your show for 60 seconds.

Jay Clouse [00:03:15]:
This episode is full of little insights like that, experiments that Chris has run, the results that he's seen, And the decisions he's made because of it. So in this episode, you'll learn how Chris grew his podcast. You'll learn how he was able to build and leverage relationships with high profile creators like Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose, and how you can build similar relationships yourself. We also get very, very tactical into the experiments that he's run to grow his podcast So you can focus on the tactics that really move the needle the most. I'd love to hear what you think about this episode. You can find me on Twitter or Instagram at J. Claus. Tag me.

Jay Clouse [00:03:47]:
Let me know that you're listening. But now let's learn from Chris.

Chris Hutchins [00:03:57]:
So I've always is wanted to have the best experience in life. And and that'll cover everything from travel personal stuff to career and and all of it. And I just always believed that there was, like, some loophole backdoor way to get the best experience without spending all of the money. And one of the kind of formative stories in my hacking adventure was I went to a boarding school. And I'd say, like, Almost everyone had an unlimited supply of parental money, except me and, like, probably 10% of the school. So every night, People were going and ordering pizzas, and I was like, if I order a pizza tonight, I won't have any money for the rest of the month. And what if I wanna do something? And so, I was like, how do I solve this? And most people's answer is like, well, I just don't get the pizza. And I was like, well, no.

Chris Hutchins [00:04:46]:
Like, there's gotta be. So, I ordered a pizza, and then I sold 6 of the slices, and I ate 2 of them. And I just sold the 6 slices for the cost of the pizza divided by 6. And then I was like, oh, I ate pizza for free tonight. And then I could do that every single night. And because I had the metabolism of a high schooler, it was like, you could actually eat pizza every night and not look ridiculous. If I did this now, it would be a horrible, horrible weight gain adventure. So that was something where I was, like, oh, wow.

Chris Hutchins [00:05:11]:
I wanted the pizza. I can now get the pizza, and I don't have to pay for it. If we did an entire story about the chronicles of my use and and life, you'd find all these little things of, I want the thing, and I'm willing to do the work to get the thing, but there has to be a more efficient way to get the output. Often in the form of saving time or saving money, or maybe saving headache or or overhead.

Jay Clouse [00:05:32]:
So I've kinda watched this from afar, and I've really admired it because I'm the type of person who feels like he's riding a bicycle in 1st gear on flat ground. Like, I'm pedaling like hell, and I'm moving forward, but you look at it, it's, That is super inefficient. And then I see guys like you ride by in 3rd gear. I'm like, shit. I didn't know that was an option. So I want I wanna understand how your brain works a little bit. You said when you got into podcasting, you wanted us to support you and your family and be big and have people love it. So as much as well as you can remember, what was the mental thought process for next steps?

Chris Hutchins [00:06:07]:
I think it probably goes back, and I wanna set a a little bit of a stage for people listening. It probably goes back 10 years in that my entire career, I don't know. Maybe I feel like I'm I guess I'm pretending I'm younger than I am. Maybe it goes back 20 years. But, like, the entire career I've had, I've known that I'd wanna do different endeavors the entire time. And so building relationships, adding value to people's lives, kind of laid the groundwork for, hey. I'm launching a podcast, and would you help support that? So out the gate, I had a tremendous amount of support from people who I've helped and tried to add value to their businesses, lives, projects, etcetera, for my entire career. So I think that was a big piece that started even before the podcast came out.

Jay Clouse [00:06:53]:
In terms of, like, I had support from people out of the gate, what form did that support take?

Chris Hutchins [00:06:58]:
I started a company a handful of years ago, almost a decade ago, with a guy named Kevin Rose, who way back in the day started this site called Digg, which was kind of A a Reddit like company at the time and kind of, unfortunately, didn't work out as best as as anyone intended. Kevin has millions of Twitter followers. I'd been helping him with Tons of projects. We'd work together. When I worked for him, I worked as hard as I could. So when I launched a podcast, I was like, hey, Kevin. I'm thinking of launching a podcast. You know, he was like, let me tell everyone about it.

Chris Hutchins [00:07:28]:
He even invited me on his podcast and was like, hey, Chris. Talk about this podcast you're launching. And if you go back and listen to that episode, the funniest thing about it was I didn't have a name at the time. And so he was like, Chris, tell me about this podcast you're launching. And I was like, Kevin, I don't have a name for it. And he was like, well, we'll put that in in post. Go home and record something that I can insert that answers what's the and give it to me in 2 days. So I had to name the podcast in 2 days, which, you know, was was a very stressful 2 days.

Chris Hutchins [00:07:56]:
But so that's an example. Just people retweeting things, sharing things, adding it to their newsletter, talking about it. You know, there was no secret silver bullet strategy. It was just you know, I think everyone kind of gets 1 1 or 2 chances every 3 or 4 years to ask their friends, family, colleagues for a favor, And I had been storing all of those favors for 10 plus years and decided now would be the time to use it to see if this podcast has legs? Because, you know, there's hundreds of thousands of podcasts that don't go anywhere. And until you kind of break through to a little you know, let's call it thousands of downloads a month, you know, it's really hard to see it being a business that could sustain anything. And so I thought, let's ask for all the favors and launch it into that that area. And if it doesn't work, it'll just fall down. And so my idea was I'll do 8 episodes.

Chris Hutchins [00:08:49]:
I'll do as big of a launch as I possibly can, And either people will like it, and then I'll be excited by it and keep going, or people won't. And I'll see, like, the 1st episode got a ton of downloads, and the 2nd one got none, and the 3rd one got less and less and less. I think I was lucky that I picked a topic that I was so personally obsessed with and, like, was just my entire being in a show that, you know, it it kind of worked. And the the downside to my strategy is Sometimes it takes, like, a lot of years to build in your reps to feel like you've got something ready for the world to see. And I think The downside of doing a big crazy launch is that, you know, you if you don't have that ready right away, people are gonna get introduced to a less than ideal version of your show. But I recorded, I think, 6 episodes, and the 6th one was so I was like, that's number 1. Like, I just knew after that recording that it had had to be episode 1.

Jay Clouse [00:09:47]:
And so that was it. I guess, an underrated podcast launch tip, by the way. I did the same thing with this show. Like, my 1st episode was Seth Godin and then James Clear, but those are probably, like, somewhere between the 6th and the 8th interviews that I did. But man, I I'd love to hear this from you, actually. Do people go back to your 1st episode a lot when they find the show? Because I I find that on a monthly basis, my first 2 episodes are still some of the most popular episodes of the podcast.

Chris Hutchins [00:10:09]:
So this data is a little skewed because I a friend of mine is Tim Ferris, and I went on his podcast and did a 3 hour long interview where I interviewed Tim about everything related to podcasting.

Jay Clouse [00:10:23]:
Great

Chris Hutchins [00:10:23]:
episode. Before that, Tim said, go give me an episode I should listen to of your show, so I could talk about it. And I sent him 2, and he liked episode 1, and he was, like, this episode was fantastic. And he Told everyone to his, you know, close to a 1000000 listeners, go check out Chris's show. This episode number 1 was fantastic. He's like, The guest he had is just everything you want in a guest. And it was, like, you know, it was a great endorsement for the show, but that That drove so much traffic to episode 1 and continues to that it's a little bit I'm a little unclear how much of people going back and listening to number 1 is people that wanna go back and hear the beginning or people that heard Tim Ferris's podcast, which could be a completely different, you know, reason for that growth.

Jay Clouse [00:11:08]:
Yeah. It's tough. Okay. Let's put that aside. A moment ago, you said, you know, you've been spending years in your career adding value to people, and so you you Build up, like, these cards that you can play and ask for the favor. This might sound like a stupid question, but what does it look like to ask for a favor?

Chris Hutchins [00:11:25]:
It would be, hey. I'm launching a podcast on Friday. It would mean the world to me if you could post something about it. You can write anything you want, but I wrote something for you to make it easy. Feel free to tweak it, change it, write whatever you want. Anything is appreciated. And if it doesn't feel like something you wanna do, no worries.

Jay Clouse [00:11:44]:
Is that a text message? Is it an email? If it's an email, is Is it a bulk send? Is it a bunch of individual sends?

Chris Hutchins [00:11:50]:
It's probably a text or a phone call. I find that when you ask something to someone in person, they're more likely to say yes. So if I were to ask you if you do something to support me and we're Now live on air, you're probably gonna say yes because you don't wanna sound sound rude. But if I send you an email, it'd be much easier for you to ignore that email or write back, I'm really busy this month or I'm not willing to do it. So I think, you know, the closer you can get to a live recorded environment, which prior to having a podcast is probably an in person meeting or a phone call, I think the better.

Jay Clouse [00:12:24]:
I like asking these questions because I find a lot of the folks in my audience a lot of creative People. I've heard creative people described as highly sensitive people who are telling the story of what their experience of the world is like and Sharing it with the rest of us. And so if you're a highly sensitive person, a lot of people default to not making the ask, Not asking for a favor because they feel like they are imposing. And it's not even because they don't want to be asked themselves, which I think is probably a misconception where they think, well, I wouldn't wanna be asked, so I won't do that. No. For some reason, we just think that we are imposing, and so we don't make the ask, And we don't get the benefit from it. And these things compound. You know, the the ask to Tim to do that podcast episode, not only did that help with the launch, I'm sure that's continuing to pay off over time even though you're not continuing to do that interview.

Jay Clouse [00:13:19]:
So it's something that, I really admire about folks like yourself who earn the right to ask and then make the ask.

Chris Hutchins [00:13:26]:
Yeah. I think the earn the right to ask is an important thing. You don't wanna find some person that you know and be like, hey. Can you do this thing for me? Until you've kind of built up enough of, You know, like social currency, if you will. And so one thing I did early on, which is a strategy I think everyone should take on in whatever arena they're playing in, And and you were a both participant and recipient in this whole thing was when I got started, I was like, I wanna learn everything about So I'm gonna go talk to everyone I can, and ask them questions, and try to ask good questions, and important important few points. I'd go listen to anything they'd done on podcasting, so I wasn't wasting their time asking them questions they'd already answered. And I think one of the most Valuable things that someone once told me. They asked me they were we were talking about podcasting, and I can't even remember what.

Chris Hutchins [00:14:17]:
Someone said, I need to figure out how to do that. And I was like, do you want me to help? And his response was, I have a personal rule that I don't ask people questions if I can find the answer myself in less than 15 minutes. And I was like, I love that rule. Like, I wish the world adopted that rule. So I try really hard to make sure that when I'm going to any of these conversations, I'm not just going in being like, hey, Jay, how did you get started as a creator? Because I'm pretty sure you've done an episode answering that. So I'd binge everything, ask the questions. That was part 1. Part 2 is after I'd had 15, 20 conversations, I started pulling together all the insights from that, and I share it back with everyone.

Chris Hutchins [00:14:59]:
So, you know, I I put together, like, a little presentation last year of some growth hacks I learned on podcasting, and I remember sending it to you and saying, hey, check this out. It's great. That was one strategy I have. So if you're going to do 5 informational interviews, which I guess is the, like, college kind of term when you're trying to get get a job, but Same concept. Take all the learnings and share it back to everyone else. Even just summarizing what you learned from that per single person, can you imagine if Someone called you and said, hey. Can I pick your brain on writing a newsletter? And you you were an expert in newsletters, and you answered all that. And they wrote back to you and said, hey.

Chris Hutchins [00:15:34]:
I just wanted to summarize the top 5 takeaways that I got from our conversation about newsletter growth. You're giving this amazing gift to someone, which, by the way, in the future, they're gonna get an email from someone else that says, hey. Can you talk about newsletter growth? And they're gonna say, hey. Actually, here are the top 5 takeaways that someone had from a you know, like, you can give them something that adds their value to their life easily.

Jay Clouse [00:15:56]:
I would love to hear how you think about and prioritize content creation, Relationship building and any third thing that comes to mind. Because, even just hearing your answer here, What I'm hearing is there's a lot of consumption that you're doing before you reach out to folks and have conversations. There's a lot of conversations you're having. Then there's time in Sharing that back to people. These are all things that are outside the realm of traditional, you know, quote unquote, content creation that are super A high value, high leverage, and I'm realizing I haven't created much time for. So I'd love to hear if these are, like, things that you've noted Explicitly as priorities, or is this just kind of an implicit way of operating? But even still, how much time are you spending on these activities?

Chris Hutchins [00:16:44]:
It's interesting because I I did an interview about podcasting with another podcaster named Danny Miranda, and he he talked about how his show was a way for him to build his network. And, you know, it's a reason that he put so much energy into flying to his guests and recording in person Because he's really trying to build relationships with people. And when I do my show, when I think about the content I'm creating, I will sacrifice everything personal for the content. And so, to the detriment of my relationships, I've done interviews where I'm like, I know that if I ask this follow-up question, I will build a better relationship with this person. However, I know that the follow-up question I'll ask is not gonna deliver what I want to the listener in terms of content. Now, I might be wrong there. Maybe people want a little more storytelling and everything. But if you listen to my show, it's, like, how can I densely pack, Like, as much knowledge about a topic into, like, a 1 hour masterclass from a true expert, and break out All the strategies and the tactics and the individual specifics? It's not how do we talk about some cool story in your life.

Chris Hutchins [00:18:00]:
And so I remember doing an interview, and I I I actually would say maybe I didn't do as well of a job here delivering on that promise with a guy named Mike Hayes, who I believe is a commander of SEAL Team 2. And I was like, the storytelling that you could get from someone who's commanded a SEAL Team is probably We could fill hours. But I was like, I'm here to talk about the leadership lessons that you got from this role, so that other people who are leading teams and leading companies can benefit. And, yes, we did some storytelling, but I really wanted to focus on the tactics. And so, I don't think I have as good of a relationship with the guests I've had on my show as other podcast hosts would because they went in person maybe. And for me, I'm like, the reason I can't go in person is because I need time for other things, like building relationships. Like, going in person would take more time, But I'll get the same output for the show doing the remote interview, I think. And so when it comes to content, that's priority 1.

Chris Hutchins [00:18:58]:
Like, delivering on the premise of the show, which we don't have a banter show. We have, like, a chock full of tactical information show, But that leaves time for me to go and really prioritize outside of that building relationships. And so I I've built a ton of relationships in podcasting with some of the tactics I've talked about. I'm starting to meet people in other creative spaces. I'm a member of your lab, so I've met lots of people in the lab doing other interesting things. And so it's kind of a balance of Side of the content, I'm willing to prioritize it. Within the content, I'm not. Similarly, I have people that I know would be big guests that I happen to have in my network, but I just don't think what they have to say would fit the theme of the show.

Chris Hutchins [00:19:45]:
And it drives me crazy that, you know, someone with who who has a very Let's say, like, YouTubable and and, you know, name that would probably perform really well for the algorithm. Someone with millions of followers that might post it. But, like, they just don't have tactics and strategies about optimizing any aspect of your life. So I just don't have a place for them in the show. Yeah. And even though it would probably benefit my relationship. You know, one of the founders of, like, a massive unicorn company that everyone I'm sure listening has on their phone was, like, I'd love to come on your show sometime. And I was, like, well, I just don't know what we talk about.

Chris Hutchins [00:20:24]:
Like, I'm sure it would be a great relationship builder to invite, you know, someone like that on the show, but it just I care about the content first.

Jay Clouse [00:20:32]:
I I think it's a smart approach though, because I do see a lot of interview shows that are clearly, like, Guest name and clout oriented that it's difficult to package that show as a premise that is growable. It's, like, hard to say this is what the show is about. People who like this should listen to this show, or people who are trying to learn this should listen to this show. It's not clear what you're tuning in for. And I think that becomes very binary in terms of the outcome of that show over the long term. It's either gonna be huge and it's gonna be, like, School of greatness type thing, where it's, like, we bring on big names who have achieved great things all over the place, and we talk to them about everything. Or it's gonna Go to 0 over time. Because it's hard to hold an audience's attention for a long period of time, I think, if you have non specificity.

Chris Hutchins [00:21:23]:
And how if you're out there trying to start a podcast, how do you differentiate being a show that's premise is I interview people about their success? Like, there's Thousands of shows doing that. Almost anyone that you're talking to has been on many of those shows. So I tell everyone, like, tell me in a sentence what your show is that makes it very clear that it's not what a lot of other shows are. And maybe maybe it needs to be 2 or 3 sentences, but, Like, I wanna hear from your trailer that you're not we're just like Diary of a CEO, but we're just not Diary of a CEO. Like, Okay?

Jay Clouse [00:21:56]:
Well We just have less access and less resources.

Chris Hutchins [00:22:00]:
So that's what I wanna push people to to do is think, what can I do differently, and what can make my show unique, and and own that? And at the expense of that comes, you're probably not gonna some other area. For me, it's, You know, the if you wanna really pull out all the tactics, it means when I hear someone mention something that could be an interesting story, but I Also know there's, like, one other important tactic that they're very good at. I pivot to the tactic and not ask them a question about their family, which, You know, those kinds of questions build better

Jay Clouse [00:22:33]:
relationships. After a quick break, Chris and I talk about his approach to mastering new platforms. And later, we dig into the specifics of his podcast growth experiments. So stick around. We'll be right back. And now, back to my conversation with Chris Hudgins. Tell me if this is true about you or not. I I have a sense that When you have an idea or you set your sights on something, it becomes a very intense like, you you focus very intensely in that direction.

Jay Clouse [00:23:01]:
For example, you said you joined the lab. Immediately, when you joined, like, who can I talk to about x, y, or z? And then you have those conversations and, like, you get into something, you commit to it, you move through it quickly. Is that does that sound fair? Does that sound like a fair classification?

Chris Hutchins [00:23:15]:
So if anyone listening goes to listen to all the hacks, you'll see lots of reviews. You you don't see downloads on podcasts, but there are, you know, tens of thousands of them every episode. And then you go to YouTube and you're like, wow. Couple 100. What's going on there? And part of the reason is that I know there are so many things I'm not doing well on YouTube intentionally. Like, I I'm fully aware. But right now, I tell my producer and editor, I'm like, just edit the video and put it on YouTube. I don't care what the title is.

Chris Hutchins [00:23:42]:
I don't care what the thumbnail is. Just put it up there because I don't wanna not have it up there, but I don't care. Because I know that if I start caring about YouTube, I will not be able to stop at consuming Every possible bit of information about YouTube and going so deep on it, and I'm not ready for that project to to commence. Yeah. Because I know I won't be able to control myself from going as all in as possible. And, you know, I started with the podcast. Next thing I focused on was the newsletter. And I know that social.

Chris Hutchins [00:24:16]:
I know that, you know, video and clips and threads, and there's lots of other things I should be doing. I know that when I want to tackle those, I will hopefully do a great job, But it will take a lot of energy, and I just don't have the time for a new project yet.

Jay Clouse [00:24:31]:
But it's such a it's such a skill because I know you listen to, Invest Like the Best, Patrick O'Shaughnessy show. Do you recall the episode of Boyd Varty called Live Like a Tracker, I think it was called?

Chris Hutchins [00:24:43]:
I do not.

Jay Clouse [00:24:44]:
This is guy. He grew up in, like, the bush, and he really relates a lot of life to what it's like to track a lion in Africa. And something from that episode that I think about all the time is he describes lions and their animals of prey. He's like, They have 2 speeds. They're going at a 100% to capture their prey, get the kill, or they're resting 100%. And I see people who have that same, like, mentality and approach things in that way, at least in broad strokes. And I realized that I am Almost completely opposite, where I've, like, set my life up to be operating at higher than average 100% of the time. And I think I'm really missing out on some of the the gains that come from the top level of intensity.

Jay Clouse [00:25:32]:
But it would come with a trade off of doing less, if that makes sense.

Chris Hutchins [00:25:36]:
I listened to one of your retros recently, and I was like, god. I had the opposite feeling, though. I was like, gosh. Jay's doing all these things. Why am I not doing all the things? He's doing everything. I'm so Far behind. I'm not doing any of the things. So I had the opposite feeling, looking at you thinking I was I was leaving all these opportunities on the table.

Chris Hutchins [00:25:55]:
I don't have courses. You know? Like, I'm not you you're you were like, I wanna post on LinkedIn every day or something. I was like, oh my god. Every day? I haven't even posted on LinkedIn yet. So I am leaving things on the table because my strategy is become, like, a master of a platform before attacking it. And I do think there's an alternative, which is the kind of Facebook, ship fast, break things strategy of just getting something out there and testing it. And so I have to scale myself back from doing that but I'm depth your breadth

Jay Clouse [00:26:30]:
I think you're taking the right approach though because especially given the other things that we know about your approach in your personality because you would be able to conquer 1 game. We'll call it podcasting And then that gives you the asset that you can basically barter with somebody on some other platform. You'll be like, hey, you're getting into podcasting. Let me teach you how to be really great at podcasting. Let me even give you a leg up because I'm going to shout you out of my podcast or whatever channel that I have. We see this a lot with social media in particular, where somebody will go and crush LinkedIn, and then they say, next, I wanna take on Twitter. So they find someone who's crushed Twitter but has no LinkedIn audience, And they basically barter across that. And that's such a faster way of becoming multichannel at a high level than trying to brute force all of them at once, which has been my approach thus far.

Chris Hutchins [00:27:19]:
It's funny because you you say that because I'm talking to A friend in, like, the medical field who's just like a very well connected doctor that's like, if if you ever have a medical problem, you wanna know this person. I'm bartering podcasting knowledge because he's asked a few people, and they were all, like, go talk to Chris. He he, like, if you are trying to launch and grow a podcast, talk to Chris. But I'm not even doing it for social media help. I'm doing it for, like, some future situation where I have some weird disease, and I'm, like, I know that The doctor that knows every doctor in the Bay Area, like, you know, will pick up my phone call because I helped him with his podcast. Yeah. And so And by the way, I might never get that disease, you know. Like, it might it it's a good relationship to have, but I it's not like a quid pro quo necessarily.

Chris Hutchins [00:28:02]:
It's just, you know, you're getting to meet interesting people if you're at that level in one arena. But it means that My social following, I noticed you were like, this you track the growth of all your social channels. And I'm like, I'm glad I don't because they just it would be a flat line. So I do think that at a point, there's kind of 2 versions of what you execute. 1 is execute a strategy that works and then go and optimize that strategy. And that's where I've started pivoting to. So for YouTube, it's like the strategy that works is post your videos on YouTube. We could probably tweak the thumbnails.

Chris Hutchins [00:28:38]:
We could probably tweak tweak the descriptions. I've started doing, like, slightly punchier intros that I think I picked up from a episode of this show. And I'm not gonna go all in, but I'm gonna make a handful of changes to try to level up where we're at. Let's pick 2 or 3 clips and post those, even if they're not the best Clip designed the best way. And then if I want, I can go deeper on each on each one later to improve it, But there is an 80/20 to it that I think I avoid by trying to get to, like, the 95. But there is a certain advantage If you can be amongst the top experts in any field that you get from other people wanting to connect with you, and trade with you and barter with you because you have that extra 15% of knowledge that most people don't have.

Jay Clouse [00:29:27]:
Well, I wanna get into some of the nerdery that is the test you've done on Podcast Growth. But before we dive into, like, the specific tests and some of the data we've seen and what's worked well for you on Podcast Growth at a high level. Do you think that these small tests are more impactful than just having relationships and calling in favors.

Chris Hutchins [00:29:49]:
I think that neither of them matter as much as just having good content. So I don't think you know how to use the favors without doing the tests. So we could talk a little bit about guesting versus cross promoing versus other stuff. The only reason I know what the right favor to ask is is because I've been doing the experimentation to learn what moves the needle. And so and you can only ask so many favors. So I would say a lot of what I'm doing now is not calling in favors. I think I called in a lot of favors when I launched the show, and I kinda used them all up. Now it's, well, I've learned what works.

Chris Hutchins [00:30:24]:
I know it's valuable to me. I know might know it's valuable to someone else. I can even convince them that this thing that I know is valuable to both of us is something they should consider that they weren't considering because I know it will work. So I think you have to understand those tactics and and understand the results. And by the way, I'm happy to just share them to save people a lot of time. I think the entire premise of my existence and my show is like And, by the way, my show is not about podcasting. Right? It's about, like, travel and money and life and negotiating and health, all these things, and I just go as deep as possible. And since I've done that on one area, let's just share it and save people some time.

Jay Clouse [00:31:02]:
Yeah. Okay. That's helpful. And it's a good call out to say, Also, most importantly, the content has to be good. I feel like a lot of times on shows like mine, we focus on all the things around the content to say, How do we grow this? And it's really making the assumption that the content itself is even worthy of being grown, which is A bold assumption to make because the bar for quality content gets higher all the time. And odds are, if you're wondering, is my content good enough to spread or worthy of that? The answer might be no. It might be, like, let's get back to the lab and make make some really good I mean, the lab, like, in literal in the metaphorical sense and make stuff that's that's better. Okay.

Jay Clouse [00:31:45]:
Well, let's let's talk about some of these experiments that you've run because you launched a show, you're now full in on this as a creator. The podcast is the core of it. You want this to support you and your family. So how did you go about testing these different avenues for growing all the hacks?

Chris Hutchins [00:31:59]:
So first off, podcasting is a stressful place to test. So if you're in any other creator platform I'm gonna try to make these lessons relevant to any platform, but they'll be coming from a podcasting world. It is just exponentially harder because you get no information. I'm loving going into newsletters right now because I'm like, oh, I know that this person subscribed and then opened this email and then bought this thing, and, you know, then clicked a link. On podcasting, I'm like, I know how many people listened, And I know what platform they listened on, but I have no idea if they're gonna listen next week. And by next week, I won't know if they're the same person that listened the week before. So it is very very hard. However, the one key component that I think makes a lot of tracking possible.

Chris Hutchins [00:32:45]:
I think there's, like, 2 big things that I do that lots of people do 1, very few people do the other, is I'm just doing the best I can to track all the things I'm doing. So on the audio side, I'm using a lot of things from Chartable, which is an analytics platform that I think there's a free version of and a paid version paid version of. If you use the megaphone hosting provider, the paid version is free. And they do a really good job at using the IP address data from people listening to the podcast, and letting you do interesting stuff with it. And I think one of the unique things about podcasting is when you have video, if you upload your video on YouTube, like, you don't like, they're watching on YouTube, and the video is on YouTube. When you upload your audio podcast to whatever hosting provider you use, everyone, whether they're on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, or Overcast, or Google Podcasts, they're all consuming the audio file that's hosted on your hosting platform. So you actually get a lot of information from the source, whereas on most other mediums, you've got to go put the content on a bunch of sites. So you actually get a full comprehensive picture of everyone across every site that's listening.

Chris Hutchins [00:33:57]:
And because you get their IP address, which I assume everyone's technical, but I probably shouldn't since I kinda grew up in, you know, Silicon Valley startup world, which is just a, you know, a number associated with your your Internet service provider at your house. So, like, you if you're at home on Wi Fi with 10 devices, as far as my hosting provider knows, you're all the same IP address. If you leave your house and you get off your Wi Fi, your cell phone now has an IP address. If you go to school and you join their Wi Fi, now you have a different IP address. So it's not a perfect solution, but at least you get some ability to see who that person is. And so the most important ways that I use those analytics are with link tracking and with cross promotion. So with link tracking, you say, hey. I want someone to share this podcast, and they can you can give them a link that'll redirect anywhere you want.

Chris Hutchins [00:34:49]:
Could redirect to Apple, it could redirect to Spotify. It could redirect to your website. It could redirect to Apple for iPhones and, you know, Google Podcasts for Androids. And when someone clicks that link, Chartable says, what IP address? Click the link. And then it looks at all the people that downloaded the episodes and played the episodes of your show And did did that same IP address listen? So you can start to say, oh, I'm gonna sponsor a newsletter. Got a 100 clicks, nobody listened. Not good. I'm gonna put my podcast in my TikTok link in bio and make a bunch of video shorts, which is an experiment I ran.

Chris Hutchins [00:35:23]:
And I was like, I wonder how many people are gonna go listen to my podcast after I got I don't know. It felt like probably close to a 1000000, hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok. It was, like, a very small number that you could probably it's probably, like, 5 or 10 people. So I was, like, wow. Link in bio on TikTok, not converting very well. Now, Could someone have gone to Spotify and searched? Yes. So it's not a perfect answer, but that's one path. I also use it on shows.

Chris Hutchins [00:35:52]:
Maybe I'll send you a, a smart promo, which is a way to say, hey. Did the IP address of anyone listening to our conversation right now go check out all the hacks? And it'll look, and over 30 days, say, wow. Some percentage of the people listening did, and I'll get an idea. Should I go on more podcasts? And I'll I'll actually track it. I'll be like, should I go on more podcasts and talk about podcasting and creator life, or should I go on more podcasts and talk about life hacks and that financial optimization and credit card points and miles, I would guess that the latter would perform better since it's closer aligned to the topic of my show.

Jay Clouse [00:36:29]:
This was super well explained. This even I mean, I use Chartable, and I do a lot of the stuff, and this has helped close some connections for me to even better understand how to use these things. So of the different tests you've run and it sounds like you're creating a lot of chartable links. Like, essentially, people listen to this. It's kinda like creating a Bitly link.

Chris Hutchins [00:36:49]:
Yeah. I'm also creating a lot of Bitly links. Because the 2nd piece of all of this is I use a site called PodPage, which if you have a podcast, you're not using PodPage to host your podcast's website. Doesn't have to be your brand's website, but your podcast website, I think you're doing it wrong. And I could, you know, I could go down a 1000000 lists here about why. Maybe I should go make a video about why. But one of the features is that and I'm sure you could do this with WordPress and anything else. But one of the features I like is anytime I'm creating a link to share, I just create all the hacks.com/something.

Chris Hutchins [00:37:22]:
I redirect it to a Bitly link where I can track clicks, and that Bitly link goes to wherever I wanna send people. And so whenever I announce sponsors, I say, hey. Go to all the hacks.com/8sleep, which is a sponsor of mine. And people will go to that link, And I'll know how many people clicked on that link or went to it, you know, by typing it into their browser. So I can get a sense. Let's try a few different ad reads and see what works, or let's tell people to sign up for my newsletter. And you might think that all the hacks.com/newsletter is the landing page, but in fact, it is a redirect to all the hacks.com/blog, which is where I actually host the newsletter so that I can track the links on that redirect, specifically ones that I announce on the show. Maybe someday I wanna try a new experiment and go to all the hacks.com/email and track that one separately so I could get a sense of, When I talk about certain things, what do people click click on or go to, what works, what doesn't work.

Chris Hutchins [00:38:21]:
So, yes, I'm creating lots of them. I think I have hundreds of, You know, short, you know, pretty they call them pretty redirects on PodPage. I have hundreds of those, hundreds of Bitly links, hundreds of smart promos and smart links. And it's led to some really interesting discoveries. And one that I shared with you earlier, which, at least to me blew my mind is every time I have an episode and I have a sponsor, I say, hey. Let me tell you about the sponsor. I talk about it for a minute, and I tell people where to go. And so let's take an example of Copilot, which is my favorite app for tracking expenses.

Chris Hutchins [00:38:57]:
It's a iOS Mac only app. So sorry, Android users. And I'll say, if you wanna check out Copilot and if you wanna get a deal because we've got an awesome deal, go to all the hacks.com/copilot. And I'll say that in the episode. Now I'll also put that in the show notes. So if you've ever listened to a podcast, you're listening to podcasts right now. You click down and look at the episode. You'll see it written out.

Chris Hutchins [00:39:17]:
I put a different URL in the show notes, and I went and saw how many people were clicking on the links in the show notes versus how many people were listening to the audio and just typing in all the hacks.com/copilot on the website. And it was twice as many people were clicking on the link in the show notes as going to the URL, which made me think, wow. Sometimes I run ad campaigns across my entire catalog of episodes dynamically, but I'm not putting any links in the show notes. I should go back manually and add all those show notes every time I one run one of those campaigns. Sure. It might take me 20 minutes to go manually add all those links, but if it's result if it makes up 2 thirds of the traffic, I could really outperform for sponsors. So that's something that I started doing anytime I run those campaigns because I know how important it is.

Jay Clouse [00:40:07]:
This is in the weeds. But when you do your ad reads, do you say go to allhacks.com/copilot? Do you also say or check the link in the show notes? Do you make a call to action to check the link in the show notes?

Chris Hutchins [00:40:17]:
I actually I did maybe a year ago, and I stopped. But, and this isn't the same, but at the end of every episode, after the last ad not the end of the episode, but the end of the last ad, I say, if you want links to all the promo codes, deals, coupons, everything from all of our partners, go to all the hacks.com/deals, which is not the show notes. It's a 3rd page where we have all of our deals. So if you go there, you'll see here are all of our partners. Here's all the promo codes, the coupons. We try to get good deals, so they're all there. And I track that separately. That was, like, 10%, and then it was, like, 60% click and 30% it'll go to the URL.

Chris Hutchins [00:40:57]:
So the URL did convert higher, higher conversion. So I went to one of my part brands, and I said, hey. Can we trade data? You know the conversion rates. I know the click rates. Let's trade data so that we can try to figure out how we make our relationship perform better. And it was like people that typed in the URL had a little higher intent, So they converted better, but clicks are still pretty valuable. So yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:41:19]:
Well, the the other insight from that that I hear is Listeners have an assumption that the links you share are in the show notes, even though you haven't explicitly told them that that sponsor link is in the show notes them to go seek out in the show notes versus go type it in, that's interesting. Because I've always I've I've really, like, assumed People aren't looking at the show notes most of the time.

Chris Hutchins [00:41:41]:
Me too. I still did them. I don't know why. I put very detailed show notes with all the links to everything we talk about, You know, an author bio, I have clickable, chapters in Spotify. And I was like, I I wanted to do it because I wanted to do what's what I thought was best, But I assume no one used it, and now I'm like, wow. I was totally wrong. And so I've been telling all these podcasters I know, this is a good example to rewind a little bit. I'd email podcasters I'd know, I'd go to their podcast, and I'd look at their show notes and say, hey, I noticed you don't put links to your sponsors in your show notes.

Chris Hutchins [00:42:14]:
I just ran this experiment and found that 2 thirds of the links or the clicks for my sponsors are coming from the show notes. You should probably consider doing this and see if you see an uptick. And then 1 friend of mine hosts a podcast. He did it. And he was like, wow. I saw an uptick in performance for my sponsors. I was like, yeah. So anytime I'm learning something, I'm like, how do I get that information back to other people?

Jay Clouse [00:42:35]:
After one more quick break, Chris and I dig into his specific podcast growth experiments. You'll wanna hear this, so stick around. We'll be right back. And now please enjoy the rest of my conversation with Chris Hutchins. So from your copious link production and tests, what are some of the other insights you've had when it comes to, growth experiments?

Chris Hutchins [00:42:57]:
I think an interesting one is it is wildly more valuable to target people on platforms that are the exact same as yours or closer to yours. So podcasting, for example, if If we do something cross promotional, it's going to perform a lot better than if I do something cross promotional with a newsletter, which is gonna do even better than if I cross promo with someone that does Twitter or Instagram or TikTok, because of the the relationship they have and the type of the content that their followers are used to consuming. Furthermore, if you can be a guest on a podcast instead of just cross promote with a podcast, I found that it does anywhere from 10 to 40 times better.

Jay Clouse [00:43:44]:
And that's not 10 to 40%. That's 10 to 40 times better.

Chris Hutchins [00:43:48]:
Yeah. Like,

Jay Clouse [00:43:49]:
When

Chris Hutchins [00:43:49]:
I when I run a cross promo, it'll convert somewhere between 0.1 to, let's say, 0.8 or 0.9% of the audience of a show, meaning, you know, slightly less than 1% might come over and try out my show of people that have never tried it out before. So these are brand new listeners. And when I do a cross promo or sorry. When I do a guest spot, it can be as high as 4% of the audience of that show comes over. And then one time, I did a episode where A host and I were friends, and we recorded an episode on each other's platforms. And remind me to tell you about this strategy because I think it's a great guesting strategy. And that did just as well. That did really well also.

Chris Hutchins [00:44:35]:
We recorded an episode together and put it on both feeds, and I thought maybe it wouldn't because people had already heard the same content. But it goes back to that guessing. It's people wanna hear you for an hour, not hear you for a minute. Because at the end of the day, I think a lot of times podcasters forget that people are coming for the host. Like, the the topic has been talked about on other shows. The guest has been interviewed on other shows. The thing that's gonna keep someone listening is that they like the host's perspective, because that's the only thing they're gonna get that's consistent the next time. And so you've gotta remember that People need to like you.

Chris Hutchins [00:45:10]:
This is entertainment. As much as it is information, as much as it is ink is content, it's gotta keep you entertained. It's gotta keep you, like, hooked, And the only person that's gonna do that well is the host. And so if you have someone else saying if you're on a your show saying, hey, I really love this other show. Check it out. That's great. But if if someone can hear the host of that other show and like them, it's gonna do so much better. But there are some people that think, gosh.

Chris Hutchins [00:45:37]:
I don't know if I have the credibility to go on some shows. And something I've managed to do once with Tim Ferris, once on the Bigger Pockets Real Estate Show And and I respect Tim for saying this. I I sent Tim a note, and I said I sent him, like, 20 questions about podcasting, none of which I'd found him answered publicly. And my 21st question was, and, by the way, could I come on your show as a guest? And he immediately wrote back within 2 minutes, and he was like, were the 20 questions fake just because you felt like you needed to ask me something to be able to get to the 21st question? And I was like, no. You don't have to have me on your show, But I really wanna know the answers to these questions. And he was like, well, I'll be honest. Right now where I am in my life, I'm not that interested in, like, all the optimizations of credit cards, points, and miles, and deals, and stuff, which makes sense. Tim has a lot of money and maybe doesn't have to optimize for those things.

Chris Hutchins [00:46:29]:
But he's like, but I always get emails from people asking how I grew my podcast. And so why don't you ask me those 20 questions on air as the host of The Tim Ferriss Show. And we'll talk about podcasting. Naturally, your show will come up, but I'm not that interested in interviewing you. And I was like, great. That performed really well, drove a lot of people to my audience, which was awesome. I learned a ton. You can too because that episode is public.

Chris Hutchins [00:46:55]:
Anyone can go listen to it on my or his feed. But I tried that strategy again. There's a podcast called Bigger Pockets Real Estate. Really big show, probably the biggest real estate podcast out there. You know, I've got a target. I'm like, I wanna go on some of the biggest shows and add value so people wanna come listen to my show, but I just don't have a lot of knowledge about real estate. So I was like, how do I But I knew someone that worked at BiggerPockets. So I was like, I have the in, but I don't have the strategy.

Chris Hutchins [00:47:21]:
And I just said, I wanna do an episode about optimizing the home buying experience. Your hosts know real estate so well. Could I interview your hosts? And we'll air the episode on both of our feeds. And it's great content for them. Anyone listening that's a content creator knows that, like, coming up with ideas for content and prepping them and planning them, it's a lot of work. So if you go to another content creator and say, hey, I'm gonna plan an episode for you. It's gonna be awesome. I'm gonna put hours of work into it.

Chris Hutchins [00:47:49]:
That's great. So we did this. It performed so well for both of our shows, and I've I managed to effectively get a guest spot on a show that I have no Qualification being a guest on because I kind of went on as a host.

Jay Clouse [00:48:05]:
Alright. Let me recap some of these things. This is so good. One thing that you said kind of in passing, and I'll make sure people understood what you mean. You said, it makes more sense to basically have your strategy in the same medium. And the translation of that is if you're trying to get podcast followers, subscribers, you want to be doing marketing efforts in podcasting. It's more effective to Cross promote or guest or do some sort of collaboration with another podcaster because that audience is already in audio and get them to transfer to your audio then to do an email campaign trying to get podcast listeners. Yep.

Jay Clouse [00:48:39]:
Second thing you said was, guesting is Ten to 40 times more impactful than cross promotions. And we've we've really been sold as podcasters, like, cross promotions as, like, the silver bullet, Which I think may have been true at some point in time, but I think it's less effective as more and more shows do it. And then you said a strategy for doing A guest swap is basically to cocreate a piece of content together that you can both air on each other's feeds.

Chris Hutchins [00:49:06]:
Or even you create it for the like, Yeah. Try to make it as little amount of work for someone else as possible. And sometimes, I'll I'll put a twist in a little bit of this. I did a show with Ramit Sethi, And I said, hey. I'm gonna have you on my show. You don't have I've tried to pitch a guest swap. Right? Why don't I come on your show? Why don't you come on my show? A really cool advantage here, and this applies across all platforms, is that the less you're just swapping impressions, the less people ask about download numbers. So you say, hey.

Chris Hutchins [00:49:38]:
Why don't I guest on your show? You guest on my show. It's not about the number downloads. Whereas if you say, why don't I air 20,000 impressions? It just has to be about the numbers. It's just how how how it is. And so but he doesn't have guests. So I was like, hey. Why don't you come on my show, and then it'd be awesome if you could just do a cross promo on your show? So I turn you know, at a minimum even though I was gonna have him on as a guest anyways, why not make the ask? He could just say no, but maybe he could say yes. Or Sahil Bloom, you've had him on your show.

Chris Hutchins [00:50:10]:
I said, hey. I'd love to have you on the show. I know you don't have a podcast anymore, but if you could at least, you know, promo the podcast in your newsletter, that would be awesome. Or maybe I should have said, if you could promo my newsletter in your newsletter Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:50:21]:
It would

Chris Hutchins [00:50:21]:
have been even better. So always make the ask, but I love giving people an out that makes it feel like you're not forcing their hand. It's like, I'd love if you could do this. If not, totally understand. Yeah. And, usually, you get the same result. But if the person wants to say no, they're gonna feel better about saying no, and it doesn't, like, tarnish your relationship with that person.

Jay Clouse [00:50:43]:
Yeah. Something I found to be effective, but difficult to replicate. People who are getting new into podcasting new, they have this assumption. Well, if I have a big name, not only will that draw people who are interested in that name, but maybe that person will share it, and that's gonna be my golden ticket. In my experience, a lot of people who are, like, professional interviewees, they don't really have interest in sharing every appearance they do on a podcast because that would become all of their content. However, folks that are on a sharp upwards trajectory who have not done a lot of guesting yet. There's some real sweet spot there. My friend Chanel, she has a great newsletter called Growth and Reverse.

Jay Clouse [00:51:20]:
She was on the show a couple months ago And that show is, I believe, the number one most popular show, at least on Spotify, that I've ever done. It outranks Seth Godin and James Clear. And it's because she was excited to share it because she hadn't been doing much guessing. Her audience is on a a sharp Upwards trajectory, and they love her work, so they're excited to listen to it. And a similar thing happened with Dickie Bush when he was just starting ship 30 for 30. So there's, like, this this in between area where, yeah, if you find someone that does have an audience, but they have not yet really done much publicly, that can really have an impact.

Chris Hutchins [00:51:57]:
Yes. I found that the bigger the name the value of having a really big name guest is not that they're gonna share the episode. It's not even at least on podcasting, that it's gonna magically, like, hit the algorithm because on podcasting, there is no algorithm. And it didn't even work on YouTube, by the way, for big name guests. Like, it even though I don't have a huge channel, it didn't hit that algorithm.

Jay Clouse [00:52:20]:
Yep.

Chris Hutchins [00:52:20]:
I think because most YouTube channel most people on YouTube are not looking for a 1 hour long interview that's not very visually interesting. Preach. But then, I've done episodes with people that no one knows. Forget even whether they shared it or not. I by the way, totally agree with your strategy. Finding people with smaller, loyal, excited audiences that don't get enough. They want more of the person that they're listening to, reading from, etcetera. Great strategy.

Chris Hutchins [00:52:46]:
But I've had episodes with that didn't get shared by the guest, but where the guest was just so good at the topic that the episode did incredibly well, far better than episodes with really well known people. I did an episode with Tony Hawk, who I imagine anyone listening knows. But, But, like, the content wasn't as good as I wanted it to be, partially because I think Tony Hawk is just a savant in skateboarding and just isn't as intentional. As much as you and I are like, let's research all these things and let's try to be experts. He's like, well, I just skateboard, and I just happen to be very good at it. And I just try hard and, like so he couldn't articulate A lot of tactics that someone could replicate because he's it was entertaining. It was great. But the one thing it did do is now when I'm trying to get someone to come on the show, I can say, we've had on guests like Tony Hawk.

Chris Hutchins [00:53:35]:
And people are like, oh, if you've had on that really big name guest, you probably you know, I I probably should go on that show. So my rule is get 3 big name guests if possible because it will help recruiting other guests. And after that, make a 100% of your decisions based on whether they are going to create incredible content or if they're so big that they'll push down the the the least of the 3 big name guests and be the new number one. So I don't know if Obama has tactics, But, like, a former president? Sure. I'll say yes. And and I think that would really help recruit any other guest in the future.

Jay Clouse [00:54:15]:
I do see that some folks, they take that guest name strategy and then they almost, like, keyword stuff the description of their show. And I don't know how effective that is. You know, where you're, like, that your show description you're cramming in a bunch of guests that you think people might be searching for. I don't know if that works well in, like, a Spotify search or an Apple podcast search. But I do see a lot of people at least trying it.

Chris Hutchins [00:54:38]:
So I can tell you that that strategy does not work on Apple because Apple does not index the show description. Spotify does. All the other platforms do. Not all, but most of the other platforms, Castbox, Overcast, Google Podcasts, Player FM do. But there are Apple is, for my audience, the number one platform for the podcast, and they don't index Description. So the things that you can focus on, title, author, episode title. And then the 5051 is channel description, and everything else doesn't matter. The description of your episode, only 4.3% of podcast listeners use an app that searches the episode description.

Chris Hutchins [00:55:22]:
So The channel description is still there for Spotify, but, really, the most important thing that you can title is the title, Which is tough because you don't want your show to be creator science colon YouTube podcasting newsletter. Like, so, SEO for podcasting is really really tough, but I'm excited to spend a little bit more time. I've never really thought of my podcast website, which is just all the hacks .com, as like a blog. So I haven't thought about it from the strategy that most bloggers do of SEO and everything. But I was playing around on a PodPage, and Either a released or soon to be released beta feature is on every single episode. PodPage is now analyzing All of your keywords and your SEO stuff, and he's doing the site is doing a SEO analysis for every episode. So I want this is another thing. I wanna spend a little more time digging into whether focusing on SEO could impact the podcast, but Knowing that I only have the title and, you know, the episode title to to do that from is tough.

Chris Hutchins [00:56:35]:
But the episode title, if you look at, a Tim Ferriss Show episode, you'll notice I'm looking at the most recent one. Doctor Shirley Sarman, a legendary PT, does a deep dive on Tim's low back issues, teaches how to unlearn painful patterns, talks about movement as medicine or poison, and more. That is a very long podcast title. But I can tell you that the podcast episode titles are indexed It's by everyone, so maybe there is an argument to having really long podcast titles because you can pull in a lot of the keywords from there.

Jay Clouse [00:57:08]:
I was wondering about that because part of me, whether it's episode titles or email subject lines, There's a point of truncation in a lot of places. Right? And so a lot of times, I'm I'm trying to play the game of I wanna make sure everything is seen pre truncation Or at least everything pre truncation should be compelling. I think that's probably the strategy to say we know truncation happens doesn't mean not to go beyond the point of truncation but just make it so that everything pre truncation makes sense and is compelling but doing more descriptive keywords in Episode titles sounds like then would be a smart strategy. And I wasn't sure if that was a strategy decision on the part of people like Tim or if that was, like, an artifact of just how we used to do it and that habit has persisted.

Chris Hutchins [00:57:55]:
Yeah. I don't know the actual answer there. I Now I probably I probably should've asked that in our 3 hour podcast episode about Tidal, but it's at least something that might matter. But the description thing, it might it does matter on Spotify. So if you're trying to grow on Spotify or your audience is more in line with Spotify's audience, which I've found that the Apple audience and this is probably no surprise, like, the Apple audience probably skews a little older and a little higher net worth than, you know, the non Apple audience. And for my show, at least, I can tell you after Apple and Spotify, the biggest player is overcast with 4%. So, like, Spotify and Apple, like, dominate the entire market. But I have friends whose shows are 70% Spotify.

Chris Hutchins [00:58:44]:
So if you play in the Spotify demographic more, maybe the the the show description could be better better key worded. And I haven't played enough there, but I probably should consider it.

Jay Clouse [00:58:56]:
Something we didn't touch on when we're talking about cross promotions, guesting is feed drops, where you basically place an entire episode of your Joe, in the feed of another related show. Have you tested that much?

Chris Hutchins [00:59:07]:
So the problem is I'm not necessarily opposed to doing this. I'll go back to what I said before, which is, like, the content is the most important thing. And so I'm really not interested in any strategy that would, you know, put anything put the content down. So maybe if I found an I haven't done it, to be clear. If I I have done the strategy of me and another podcaster will co coproduce something and place it in both feeds. That I have done. I have done I went on as a guest on another show and took the interview of me and put it in my show, But I have not just put an episode from another person about another topic completely unrelated to me or the show and put it in my feed. And part of the reason is that I just I don't know if that's what I would want as a listener.

Chris Hutchins [01:00:01]:
Yeah. Unless it was done Very very thoughtfully. And I have heard, there's a podcast called the Mad Fientist. And I believe, and I could be wrong, but I believe there was an episode where he was, like, I heard this interview with so and so, And it was so good. The guy asked the host of this podcast asked every question I would have asked, that I thought, why would I waste my time Asking this person to go do another interview where I would ask the same questions they've already been asked. And so instead, I emailed the host and said, would you mind if I just aired your interview on my feed. And that's something I've considered. Same.

Chris Hutchins [01:00:45]:
And and and would do it as a swap. Right? Hey. Air this on my feed. And then in return, maybe you'll do some cross promos for me. Maybe you'll have me on as a guest. Maybe so that is a strategy that's in my, like, to test soon but haven't, But it would need to be because I found a show where a specific episode was so good, and I just I didn't even think trying to get that host or sorry, that guest on my show was worth the time because someone else did such a good job. So I haven't done it. The only other place that I've thought about doing it is there's a few guests that I've been trying to get on the show, and for Ever reason, I just have been completely unsuccessful, and I feel like what they've said would be really valuable.

Chris Hutchins [01:01:31]:
And even though there are questions that I would want to ask this person if I could get them on the show, I just I haven't been able to get them to agree to come on the show. And so that could be another reason to say, look. I wanted to do an interview with so and so. I love their book. I couldn't get them on the show, so I found the best interview. What I've actually experimented with instead is if there's a topic and I can't get a guest I want or I can't find a guest, I'll just do the show by myself. Like, I think too many people lock themselves into a format for their show. And the format I started with, Now I have 3 or 4 formats that I regularly do that were not what I started with.

Chris Hutchins [01:02:15]:
My show started as an interview show, and then I was like, well, let's do some q and a episodes. And those performed, by the way, better than many interview show episodes. And then I said, well, I wanna talk about insurance. So I was like, I wanna help people make all the right decisions with their insurance policies. And so that was my next goal, was to do an episode on insurance. And I was like, who knows enough about insurance to do this episode? And I couldn't find anyone. And I looked, but I just couldn't find someone that I thought was the right person to do an interview an episode about insurance. And I was like, But I research insurance on every policy so much that maybe I'm the one that should do this episode.

Chris Hutchins [01:02:55]:
And that episode has been incredible. I just as we record this, yester or this last week, got this review, and I just have to read it because it's my favorite review I've gotten so far. The title is episode 104 saved me $15,854

Jay Clouse [01:03:10]:
a year.

Chris Hutchins [01:03:13]:
Priced all their insurance policies after listening to that episode and was like, this this was like, they saved over $15,000 a year. And if you would ask me when I was starting the show if I would ever do it by myself, I would say, no. It was a get like, it was just a show for interviewing. That happened. Then I just, one day, had all these weird ideas, and I just wanted to talk about them. So I did an episode that I called, like, my musings about things. And that episode did better than, like, every other type of episode. It was just me talking about how I fought with Macy's to get my warranty covered on my couch, and how How I was thinking about planning a last minute trip.

Chris Hutchins [01:03:48]:
So I really encourage people to experiment, not just with growth, but with your content format. Sometimes I've done short episodes, released them on an off day. I don't know. I just feel like my show has evolved to the point that more than 50% of what I'm doing now is not what I originally they sought out to do. And it's only because I was willing to experiment with new stuff that I was comfortable with with trying it, and now it it I love doing the show even more because I get to do these other things.

Jay Clouse [01:04:17]:
Yeah. I agree with that. We, Connor and I did an episode talking about what we learned on YouTube. I've done q and a episode recently. And in terms of, especially, retention throughout the episode, those episodes perform so well. Yes. That has me really interested in doing more solo stuff. We're running a little bit long.

Jay Clouse [01:04:36]:
So I do wanna get to 1 more, kinda, category here, which is paid acquisition because I know you've run some paid acquisition tests as well. We don't have to go through the nitty gritty of all of that, but I'd love to hear some of the takeaways you have when it comes to paid acquisition. Is it worth it at a top level? If so, to some degree, what platforms seem to be the best And anything else that you think is important for folks listening.

Chris Hutchins [01:04:59]:
So the one thing that really sucks, unlike newsletters, is and and many other channels is when you run paid experiments, you can see the uptick. And many of the paid experiments you'd run-in podcasting are are tied to a player app, And so you can see the uptick in that player app, but it's very hard to measure the retention. I've just started I just ran an experiment a couple weeks ago, and I'm looking The retention curve because I ran it with a app called Player dot f m. I can see the number of new downloads on Player dot f m, and then I can see how that goes over I'm and after a handful of weeks, I'll be able to say, well, it used to be 50 or a 100 people listened. Now a new episode gets 400. So, really, now I'm feeling like I got an extra 300 listeners. Let's divide that by the cost of the acquisition experiment and what it'd cost to get a listener. I've found that at the lowest end of that spectrum, it can be a couple dollars, like, $2.

Chris Hutchins [01:05:55]:
And at the highest end, it can be, you know, more than $10, which I would put in the category of a total waste of time. The challenge is I and I found a site. This random person sent me an Imessage, like, came in as a text, but from an email address. His name's Ibrahim. And he was, like, I have a podcast growth company. I wanna run a growth test for you, totally free. You pick an episode. I'll send you traffic, and you can see the quality.

Chris Hutchins [01:06:19]:
And I was like, okay. Why not? And I ran this experiment, And he was very transparent. He was, like, our service will drive downloads to your podcast. People will listen just long enough to trigger the download, But not long but they're not listening to the episode. They're just triggering downloads. So that paid growth won't help my sponsor revenue, or Sponsor conversion or anything. It will help the show's download numbers, which may help me convince advertisers to Try the show out because it has more downloads. A really interesting fact is that because there's so many agencies playing in the and I'm gonna come back to your question.

Chris Hutchins [01:06:59]:
But because there's so many agencies playing in the podcast monetization world, people have gotten so stuck on CPMs for pricing for ads that even if your show converts 3 times better than other shows, many brands, because the agency is the one doing the media And we'll never pay 3 times as much for your ads even if they convert 3 times better. The hack there is to try to say, great. We'll do this super cheap test, but know that we're gonna be charging 3 times more. And so then they go back to the brand and say, how did it convert? And they're like, this show's amazing. We should do it. And they're like, well, it's 3 times more. And they're like, we should still do it. But it could be worth and 1 1 podcast network told me, oh, well, we just tell all the brands that you have twice as many downloads.

Chris Hutchins [01:07:44]:
And I was like, really? He's like, yeah. We just lie about the download so that we bring the CPM to a place that they would be comfortable with. And I was like, I don't feel good using that strategy. I definitely don't feel good working with you, but it's so ridiculous that you can't just convince them to care about performance that they care so much about an arbitrary number. So it's messed up in many ways. So you could just buy downloads that mean nothing, and that might help that arena. Overcast, I think going back to the first thing we talked about with content, they let you run really small dollar experiments for podcast ads. And I'm looking at them right now, and I've run 8 anywhere ranging from $250 to $1400 depending on the category you advertise in.

Chris Hutchins [01:08:28]:
The range of subscribers I got from these experiments was, like, 49 to 204. So we're talking very very small numbers, but like I said, if I spend $350 and I get 99 subscribers, It's, like, you know, $3.8.50. It's not the best use of money. Mhmm. But the reason why I advocate people test something like this is When you run an experiment on overcast, they tell you how many taps they think your podcast ad will get, and they tell you how many subscribers they think you'll get. Then you can run the ad and see how much better you perform than what they suggest. And if you three x that performance, you probably have a good show. So if you're wondering, do I have a good show? Run an ad for your show, spend $350 or $500 for whatever category it's in.

Chris Hutchins [01:09:17]:
And if your show performs terrible compared to their benchmarks, you might not have a good show.

Jay Clouse [01:09:22]:
Or at least I mean, I I would guess, like, the taps metric on that would tell you how good your Packaging is in terms of a premise. Yeah. And then subscribers is like

Chris Hutchins [01:09:30]:
So you could break it into 2 experiments.

Jay Clouse [01:09:32]:
Yeah. And then the subscribers would be, oh, I liked it.

Chris Hutchins [01:09:35]:
Yeah. If you wanna test cover art, run an experiment 1 month with 1 cover art, run an experiment the next month with another cup another cover art, Same description, and you'll be like, oh, which one do people click on more? I think a lot of people that design their cover are design it where it's taking up their whole screen and forget that most people are seeing it, you know, smaller than, you know, their thumbnail. And so I love doing those little experiments to test the title, the description, the album art, That kind of stuff. Castbox is a platform for paid advertising that I found dollar per subscriber performs the best. What I don't know, and I'm not sure how to think about it, is I don't know if it helps advertisers. Like, I don't know how engaged these listeners are. I don't know how loyal there are, but it does but I can see that people are still listening on Castbox. And I think the only reason I am skeptical that I've just never met anyone that actually uses the Castbox app to listen to podcasts.

Jay Clouse [01:10:33]:
I 100% agree. I I am in agreement with that Full assessment. Although, I do think that it probably does not help advertisers much. I I am also dubious of it. We've run a a good handful of Castbox ads Because it is, like, the dollar for dollar best spend if you're trying to grow week over week downloads. And there is, like, a noticeable decay over a period of months, but it's still a significant portion of My total downloads and I haven't done a Castbox campaign in a year. So I do think that there are people Who do genuinely listen from it. What I think happens is and I don't know this for sure, so don't quote me.

Jay Clouse [01:11:14]:
But I think what happens is Castbox pays for downloads in the App Store. And when you download Castbox, they say you should subscribe to some shows. And I bet they recommend some of their paid advertisers in that spot in the app experience. So they are real people. But what you don't know is if they are actual If they're gonna stick using Castbox, you don't know if they're going to keep listening to podcasts, and you certainly don't know if they actually liked your show. This is my hunch. I don't know this for sure.

Chris Hutchins [01:11:43]:
Yeah. I can tell you that Player FM does something that the thing that makes me skeptical is that if you sign up for player.fm, they'll precheck, like, 10 podcasts. And if you're running through the onboarding, you just hit next next next next next, you'll end up subscribed to the sponsored podcast, And those episodes will start downloading and downloading on a weekly basis with no intention. I believe on Castbox, the user has to opt in like, yes. They're shown promotional things, but they have to opt in to them. So it's a little higher bar.

Jay Clouse [01:12:14]:
Doubt. Yeah.

Chris Hutchins [01:12:15]:
But I'm looking right now, the Castbox app on Apple. And, yes, they probably pay to promote the app, but it has a 116,000 reviews, Four point eight star on Google. Yeah. They have 10 +1000000 10,000,000 plus downloads, 290,000 reviews. So, like, people are using this app. You you can't get 290,000 reviews on Google and 116,000 reviews on Apple and not have people using the app. So I think Castbox is a good a good channel for growth. I would have to spend a tremendous amount of money to see how much it affects conversion, I I tell myself that I really wish that I could build the, like, analytics optimizers version of my pie of this whole thing.

Chris Hutchins [01:13:00]:
And what I would do is I would tell Castbox I would give them a different RSS feed. And, actually, I could do this. Now that I'm thinking about it, I have a new experiment, because you give each player an RSS feed. And so I think, what if I gave Castbox a new RSS feed And I use something like Zapier, and I use Zapier to go say, take the RSS feed from Megaphone and find and replace all the links with different like, I come up with I don't know. I gotta think about how exactly I would do this. But the idea would be have all the links in the show notes get redirected through something where I could track them and see, do Castbox users click links in the show notes? Mhmm. And I Think that if I gave them a different RSS feed, I could even do this manually for 3 weeks. I'll just find replace, and it's only for the latest episode.

Chris Hutchins [01:13:50]:
So If I can remember, I might try to change my RSS feed on Castbox, host a static file that's just a duplicate of my RSS feed, and manually add in my next week's episode, putting Bitly links specific for Castbox, and see if people are actually clicking the links in the show notes.

Jay Clouse [01:14:09]:
I love this. I hope you do it. I would never, but I hope you do.

Chris Hutchins [01:14:14]:
So at the end of the day, paid growth, I think I've also run some paid ads, like cross promos, but I just pay someone to read ads for the show. I know Jordan Harbinger does a ton of these. When you're getting started, you just you don't have a choice. You don't have the inventory to give people to make it work. So they just they didn't perform as well as cross promos. And I think the hosts were just kind of reading ads. If I could find the right person, the right show, I maybe would try that again and see how it performs, but it was tough. I I I haven't found a good paid strategy other than pay someone to help you make the show better.

Chris Hutchins [01:14:51]:
Like Yeah. Pay someone to go pitch you as a guest, but not some service that's gonna, like, churn out these guest pitches that are I've received so many of that are just boilerplate templated, pay someone to go listen to 10 episodes of a podcast and craft a very specific pitch that makes it so obvious that you've listened to their show and understand it and then send that effort. Don't pay someone like, I'm Low number, high high quality. And so I could tell you if someone pitched me, I could tell you exactly what I want in a pitch. Want someone to pitch me

Jay Clouse [01:15:27]:
on a

Chris Hutchins [01:15:28]:
topic that's broadly relevant to most people in the world about a topic related to life, money, or travel that they are an expert in and that we could have a conversation that will help someone learn some strategies and tactics to upgrade their own life in that area. But I get people that are like, Do you wanna interview Bill? Bill started a real estate company that got really big. And I'm like, I don't have a show about people who start real estate companies got big. No. I don't want to interview. True.

Jay Clouse [01:15:55]:
I don't even I

Chris Hutchins [01:15:56]:
don't even respond. But the but the number of people who've actually taken the time to say, I get what you want, And I have it, and here's why. I've had multiple of those people on the show as a guest.

Jay Clouse [01:16:07]:
Alright. Last last question, I promise. Since you use Chartable so much, I need to know how much you pay attention to the new device retention graph in Chartable. Do you look at that much Retention episode over episode or month over month?

Chris Hutchins [01:16:21]:
So I have looked at it. And the reason I don't pay attention to it, but I want to now, is that I don't have a good baseline. So if I'm looking at mine, the average after next episode is 36.35%. But I don't know if that's good because I have no idea what's what's normal. If they had benchmarks, I would look at it a lot. And so, you know, what I'll say here's here's what I'll say. If you have a podcast out there and you want to know how you're doing against the benchmark, take a screenshot of your chartable new device retention, gin, episodic, 5 episodes. Send that screenshot to me, podcast at all the hacks.com, And I will aggregate all of it, average it out, and send a benchmark.

Chris Hutchins [01:17:06]:
Maybe send me also how many downloads per episode you get So that if the numbers are very different between show size, we can split that out, and I will use those benchmarks and share them with everyone. I'll send them to you, Jay. You can choose whether you wanna share them in a future episode also. But yeah. So I don't the reason I don't use them is because I just don't have a good sense of what perfection is.

Jay Clouse [01:17:27]:
I 100% agree.

Chris Hutchins [01:17:28]:
I assume perfection is, like, 50%. I don't think anyone's metrics are probably higher than that unless you have a very small show with a very loyal set of people who never leave their house.

Jay Clouse [01:17:40]:
I 100% agree. This I I also really want to pay attention to this because I'm feeling like I've ignored this for Too long. But everyone I've talked to so far says when they look at this chart, they get depressed. So the question is, is this data hard to gather and difficult Do believe, or is churn in podcast listeners so much higher than we realize? I don't know.

Chris Hutchins [01:18:02]:
I don't know the answer, but I do know. Here's a here's a around the way answer way to answer that question. I know the average number of downloads that I get on different platforms I know that on Apple, if I get 25,003 963 downloads, This is a little bit a little bit old, but when I did this, I had 30,975 subscribers. So about 31,000 subscribers, 26,000 downloads. So from Apple, I know that a very high percentage of my downloads must be coming from subscribers, and most subscribers are listening. Spotify, of 5,000 downloads, they came from 46,000 subscribers. So on it's very clear that 1 in 9 people that subscribe are downloading each time. And by the way, it could be less because some people might not even be subscribed.

Chris Hutchins [01:18:54]:
But on Apple, it's, like, 7 out of 8 or something. Wild. 5 out of 6.

Jay Clouse [01:19:00]:
Very interesting.

Chris Hutchins [01:19:01]:
On Castbox, it's 2 out of 40,000. So on Gas Box, it's it's, you know, it's not even close. So it's weird. I have more subscribers on Gas Box, and, you know, then on Apple, but I have 10 times the number of downloads on Apple.

Jay Clouse [01:19:16]:
Wild. Alright, Chris. So this has been awesome. I feel like we'll probably be giving folks listener exhaustion at this point. I could Keep talking about this, but I feel like we save it for a part 2. I hope people do email you with their Chartable retention numbers. I have no idea why Chartable doesn't just aggregate a benchmark. That'd be so odd.

Chris Hutchins [01:19:32]:
Benchmarks for a lot of things. For smart promos, they do benchmarks. I wish they had a benchmark for this number. If I could get someone at Chartable to respond to my emails, would ask them. But Man. They'd have to build something to make this possible.

Jay Clouse [01:19:49]:
I have I've learned so much about podcasting from Chris, and I hope with this episode, you did as well. If you wanna learn more about Chris, you can visit his website at all the hacks .com. Links to that and his podcast are in the show notes. Thanks to Chris for being on the show. Thank you to Emily Kloss for creating our Or thank you to Adam Lockwood for editing this episode. I'd love to hear what you think about it. You can find me on Twitter or Instagram at jklaus. Just tag me and let me know what you thought.

Jay Clouse [01:20:14]:
And if you really wanna say thank you, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next