Logan: Rashad.
Rashad: [00:01:00] Logan, this is a non standard episode. Do you want to give some context as to what we're doing here?
Logan: So we get asked a bunch about how you make a podcast? How did all of this come to be? And I think you especially, but me at times as well, have had to have a lot of 30-minut long chats with people about our lessons learned and like what we could do and all that stuff. And I think we've learn some interesting stuff along the way, and so we've been talking about doing this for a little while, just like a post-mortem on some of the things that we figured out in making the show and producing content and building what we've built and so some interesting lessons of the journey, now that we're 85 episodes in.
And then 25 percent is I fucked up scheduling a little bit and didn't have a guest. So that's timing, here is we're we're committed to every Friday morning delivering something to you. So here we are. It's it's the two of us talking about this. So
Rashad: it was this or no episode,
Logan: it was this for no episode basically.
So be appreciative. If you don't enjoy this, [00:02:00] which hopefully people will, then you can pick the other path that we didn't take, which is not listening to this
Rashad: totally. Okay. So in terms of structure, I guess the, just to lay out how we'll go through things, I figured it makes sense to start at what the show was originally, how it's transformed. There's been like two or three like major transformations in the show, and I feel like each one of those we've had some big strategic learning that Maybe people
Logan: Yeah, I think probably a small percentage of people at this point, we're here with us in the early days, right? It's just based on the end of how we've grown the people that were here in the start. We're not probably don't know the path.
Rashad: Yeah. So maybe the whole like how this came to be is interesting. We originally started as more of a news show. You had two co hosts that were one founder operator person and one other VC. It then evolved into just being you.
We hosted a series of web three debates, and that took up probably 10 to 15 episodes over the summer of 2022. And then ultimately, like, how would you [00:03:00] describe the show that we've landed at now?
Logan: Yeah. I think the product now is pretty consistent. We do interviews and conversations with important or interesting people in the broader tech ecosystem. It's probably, I don't know if someone can actually look at this, but 80%oOperators and tactical lessons that they've learned along the way and 20 percent investors or other that and their insights about this stuff
I think our goal now in every episode is to have someone that's uniquely interesting, giving a unique perspective on actionable. Insights that they've gleaned along the way. And I think that product, at least based on the subscribers and stuff, it seems like people like that product enough. Or at least the people that don't like it don't tell me that much.
It seems like it's working.
Rashad: we'll talk about the people that don't like it and very much do tell you in the comments or whatever and how mean people can be. But also how nice and great people can be with giving feedback. And I think, yeah. One thing I was thinking about as I was going through our guest [00:04:00] list is I feel like we are very selective in choosing guests that have really walked the walk even if they haven't been on a ton of podcasts or don't have the biggest platforms.
That's not really something we pay attention to, or I don't know, maybe that's something
Logan: No,
Rashad: to.
Logan: in the early days, I thought Oh, the number of Twitter followers someone had is a mark of importance, and it's just not. It's just making good content. It's almost better if they haven't done stuff before and that they have interesting lessons that they haven't shared elsewhere is actually a better thing than how big of an audience someone, someone has.
And so I guess maybe just the genesis of the show itself was it was 2021 in the fall winter and the market was crazy for VCs. And I was like, Hey, we need to do something. I need to do something to stand out more than I have. And I've been fucking around on Twitter for a while, but that.
It was interesting, but it was very one dimensional in my [00:05:00] personality and it grew and I think I figured out like how to grow it and it was shit posting and it was jokes and a bunch of things like that. And I wanted to do something different that allowed me to showcase a little bit more of my personality than like 140 or 280 characters are now infinite number of characters would allow.
And so I thought I looked at the All In pods success and I was like, Oh, if younger people in the industry could do that seems like clearly there's a market for it. And so that was the only real thought behind it. And so that was December of 21. I recruited Zach and Nikita to come on and do it.
We were friends, friendly with them. And so we did a few test episodes over the course of December into January. And then you came on board and around the time and then we launched the show as a, basically a rip off of All In Pod with younger people involved.
Rashad: Yeah. I remember we took a bunch of inspiration from how they were running their show. [00:06:00] It was a very news focused. pod, like we would find the most interesting five to 10 headlines about the week. Some of them would be like serious things, like whatever, Sequoia announced a fund, but then some of them were more like Twitter news.
Like I remember there were a lot of just like in the Twitter zeitgeist news stories that you guys would talk about. How was that experience
Logan: It's interesting, right? I think one of the lessons I've learned is people either want to be entertained or they want to be educated. And I don't think we had that thesis early on. We were just Oh, this is working. We saw something else that was working. It was like, all right, let's put a spin on it.
And I think founders probably can often take inspiration from something else and iterate around something. And so it wasn't more thoughtful than that. It wasn't like, Oh, I asked myself what deeply. Appeals to me as a person and that I'm really going to want to commit to for an extended period of time.
It was just oh, that works for those guys.
Rashad: it wasn't a lot of market testing
Logan: No, there was zero. It was [00:07:00] like,
Rashad: did you talk to? I imagine you, you must've talked to some people about Hey, I'm thinking of starting a podcast. What should I do?
Logan: people, but. At the end of the day, the thesis of, hey, all in podcast, but younger people is no one's gonna say that's a bad idea like that could still work today. I don't know someone. Someone probably will do that well. And if so, if you get the right formula of people in place, then that could totally work.
What I found is that I fucking hated it. I really hated it. I'm not that interesting in my opinions on stuff, generally. Or this stuff I know I can go really deep on, but the stuff I don't know, I don't like doing drive by commentary and hot takes around. And it's just if you're going to give opinions about stuff, I wanted to be really informed and well versed in it.
And you can't do that if you're going to be, like, effectively a talking head. And I fucking, I
Rashad: Also you have a full-time job as did the other two guys that were even equally or less [00:08:00] prepared than you were to have
Logan: Totally. And so just like shooting from the hip on news commentary, you expose yourself to a lot of you're either not going to be interesting because you're too muted on stuff or you're not going to be interesting. Insightful or have a real perspective on stuff or people are going to call you a dumbass, right?
And like none of those things I particularly liked and so so we did that for How long 10 to 12 episodes
Rashad: around 12
Logan: 12 episodes?
Rashad: That's when you interviewed Keith and that
Logan: Yeah, and we had Nikita was starting GAS at the time, and he had different time commitments he could make to it, and then Zach's firm wanted more oversight of the review and process and all that stuff and so ultimately that, those things came at odds with our ability to put something out consistently because you needed people to talk about things that were topical, right?
And those people constrained with time and people that wanted to review stuff just doesn't lead to publishing
Rashad: The [00:09:00] review thing is interesting. It doesn't sound like a huge deal of Oh, just send it to them. They'll, redline it a little bit. But when you're trying to turn around an episode in one to two days, like the operational friction that adds, the Justin's here sitting off camera, our editor, having to go late nights to just get an episode released on Friday consistently.
Cause that was our thing. We were like, we're going to release an episode on Friday. It was a huge pain in the ass.
Logan: And especially if like you have three people talking and we all agree and come up with something interesting and then someone else is yeah, I don't know. I don't think so. That's it's hard enough to make a good product. And then it's really hard to make a good product. And then, whatever, be handicapped in some way.
And what you can say our thesis was, I think, one that could work, but for different reasons, none of us particularly could and it just it sucked. I really, it gave me so much anxiety. I did not enjoy that
Rashad: Did you consider bailing? I know there are statistics out there about how few podcasts make it [00:10:00] beyond ten episodes. Were you like, about to throw in the
Logan: Yeah. What those stats are like it's,
Rashad: something crazy here.
Logan: here, yeah. Pull it up. What is it?
Rashad: It's a, okay. So 90 percent of podcasts don't get past episode three. That's 1. 8 million people who quit of the ones left. 90 percent will quit after 20, 20, 20 more episodes. And then to be in a top 1 percent of podcasts in the world, you'll need to publish 21 episodes.
Logan: My thought process on it was I set different mental milestones and I was like, Alright I'm gonna do four episodes. That was like all I committed to do. And then we collectively agreed to do twelve. And then at twelve was really the fork in the road thing. And we had built some muscle memory and infrastructure internally at Redpoint of how to do this.
I, you had come on board. We had started working with Justin. It was like, we were a little committed in some ways to figuring out how to do this. And so I felt some obligation to [00:11:00] like, keep pushing on because we started it. And I also just don't like those stats, right? I just knew that persisting in some form would lead to something.
If nothing else, I would learn from it.
Rashad: Yeah.
Logan: And so it still is a grind, right?
Rashad: And the market backdrop of this is. This is pre like market
Logan: This is while the market kind of ish was turning right. So like we, or I wanted to do something in a point in time in which I wouldn't have had time to do it, and then the market's like slowing down when I actually had time to do it. So it worked out pretty well. Then, but yeah so we persisted into it.
I looked at the Jimmy Kimmel's and the David Letterman's and the. Jay Leno's and Jon Stewart's and whatever, all those people in the model they have works pretty well. It's like you do news and topical stuff and then you do interviews and conversations and people come for the guest, but they stay for the current events and [00:12:00] the news and that format really works.
If you have either, if you're willing to shoot from the hip, you're smart enough to do that, or you're willing just to expose yourself to hot takes and stuff, or you have time to do this as
Rashad: have an entire writer's room
Logan: Yeah,
Rashad: jokes or you're charismatic, like Jimmy Kimmel
Logan: totally. Totally. And even then, if you go back and listen to Kimmel talk about his early days, he like says he wasn't good at it.
And that's someone that's like insanely talented. And so that format clearly works. There's a reason people do it. And so I was like, All right we'll just keep doing this. But it was like, I had three jobs. It was Hey, I had to stay up with current events. I had to interview a guest and have and also book guests.
And then I have my actual job as well. And all of those were like different things. And especially the ephemerality of news cycles and stuff, you couldn't. Backload a bunch of episodes or something. It was like you couldn't can them and [00:13:00] release them.
Rashad: we'd record Thursday and by Saturday, our release day, it would already be old news.
Logan: Yeah, exactly. It was like the new cycles were so tight and it was just a hard product to keep going. But we evolved for a while and I couldn't find it. co host to come on and do anything with me. It's really hard just to talk behind a mic by yourself and give opinions and stuff.
It's much easier to banter with someone. And so then Weinberg and I Zach from Flatiron now Curie bio was a lightning rod. He's uniquely talented and a bunch of vectors of he's just very smart. He doesn't give a fuck. He has a ton of credibility. And he was the one that I kept trying to recruit in thinking, all right, I can be diplomatic and not as interesting and he can be a lightning rod and very interesting.
And it worked really well with him which led to the, all the crypto stuff as well, where he would just rail on crypto and debate people and all of that. And that was like a. It was, that was lightning in a [00:14:00] bottle of people just loved that. And there's a reason debates, presidential debates or like whatever, people yelling at each other and arguing points like they will on all in podcasts.
There's a reason it works well. It's just like high entertainment and high education as well because you get to feel out two points. And so that was like a real lightning in a bottle kind of moment.
Rashad: Yeah, I was going back and listening to some of the crypto debates episodes. We had probably 10 or 12 people come battle Zach, and these were like very credible people in the crypto world. And yeah, those episodes were great. We were still doing news as well, and we were having guests on. So what was the major learning from that chapter where we were doing crypto debates?
We had evolved from three co-hosts to just you and you were still doing a combination of news bringing on people you like and crypto debates.
Logan: I would say that there. Like the founding [00:15:00] principle of what you enjoy doing and having someone, having people committed with you to go do that. I think that's probably true of those entire periods of time. And the crypto debate thing or that debate format, again, it could have worked if Zach could have committed the time to doing it and I don't know if I would have been happy doing it, but I probably
Rashad: You were pretty adamant about I remember there were three or four episodes where you were like, this is our last one. This is going to be the last crypto debate because I don't want us to just be a crypto debate
Logan: yeah and at some point, like clearly the market runs out of that. Content and then you become known for something that isn't what your brand was. And so I think the biggest lesson that I learned as we started to do the interviews and stuff, and this is true for any podcast is you really need to niche down.
Into what it is that you're going to have your product as and so whenever I talk to someone you maybe you're Mark Cuban or you're the smart list guys [00:16:00] or you're the strike force five like some of these podcasts that have come out where they're actual celebrities themselves and they're able to be interesting in their own right.
And talk and whatever, and those people are just supremely gifted and otherwise, one, you're going to have to really work at what it is that you do, and you're going to start out really shitty. It's just like whatever product you pick, you're going to be really bad at early on. And two, you really should be in the top.
1 percent of where you're going to start and then build concentric rings around that. And so the TAM initially for content should be really small and that's like really counterintuitive to people. And I made that mistake. I was like, who are the most interesting people that I can get on to interview and I'll just get them to tell their story and that will be interesting.
And actually no one but their companies or their coworkers or their family really care about their story.
Rashad: Even for someone as big as... we had. Mark Cuban on, we had Kara Swisher on [00:17:00] and they were great guests, but did they perform like disproportionately higher than, your average like
Logan: No, and that's the other thing is people have, if people are like big Kara Swisher fans, they can go hear her, whatever, five times a day or whatever it is, right? And Mark Cuban, you can hear from a lot. And so you, a big lesson of that was not to just go for breath of, or like famousness or whatever, or notoriety.
It's like niche down into the content that you want to deliver to people. That is actually uniquely interesting that you're uniquely able to provide. And I think the mistake. I made was just like, Oh, I'm going to chase the people that are the biggest that I can find.
Rashad: name that I can
Logan: Who's the biggest name I can get?
And I'll just get them to tell their story. And people don't really care. That's the fact of the matter is if they're really big, they can hear them other places and get their story other places. And so that was a really interesting learning and mistake. And then also my [00:18:00] interest don't align with everyone else's interest.
And so if you if left to my own devices, I would just go pursue some smattering of like B to B software. And yeah, exactly. College football coaches. Yeah, I would go just yeah, exactly. Some hip-hop rappers. And yeah, exactly. Instead, you need to think about who your core audience is and who gives a shit and then build out from what they would want to hear to be educated or entertained around that.
And that was something that I didn't even know who our core audience was, who we were trying to appeal to, what we were trying to teach them or educate them on. I was just Oh, founders or other people that like tech stuff, right? And that's not. You can get that from a bunch of different places, from people that are far more entertaining than I
Rashad: Totally. And we also constrained
Logan: You said totally a little too quick after entertaining than me. That like a deprecating joke and you're like yeah. Fucking loser. Yeah.
Rashad: Yeah, the idea of you being entertaining. But, we constrained ourselves to a caliber of guests to that was like really high to your point about the [00:19:00] niche thing. If you find a niche, Lenny was a great example of this with the product stuff like you don't have to find like mega famous people to talk about that.
You just have to talk to people that really know that
Logan: I have so much respect for Lenny and Lex Friedman and Harry Stebbings and these people that started with you need to start Really small and Lenny was like the people he get aren't notable in their own right for the most part. There's some that are but there are people that are real practitioners in their domain and a lot of people care about product and he gets them to give very actionable insights right as you expand from there you can start.
Putting more loops around it and go. Harry's name of the show is still 20 BC, right? But he interviews Scooter Braun or whoever it is, like just different people all the time. And so you can build or Lex Friedman used to be the AI podcast and then he has Kanye West coming on now. And so like you can evolve, but you have to have a core foundational base of people and you have to do, you have the answer to the question of why they should give a shit about you [00:20:00] versus.
infinite content out there. There's infinite things they can go watch. And you're not competing with like just the other people in the market that you're thinking about. It's Oh I just need to be better than the other tech
Rashad: Or all in, I
Logan: yeah, no, you actually need to be better than anyone.
Anything else anyone can do with their time. And so
Rashad: shows on Netflix
Logan: going to a bar with their friends like going to a movie, watching sports, like you're competing with all of these things. And so your competition, and that's why I don't mind. Saying this stuff is like we're not I want to help people start their podcast and get going because ultimately there's no market share capture really from me.
I am friends and a lot of people have been magnanimous in the. In their support of me along the way, the acquired guys have been super helpful. Eric Torenberg has been super helpful. Jason Calacanis has been very magnanimous with me. Harry Stebbings has been very kind, like all these people. I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of people that have been helpful along the way, but they've been.
Very nice, because we're [00:21:00] not at competition really with one another. We're competing with TikTok, and we're competing with whatever, going to a bar with your friends, not each other.
Rashad: Within this chapter of we were starting to do interviews, I was going through episodes like... 25 to 35, and we did have a few episodes that resemble what we do now. A few of them being Parker Conrad, we had come tell his story and give a bunch of operating lessons that is still today one
Logan: I think that feels, I feel like that feels the same product today. And which was accidental in that it worked out that way, but it ended up being, and the other thing that was interesting with him is I did all this prep, like I do a ton of prep before these things, and I did both of those or I did that in person.
And, and I felt like there was something that people would tell better stories in person. I just felt that and I, I didn't have any evidence to support it. But it just really felt like the difference might not be apparent to the listener of the quality of audio. If you're just [00:22:00] listening on Apple podcast, you might have no idea
Rashad: numbers weren't also substantially like validating that in person
Logan: I would actually say all of this stuff in the early days was mostly like intuition for the most part. Had we just listened to the numbers, we would have. been a crypto pod, crypto debate podcast, and we would be reeling now trying to like pivot and find our own way. So the numbers didn't support spending the effort to be there in person with people scheduling.
There were all these constraints of I had four different vectors of constraints that presented themselves. One was the Caliber of the guest and so that holding that bar high one was quality of the conversation. So the ability to to have deep dive conversations with folks and being like, I was well researched in it.
One was doing in person versus virtual and then one was releasing every Friday. And those four things, even still today, are at odds with one another, right? It's like all of those at some point it's going to break. I'm going to, I just can't do all of those things. And the consistency one is one that I.
debate especially now I have a wedding coming up, and I'm going to be on a high moon, and will I be able to keep up the consistency [00:23:00] thing? For the most part, though, everyone that is successful is fairly consistent. The acquired guys are the ones that is the exception, and they do so much research and go so deep on it.
And so I, those things were all at odds with one another, but in the Parker Conrad example, what I found was I knew every interview he had ever done, and somehow, in person which was just an intuition, he told the story of, David Sacks and him and Zenefits, which he had never told before. And I assume he was under like some, whatever, non disclosure agreement or something.
And I don't know why he decided to tell it there. He was he was comfortable with me and we got going in the
Rashad: I bet he wouldn't, there's no chance he would have told that story virtually
Logan: 0%. If he had been staring into the camera, knowing it was like recording there's no chance. And a similar thing happened with Palmer Luckey when he told the story of getting fired from Facebook, right?
He had never told the story so in depth and all the specifics around it. And I went and read a book about. all the stuff before, so I was very well researched when I went into that conversation, and he just went for it, and I know he was under NDA with a lot of stuff, and he was like, ah I, [00:24:00] come after me if you choose, I think, was his mindset, I don't
Rashad: dealt with enough of, you know of that
Logan: Totally.
Rashad: felt probably like comfortable dealing
Logan: And so that was an intuition and a learning and something we've mostly stayed consistent to. There's been some times in which we haven't been able to make it work for whatever travel related reasons, but I think that's held true.
And even still today, we've had episodes, maybe in the last couple of months in which people said things they definitely shouldn't have.
And their PR teams came back to us like pleading because realizing we were maybe going to make national news.
Rashad: We had already clipped it and made it the intro and we had all these
Logan: yeah, and the fullness of time, yeah, there's been, we've had two of those in the last two or three months of the things that like the PR teams were very much and that's actually an interesting other thing is there's this weird dichotomy of these people, especially those that don't do a lot of interviews they, they want some type of Ability to strike stuff and I actually like giving [00:25:00] them that comfort because then they know they're not like they let loose a little bit in the conversation knowing they can take it back after the fact most people don't take us up on that and then when they do it's really fucking frustrating because you're sitting there and it's oh my gosh this is so good and then maybe we'll release you know when I'm Where my will I'll just let them rip.
Yeah. Yeah. It was like all the things that are like would have been national news stories or something, which weirdly we've had a couple of those things come out, but it's very rare stuff gets taken out. But when they do, it's usually they're really salacious stuff. So those are like tensions around it, but the in person thing has been really beneficial too.
And I think we realized that during that era
Rashad: 100%. And the, to your point about consistency, because I've gone back and forth of does it really matter? I think it matters for a few reasons. One, it's just like holding yourself accountable to actually doing something. Cause if you give yourself license ah, we'll just release on Sunday. It's a very slippery slope to Sunday becomes.
Monday to becomes, ah, we'll just skip this week and we'll go next week. Maybe [00:26:00] we should just do it every other week and then all of a sudden, like you're not producing nearly as much as you wouldn't. So that's the first point. The second point ties to a broader thing of just like building trust with your audience, which is.
What this is all about. No one episode is gonna make you a huge podcast. You might get a banger, and it'll get you some new listeners, and they'll come along for the ride. But ultimately, you need to be doing something consistently, over time, very well. And giving your listeners the sort of the certainty that like, I have a workout class every Tuesday, I go home, I make dinner, I put on YouTube, and my show is going to be there.
And if it's not there, I'm a little disappointed. And so
Logan: And you go find something else that's going to fill that spot and you risk It's interesting the slope of the line in the graph that we have on the listenership And i'm going to describe this for people that aren't watching a video here. But basically when you start everyone you get a ton of like drive by people that are willing to listen because it's Oh, maybe this is a product for [00:27:00] me.
And it turns out like for the vast majority of them, it's not a product for them. And this is if you launch with a something of a audience, like I had a big Twitter audience. And so the vast majority of people didn't like the product. They were like, Oh, this guy's not as funny as I thought he was or something.
Or he's a little, this is not what I expected. Make some more jokes. And so you get a bunch of churn initially. And that continues to happen and people will give you a second shot, a third shot, a fourth shot or whatever it is. But then you bottom out at some point and then you start to compound on the way back up.
And so the consistency of building that audience of people that listen to you is just really important. And what they're coming for is delivering it every time and setting the expectations that you're consistently going to deliver that. One of the interesting dichotomies as well is you suck.
When you initially start, you just do no one's naturally good at any of this stuff. And so when you're your bias is Oh, let me get the biggest guest I possibly can as my initial episode and weirdly [00:28:00] that's a terrible idea because you're going to be at your worst at that point in time and you're audience is going to maybe come in, but then bottom out because they're not going to like you, or they're not going to like the product or whatever it is.
And so there's this weird tension of like, how big of a guest do you launch with keeping them going and incremental, but also you being bad. And that's a very weird thing is you're at your worst and you're trying to get more people to come on. And so I think the best. Podcasts for the most part, start out random.
And then they compound the people like aren't notable people in the industry for whatever reason, and then they compound over time as they get better. And so by the time most people discover it, they've refined how they do things right. And so we go look at the people that I admire, talk to or whatever.
The Acquire guys started out with a very small listenership and just kept compounding over time. Patrick O'Shaughnessy, same thing. Harry Stebbing, same thing. Lenny started a newsletter and then to a podcast, same thing. Lex [00:29:00] Friedman, same thing. All these folks started in relative anonymity and this built a good product and got more people to come in.
And I think that's an interesting sort of thing that you just need to work through. You're not going to be very good initially, right? I don't know if we still are but we're better than we were. So we kept at that weirdly kind of times to the rebrand as well, for the most part, I think by early December we were mostly doing the same product doing standalone single interview releases, I think, for the most part by November, December of last year without a ton of news.
I don't exactly remember the timeline, but then we rebranded in January, and we've been more or less the same product since then, for the most part, with the occasional exception of whatever, SBF but SBF2, but SVB goes under or whatever, like Elon by Twitter, some like topical episodes and stuff which I think we'll continue to do, or we don't have a guest book and we just talk about ourselves for a while.
Rashad: Yeah. This is the first of its kind [00:30:00] and maybe the last, but
Logan: we'll see how it does.
So how would you describe it? Cause we've gone back and forth on trying to create a tagline for the show. And it's some combination of untold stories of, Silicon Valley to, we emphasize a lot of like tactical you can learn something from this to go apply it to, if you are a founder, an operator, or even an investor, like there are stories that you can take away from this or things that from a hiring perspective, the best question to ask when you're interviewing executives or.
How to launch your second product.
Logan: don't even know what the right description is, and this is why we don't have a good tagline, obviously, but it's some combination of stories, which are certainly interesting and powerful [00:31:00] at times, and then the actionable insights as well. And I think the stories are the entertainment, and the insights are the education is like when you think about that dichotomy.
And... And so pulling those things out, everyone has a story to tell, but there's only so many elements of someone's life that is particularly interesting. And so going all storytelling and narrative narrows your Tam a little bit. And then going all actionable insights, I think can work. And if I had to bias, I would probably bias towards more actual insights.
But I personally enjoy the human side of pulling things out of people. As well. And so I don't want to give up on the storytelling thing in elements of that. And so I think the product that I hope people walk away with both the guest and the listener is something of a definitive account. Of at that moment in time, that person's journey is well as their learnings, and I don't know what pithy little tagline that ties into.
But I think [00:32:00] that's the consistent product we've come on. And now we've reached this. There's this funny referential element of like when you. You keep want to up leveling your guests, but the guests also want validation from other people coming on. And so there's this funny little flywheel that you just keep building on of X person went on and X person is important.
So okay, now, and each person, no one wants to feel like it's the most important podcast they've ever been on. That was actually a funny. I reached out to Neval one time we were in, or I bumped into him in Miami and I asked him and he's I went on Rogan. I think it was. And he's and I never wanted to go on a podcast less important than the one I've been on before.
And so I'm never doing another. He's that's what he said. He's I'll do Tim Ferriss. Cause he helped break me in the early days and make me important. But he's I'm not doing podcasts anymore. And I was like, interesting. So if you break that in a ball, you motherfucker you lied to me.
But it's an interesting thing of that's a funny social proof of just the compounding that people want the validation. We think about that, right? I like, I [00:33:00] will, I still do. all the outreach today to guests. I still do all the prep today. We've tried to outsource that and I just, I don't know, I'm too OCD.
At some point, scalably, I might need to more support than I actually do from a research standpoint. But there is a funny thing of how I craft cold emails to whatever, public company CEOs and say why they should come on. And I would say half are. Maybe half our guests at this point are cold outreach and half our guests are some referral in and the cold outreach, it's okay I know this person probably views that person as a peer or someone that I know will entice them a little bit.
And that's like an interesting thing of keeping all this stuff
Rashad: Is this the same outbounding strategy that you use to get founders to
Logan: 100%. It's the exact same thing. It's just what
Rashad: seen some of your notes and I'm like, this is, yeah, this
Logan: It's what can I interestingly and uniquely say to get this person to spend time doing this? And there's a [00:34:00] staging as well of waiting for Okay, I'll wait for that episode to release because then the other person will be more inclined to go do it.
And I also think we've by not screwing over PR teams at times by doing a ton of research in advance we try to walk away with the other person feeling like they really enjoyed it. And now I think people recommend it to other people and I get former guests referring in their friends and being like, Oh yeah, you
Rashad: I think we've been like, since we've we started doing that naturally. And now we've built that into our brand of we want to be. One, one of the most well researched interviews that you're going to hear. So you can go listen to 15 interviews of Mark Cuban, but like the one that the Logan Bartlett show does is going to be more in depth, more nuanced.
Like clearly we have done the prep coming in. And then also the guest is going to like us coming out of the interview. That's an important,
Logan: certainly a goal. Like you don't want to be confrontational. I could probably count if we've I don't know how many interviews [00:35:00] we've done 65 or something. I could probably 70. I don't know what the number is, but there aren't many people that walked away. I think feeling like they didn't get what they asked.
They signed up for in it. So I think for the most part, I don't like giving questions in advance to people. But if they really want it it's whatever, at the end of the day, I want them to be proud of the product as well, which we found is actually an important thing. The sharing and all that I think is an interesting, Harry Stebbings originally did a really good job of that, of like making sure the guests shared it and then asking other people for questions in advance and then asking those people to share it on the behalf.
And there's that was definitely something I thought we were above was like asking guests to share the episode, but it's, that's been an unlocked in the last, whatever. Six months, nine months of just like leaning into that as well, which is just a little lesson and it feels like you're above Oh, I don't want to plead with my guest to share it or whatever.
And it's no. Yeah. Sometimes you
Rashad: because it makes a huge difference and it's like they're sharing it with their audience. So we'll [00:36:00] have, Jody Bonsall on and he has 50, 000 LinkedIn followers that have been following him for years because of what a great, executive he is. And then he'll be like, here's an hour and a half of me sharing my operating secrets.
Logan: then you retain X people. That's the thing, is there's a very natural bounce rate of people, but you retain and compound over time. And the end you start with is important. Then the consistency of delivering what their expectations are important. And then you retain some percentage of them, and then that compounds over time,
Rashad: I want to hit some of these others again, not, we are far from a perfect product. We have room to evolve.
Logan: How embarrassed are we going to be in like a year when we look back on our, this thing and we're like, Oh God, this is we thought we had any insights to share with people.
Rashad: We thought we of things that we've completely fucked up so far. But what are some other moments that we've looked at each other and Fuck man, it's episode 58. Why have we not been doing this the [00:37:00] whole time? I think some other ones I can think of is... It's like really leaning into video.
We, we made it a point to, I think episode one is on YouTube still, like we were releasing a video and honestly we made not, we probably shouldn't have released that video, on video
Logan: Episode one definitely isn't on YouTube, but like episode four
Rashad: Four or whatever, but
Logan: we should take that
Rashad: we didn't know how to do video at all, we didn't know how to like We were just treating it as a listening product on YouTube.
So I treat I think we treat listening and maybe Spotify is just in the middle because they actually accept video. But then YouTube is its own beast and then listening as its own beast. But with spot with the listening platforms, there's only so much you can do to get people to listen
Logan: It's a dumb RSS pipe that if you listen to Apple podcasts, like there's no algorithm, the analytics you get back are terrible. There's no algorithm
Rashad: Maybe you have you can favorite a show or you can follow a show.
Logan: You can. But that's it, but it's not it's very simple and it's all feed based just an RSS feed, it's a...
Rashad: the benefit of that is [00:38:00] that I think you'll have more recurring listeners or once people are, that sort of Tuesday night, I'm going to listen to it while I go for a run type listener. They're going to keep coming back to it
Logan: And that's definitely the biggest historical market for podcasts, quote unquote, is that, like Apple
Rashad: I'm cooking, put it on and, make my dinner while I learn how to get better at my
Logan: Yeah, shows that call themselves podcasts, the majority of those are consumed on... Apple podcasts, for sure. Now, then there's Spotify, which is a little bit in the middle of it's more algorithmic. There's recommendations. We get better analytics back from them. You can do video on it. Ratings, all that stuff
Rashad: Chapters is good. You have some level of interactivity, but for the most part, it's still a dark hole of you publish it anyone can go release a podcast, publish it, it'll show up the same as a very well established podcast.
Logan: And they're getting better at it. They're pushing on a lot of the algorithmic iterations and stuff.
Rashad: And they're getting better at it. It's really not worth devoting [00:39:00] our attention. On those things, because all we can do is produce the best podcast listening show that we can and then release it and hope that people go listen to it. Now, YouTube is where we probably spend. It's not the majority. I don't know what percentage of our listenership it actually makes up.
But it's certainly where we spend the majority of our time.
Logan: By far the fastest growing.
Rashad: it's the fastest growing and you have the opportunity for these mega bangers. I don't know what Eleazer did. Probably close to 200, 000 views, like you're just not going to get that on some of these other
Logan: It goes viral. It like, it quite literally goes like viral within the YouTube algorithm, which is not something like you can't go viral on the Spotify algorithm or you can't go viral in the Apple podcast algorithm, right? YouTube is its own beast. So
Rashad: as much of more of a pain in the ass it is that it's 500 percent more work To do a podcast that has video. But
Logan: the reward is the potential and the number of knobs you can twist on,
Rashad: more fun. I find it way more fun than
Logan: but it's infinite. [00:40:00] It's actually do you hear Mr. Beast talk about this stuff?
Rashad: yeah.
Logan: It's insane the level of algorithmic sophistication and like content iteration you can do. Our thumbnails, how enticing you make the thumbnails to click on, the intro, how long it takes you to set up a guest how you whatever, introduce the person, what kind of context you give in advance versus getting right into the conversation itself.
There are just so many dials that you can twist on YouTube, not to mention YouTube Shorts, which is its own kind of algorithmic, whatever, TikTok clone. There's just descriptions, chapters
Rashad: Intros like how you entice someone to click through and then how you get them engaged in the first minute and then how you retain them. Like we literally have a different video editing treatment for the first 15 minutes because we know that's the most important time for
Logan: and then it compounds, right? And so if you get better click-through rates because of the thumbnail and you get better like listener, like less drop off than it [00:41:00] shows more people. And it's just all the effort that you can put into that is rewarded in an algorithmic way. And it's just you have to iterate on it and just keep getting better.
Each episode, we're like a little better at YouTube and we're still not great at it. You, I don't know, would you recommend to someone today to start? YouTube first and if you're thinking you want to do a podcast, is this like worth the squeeze of everything or like first validate that you at least want to do 12 episodes or 20 episodes or 50 episodes and then go there over time?
Rashad: If you don't have the time, if you're, if all of your attention is going on the show itself, I'd say it's better. It's better used there. If you feel like you have a good premise though, and you have a decent show idea, and you have some time to focus on video, then I'd say it's worth uploading
Logan: it's, and the other thing is YouTube's the only one that has listener and viewer numbers public, right? And so it's, if you're starting, it's a delicate balance of starting [00:42:00] and everyone's going to see how many people listen to it
Rashad: It's going to suck.
Logan: yeah. And so you're going to want to keep improving it and you're rewarded for improving it, but it's a ton of fucking effort to improve it.
And the amount of iterations and stuff, I think today, if you were to say, let's take out the core Product itself, like the stuff that for the most part, my research, outreach, whatever, all that stuff, and then the scheduling, we get someone there and we get a product set up and recorded everything in post.
What percentage of time do you think goes to YouTube versus Spotify and Apple in a bucket together? But
Rashad: It's gotta be... 80 plus.
Logan: that is what I would guess is 80 percent
Rashad: We don't actually do much to the actual episode, like the conversation that gets had between you and the guest is for the most part what gets published, with the exception of the PR stuff and whatever.
Logan: I would say and I would say everything that goes into apple and spotify benefits. YouTube and so that's a base of what an episode is and then all the bells and [00:43:00] whistles is Incremental on top of that and different for YouTube, which has been a very interesting Learning and I guess it's just something that you need to keep working at and getting better And on an Apple podcast Making one episode or thumbnail or title better than the prior one You'll never know if it actually worked on YouTube like The click through rate percentage that you can see on the episode is just it's very incremental from one episode to the next.
And so you learn so much more and you can keep improving and optimizing.
Rashad: it's fun to obsess. Sometimes it drives you crazy, but at least you have some visibility like Spotify. It's Oh, this episode got X thousand downloads like, okay, great. I don't really know what was driving that or what wasn't on YouTube.
You're like, Oh, this many people are coming in from a LinkedIn promotional post that we You can literally see the inbound traffic, you can see what the click through rate is, you can see how many people YouTube is showing to, and all of those things are [00:44:00] very motivating if you're the sort of operator behind the scenes trying to make this thing big gives you something to go off of, to be like, okay, next week I hope we do better in these different things, and I think that ties to a point of just if you are Thinking about doing a podcast or doing a podcast and you're, it can be so frustrating at times because you fucked up the intro and it published and you're like, God, that was a really good episode, but it's so important to just put that behind you keep going forward and really just focus on like getting all of the things that you need for a good episode, right?
And it's so many things, but and none of them individually will make or break an episode, but. You just gotta keep doing them all right.
Logan: I found that learning, like looking back, but not... Agonizing over it and looking in the distance, like looking one episode back and learning, but not agonizing and then keeping your eyes on downfield on how many you [00:45:00] need to do is the most important psychological thing and so every episode we do a postmortem like what we did right, what we didn't do right all that we learn from it, but then it's snap and move on with the exception of the key through boy Miami incident when they fucked up the audio and I still want to if I See those guys in the street.
Rashad: I don't think I've ever been so emotionally distraught from something that happened at work as I was with, do you want to tell the story of the production, we hired a production company in Miami. Like we have our New York guys, we have our SF people because that's most, 90 percent of the episodes we shoot, but Miami tech week, we always do an episode with Keith for boy.
So we had this like local production crew in Miami. I almost want to like, link the no dox them, but
Logan: yeah. And they just they were an audio crew and they just messed up the audio.
Rashad: up the audio and then were just like very unapologetic about it after the fact. And they were like, yeah, no we mentioned it to Logan like midway through the interview. Like we asked him to, to rerecord. It's motherfucker, we're not going to rerecord 45. Keith Reboy [00:46:00] has 90 minutes to record with us.
This is very important time.
Logan: And like you, you have one job. It's just
Rashad: Yeah. Just monitor the fucking camera.
Logan: Tell us that it's good to go, right? Gosh. So with the exception of that's still pisses me off. I think everything else is snap and move on after you do the postmortem, but keeping your eyes downfield on get incrementally better each episode, but keeping your eyes, I committed.
Two, I said four episodes and 12 episodes, and I think it was six months, then 12 months, then another And so January 31st or whatever of this year, we'll sign up mentally. There's no obligation. We don't have any advertisers or anything, but there's, we're going to sign up for another season, presumably, and that will be another year.
And we'll see if we want to keep...
Is helpful not to agonize too much about the past. The other interesting thing from an interview standpoint, and I think I can probably speak to that best. Although we obviously tried other formats is your inclination is to tell a [00:47:00] story linearly in a way of okay, give me your background and where you went from there.
And I found that. Jumping around. And we don't really reorder the episode in terms of how it happens, but sometimes we've pulled forward a segment of the conversation, right? Just we feel like it's appealing and we'll reorder.
Rashad: 20 minutes matters more than your last 20 minutes, because more people are listening, so we want to put the
Logan: And if they're if they stuck with you for an hour they'll stick with you most likely for another 15 minutes versus the chances that they don't make it past the 10th minute if the content isn't interesting is decently high, but asking questions in a way up front that makes people feel comfortable.
But then also be willing to dive into the meat of what you want to get to is an interesting, just like tactical thing. And so one of the things that I do when I get together, most of these people at this point I've never met before. And we, maybe we've interacted on [00:48:00] email a little bit and maybe had good banter.
Maybe I got passed off to a PR team pretty quickly. But getting 10 minutes ideally with them just riffing initially making them feel a little comfortable and even when we start recording the first five minutes or something Talking to them in a way that allows them to warm up a little bit rather than if you went to the gut Of the conversation that you wanted to really ask about initially their guards definitely a little bit more.
And so I found the longer I spend with people in advance, the more I am able to warm them up if they get there 15 minutes early. Generally, I know that we'll have a great discussion. I've tried to do some prep calls before with people to get them on and say, these people are so busy and it feels It's probably worthwhile.
Maybe that'll be something in a year that I'll look back on.
Rashad: As we have grown, we've earned the license to ask for more from our guests. We used to do one hour, now we do two hours. And that can be one thing that we ask [00:49:00] for in the future,
Logan: That's decently onerous, actually, of people, is we're asking at least two hours from all of these people, and with the most part we get that. And these are very busy important people in the world.
Rashad: rate on,
Logan: Yeah, the per hour rate. Yeah. Not worth fucking up their audio. Yeah. So I think that's been something that we've been able to do with time.
And I think when you look at Lex Friedman or Joe Rogan or some of those, like they've gotten longer because they've earned the right to be longer with the guests. The guest is going to come in and sit there and really go through all the different stuff in their career. And I feel like we've gotten more to a point that not only is our guest quality gotten better, but their willingness to dedicate the time to doing it has gotten a lot better too.
Rashad: Do you want to talk about people are mean and how you've maybe balanced, like taking the feedback we get in the comments on YouTube, some of it we've actually because it can be mean and true,
Logan: Oh, totally. I think actually, I actually think [00:50:00] every episode has a fair thing to criticize and and stylistically, there's a lot of things that you can criticize me for that. I I want to be better at
Rashad: asking thing is like the most recent one where I think
Logan: Totally. I'm like, in my effort to make people feel comfortable, at times I can be a little circular in my question asking.
And I've gotten better at it, but someone called it out one time. I don't know if we want to tell people this, because now they'll be listening to hear me ask ask, random questions and stuff. But but someone was calling it, they're like, just get to the fucking question already. And I'm like, ah, good
Rashad: Yeah, you're like you hurt my feelings, but,
Logan: Yeah like this guy spends more time building up to a question than asking it or something and I'm like, ah,
Rashad: I actually put them up to that.
Logan: yeah, exactly paid him to do it, but it is a funny balance of that feedback is definitely true. My energy is to get people more comfortable, and so I don't go to the crux of the question initially sometimes, which can definitely
Rashad: And it's easy to look at that comment and be [00:51:00] like, have the attitude of you fucking interview, whoever, or you don't understand. It's really, it's tough.
Logan: and then you're yelling at a non Twitter, or YouTube reply person? Yeah.
Rashad: it's important to take that stuff in
Rashad: you're actually very accessible. This is something people, if you're made it this far should know is you are very accessible. On Twitter. I think you respond a lot on email, like YouTube comments.
Logan: I think every nice comment I've ever gotten, I've tried to respond to in some way in whatever format that is. And that's gotten harder as it's gotten, whatever, bigger. But I think that's really important in the feedback people give or. When people reach out and say stuff, I internalize it for good and for bad.
And so when people are, I don't read all the TikTok comments, to be fair, that's an example of that's a black vortex of Gen Z people very upset with with mostly not me, mostly the guest, but going down the rabbit hole of TikTok [00:52:00] comments is like a really funny thing.
Rashad: common thread I would say on the people getting the rage on TikTok is usually a more tenured CEO talking about hey, I expect my employees to like work. Hard and people in the comments are just like it's not fucking fair
Logan: Yeah, it's Oh, typical patriarchal society mindset. Capitalism is like trying to, whatever. If you'll just flip out anything, it's when someone remote work, that's my favorite when a CEO, people have stopped taking a bait on that. Cause I think it's settled out a little bit when it was up in the air, a little bit of how things were going to evolve.
If you asked someone and they were like, yeah, I think we want our people coming in person. Just. The Gen Z TikTok people will get so fucking mad about like typical boomer mindset, wanting us to show up to work and be employed. It's I that is a funny example, but to your point on the comments, yeah that is an interesting thing.
If you're going to do this, [00:53:00] and especially if you're going to do what our original product was, which is commentary and opinions and all that stuff, like just be. Prepared for people to be upset and disagree where if you have one opinion, the internet will find the people with the other opinions to argue with you about it.
And and so that's something you do need to have, even as benign and innocuous as oh, interviewing tech executives or investors about their career and their operate like that's a pretty benign. Concept, but still people find stuff to be outraged about or criticize you for. Now the good side of it is I think for the most part our listeners at least the ones that I've interacted with are all very respectful and thoughtful and considerate
Rashad: people that gravitate towards this type of content tend to be people that agree with that sentiment in general
Logan: I have a friend that does a sports podcast and and it's [00:54:00] really big and it's under the barstool umbrella and like the stuff he gets said back, he'll be like, Oh, whatever the Giants sucked yesterday. And his comments are like from Giants fans being like, you know what? You suck.
And you're whatever. It's your parents don't love you. And it was probably because you were adopted as a child or something. And it's like, where did, all he said was the football team was bad. And so thankfully it's not quite. That level, but you'll still get it no matter what content you put out there.
You'll get people criticizing, which I think is a feature, not a bug of this. If people are willing to invest the time with you inevitably, to have a hundred thousand people
Rashad: problem to have.
Logan: to have a hundred thousand people listen. If you have a 90 percent approval rating, that means 10, 000 people are going to dislike you in some way, which is.
That's just a feature of all of large numbers and 10, 000 people saying mean stuff to you can be pretty mean and if you ever want to be like entertained with that, go to any big podcast or [00:55:00] whatever reality show, I'm sure is reddit. Sub forum or something, or go to the YouTube comments or go to their tick tock page and just read the comments from people that presumably even like the show enough to subscribe to the Reddit forum or something, and they're just like brutal to the people at all times.
And so it's just, it's something you got to know going in, especially if you're going to have some level of success. I also think that's an important. Another thing is what is success for you is an interesting thing to ask yourself going into it. Because it can be insatiable of just pursuing the next rung in the ladder of you just want the numbers to go up, right?
And to keep bigger, keep growing and be better than before. And at some point you need to acknowledge what success actually looks like and what you want it to be and who you want to emulate and also when to quit if it's not working, right? And.
Rashad: if you hate your life.
Logan: Yeah which, which could be not working. [00:56:00] If it's not working, it could be you're miserable with it.
And finding something that actually resonates with you because it is a grind. We said it earlier, but it's a hundred percent, like the amount of work I think next week we have right now, I think it's four separate episodes, two hours each. Normally, obviously number wise, I don't have all those stacked in together, but just the way the scheduling worked out.
And. I'm very underprepared for it and I need to sit down and do a ton of research and I'm going to do it over the weekend and spend my whole weekend just listening to other podcasts or reading news articles or just thinking or reaching out to people to ask questions that I should ask and you need to uniquely enjoy it and also recognize that the journey, no single episode will ever feel Fulfilling in the, it's oh yeah, if I just get XYZ guest and it's no the second that episode is published and [00:57:00] you get the gratification of it being out there, it's on to the next one.
And so I think acknowledging that if you don't enjoy the journey, there's no milestone at the end that you're. Going to get to that's going to feel like, Oh yeah, once you hit whatever 10, 000 subscribers, it's so much better. It's, it's not, it's it's just the same. It's the numbers are a little bigger and there's more people saying nice stuff and more people saying mean stuff.
And that's maybe you get better guests on, but the process is no different than what it was before.
Rashad: Hopefully this has been some combination of entertaining, educational to our guests. Probably a good opportunity to just thank people that have tuned in and listened to the show. It's grown pretty significantly especially as we've figured out, based on feedback, what's worked and what we've enjoyed
Logan: yeah, no, it's been it's been a really fun. Any of the one, any of the lessons, that we have here or postmortem and retrospective with a caveat that I still think we don't know. We know some things, at least the [00:58:00] mistakes we've made, but we still don't know. We don't have it figured out.
We're not, we're certainly not the, yeah. The top charting podcasts in the world or whatever, these are just our own antidotes, which is I guess a good plug to please share with your friends. So we are the top performing podcast in the world. But but I think yeah, this is it's been gratifying doing this and the people we've.
I've met along the way, both on the listener side, as well as the guest side. It's just been, it's been a fun experience and I think I'm much better as an investor. Interestingly, I got asked the question now of like why I keep doing it by guests that we're going to have on at some point in the next couple of weeks, he's like why are you, why do you do this?
And I was like, I I just enjoy it and I think it makes me a better. Board member to the companies I work with, both because of the network I've been able to build around it and also the insights. It's one thing to go learn for the sake of learning. It's another thing to learn to study for an interview with someone, right?
Rashad: to put on a show in front of thousands of guests. You're not going to want to look [00:59:00] stupid. So you are going to do the, read every book
Logan: You're going to take notes in a way that goes above and beyond what you would do otherwise. And I I am really appreciative of everyone kind of allowing this to exist because I am, I think, better at my job in a meaningful way as a resource for founders, both because of the network I've been able to build as well as the lessons I've learned along the way.
So it's been super fun. So thank you everyone for the journey. And yeah, we'll see I promise there won't be any more naval gazing episodes here for a little while. And we'll get back to your regular scheduled programming by by next week. But yeah, just thank you to everyone for coming along the way.