My First Million - One Question Friday: How Do You Make Your Podcast Standout?

Episode Date: July 22, 2022

Producer Ben (@BenWilsonTweets) answers one MFM listener's question: What did you do to get your podcast found by famous people, Sam and Mr. Beast? And do you have any advice for how to develop this? To submit your question and hear yourself on My First Million, go to MFMPod.com and click on the circle with the microphone in the lower right hand corner. ----- Links: * How To Take Over The World * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Okay, hi, it's producer Ben. This is one question Friday. This is where we take one question from a listener and we answer it on air. Today, I'm answering it because Sam and Sean took a long weekend. They left a little early on Friday. And a few of you asked questions to me because I was on the show a little more than usual this week. So I figured I would answer one of those questions. So let's play it.

And before we go into the question, as always, if you want to leave a question for Sam and Sean to answer, usually at Sam and Sean, go to MFMpod.com and click on the microphone in the lower right hand corner and you can leave a question. And if we select your question, your voice will be on air, be on my first million. Okay, let's get to the question. Hi, this is Jeremy. My question is for producer Ben. What did you do to get your podcast found by famous people like Sam and Mr. Beast? And do you have any advice for how to develop a good idea for a podcast? Okay, so to answer the first question, what did I do to get my podcast found by Sam and Mr. Beast? So the first answer that I have to give, honestly, is nothing.

I'm extremely lucky. That's how I feel. And, yeah, I don't know. The first time I heard Sam mention how to take over the world on my first million, you may have heard me use this analogy before, but I felt like I was watching TV. and then all of a sudden the newscaster looks out of the screen and is like you, I'm talking to you. It was very bizarre, very weird.

I had no expectations, no knowledge that he was going to mention it and it just totally caught me by surprise because I was already a fan of my first million. So I don't have like a deliberate strategy or anything like that for getting famous people to find and like my podcast. I feel like all the strategy

is essentially just the content. Which leads into the second question, do I have any for how to develop good ideas for podcasts. And yes, I do, because I get pitched a lot of podcast ideas. A lot of people come to me. And most of them are good but bad. What do I mean by that?

Good but bad. The worst thing that your idea can be as a podcast is fine. And that's my reaction to most people's ideas for podcasts. I go, yeah, that sounds fine. And there's a problem with fine. And this is the problem. So before I worked in media, before I did podcasting, I did management consulting. And I was on this one project where we worked

for a security sales company. Guys go to door to door and sell security systems. And they had a problem, which was they had all these fraudulent sales. And all these fraudulent sales, as we looked into it, would happen at the same time of the year. It happened at the end of the summer. And so as we dug into it, what we found out was that these salesmen for the security system were incentivized such a way where they had these really steep steps, where it was

like, if you sell nine security systems, you would. will make $5,000, but on your 10th security system, it jumps up to $20,000, which is totally crazy, right? So what you would get is you have all these summer salesmen who are just selling for the summer, and they have to hit these certain steps. They have to hit a certain number of sales. And if they do, they're going to get this huge lump sum. So towards the end of the summer, they're really trying to hit these numbers, and they get panicked, and they start just selling accounts like crazy, even if that means fudging the numbers a little bit, selling systems fraudulently, stuff like that. So it's a big problem. So we go tell them, hey, this is a big problem. You should do a more

gradual incentive structure. And the executives at the security system company told us, you know, we've actually tried that and it didn't work. Sales went way, way down when we did that. Not just the fraudulent bad sales at the end of the summer. Yes, we got rid of those, but overall sales went way, way down. This data is wrong every freaking time. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated. Whoa, I can see the client's whole history.

Call, support tickets, emails, and here's a task from three days ago. I totally missed. HubSpot, grow better. And so we thought that was interesting. He said, why do you think that is? And what they said was, panic is an exponential. greater motivator than mere desire. So you might want something and you'll work a little harder to get something that you want. But if you're panicked, then you'll work 10 times harder, okay,

exponentially greater. And I think that's true. And I think that's true of podcasting and of content as well. Too many people think, oh, well, I'll just produce something that's okay, that's good, that's fine, that's inoffensive. I'm going to try and capture as big. of an audience as I possibly can. What you really need to be optimizing for instead is not panic, obviously, but obsession. It's better to have a smaller audience with a very few people who are totally obsessed with your podcast. And so every decision I made with my podcast, which is a history podcast called How to Take Over the World, was with that in mind. So, for example, when I first started telling my friends and family, I'm making this history podcast called How to Take Over

the World. Everyone told me the same thing, which is, That name is like too aggressive. You need to chill a little bit. Can you call it something like a little milder? How about, you know, life lessons from history? And I just thought, no, I think I really, really want to make a podcast called How to Take Over the World. And I think I would be obsessed with a podcast called How to Take Over the World. This is just like, how cool is that?

Everyone wants to know how to take over the world, or not everyone, but I do. I want to know how to take over the world. That sounds incredibly interesting. Similarly, if you go listen to the podcast, it's intro music, is that. It's now iconic. A lot of people love it, but a lot of people, when they first heard it, said, oh, that beat is like really aggressive. If you listen to it, it's a very aggressive intro song. And so a lot of people tried to talk me out of it. They said, it's good, but can you back off a little bit? Can you make it like just a little less broie and a little less out there?

And if I had done that, it would be more agreeable to more people, but there would not be as many people who are obsessed. People are obsessed at that intro song. People love it. And so to me, that is the key to good content. These really, really strong emotions. So you need to get people obsessed. You need people to feel panicked, right? If it's a podcast about like a social issue, you need people to feel terrified, feel horrified,

mortified that this thing is happening, that you're trying to illuminate. And too many people go, well, this is a good idea, right? Like this is interesting and that doesn't cut it. And so I think the fact that I made a podcast that honestly does not appeal to some people. And I think a lot of people don't realize that. But like some people are very turned off by a podcast called How to Take Over the World, this aggressive intro music.

And but that's okay because it's more than made up for by the fact that a few people are obsessed with it. And they will then tell other people about it. They evangelize the podcast. And that is ultimately how people like Sam and Mr. Beast heard about it, was through the grapevine. And so, yeah, thanks for the question, Jeremy. That's my advice.

Make stuff that people are obsessed with. Okay, next week, one question Friday, we'll be back to Sam and Sean. Thank you for doing it.