Jordan and Alban are hopping on to talk about the mishap that sparked a big idea in listener interaction, Fan Mail, and celebrating getting the #1 spot in the PodPros AE Podcast Report!
Jordan and Alban are hopping on to talk about the mishap that sparked a big idea in listener interaction, Fan Mail, and celebrating getting the #1 spot in the PodPros AE Podcast Report!
All right, you know how, like movies and books and all sorts of things do like foreshadowing, like they're dropping hints, something feels inconsequential, some character shows up and they kind of like look sinister and you're like that was weird. And then later on you find out like oh, it's the murderer. Oh, it makes sense that they had that knife there, right.
Jordan:
Yeah.
Alban:
I love these moments in movies and stuff, but I love it more when these moments happen in real life. So I think back, uh time. Somebody like shot me a text and like, hey, come on over to this party. And I went over and meet a bunch of people and one of them turns out to be my wife you know, I think I almost don't go and that turns out to be this moment where, like, everything changed for me, or I think about. There's the story. Have you ever heard the story of the microwave? No, okay, the guy who invented the microwave. He's just playing around with this like radar vacuum thing. Oh my gosh.
Jordan:
And he that sounds so dangerous. He's just playing around with it.
Alban:
Well, he doesn't know it's dangerous. He's just playing around with this thing and he's got a candy bar in his pocket and who knows why, why does he have a candy bar in his pocket? This inconsequential thing? And then he realizes why is the candy bar melted in my pocket? Because he's microwaving it. And then he realizes, oh, we could heat up food like this. And we just launched fan mail and I'm thinking about, like how did we come up with this? Like I know we started texting it or we started playing with it. I went, could I find the moment? And so I went back and I found the moment where quote unquote fan mail was invented no way. Where quote unquote fan mail was invented, no way. So first episode of the year Kevin is asking his sound off question and he trips over all the different ways to reach out to the show.
Kevin:
Open up what X or what are all the ways they can contact us, Jordan.
Jordan:
Well, they can submit their response by leaving a 30 second voice message at podinboxcom, slash buzzsprout, or tweeting the answer or sending it as a boostagram.
Kevin:
This is something we have to figure out for Buzzsprout. I'm going to put this on my short list of problems to solve. There has to be an easier way for listeners to be able to contact the host directly. I'm going to solve this problem for podcasting my 2024 resolution.
Alban:
And I'm like you know, I hate when shows say all these different things. They've got like 10 different ways. And as soon as I hear 10 ways, that's kind of zero ways. I wonder if it would just be easier if we had one way, you know, like just email the show, or maybe just like text us, you know, send us a text like put Kevin's phone number in there, no big deal, and text it in Kevin's like yeah, we've got to make this easier. And what do you know, next episode, we've got a text in there and we're like, hey, text the show and I think it's immediate, like that's the episode. As soon as we got this flurry of texts the first time the number was in the show notes. Then I see I got a ping from Kevin at work. It was only a few days later. He goes hey, let's not talk about this too much. I think this is going to be a big feature.
Jordan:
That's so crazy. I completely forgot that he had said that.
Alban:
Well, it's now Kevin's 2024 resolution, I think, has been fulfilled. He might be one of the first people to hit his resolution for the year because it's going so well. In the last week, 17 people have written in to the show we said we launched the feature. We've gotten 17 people Some of them multiple times, have reached out. We've seen hundreds of shows turn it on and we really limited who can do it.
Jordan:
Yeah, I think that's really great and I hope that people do turn it on because it is an awesome feature that we have. So I'm really excited about this one and I'm excited for us to roll it out to more of the Buzzsprout podcasters.
Alban:
Oh, I should tell you it's out now. So last week we rolled it out kind of limited. We said hey on, it's only on iOS for a bit, and now it's out everywhere.
Jordan:
No way. Oh, this is great. How did I not know this?
Alban:
You don't know it because, uh, John texted me and said, hey, it's out. I'll talk about it. I'll talk about it on Snapcast.
Jordan:
I was thinking how did I miss that?
Alban:
No, so it just went. It's out for everybody. So just log into your account, click fan mail, enable it and then in your next episode let everybody know. You can text me, send me what you think about the show, tell me where you're listening, why you care about it, what's important, and let's get some listeners. I mean, I want to hear what kind of encouragement people are getting when they turn on fan mail.
Jordan:
All right. So I also have something to talk about on the Snapcast, and we're number one.
Alban:
Great Number one, one. What.
Jordan:
We're number one on the Pod Pros AE podcast report. We took the number one spot this month, which is awesome.
Alban:
What's an AE podcast report?
Jordan:
So the AE podcast report, pod Pros, created the actively established podcast report, and what that means is they display only independent shows that have a hundred episodes or more published. So out of all the podcast hosts, we have the most podcasts that have over a hundred episodes published.
Alban:
Okay, anything worth the top of the list, I'm excited. Okay, I actually really like stats like this. A lot of times people ask how many podcasts are out there and the answer is over 4 million. But as soon as you say it's got to have 10 episodes, it's actually have to be active, like it published something this year, very quickly drop down into hundreds of thousands definitely less than half a million and people are always surprised. They're like those are pretty low numbers. So if PodPros is making it, you've got to have 100 episodes and still be active and independent. These numbers are definitely filtering down quite a bit, but they still feel kind of doable. If you told me your goal is to do 100 episodes at some point over the next 10 years, I feel like I could. I could hit that.
Jordan:
You know this actually ties in perfectly with the discussion that we had last episode about how, like MKBHD and Mr Beast, you know they had to create a hundred videos to get to like 74 subscribers. This actually ties in perfectly with that discussion that we had and I think that this does. You know, I, I, I agree with you that I like these stats because of you know, the keep podcasting, keep going. You know, like a hundred episodes is nothing in the grand scheme of things, and so if you just keep doing it, you're just going to improve.
Alban:
Yeah, it's very encouraging number. It's one thing to start podcasting, but it's really hard to keep podcasting, and I know during COVID tons of people started shows, but if you started then and you kept podcasting for the last four years, they're still going. So, to anyone who's listening, if you're in that rarefied group, congratulations. That's incredibly impressive. And continue to keep podcasting. Yeah, rolls off the tongue.