Everyone and their mother has a podcast now. You can listen to endless hours of people droning on about any subject, it's a blessing and a curse.
In early 2022 I was approached by someone quickly becoming a titan in the barndo-sphere, my now co-hostess, Emily Marshall. She said it was time to share her side of the story and her role in the business, and she wanted me to help her do it. Emily is passionate about educating potential homeowners, and other builders about barndominiums, and I've always seen their platforms as a gold-standard... so as relative nobody, I was immediately in.
By the time this offer came around, Emily and I were already buddies. A few times a week we'd share mean comments people left on our various social media accounts, talk about awful and dishonest stuff we saw in the niche, and complain that there wasn't a good way to share conversations like ours with our current platforms.
YouTube is great, but people don't have time to sit down and watch a video.
Instagram is great, but its not built for long form conversation, and you need more than a minute to explain a lot of this stuff.
Websites are great, but its a lot to sift through to get the info you want, and just like YouTube, people don't have the time to dedicate to that.
So, a podcast seemed like the best way to fill the gaps. Give people an easy listen, with lots of notes and resources linked in the description. Best of both worlds... after all, we were having these conversations anyway, might as well share the fun, right?
We were all in, sharing ideas back and forth for names and logos, buying up potential domains, and jotting down potential guests. It happened fast, or at least it felt fast. I guess everything feels quick when you live in relative chaos (if you've listened to my episode of the podcast, you get what I mean here). Before I knew it we had a scheduling system, and I was hiring babysitters so we could record our meetings on zoom.
It felt like a step in the right direction, but I had no clue what to do with the recordings once we had them. Before this I'd only been on zoom a handful of times, and I'd never edited anything longer than a reel. I started making big investments, spending something like $4,000.00 on a new computer, a blue yeti microphone, and extra hard drives.
Luckily for me, Woody was all in too. He's always supported me in starting websites, sharing online, and never questioned my motivation. I have to admit to y'all, I felt silly when I first started our build page. Instagram then, felt to me like a place where everyone was trying to make it, faking it, and I was kind of embarrassed to say I was joining the IG rat-race. I knew I'd be judged for my posts, just like I'd been judging others, and while it was scary, it was no scarier than walking into prison every morning or calling CPS when my patients families were living in absolute filth and infestation.
This wasn't that scary.
With all my new equipment, I had to get to work. Emily's plate is totally and completely full, so I learned to edit. We use Final Cut Pro for the podcast, and will use it to edit our YouTube videos as well (hopefully soon). At first I thought I'd get a head and edit all of our episodes ahead of time, and schedule them for release, but that didn't work. See, the truth here is, I'm not that organized, and there isn't enough time in the day to get more than one done.
After 9 months of planning, zooming, brainstorming, and building up our podcast, it was time to start releasing episodes.
Episode 1 was a quick chat, something Emily and I do a few times a week, only this time we had some notes and I tried to keep my language clean (what can I say, I married a sailor). The most intimidating part of the launch was sharing it on social media. We didn't know much about podcast statistics so understanding what kind of listenership constitutes a "good podcast" was difficult. See, on IG you can get thousands of hits on a post, but in podcasts, having over 100 downloads per episode is a big deal. I tried not to expect a big turn out, because I try not to ask my audience to do anything for me. No one owes me support in that way, but then the downloads and shares started flowing! On the day that we launched, my announcement was shared over 50 times, I was immediately relieved. We had worked so hard, burning the midnight oil, buying equipment, spending on babysitters, and holding off on projects to make this happen... and it was paying off.
You may be wondering, "So what do you get out of doing a podcast? Like how do you make money?", the truth is, we aren't making money from the podcast, and unless we start landing some partnerships, we won't. If we keep doing as well as we are now, those things will come, I'm not worried about that. Right now, we benefit from this podcast in another way. The real payout here, is growing the community, and educating people so that they can build too. The more people we reach, the more people we can help.
Soon, we'll offer some merchandise to help support the show.
Cute stickers, mugs, maybe t-shirts... all aimed at bringing more people to our pages, getting people well informed, and making these homes easier to build for the average person.
If there's a certain type of merch you'd like to see us carry, please let us know!
Email Megan@BarndominiumTour.com and I'll take your suggestions.
You can also reach out if you have questions about starting a podcast, I'd love to hear from you and help in any way I can.
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