Selling a Podcast

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We're continuing our season of interviews and we're continuing our interview with Adam Adams. We are talking about first time around, first episode, we talked about his initial podcast. This is episode we're going to sort of wrap that up and talk about the process of selling it, which is actually one of those things that I think is very important for you to hear because although a podcast is very personality related at times, I think a lot of what we do, a lot of our side hustle kind of work is the kind of thing that we feel like we're the only one that can do it. That there really isn't a way that we could potentially sell that if we wanted to go do something else. And so we, I guess we're sort of left either you stick with it or you let it die. After hearing how this was really not what he'd got himself sort of painted in a corner, it was not really what he wanted to do. He wanted to shift focus on his really on his podcast and actually get rid of it and do a very big change and get out of the real estate market. This is something that he probably would have just let it die had he not gone through this process. So I think it's important to hear and there's some, there's some good lessons. Again, Adam makes some, some great points about business and business continuity and how you can position yourself to get out of being the primary worker for your business. That being said, because he's going to say it better than me, let's get back to our discussion with Adam Adams. Yeah, we, we talk a lot in more orally in a career focus about having, you know, roadmaps and doing it, particularly going back to that sort of that cornerstone idea of, of revisiting, even if you had, and maybe you did when you started, you had this I have a tear avatar, someone in your mind and, you know, maybe partially to completely, you know, fleshed out. But as you said, you can, you can drift. We have this drift because things were all like that dog and up where it's like, you know, squirrel and we're off on something else. We'll see some shiny thing or we'll see something. We think that this is the path to whatever that success is we're looking for. And when you get, you know, sometimes very quickly, but sometimes, you know, three, six months down the road, you, you see that, oh, wait, that's not, this is, I'm not where I want to be. I am, I'm drifting away from where I want to be. You can see any brand, you'll see this kind of stuff and you'll see big, big companies with huge marketing departments and brand is such a focus and they will just completely dump something at some point because they'll say, oh, wait a minute, that's, that's not us. We thought that was us when we started looking into it. It was a great idea. And then we got into this is not us. And so it's the same thing. It's either divest themselves or shut it down or something along those lines like you did, which is another neat little thing to talk about is the idea of selling your podcast because I think it's so often a personality type of thing that I don't think people realize that's even an option. That's that's something that anybody could even do. So I'd love to give a little more background about how you decided to do it, how you went about it and then how sort of how that that sale went as far as like being able to just divest yourself of it, because that's a lot of time that was invested in it. I know 100 percent. I will talk about selling the podcast, how I did it, why I did it, what made me even think that it was an option. If you don't mind, can I talk about another quick issue that I did with my podcast and then go right into the how I sold it? Oh, definitely. OK, all right. So so if you build it, they will come field of dreams. If you build it, they will come. My belief, because I was inspired by that movie, my belief is that I just had to have a podcast and then I would have all of the listeners. And it was a little bit of a fallacy for me where in the beginning one year of having my podcast, I had a podcast, but I didn't have a strong listener base. I didn't really have a listener base. Maybe it was like 100 to 300 people per episode downloading. I don't even know if they were listening, but 100 to 300 were downloading. And the moral of this story is it's not just if you build it, they will come. It's it's not just if you if you're in your car and you want to go on a trip and you decide I'm going to go from California to New York City, they're pretty polar opposites. Or even if you want to go from Florida to Alaska, they're pretty dang far. You understand the the directions, but you even might understand where you're going to stop, where you're going to sleep, what national parks you'll visit. But here's the thing that was missing when I believed if you build it, they will come. There was no fuel in my car. I had the road map. I had the plan, but the car was only able to get a few feet because it didn't have gas. It didn't have that fuel. And so the other fallacy, the other mistake that I had made was believing that because I have a podcast, Apple is going to say, holy cow, Adam, Adam started a podcast. We got to put this in front of everyone. And I learned the hard way that I had to do my own marketing. I had to add fuel to the tank as I went. And you can't just fuel one time. You've got to keep adding fuel throughout your journey or else you're eventually going to stop. And so for me, I learned the hard way that it's important if you have a podcast that you've got to do your own marketing, your branding, paid ads, organic ads, reach out, let people know about it. If you don't do those things, you have no fuel and you're not going to get anywhere. And so you even know where you want to go. You've got the plan, but you don't arrive because you don't have that fuel. So that's the other thing that I just wanted to mention. It's not if you build it, they will come. Apple doesn't get excited just because you have a podcast. There's millions of podcasts now. The pod Apple will only help you if you help yourself. You've got to do some of that first and then you might trigger some algorithms which say to them, hey, this is this is worth something. Let's put it in front of a few more people. All right, can I I'll transfer into first before you go? OK, go ahead. Get a thank you from Steve Jobs when you put your podcast out. He's like, hey, thanks. I'm so excited for you, Adam. What can I do to help you build your organization? I must have missed that email. You just you probably got to check that. Check all those calls. They're not all like extending your warranty. I must have missed that email. Um, so how I sold it eventually after it started growing and it went from 100 or 300 downloads per episode to I think it was at 3500 when the day that I sold it and I was a little frustrated, I'll be honest, that after the four month transition and I'll talk about the transition period after the four month transition, the person who purchased it from me had 6500 downloads per episode. It nearly doubled in the four months of transition period. And that was when I finally was realizing all of the things like how to market, how to do, how to add fuel, et cetera. But what made me decide before I get to the four month transition and how we sold it and the logistics of it, what made me decide is I was at my mastermind group. I pay for a mastermind. I think that this is a great thing. I believe in it. I believe in coaching. I believe in mentorship and I believe in mastermind groups and education, reading books, et cetera. This mastermind costs 22 grand the first year. Now, there's others that are one hundred and fifty thousand. There's others that are 10 or 20 or 30. This one was twenty two thousand. And I'm part of this group paying a crap ton of money to be part with these people. And I've got to meet them three times a year. And I'm starting to think that there might be a real estate crash. I don't know, but it is it is twenty nineteen. Things have gone up and up and up and up and up. And I'm saying I might not want to do real estate. And even if I did do real estate, I'm finally learning after years of having a podcast. It was like three years into it. I'm finally realizing that I'm not even serving the person that I want to serve on this show. And so here I am in the mastermind and I'm talking to all these, like many of them are multimillionaires. Most of them are doing really, really well and they've got their own skill set. And there's 15 of us and I'm asking them, what do I do? And there was a few things that came up. People were asking how many people listen to every episode at the time. It was like thirty five hundred. So they're like, how many people listen to every episode? And there's a lot of speakers. This is important. There's a lot of speakers, people that go speak on different people's stages. And when they do that, they speak in front of twenty people, a hundred people or maybe six hundred people, twenty, a hundred or maybe even six hundred people. And they end up making hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, speaking on stage one time. And they were blown away. They were like, you talk to three thousand five hundred people three times a week. It costs me time and money and effort and hotel stays and and flights and time away from my my wife and my kids in order to be in front of twenty or a hundred or six hundred people. And you're talking to thirty five hundred three times a week. And now they're starting to have these dollar signs. They're starting to say this seems valuable. How much would you want for it? And I and I'm like, I don't know, maybe like 50 grand. Now, this is important that I pause here and just say I shouldn't have said the first number. All of negotiation. You don't start by saying the first number. You start by saying, what would you pay for it? What's that worth to you? But I was an idiot and I didn't know that I had a whole room full of buyers. And I just thought 50,000 sounded like a lot of money and it would help me not have to worry about the podcast. So I was like, like 50,000. So one guy goes, I'll give you 50,000. The other guy goes, I'll give you 54,000. The other guy goes, I'll give you 60 grand for it. And now I'm sitting here like, wait, what? There's a market for purchasing an audience. I didn't know. This is the first ever experience. And everybody's talked about how I helped. I've helped a few people in that group with their podcast. And then they grew, grew to ranking in the top one percent. And the boss, the owner, the main person was like, man, I think not only should you sell it for 60 grand today, but you should probably start serving podcasters more because you, Adam, think that the market is shifting from for real estate, which I don't know for a fact, if it did, I think I would have made money if I would have bought for three more years in 19, 20, 21 and 22. If I would have kept buying, I probably would have been great, but I was conservative and I wanted to chill. So he goes, why don't you start serving podcasters? You obviously love it. Whenever anyone in this group asks us about, asked somebody about what to do, you light up and you pour into us about podcasting and how we could do it. And so that's kind of where it was going. So I decided in 19, I would sell my podcast and I would start a podcast about podcasting and a company about podcasting. So as I did this, as I focused on this, as I was going through the motions, I didn't actually honestly sell it to any three of those people because why didn't I sell it to them? The podcast was kind of like my baby. We all want to give a baby to a good home. It's your blood. If you're going to give it up for adoption, you want to make sure that it's going to be treated fairly. And I decided that money wasn't the most important thing. I could have probably got 150 grand for it. Probably pretty easily. But I went and reached out to the person in my world that I thought would be the best for taking it over somebody who would care, somebody who would serve. It wouldn't be about money for them. It would be about service for them. And my audience, my listener, my 3,500 people downloading every episode would get a good amount of value and they would resonate with the new person because they had a personality similar to mine. So this comes into the four months transition. So I reached out to this guy named Jason. Jason says he's interested. He wanted to start a podcast anyway, and I sell it to him for less than 50 grand, unfortunately, but I basically just said, make me an offer, whatever you think. I'll just sell it to you because I care more about the audience and that it goes to a good home. So we decide on some logistics. How are we going to do this? We decide that we're going to get a contract. So I got my attorney to write out a contract, first ever contract, probably of its kind, about how all, this is important, of the intellectual property and rights domains would become ownership under him instead of me. So it was a creative real estate podcast. And so there was a domain, there was a few domains that were similar names to creative real estate. And he got all of them. He, he basically now owns them all. He also got the right to all the previously recorded content. So there was almost 600 episodes ready to go and he now owns all of them. I don't own any of them. I had a sponsor. It was actually a recent sponsor. They had just reached out to me while I was trying to sell the podcast. And I asked the guy, Jason, I said, Jason, there's this compelling offer of somebody who wants to pay. It was like $3,500 a month. It's not a ton of money, but it was either like a three month or six month contract, I honestly don't remember now. But this guy wanted to support the podcast. And I asked Jason, this almost covers your cost for the three to six months of 3,500 a month. This almost covers your whole costs. Do you want me to sell it to you with this asset of a sponsor or do you want it without, and to just sell your own products or services or whatever? And he goes, yeah, let's go ahead and have that guy. And so for the first month, I made the 3,500 and all of the other months, I don't remember how many Jason made the 3,500 at each month by working with a sponsor. So it was, it was his asset to keep getting paid by that. Um, what else did we do? We, we talked about and negotiated all the pre-recorded content. I call it banking episodes. Everybody knows that in our fiscal lives, we're supposed to have several months worth of expenses set aside. So for a lot of people that six months of expenses, that six months of income, that's 12 months, it's three months of expenses, whatever. So for me in podcasting, I had six months of pre-recorded content. The moral of the story is if you are a podcaster record more than you produce, uh, uh, get the content ready ahead of time so that you can publish, even if you're sick with COVID recently has happened, uh, I had a client, he got COVID. He went to, um, Hawaii for a couple of weeks, but it was no big deal. He had three weeks of pre-recorded content. So he was going to go to Hawaii. He wasn't going to record anything for two weeks. And he was going to get home. He would still have one ahead, but then he got COVID and took him out for two weeks. And randomly enough, this is a total true story. His name is Corey Peterson. Uh, after going on vacation to Hawaii with his wife and getting COVID, he also got emergency gallbladder surgery. And so more moral, moral of the story, Corey had three weeks that he didn't publish any episodes and it's really important to be regular. And so for, um, for him, he actually started losing listeners in that three weeks. I don't want that to happen to me. I want to bank episodes. So I record more than I produce. So at the time, as I was selling the creative real estate podcast to, to Jason, I had six months of already ready to go content. So now he owns that. So if Jason is sick or has gallbladder surgery or goes on vacation or gets busy, he has all of these like ready to go episodes that he can produce at any time. Another thing that we decided is I didn't, don't you think it would be completely awkward? If you love the show and a person like your listener today, they love Rob. They love Rob. They come to see Rob. Now, if you, Rob, were selling your podcast and it was cold turkey today, it's Rob. Tomorrow it's Jennifer. And don't you think you would hurt some people's feelings? Don't you think people would be like, wait, what is this? Like, this isn't what I was used to. I didn't ever know anything about this. And you might get a couple of bitter people tuning out of the podcast forever. Well, I didn't think I wanted Jason to experience these 3,500 people to just hate him. And so we decided to add these other things in this four month transition. Number one is we would do 12 episodes together. We would just record 12 episodes as co-hosts. That's one of the things. Number two is before those episodes would launch, he would be a guest on my show. And while those episodes were launching, I would just let everybody know, hey, I decided to bring on a co-host. You can go back to episode, let's pretend it's 600. I don't remember the name and the number, but you can go back to episode 600 and get to know Jason, what he's about. That was a really good episode, valuable anyway. But I brought him on as a co-host. All right. That's another thing. The voiceover artist that had recorded the episode, he was a co-host. He recorded something that says, welcome to the creative real estate podcast. Here's your host, Adam Adams, switched it to welcome to the creative real estate podcast. Here are your hosts, Adam and Jason. And so we re-recorded that same voice, same voice. We kept the music the same. It was already original theme music. Nobody had ever heard it before. It was only, it was original to my podcast. Kept the music, kept the same girl's voice that was doing the voiceover artist and just tweaked it so it just said his name also. And then we also tweaked the artwork. The artwork had my beautiful mug on it. Your listener can't see me right now, but I'm super duper handsome. It had my beautiful mug on it. And so what we ended up doing is adding him to it. So it's the same colors, the same fonts, the same logos, but it just has his beautiful mug and mine. So here we are side by side, Adam and Jason. That was another, another big step. And then the last big piece was he wasn't a tech savvy person, just like I wasn't, but I had learned over time. I had published almost 600 episodes. I had learned over time how podcasts work. And so I just gave him, I gifted him a little bit of podcast coaching. So if he ever needed me, he could just reach out and I could help him find a mic or set up his, his recording studio or whatever it was. And there was, there was a couple other parts, but those are like the biggest, those are the biggest overarching pieces. And I'll turn it over to you if you have questions. I don't know. That's, that's awesome. That was a nice full featured story. Cause it's, it is, there's a lot of that. There's a lot to that, that I think people don't think about, but yeah, particularly in general, because I don't think people think about the idea of selling a podcast. But then to think about, like, you know, it's not just, it isn't just that person. It's all of that material and the listeners are mostly technical. So they've done things and understand, like when you build a website, it is, it is invaluable to have like all of those colors and all of those fonts and all of those images to have that available as opposed to trying to find it or trying to mimic it. Cause you, especially colors, you never get like, you know, it's always going to be like a little bit off and then it doesn't look quite right. And it's just, there's so much, it goes into the context or the ambiance of a show that, yeah, it's, it's more that it's not just that voice. It's not just that content. They're just saying it's that entire experience. Like you said, it's like the music and all of those little pieces that come together to make a podcast. And that is where we will pause this episode. We will come back and finish up in our next episode with the Adam Adams interview that will not complete the season. We still have plenty more lined up. So we will be back continuing to talk to people on a wide range of topics. And as I said, I had a great time going through a lot of these interviews, learn a lot every single time I spent time talking with these people. So I want to share that with you and make sure that you can also benefit and become a better developer, better entrepreneur, based on some of this information. And these people that have, have done it themselves in various ways. That being said, I'm going to wrap this one up and let you get back to your busy day. So go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you. 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