“And honestly if you think the standard’s too high for you or you don’t like me because I’m uncompromising about that standard then that does not matter to me because I’m not here to be liked.
“First and foremost I’m here to produce high quality work with a high degree of integrity and work that we can be proud of. Everything else is a secondary bonus.”
He also revealed that he has deleted episodes before as he did not think the conversion was worth sharing with the audience.
Money
He added: “I have never ever cared about making a profit from this podcast. This fits into ‘the things I do because I love it’ bucket in my life. My goal is, as I said to my team at the time, is just to break even.
“Jack Sylvester, who I produce this podcast with, made a shopping list of all the equipment we would need to make a high quality production and the total for all that equipment came to roughly £4,000.
“I want to produce the best podcast in the world. Come back to me with a list that’s even more ambitious. A few days later Jack came back to me with a list that cost £40,000.
“Most podcasters make their money by reading out adverts in the middle of their podcast episode and most podcasters get these advert deals from some kind of podcast advertising company that acts as a middle man between the podcaster and the brand. The brand is basically paying them on a dollar-per-download basis.
“The issue with this is that the middle man is taking a big, big cut and the brand is paying a fixed fee per download regardless of how good your show is, who you are or how valuable your audience is.
“The brands are basically handing the middle man a bag of money and saying get me podcast downloads as cheap as possible.”
Cutting out the middle man
He said: “I made a list of five companies that I genuinely use every single day and have done for years. Companies that have helped me in various aspects of my life and/or companies that I really loved in terms of their mission and values.
“I made a nice little presentation deck which was just two-and-a-half slides long, showing my audience, the growth, and I got hold of the e-mail address of the CEOs of those five companies.
“I sent them all an e-mail explaining exactly why they should sponsor this podcast, my ambitious plans for the future, I told them I was a customer of their brand, proved I was a customer and I told those companies I would make this podcast the number one business podcast in Europe if they backed me and that I would do it within 12 months.
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“All five of those companies replied. One of them was the CEO of a company called Huel, guy called Julian Hearn. He called me the next day offering to support me and this podcast.
“A few months after Huel backed the podcast I actually asked Julian, the CEO, if I could invest in the company and I ended up being a pretty significant investor in the business and I also now sit on the board too.
“Outside of those sponsors I have the odd brand collaboration or opportunity every other month which I might mention on the show from time to time.
“My three key sponsors and my other sponsors pay varying fees depending on what I do for them but all in all this year this podcast will generate over $1.2m which is just over $100,000 a month.”