The Best One Yet - *Live* at Spotify - Part I: How we build this (every day)

Episode Date: November 22, 2019

Spotify invited us to their NYC offices to record a live podcast — it’s a podcast about podcasts for our podcast listening Snackers. We introduce to the Snackers how we got into podcasting, how we built this podcast (every day), and the 5 ingredients for a podcast that people will actually listen to. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is Nick. This is Jack. And this is snacks. Daily, it is Friday, November 22nd. We've got the best one yet. We have a special breed of T-boy today. This is like a wonderful mix of stories we put together. Jack, what have we got as a first story?

It's been a huge week for Apple. It got a visit from President Trump. It was basically soft promise that the tariffs would be exempted for them. And Trump encouraged them to enter the 5G race. Apple has the best lobbyists in the United States right now. CEO Tim Cook. Yeah. Second story, Tesla just unveiled the

fifth model at a high-end event to loss. This is not even a car. This is a pickup truck. Working title, Cybertruck. Cybertruck. They had Model 3, model X, model E, model Y, cyber truck. Now, we're going to compare this to Harley Davidson, which also had an electric motorcycle. Interesting comparison. Hasn't been working out too well. Third and final story. It's been a huge day for cannabis stocks. It was a brutal week last week for cannabis stocks. The House Judiciary Committee just moved forward in the process, a bill that would legalize marijuana nationwide. Why? Marijuana has been waiting for this.

This is like a Cubs winning the World Series kind of thing. Right, but you know, bills take a while to become law. There's a whole bunch of votes and signatures still needed. Now, Snackers, before we jump into all that, we're actually not going to jump into those three stories. Because we're in a kind of a different situation today. We're not in our usual studio. If you want to know about Apple, Tesla, and cannabis stocks, check out Robin Hood Snacks,

our daily newsletter. We actually produce it every day. Snacks. That's how you figure out those news. but we have a special podcast today. This is a new milestone. It's the first time our listeners can also see us. Which is weird, bizarre, maybe even disappointing for a lot of people.

We are at Spotify's New York offices on the 71st floor. A few minutes ago, Jack and I looked out, you could see the Statue of Liberty. You could pretty much see Brazil at a certain point. Now, it's apropos because Spotify is kind of a big deal, kind of a leader in the podcasting space. And this entire podcast is about podcasts. Jack and I are going to jump into how. how we actually got into podcasting. Yeah, I actually just realized, Nick,

we haven't really introduced ourselves to the Snackers. No, the Snackers need to know this. Then we're going to go into how we actually build this every day. We produce a product. We launch a new product every day. There's a lot of steps that go into it. We're giving you the behind-the-scenes scoop. And then Snackers, we're going to talk about like the five sprinkles, tidbits, secrets,

those little nuggets that Jack and I like to sprinkle in that we know you love and we love to give to you. Okay, that's part one. True. And that's what you're listening to today. which is Friday. Full disclosure, it's Thursday for me and Nick here at Spotify's New York offices. But then for part two, we're going to be sitting down with Max Cutler. Max Cutler is kind of a big deal in the podcasting space. Co-founder and MD over at Parkcast with Spotify, which acquired his company.

We're going to talk to him because he's a thought leader in the podcasting space. It's almost like he's on the Jedi Council determining the future of podcasts. It's powerful. He's going to use the force. It's a little bit of a mace window type. We're excited for this. So before we can jump. into all that. Let's hit the jingle. New York. Thank you for letting us podcast right here in your offices. It's really generous of you.

We assume this is streaming globally. So Stockholm, L.A., everywhere else too, probably. Yeah. We understand that you guys are kind of interested in podcasts. So Nick and I are going to tell you right off the bat the story about how we got into podcasting. And it actually starts over 10 years ago when I met Nick at Middlebury College as a freshman year student. So Jack and I walk in. First thing we noticed, same protein shake situation. That's Myoplex. Second thing, same Seinfeld DVDs. Third thing, we were both huge fans of the Daily Show, not with Trevor Noah.

May have been VHS. With John Stewart, although I love Trevor Noah. So, Jack and I noticed we've got this cool overlap. We had like a total Venn diagram situation. There's like just enough in the middle that makes sense. There's also some differences. Totally. So Jack's got blonde hair, I've got brown hair.

Jack's got blue eyes. I wear blue shirts. I'm from Vermont. He's from New York. brothers, he has his sister. I taught Jack got to swipe a metro card. I taught him out of ride a buck. It was actually a thing that happened. It was pretty critical. So now we fast forward four years. Nick and I become roommates again in New York City. We're working in the financial industry. Kind of a bad time for the financial industry. This is like 2011, 2012, Euro debt crisis. Greece is falling apart. Portugal's

like selling its bonds or something. Like a hundred yards away from here was Occupy Wall Street, which I had to walk past in my shirt and tie every day. Wasn't a fun time. A lot of hate a lot of animosity towards the financial system. So Jack and I get together at Old Town Bar on 18th Street and start saying, you know what, there's a problem here. Business news isn't connecting with our generation. We should fix this. And I said, what should we, how should we fix it?

And I said, why don't we do something that produces business news every day? And Jack said, how about we never miss a day of that? And we haven't missed a day since we started that company Market Snacks back in 2012. Right. How did we do that when we? when we also had full-time jobs in the banking industry. Well, we kept it a complete secret and didn't tell our employers. This is true.

That night opened up a WordPress blog. It was like $9.99 per month. We wrote about, I think, Germany considering bailing out Greece or whatever. We developed that blog into a daily email newsletter. And then it kept growing. We grew into the video space. And it kept growing. We had a bigger audience.

We turned it into an LLC. So we had Market Snacks, the media company. on our hands. We're doing TV. We're doing video. We're out there. It's been a few years. We've fully monetized. We've got advertisers. And then we get an email that changes our life from a guy named Chris over at a production company called Cadence 13 for podcasts. Chris basically challenged us. He said, I challenge you to take what you're currently doing in your email newsletter and convert it into a podcast. Can you do that? We said, maybe. We accepted his invitation to an audition in New York City. It was January of 2018. Jack and I showed up and what we produced was extremely

mediocre. It was an awful product, but it was 60 minutes long, and we basically took that day's newsletter and tried to turn it into a podcast. And what Caden said to us is they said, yeah, you haven't nailed the format yet. You haven't figured out podcasting. It's different than TV and newsletter, but you've got a chemistry. And that chemistry is the key in the core. You'll figure out the rest as you go, and they kept guiding us. They also told us we had good content, and we proved that we could become masters of content. Like, clearly he understood we'd done some research before we got in it. So Jack and I were like, all right, we'll start doing this weekly.

We'll start doing it monthly. He says, no, you're doing it daily. We're like, all right, we don't really have time for this, but we'll commit to it. He offered us a 90-episode pilot, and it was kind of crazy to think that we could do a daily podcast, but we were producing a daily newsletter. We thought we could integrate it into our routine. We signed the contract. So here's what we did.

Cadence would be doing the editing, the distribution, getting the, podcast out there. All we would do is focus on the content. Cadence also created a nice little logo for us to put in the podcast store of Spotify and Apple and everybody else. And content is king, so Jack and I knew we had to deliver on that content. We actually did a revenue share with them so that when it came to advertisers, that's how we monetize. They got part of the revenue. We got part of the revenue. And it was nice because we had goals that were aligned. We both wanted the biggest audience possible because that's how you make money in the podcasting space. So we still remember our first advertisers because you kind of had the option with a podcast where someone else can read your ad.

Bear in mind, we had 900 listeners in the first week. It was like mostly family. And we still had two advertisers that signed up and we still love them. And we're about to give them a little bit of a plug even though they didn't pay for. One of them was like called Pitney Bowes, which was like a business machine printer of some sort. Some sort of shipping device. If you run a business, you need a Pitney Bowes machine. The other was Buffalo Trace Whiskey, which just took a big risk.

Oldest continuously running distillery in the United States. Jack and I like doing the dirt. dirty work. We did our own ads and we're proud of it. Boom. It was great. A couple weeks later, we actually got featured on Apple's podcast homepage, which was a big moment for us. Right. We jumped from hundreds of listeners per day to thousands of listeners per day. Jack and I kept gaining momentum with podcasts. Our daily listeners kept growing. And that's when we attracted the attention of a fintech company, a unicorn out in California called Robin Hood that was democratizing the financial system. Right. Robin Hood democratizing the financial system.

And then I said to Nick, we're kind of democratizing financial news. I mean, that's not how we market the product, but that's what we're doing. Because to be a part of the financial system, you have to understand the financial news at its core. Right. So the founders of Robin Hood, Vlad and Bejou, told us there were all sorts of barriers for regular people participating in the financial system. They were working on knocking down a bunch of them, but financial news is what they wanted us to help knock down. So Jack and I ended up flying out, meeting with the Robin Hood co-founders, realizing there was this mission alignment. and that they wanted to build out this news arm.

This led to the acquisition of our company Market Snacks, which we relaunched earlier this year as Robin Hood Snacks and our Snacks Daily podcast. Robin Hood Snacks is a daily email newsletter. Snacks Daily is a daily podcast. We launch your product every day. And part of that product is our exclusive for Spotify Snacks Minute that comes out every day in your daily drive,

which has been thrilling to see grow. Now we want to show you how we build this every day. This is how it goes down. Snackers listening on the pod, Jack and I at this moment while live at Spotify, we dropped like a six-minute video really cool behind the scenes of us recording our podcast, how we do it every day at Robin Hood. We show us responding to fans. We show the headline hammer when we scan the news and figure out what goes in the pod. Nick pitches stories to me. I pitch stories to him. We figure out a top three stories. Then we research them. Then we record them. Honestly, though, the video looks better as a video than it does on a podcast. At Spotify, we show, showed the video, but for this podcast, we're going to skip it. However, it's a great YouTube

video on Robin Hood Snacks page. We'll make sure you can access it. Now let's get back to the live recording at Spotify where we're going to jump into some other cool stuff. So Nick and I have actually done that 500 times approximately. Yeah, it feels like just yesterday we started with this thing. And we have millions of downloads of Snacks Daily that have happened. Well, when it comes to actually doing this 500 times, you start to notice some trends. and what we've noticed are that there are five kind of secrets, kind of ingredients, sprinkles that we try to weave in and bake into every snacks daily

that we know our audience loves and we love to do with our audience. Spotify is giving back to the podcast community right now by letting Nick and me do this live podcast here. We want to give back by sharing the secrets that we've learned. So look to the five ingredients to a great pod. First, are you a daily podcast or are you a not daily podcast? The world is kind of bifurcated in this way. And why that's important is that if you're listening,

to podcasts, odds are you're multitasking. Let's be honest, there is nobody who just sits down in a leather sofa and listens to a podcast and does nothing else. You'd have to be crazy. You're commuting, you're on the four train, you're probably doing your laundry or something, and that's why you're listening. Podcasts are perfect for multitasking. And whether you are a daily podcast or a longer form podcast that's not daily, that will really determine what type of multitasking is happening, and that's important. For us, we know our audience is listening on a commute. There's a are listening in the morning on the way home. They want something snippy.

They value their time. We respect that. So we keep it as a 15-minute punchy pod. If you're a daily podcast, you really need to treat your listeners' time preciously. But you may be a more longer form and leisurely hang out on the weekends, sit on the couch and do nothing for three hours kind of podcast. You got a lot more wiggle room to do like the first 10 minutes are just packed full of ads. And you can go an hour and a half if you want because you're on a road trip to Santa Barbara when you're actually listening to this thing. So that's the key.

choose, are you daily or you not daily? The second ingredient is being 110% of yourself 100% of the time. Here's another thing about podcasts. You can't see me. Some people have never seen us before. They only hear us, which is freaky for them

and freaky for us. And if you want your personality to shine through just through one of the five senses that we were given, you need to be 110% of yourself. That's why, raise your hand here if you like pizza. Well, if you're a podcast host,

You don't just like pizza. No. You love pizza. You love, you fucking love pizza. That mozzarella, you see it, you feel it. It's wafting. I want more, though. To be 110% of yourself, you should be specific, personal, and bold.

My favorite pizza? Danis, the sweetest sauce. Q Gardens. You also, though, want to be personal about this. So, like, one funny thing is that both Jack and I have gotten married. During the pod. Not to each other, to other people. We should clarify.

We both got married separately to other people over the last couple years. That became part of our pod. We're chatting about the stress of going on Pinterest to choose the right mason jar for the wedding party, like kind of a thing. Every detail of both of our weddings was dissected on the podcast. Literally, we did the podcast while I was on my honeymoon because we had just launched the podcast. Here's the thing. Podcasting, especially daily podcasts, is an intimate relationship that you have with your listeners.

And to make the relationship even stronger, as a podcast host, you have to be vulnerable and open up about your life and not just share the good things, but sometimes the bad things. that vulnerability and that personal connection makes the relationship stronger. So you're being personal, you're being visual, but you're also got to be bold. You want to leave the listeners with something that's not just a statement. It's a proud statement.

Nick, people are spending time in their day to listen to you. Can you at least come up with an opinion you feel strong about? It should be a strong opinion. Do your research, do your diligence, and if you're not so sure about an opinion, don't put it on the pod

until it's a good, strong, bold opinion. All right, so that's number two. Number three is find the story. Because, spoiler alert, there is always a story in whatever you're covering. Who likes podcasts here? Chances are you like podcasts that tell a good story. Right, because typically, if something's, for example, covering the news, they're going to tell you a bunch of things that may have happened.

Reuters and Associated Press cover the news in a super comprehensive, objective way that states all the facts of the case. But you don't have to summarize something as a podcast host. You just have to find the right storyline that's going to, connect with your audience. We find that the best podcast go deep into one aspect and one angle of a story instead of a comprehensive shallow survey of everything. So, for example, The Daily, we're big fans of The Daily. They recently did a story on Jewelie cigarettes, but they focused at first on a family affected by vaping and how this worked into their daily lives. My favorite

how I built this episode is Ben and Jerry's. Not because they covered everything you've ever learned about Ben and Jerry's, but because they focused on Hogendaz, which tried to to sabotage Ben and Joe's by organizing some conspiratorial boycott of Ben and Jerry's products because they considered it a threat. That was the story. And then even like niche podcast, like a Harry Potter podcast, they're finding the story within a story. It's very meta. My wife and I love the sacred text. And in the episode about the fifth chapter of Order of the Phoenix, they could have just talked about magic, but they didn't. They talked about Professor McGonagall and the importance of trusted adults in kids' lives. So snacks on snacks daily,

We do this every day. For example, in yesterday's snacks, we had Victoria's Secret, owned by a company called Elbrands. Everyone in the news is covering it. Elbrand's stock goes like this. Revenues are down. Every story was the same. But what Jack and I focused on, we did cover that stuff too, but was the fact that the founder is 82 years old.

Still the CEO. Son of Russian immigrants. Kind of an American dream. I mean, he's a great story. But he's 82 years old and he's the CEO deciding what next sexy underwear is going to have pink written on the butt. That's a freaky storyline that we think is relevant because it led to our takeaway, which is if the CEO's got to go. He's got to be out.

This isn't the right fit for Victoria's Secret. So that's why it's key to find the storyline. That's what makes your podcast. Fourth, you got to have a hook. You got to have not just one hook. You want to have hooks throughout. And this is what we sprinkle into our podcast. One hook you probably recognize if you've heard snacks daily.

This is the best one yet. Nick and I are eternal optimists and like to start your day with a positive note. So that's why we start it like that. I also think it's the best podcast. We really do. We think we actually improve every day, hopefully. But we also have an introduction to the podcast where we share kind of a funny, interesting pop culture story. We're like, you know, Papp's Blue Ribbon came out with a 99 box of beer the other day.

We want our snackers to be able to know that because you need to be armed with that kind of information. Another unique aspect of our podcast that we call a hook is our takeaway. Every single story, we have a takeaway. The takeaway is designed to be the one thing you remember of our story, if you can only remember one. thing. And then finally, snackers noted that at the end, we have our snack fact of the day. This is a super relevant, fascinating little factoid, like the fact that oat milk sales have searched 600% this year. That's something our snackers actually tweet us and send in. We give them and their hometown a shout out because we want them to be a part of the pod we produce every day. It makes it

come to real life. Audience participation is wonderful. We are live at Spotify. There's some audience participation here, which is great. But even if you're just participating in an inside joke, or recurring theme that Nick and I do in the podcast, that brings the podcast to real life. And then our fifth and final key that you've got to weave in is a bias for doing this in one take. So to do a good podcast is just like any other public speaking. The more you know the content, the better you will be.

There's a reason Jack and I aren't doing like a podcast on succulence. That's not our area of expertise. We do research on our podcast. We do diligence on all the stories that we cover. But once you push record, you're going to start recording the podcast. And you may have a temptation to eliminate one imperfection in the story by doing a second take. But what we've noticed is podcasts are not like TV. There's no makeup.

There's no cosmetics. It doesn't have to look perfect. It's a more raw medium. It's okay to have that first take. And that first take is more interesting to your audience anyway. It's authentic. It's authentic. And Nick, you're a jokester.

And I love having my authentic reactions to Nick's jokes on the podcast. podcast and vice versa. And often the jokes from either of us don't land at all, and that is totally fine. Crickets sound good on podcast too. All right. So those are five keys, the ingredients we weave in to our podcast because we know our snackers love them and we love sharing them with our snackers. So now you know how Nick and I got into podcasting. How market snacks became Robin Hood snacks. How Snacks Daily gets made every day. What are the five ingredients to making a podcast that people will actually listen to. So that's the end of our part one live snacks daily from Spotify, which has been a lot of fun.

Snackers, to those of you who are listening on audio, thank you for listening. Part two comes out Wednesday. Nick and I are about to go chat with Max Cutler, but for now, thanks for snacking. And if this is your first time listening to the Snacks Daily pod, follow us on Spotify. Definitely. Subscribe on Apple. Check out Snacks.com and sign up for our email newsletter. You're going to love your snacks.

This is Jack. Nick and I both own stock of Tesla. The Robin Hood Snacks podcast you just heard reflects the opinions of only the hosts who are associated persons of Robin Hood Financial LLC and does not reflect the views of Robin Hood Markets, or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates. The podcast is for informational purposes only, is not intended to serve as a recommendation to buy or sell any security, and is not an offer or sale of a security. The podcast is also not a research report and is not intended to serve as the basis of any investment decision. Robin Hood Financial LLC, member FINRA SIPC.