Statement Mondays: Behind the Scenes #18: Calm after the N&N storm
Statement Mondays: Behind the Scenes #18: Calm after the N&N storm
Numbers hypotheses, editing up-leveling, & the secret to landing the guests you want — Welcome back to the Statement Mondays biweekly(ish) update! (Oh dear I’m behind..)
What is Statement Mondays? It’s a podcast for college and early-career women about being bold and authentic in the workplace. I interview career-minded women with strong identities who give examples, advice, and tools that inspire listeners to bring more of who they are into what they do.
👩🏼🎨 Since last time:
I launched three new episodes:
I experimented with a new episode type in my 2nd ever Statement Extra (episode #16) which was a collaboration between Statement Mondays and a platform of women uplifting each other called YaYa :) Unfortunately, I don’t have any way of measuring what works for these “Extras”, but it’s fun for me to play with!
I’ve recorded 1-2 interviews a week for the past three weeks so I have tons of new content again! 🤩 The best part is I can curate the episode order now instead of just publishing whatever I have.
I sent one interview to a professional editing company I was referred to called Podcast Engineers — I’m hoping to get ahead, outsource the nit-picky work, and commit to a routine.
Mallory, my intern, accepted an amazing internship offer at iHeartMedia for the summer! They essentially created the role for her because of her great work at school and on STMT — I’m so proud of her and also feel personal accomplishment as a mentor and manager! Even if this podcast doesn’t go anywhere, I know I’ve still had a substantial impact in another person’s life 🙌
🧠 #1 thing on my mind: Growth and retention...
I am no longer on New & Noteworthy (which is sad yes because I don’t have the crazy ridiculous numbers every day of the week like before...) but I am excited to see what remains now that the whirlwind has calmed down. Mainly, I can distinguish between explosive growth from N&N and actual retention. After a few weeks of seven hundred listens *per day* on average, I now see spikes on Monday of 500-900 listens when I release a new episode, and then a steep decline the rest of the week. I’m guessing most of the Monday listens come from subscribers (and since Apple Podcasts won’t even give me my subscriber count this is the best way for me to guess). So several hundred subscribers?? YES PLEASE!!! That means people are liking this content 😻.
Other things I notice are that I still get a handful of listens of my trailer episode every day, which means people are finding the podcast in other ways: either by my own promotions, guests promoting their episodes, or even better — word of mouth by listeners. Trailer listens to me is a great proxy for growth, now I need to decide whether to optimize for better growth or retention. I still haven’t found a great way to get feedback from listeners so I’ll have to continue to experiment in order to figure out what to change to make sure people come back to listen every week. Especially since I see a slight downward trajectory of overall listens week to week. Not worrisome right now but I’d still prefer that be upward… Stay tuned!
🤓 Learnings:
Editing up-leveling. For episode 16 (Statement Extra), I interviewed two women at once and cut 50 mins of content down to 12 for a collaboration supporting the founders of YaYa. The episode was a challenge to myself (since I set the rules for my own podcast)! I’m learning to be ruthless about content.
Collaboration best practices. Jackie from YaYa told me I did a perfect job spreading what they’re doing: from sharing the company URL to spelling “yaya” and even opening the app mid-recording and reading from the feed… this was my first time promoting another company and sounds like my instincts were right!
Routine woes. I’m behind a week in my biweekly updates 😨 -- since I made them public I’ve felt less pressure to deliver on-time but I need to be more diligent. I’ve also started leaving the script -writing and -recording to the last minute which is both a bad-habit-in-the-making and a sign that I’m more efficient at and/or less anxious about finishing each week’s episode.
Extra effort wins. I’ve started recording a personalized video of myself asking potential guests to interview with me. It works. The personal touch shows guests they are not just a random reach-out and that I am excited for them specifically to be on my show. I landed politician Lindsey Boylan as a guest with this method + a warm contact! 🏆 (episode coming soon!)
The video I recorded for Lindsey using Loom — full video here
🍪 Asks:
Do you know of someone who is talented at designing a brand? We are struggling with brand image in our Instagram feed and would love either some pointers or even someone to redesign it!
Any ideas about how to measure whether my experimental Statement Extra episodes are hitting home?
🙌 Shoutouts:
Thank you Julie for offering to do a retrospective with me after my season 1 (if it ever ends… might take you up on that now). I hope to distill what’s been working and what I need to change, both process-wise and content-wise.
Thank you Jamie for putting me in touch with our ~guest for next week~
Wendy I cannot thank you enough for the amazing guests you send my way 💜
Thank you Brad for intros to two fantastic upcoming guests as well!
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