Behind the Scenes #12: We launched!
First week of data, lots of excitement, launch learnings… 🥵 Welcome back to the Statement Mondays biweekly update!
Now that we're live, please subscribe to the show, and rate & review Statement Mondays here!
What is Statement Mondays? It’s a podcast for college and early-career women in which I interview the boldest and brightest women across all different career paths and personality types, learn how they harness who they are in their careers, and share that mentorship and inspiration with other young female professionals.
👩🏼🎨 Since last time:
Statement Mondays launched!!
We launched three episodes on Feb 1 and one on Feb 8 (Lauren Jonas). You can find all of these on any audio platform (or always on statementmondays.com), here are links to Spotify:
I started the 8-week long inaugural On Deck Podcaster Fellowship and am looking forward to meeting more podcasters and learning best practices!
We’ve gotten over 270 total downloads on the first three episodes! I’m thrilled at how successful this first week was but am nervous what week 2 will look like without launch marketing
🧠 #1 thing on my mind: Retention
Okay now that I’ve had tons of listens in the first week, how do I get listeners to come back the next week? The obvious answer is get them to follow the podcast, but while that’s easy to say it’s much more difficult to do. Believe it or not, I never actually followed/subscribed to any podcasts until I started making one of my own (I listened to lots though). While launch week was a total success in my eyes, the prospect of week two with ⅓ as many new episodes and significantly less marketing scares me -- will people who heard my first ones come back for more? Retention and growth are the main things I’m hoping to learn from this new podcasters fellowship that started today -- On Deck Podcasters will be a community of 99 other podcasters or aspiring podcasters plus weekly workshops, discussions, and smaller working sessions that I’m excited to dive into!
🤓 Learnings:
First time I’ve truly asked for forgiveness and not permission (and high risk!) -- I didn’t run my podcast by my company’s communications to get their approval before launching it (didn’t want to give them an opportunity to shut it down before I launched!), and today my team’s comms director reached out to me asking about it. Seems fine (she agreed) since I don’t mention in the episodes who I work for, but still made me sweat for a good hour today... She has my back, but I could have been playing with fire… I’ve been planning to run the episodes with other employees by her, but my learning here was that asking forgiveness was the right way to go 😬. Sometimes you have to take a little risk!
Confirm with the guest in advance that they’ll help promote the episode. More communication is always better, so I’ll start informing the guest about her launch date a few days in advance and provide the materials then, and send a reminder day-of. I had planned to launchd a different guests episode today, but she just launched her new VC firm so timing was not great. Glad I checked!
Invest in a newsletter like this one! I was able to get so much support from friends who posted about Statement Mondays launch to their networks in part because they (you!) had been following my journey this whole time.
I’ve started following lots of other podcast accounts on Instagram -- it’s a great channel for discovering potential promotion partners and also great exposure because sometimes they listen back!
🙌 Shoutouts:
Oh my gosh ALL OF YOU get a huge thank you for all your help in spreading the word about the launch. You guys have posted on social media on my behalf, liked & commented on & re-shared my posts, posted in your relevant internal work groups, sent to individual friends who should listen, blasted it everywhere and of course, a lot of you have actually listened to the episodes :)
Thank you for the messages of encouragement and praise and feedback -- I’ve been so heartened by your support.
And of course a huge thank you to my first three episode guests: Fischer, Nicole, and Karla. You guys did great and people are loving your interviews!
🍪 Asks:
Please rate & review Statement Mondays here! It helps surface the podcast to more listeners.
Keep liking and sharing my episode launch posts every Monday (Twitter, LinkedIn, FB, IG) -- you helped me get over the launch hump, but now the tough part will be growing a consistent user base. Here’s a doc with some launch posts you can copy/paste.
Please reply with any tips on retention from the first spike of listeners! I'm so eager to figure this piece out.
Thanks for reading! And if you need a reason to be bold today, here it is -- today is Statement Monday.
Natalie Muenster
Founder | Statement Mondays