The Podcasting Mistake That Drives Away Your Best Customers

What happens when you stop trying to appeal to everyone and start building your podcast for the people you actually want to reach?

In this conversation, Tracy Brinkman shares lessons from nearly two decades of podcasting, from starting back in 2007 to building multiple shows and using AI to help entrepreneurs create more content without drowning in the work behind the microphone.

We talk about what it really takes to build an audience around your personality, why being authentic can actually help you attract better customers, and how listening to your audience can help you refine your podcast niche over time.

Tracy also explains how he evolved The Dark Horse Entrepreneur by paying attention to what listeners actually consumed, narrowing the audience, shortening episodes, and using AI-powered tactics to deliver practical value to busy entrepreneurs and parents.

You'll learn:

• Why trying to appeal to everyone can hurt your podcast
• How authenticity helps attract the right customers and repel the wrong ones
• Why audience behavior should influence your podcast strategy
• How Tracy used AI to create a more efficient podcast workflow
• Why shorter, focused episodes can increase engagement
• How a podcast can support a larger marketing and revenue ecosystem
• Why guest pitches that ignore your audience are a waste of everyone's time
• How podcasting can build credibility before a sales conversation ever happens
• The connection between podcasting, email marketing, AI, and lead generation
• Why your personality can be one of your biggest marketing assets

If you're a small business owner or marketing manager wondering how to use podcasting for marketing, build your brand, attract clients, or create more content without adding another full-time job to your workload, this conversation is packed with ideas you can put to work.

If you're looking to talk podcasting and get more information on how to make your podcast shine, our 30-minute "no pitch" podcast consultation is right for you!  Click the link to sign up for a time. 
https://pedalstomperproductions.as.me/no-pitch

Staying up to date on the latest podcasting news and trends doesn't have to be difficult. We can deliver them right to your inbox. 
https://www.pedalstomperproductions.com/

Want to start your own podcast?  Go here!

You can book time in our studios here 

Want to read about this? Check the blog! 

Transcript

0:00

I truly enjoy talking with podcasting OGs. This week's podcast started doing this back in oh seven. It's bounced around a little bit, and he has learned some amazing lessons along the way. Not to mention has one hell of a story. Stay tuned. Tracy, thanks for coming on. You went from personal hardship to lead corporate marketing teams. Like, first off, that's a hell of a story and I'll let you get into that. But really, what I want to get you said people like, how'd you do that? Like, like you're the magician. I don't know if you were like Houdini. You can see the beard. You know, I am the OG Gandalf. Um, no. Right, right. And then the light, the lights behind you and everything like that. Exactly. Oh, there we go. If you could briefly just give us a little bit of the background on the like this. This is what this stemmed from and why and how I, I, I got into podcasting it, it stemmed from a two phase kick in the teeth, right? Sure. Uh, high school army. I started my entrepreneurial journey. Computer programming got hooked on speed. Uh, five zero kicks. Open the door to the condo. I was lucky enough not to be there. Called mom. Mom, need some help? I need to get my life straight. You have to be in two years on the dark side. Uh, bless. God bless my mother and father and a brother from another mother. Pick myself up, clean myself off from the drug scene. Uh, start working at Coca-Cola. Second daughter is born. Needs a small liver, a liver, and small bowel transplant. So she only lives eighteen months. And I'm really condensing this for you and, you know, had to make the tough decision of do we leave her on life support? Do we not leave her on life support when she got, you know, towards the end of things made that tough decision. Wrap her up in grandma's blanket that grandma crocheted for her and rocked her to sleep one time. I was afraid that I was going to fall back into the previous dark side of things, because, you know, something like that really can make or break someone. And so I threw myself into personal development. And this is about the same time frame that, you know, Tony Robbins and Zig Ziglar and Jim Rohn and all the big names that we know in history were doing those big stadium tours. And I was going to all of them, and I started enacting the things that were that was being taught. I still have many of the books and tapes and CDs and VHS tapes. I just dated myself over here. I have some on my bookshelf. Exactly. Um, and so I started seeing this meteoric rise at Coca-Cola. I got like five promotions in three years, which was kind of unheard of. And so people were like, who do you know? And I just, of course, had a little tongue in cheek, but it was a lot of, what are you doing? How, how is this happening? And I started sharing what I found valuable out of that content that I was, I was just throwing myself into. And so that, you know, raised the first hand, can you teach me? And that raised a few other hands. Can you teach us as well? And I started doing some coaching off on the side and some group coaching off on the side. And I started this little thing called a podcast back in two thousand and seven on a platform. It was Blogtalk radio just a few weeks ago. Right? Just yeah, I don't know, a couple of months, you know, whatever. And I enjoyed being able to help others lift themselves up physically, emotionally, financially, whatever it would be. And about twenty twelve, I started my first, I'm gonna call it a real podcast, your success DNA. And it was all personal development. And I was, I was doing five days a week and they were about short nine to fifteen minute shots. And back then you pay walls were a little more complicated to make them work, especially with podcasts. So Monday I would hop on and deliver some value and then say, oh, by the way, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Here are the things we're going to talk about, right? And so, but they had to go behind the paywall to get those. And it was like nine bucks a month. So I wasn't I wasn't going to get rich off of it, but it was paying the bills and it was helping some folks. And that was the start of things. So that's a long winded answer to your question, I love the start of that. And I mean, and first off, thank you for sharing. And to me, it's there's, there's so many things that shake people and cause them to go the one direction or the other. Mhm. Um, the fact that you went to podcasting is I feel like a really good direction to go to. And the fact that you're doing it out of a point of sharing. Yes. To me is truly wonderful. Now, the question that I have is, and I think just on appearances alone, I know a little bit of the answer. But like you went to corporate marketing for Coca-Cola. Yeah. This is not this big. This is not the creative agency where they're like, go, wow us. Go do whatever you want to. There's, there's some pretty tight guardrails in there. Yeah. Like, were you initially kind of tempted to sanitize some of your story because of that, like big company background. It, uh, you know, I've always been one of the ones that, uh, I'll share about eighty five percent of things, right? Because I'm one of those guys. It's like you. You like me or you don't. I'm. I'm fine either way. Right? So I don't need to be bros with everybody because I really don't want to be bros with everybody. And I'm even more so like that as I've as I've aged out, I was lucky enough my dad was like that him, a twenty three year military veteran. He was the guy's guy. He was one of those connectors on any base he was on, and he didn't do everything, but he knew someone who could do it. So he would put people in connection with each other. And I learned that valuable lesson very early on, and there was a lot of folks in his sphere of influence. He was like, I don't like them, but I have to work with them at times. So, you know, I just make that happen and then I move on. He will never be at a party at our house, but it doesn't mean he's a bad person, you know what I'm saying? So and I also I also find that when you share honestly and, and as much honesty as you're either able to given the platform or the audience or that you feel comfortable, you draw aligned people to you and you repel those that are not aligned, which generally speaking, if they're not aligned with who you are from a values perspective or a life experience perspective, they'll be very difficult customers and they will just drain everything right out of you. Not not financially, but from an energy perspective. You with me? I'm seeing a yes on your face. Yeah we are. We have all had those. And, uh, it's funny, I joke about it is some of the best feelings in the world are firing bad customers. Mhm. Um, it truly is. There's another one. Um, for one of his podcasts, I was, I talked about this a few times, Scott Galloway. Mhm. Um, he tells a ridiculously offensive joke typically at the beginning of his podcast. And I, I talk about this and there's many people that are horrified by it. And I'm like, he has told you right up front who his audience is. If you like that joke, hang on for the ride. This is going to be fun. If you don't like this joke, you are probably not going to like the rest of the show right at all. Um, so it is, it's truly about finding the people with that. You've got multiple shows, you're helping people like you're helping businesses, small businesses, especially automate like the workflows that they're using using AI. Mhm. Like as you've scaled your platform, how did you structure your podcast and some of the AI systems to make sure that you're solving problems and that you are not getting buried underneath the work of the podcast because it's. I always like to tell people like people, it's, it's one of the reasons why I think so many podcasts die early is because people like it's talking. And when they realize that there is a ton of work that goes on top of that, they're like, ah, I'm out, I'm out. So yeah, like, what have you done to prevent yourself from getting buried by all of the stuff? I'm looking in two ways. One, I like the talking part and I'm very curious by nature. So learning about something so that I can talk about it, uh, really feeds me in multiple ways. But from the structure standpoint that you mentioned, I've gone through a few metamorphoses and when I started the latest podcast, The Dark Horse Entrepreneur. I started in twenty twenty. So I had a little bit of a leg up because it was my second show, but I still went to a coach and said, hey, what's going on now in the podcast sphere? And, uh, plus, with all the craziness that happened that particular year and, you know, a few months into the following year, a lot of folks moved to listening to podcasts. So that helped. But I started with entrepreneurs, which anybody with their worth their salt as a podcast coach will say, never do that. No, I currently, as I coach folks in the same way, I say, don't do that, but I did it, but I did it intentionally because I had a number of folks in my network that I knew I was going to bring on, and I wanted to see where the show would go, where the audience wanted the show to go. So I started listening to the audience and paying attention to the which ones they were, you know, going all in. They were consuming higher percentages, worth the whole nine yards. So I started leaning into that, which led me to online entrepreneurs, still super big audience and still I started following, you know, going with the flow. And as I started engaging with some of the audience members, like on Facebook and what have you, I started finding that the majority of the folks I was talking to were parents. Okay, so I'm getting ready to narrow down to parents. And about the same time AI hits the marketplace, you know what, November twenty twenty three. And I waited a few months. I didn't want to dive right in. This could be a fad, haha. He says. Hindsight being twenty twenty. Um, so and then I started saying, well, now I could use AI and the fact that my parents that are listening to this show Have compressed amounts of time. They don't have eight, twelve, fourteen hours that they can dedicate to sit down and and grind out side hustle or microbusiness. Let's use some AI powered tactics. You know, research, engagement, all these different things that you were talking about when we were before we hit record and feed it to them in the same time frame that they would be using. So I started cutting the shows down to fifteen to forty minutes. Right? So I know you don't have a lot of time, and I'm going to respect that by modifying the show and give you tactics. Start with a story, give you the machine, and then give you a call to action with a summary. And then boom, there you go. There it is, twenty minutes. If you want more, we can go on a different platform, you know, like YouTube where we'll have, we'll, we'll do a longer version whole nine yards. And I started seeing, I won't say meteoric rise, but I saw seeing the numbers reflect additional engagement. And I'm like, okay, I'm in the zone. The downside of that is finding someone to come on and be a guest became really difficult because of serving such a specific market. You know, I was listening to one of your other shows. We all get pitched a hundred times. Oh, I was just listening to this show and I think I'd be a great guest. You know, I was a US Army soldier, and this and having nothing to do with the show is what majority of those pitches are. Could I make a show that would give benefit to my audience? Yeah, but that's not what I'm here for. And you as the guest, shouldn't be coming to me to help me make a show for you to fit my guest. Anyway. I got a little derailed there. Sorry. I, I get it, and I go along with that At, because one of my favorites is I talk about this all the time. I, I co-host another show called the Business Fix and it's, I co-host it. It's just her and I and probably five to seven times a week I get pitched who would be an excellent guest. And I always joke that the way I respond to those emails is typically. Who's been your favorite guest so far? I'm going to try that. Um, it's my favorite. It's my favorite thing to do. Um, yeah, to, to type that out to people because it's once again, it's that, hey, you didn't like when they say, we've been watching the show and I'm like, no, you haven't. No you haven't. And you start seeing some of the trends. I know we're getting off on a tangent here. No. We're good. They're like two or three different types of pitches you're going to get. Yep. Because to me I haven't seen it. I think someone's teaching someone to do that or there is an agency who keeps repeating one of these three different. And my reply is usually, well, first off, this doesn't align with the show, so I don't think you really listened. And second off, whoever you. Whoever you're paying to teach you to do this or doing this for you is doing you a disservice. It's just my opinion. And, you know, and of course I put it politely, but that's my reply to them saying, hey, I don't think you listen to the show, and whoever you're paying to do this for you is not earning their money. I'm just sorry they're not not doing a good job. No, no no. Speaking of earning money, what a beautiful segue into our next topic. Yeah, you've done really well. Because for us, I mean, we do business. We do podcast production for businesses. Um, many are B2B. Many, some are B2C. We do a lot of law firm podcasts. We are looking at like, what's real? What's happening? We don't. I mean, we still look at vanity metrics. We do look at them because it's occasionally it's nice to get a win and be like, hey, check this out. People are watching. Now, granted, in that we're trying to figure out why they aren't writing checks. Yeah. But you specialize in helping businesses like generate that, that revenue growth through like smart offers and things of that nature. How does your, do you use the podcast as lead generation for that? Like how does the podcasting fit in with that? Believe it or not, not one of the three podcasts actually fit into that directly. When I started looking at those, I'm like, I don't, I don't see the path from one to the next here. Yeah. So that's why I kind of wanted to ask. Yeah, the, the revenue path for like the dark horse entrepreneur is I pull folks that are listeners to that over to the Dark Horse Insider, which is the AI newsletter. And I delivered them, you know, uh, three to five times a week, little scannable nuggets to move them along their journey of starting their micro-business. And then there are inside of that opportunities to buy, uh, course, uh, mastermind connect with me directly at different tiers. Uh, so folks are moving along their journey. I can catch them where they're at in that journey. I used that as proof that when I go engage a small business, you know, a little Joe Schmo down here doing his bakery business or doing his, uh, detailing business for upper end cars. Look, I do all this business stuff. It's not like I'm blowing smoke up your butt that I can do this. You can see all the content that I have for almost six years now, five hundred plus episodes on just that one topic. I kind of know what I'm talking about. And if you don't believe me, go listen to a few of the episodes, drive my vanity metrics up at the same time. Um, or, you know, and then you give them the, the offer of look, generally speaking, when I work with someone who has an email list that even if it's not fully active, we can usually get you about, uh, I'm going to say about four weeks worth of revenue in one week. That's, that's the average return. And that usually makes them go, wait a minute. And how much do you charge for this? Well, you have a couple of different options, you know, and depending on which business we're talking about here, it could be you pay me a percentage of any of the revenue I generate. That's a win win. You know, it's almost like what does Hormozi say. Give them an offer. They feel stupid refusing. If I'm telling you, I'm going to go and grab your email list of five hundred folks, and I'm going to pull in a month's worth of your revenue in a week's time using just that. And you don't have to give me cash up front. You just give me a percentage of the sales I generate out of that. Who's going to say no? People do. I'm not going to I'm not going to lie. But for the most part, they're like, well, let's let's give it a shot. And once they know that they see the results, well, then, you know, you can work out some sort of longer term agreement about, hey, I could do this for you every year. You can keep paying me a quarter of the percentage or, you know, here's a, here's another way we could leverage this out and just keep repeating and rinsing. And when it comes to a local market, you probably know this being in marketing, you were mentioning you're doing a new marketing program. You have to change things up a little more often than you do when it comes to larger scales, because you can reach everybody inside that local market a lot faster. And so, you know, you you got to change things up, which is easy to do. You're not changing the core offering. Most of the time. You're just changing. You're giving it a different and a prettier bow, so to speak. The lipstick, lipstick, lipstick on a pig. You can always change the color of the lipstick. And suddenly you've got a brand new look. Exactly right. Um, especially for either one of us. Either one of us would look very different with lipstick on. I would yeah, yeah yeah yeah, I would, I don't want to see it, but I think we would lipstick. That being said, like one of the things, and one of the reasons why I was excited for us to talk. You are you, you've got this personality that is unabashedly you. Um, and to me, it you've said podcasting is is very much about connecting with one person and solving that person's problem through being you. Why do you think so many people struggle when the mic and the camera come on to be themselves, because they're not used to being accepted as themselves? Oh, I love that's a phenomenal answer and it makes perfect sense. Yeah. I mean, I think it's gotten worse for the more current generations than it is for, you know, folks like us who have a little salt in our pepper. Um, because they grew up with a device in their hand that almost is telling them how they should be. Oh, you should be prettier. You should be more handsome or you should be richer. You should be driving that car. You should be wearing that product and living this lifestyle and going to that beach and all those different things. Yes, we got that when I was a kid, but it was way more toned down. It was way it was delivered completely differently. Um, I spent hours outside during summer time as a teenager. Never got any of that messaging. You look at the kids out there now and I'm going to focus on the kids. Obviously they're out there and they're still with their phones. Yeah. Here's another one going to a concert as a twenty one year old in Southern California in nineteen eighty, whatever, nineteen eighty nine, nineteen ninety two is way different than going to the exact same band now in their concert at the exact same venue than it was back then. Uh, the people are bigger, I'm just saying. Yeah, but they're all they're all like this. Yeah. And I'm saying holding their phones up watching the concert on that little screen stop. And and again, it's all that messaging that people give in their marketing, these big corporations and everybody else trying to push you towards whatever product or service they're selling. And it's, I don't know, I just go outside and play in the trees. Yes, one hundred, one hundred percent. But with that, I want to go to the, to another piece with this because I, I watched a couple of episodes, but I also skimmed a bunch of them. Um, I know for a fact, like you show up pretty much the same every single time. There's a lot of days where I come into the studio and I truly love getting on the microphone, but there are some days where the damn it, I don't feel like this. I like what do you do on those days? Uh, you know, on those days, I don't show up because here's what I do do, and I'm just being honest. When I do show up, I record extra. For example, if, uh, generally speaking, I do my recording for all three podcasts on Sunday and Sunday morning takes up most of the morning, three shows. Hello? Sure. Um, I'll record the full episode. I'll record what I'm going to call a YouTube teaser. Um, that is, you know, two to three minutes long, which is kind of the, the Reader's Digest, the cliff notes right of the episode. And that's the one you really want to put the ad spend behind to push people towards you. Um, and that way, hey, all those micro nugget folks who are not going to listen to eighteen minutes off the jump, they're going to go, whoa, wait a minute. Those couple of nuggets he shared right there. I actually got some real value out of that. What else does he got? He can just click right there. The link will be right there. And then go check out the full episode, whatever platform they prefer. Right. Um, and then I'm going to also record right now it's twelve. Um, this week it might start being thirteen. Um, purposeful YouTube shorts or shorts scripts, you know, ninety to one hundred and 20s long. And each one of them goes after a trigger that is geared towards my audience. So my personal development audience, I got twelve triggers. I'm going to be hitting my entrepreneurial parents. They got twelve triggers, quite a few of them. About seven of them are the same, but there are four or five that are different. And then my, uh, conspiratorial theory audiences or pattern recognition audiences have different triggers, right? Again, there's a few of them that are the same and I'll record those. So I have lots of content that I can just push for when I'm not feeling ready, if that makes sense. Oh no, one hundred percent. It truly does. Because, and I mean, we've all been there too, where in many cases we're like, oh crap, I got to release something this week and I don't have anything recorded yet. Yeah. And it comes out that way so very much. And I love the, the thought of banking those shorts. You're already you're already recording. Just record a few more clips to to make sure that you can sock those away. And here's, here's a second benefit, because if you're doing the full episode, in my case, it's solo. All three shows are solo currently. Um, so if I'm doing the personal development episode and it's focused on, you know, forced focus, which is an episode I just did. Well, when you're in, so you're now in forced focused mode. You've been talking about forced focus for about twenty minutes, and you jump over and you do your little short script for the YouTube, and you're still in that same mode. And then you do the twelve thirteen short clips. It's all on that same topic. So you're kind of in that forced focus mode. Whatever that topic is, you're in that mode for all the way across them. So you almost have this nice continuity that someone hears your short script and they're like, oh, totally vibing with it. And I connect to my short so they can just click down at the bottom and go straight over to the, the next version, you know, the next longer version. They, they feel that same vibe because you recorded it all at the same time. Whereas if I'd recorded on Sunday and then on Wednesday, you know, there's life happens and you're, you're in a different kind of vibe, different kind of mode. Maybe I'm outside in the, the garden and I get an idea and I just start recording on a whim. The energy is different. So the person that vibes with that energy might still get value, certainly would still get value from going over and, you know, listening to the longer version, but the energy is going to be different and they're going to feel that disconnect if they go straight across. Does that make sense? Well, no, it definitely does. And it's funny, I, I encourage people for us, we call it the batch record. Mhm. Um, record a couple of things at the same time. That way you're ready. And if for no other reason, you're either in the studio, you're you're in that groove, you're in that mode. Um, just, I mean, it's always, I always tell people it's difficult to go from my motorcycle to my car to a semi. Um, if, but if I'm in a semi, I can drive the semi all day long or I can ride the motorcycle all day long. I do not want to drive all three all day long. It's just not not a good time. That being said, like and as deep as you are into AI I things I this is this has become my favorite question. Okay. Because of course, every single one of us has a crystal ball or a magic eight ball or something that tells us exactly what's going to happen in the future, because we all know that. And that's why we keep playing the lottery and winning. Um, what? Like, uh, we are at this kind of revolutionary point, point where AI starts to come in and some of these, like we've got access to tools that we never had before. It's like we've discovered fire again. It's like we've finally figured out how to use a hatchet. What do you see moving forward for what I even just would say podcasting as a whole over the next, let's say couple of years. Wow, I'm already starting to see some of it. And I'm using one thing I think is going to potentially insult a lot of people, especially in the podcast arena, um, as well as open up the arena to a lot of others. And that is, um, text to speech. So because I have so much audio, I could actually go to a platform, eleven labs, you name the platform, right? And give them, you know, four or five, ten, fifteen episodes and it's going to be able to nail me to a tee. Now take that and take AI and do some research on whatever topic you decide your audience really wants to talk about, and you can get some nuggets out of that and feed it the transcript of those same AI of those shows that you fed into the voice synthesizer. And now you can make it sound like you. So now you have content, you have it content aligned to sound like you, and you can actually feed that resulting text over into the synthesizer. And it would sound like you and you haven't even sat down and microphone yet. Now, I say that because I'm actually doing that for my newest show because I wanted to dive into, I alluded to it earlier, the conspiracy theory arena, because I think it's interesting and it's always a conspiracy theory until someone finds out, oh, it happened. Wait a minute. Wait. Anyway, um, but it really, to me it's about pattern recognition. Things happen in history over and over. I read the book The Fourth Turning, and anyone who's read that, it's like, oh, I know what he's talking about. So there are things that are happening. And I'm like, okay, what a cool way to do this one by not even being in, you know, the person live. But I wanted it to be my voice. So and I wanted it to sound like me. So I went through this whole exercise and as I was going through it, a platform arrived where I could do a little easier. And I'm like, let me try it out. And it's really super easy if you want to use the platform in its format. I like it for how it portrays my voice. I don't like it for the script that it creates. So I still spend a little more time creating what I think is a, an audience preferred version of a script. You know, give them some content. It just wants to pull some things together. It's not there yet. Um, so again, another long winded answer. I think the AI is going to empower a lot of folks in across all the medias to be able to do research they couldn't afford to or didn't want to spend the time to do in the past helped them identify nuggets that are really of value. If you really want to dig deep, you can start looking at some of the way that platforms like Google and YouTube categorize the topics that you're in and the subtopics you're in. And once you learn about that, you can start finding what I'll call what I've heard called ghost entities, which is a subtopic that's out there that not many people are talking about, but there's an audience already there that like searches for it periodically. And YouTube is like, there, we've created it, but there's not very much. So you can almost, if you create that, that piece of content, it almost instantly becomes, you know, it starts to rise up because you're like one of the few pieces of content out there. So all that said, at the same time, there's going to be a lot of folks that want to step into podcasting. And to your point earlier, it takes a lot to get to the point we're at right now where you're just talking. Yeah, right. You have to do some research. You got to have something worthwhile to say, and you've got to kind of organize it a little bit so that you can hook people, you know, maybe open a loop and then, you know, give them the valuable content that they really are hungry for, and then remind them towards the end. Here's what we talked about. Here's why it's important. Oh, and by the way, maybe you should try and do this one thing today, right? And then you can kind of close the show out like that, right? That's kind of a whole show program format right there without even having a guest on to, you know, slow you down. I love it. Um, that being said, I always like to wrap up with the, the one piece of actionable advice that you would tell, like if someone saying, hey, I am thinking of starting a podcast in all the years that you've been doing this, in all the episodes that you have recorded, what is that one piece of advice that you would give a business owner or marketer who's thinking about winding up a podcast? And that piece of advice cannot be Just press record because that's that's too easy. That's and it's too cheesy. Right? Correct. That's correct. Too easy. Surface level advice. Right. You get for seventeen dollars, right. Um, here's what I here's what I serious, serious answer here. Um, is anyone that's wanting to start a podcast and let's focus on for a business because you did mention a business owner there for a minute, I would tell them to reach out to at least five, um, of their best friends or most respected peers, maybe both. Right. And say, hey, here's this idea I have for a podcast. What would you want to hear from it? What problems would you want it to solve? You know, ask a couple of questions like that and then shut up and listen. I would even say go so far as to record it. Have AI recorded. There's an AI option right there. And when you get through the fourth one, you're going to start seeing a pattern. There will be two of those four people that will have said the same thing. Um, I wondered if I was going to listen to a show like that. It needs to tell me this. Right. And then by the time you get to the sixth or seventh one, you're going to start hearing some problems. They would want that would be the reason they would go to a show like that, or incentives as to why they would go to a show like that. By the time you get to the tenth one, you're probably going to be in a completely different spot than when you started. You could have said, hey, I'm going to start a I'll use myself. I'm going to start a podcast about entrepreneurs. And by the time you get to that tenth one, you're going to be going, oh, I'm going to be starting a podcast about local businesses and how they can market to their, their local community effectively. Completely different shows. And it doesn't say that your first idea was bad. It's just saying, yeah, it's not what I want to hear. Okay, here's what I want to hear. And by the time you have that tense conversation, uh, it's either that or you'll completely approve. You'll completely prove your idea all the way through. Although I've never had anyone that has followed that advice. Get to the tenth conversation and go. See, I told you it was perfect. No, it just, uh, we all think we know it perfectly, but by the time we talk to our potential audience, they say, yeah, that would be good. But have you thought about this? So I it's funny and that is tremendous advice. Uh, the business fix, the other podcast that I mentioned that I co-host, we started out saying, we are going to talk to small business owners. And currently we are talking to like a large part of our audience is mid-level managers in in large, small or medium sized businesses. And once again, we found out we started talking about small business leadership, and we realized it was a much different audience that actually needed to hear it. And it was actually listening nice and were like, oh, it's these like, we're, we're talking to these people. And then we're like, oh, it's the people ten degrees to the right. Mhm. Um, those were the ones that we were talking to it and the podcast that we produce in so many cases, when we, when we're working with them and we're coaching them, it's, it ends up being that way. They start here and you hit the head of the nail because four or five episodes, they're like, oh, it seems like I'm over here. Yeah. And in a lot of cases, I think it also speaks to your candor and honesty, because we all have one idea of where we think we're going to go, but our own personality may take us a little bit different direction. One hundred percent. And we're probably better for it. Yeah. Uh, that that is the I've always found that to be very true. I mean, and once again, you have very much lived that because you are very you and I mean that as a compliment. Well thank you, I appreciate that. That being said, where the hell can people find you? The easiest place to find me is Dark Horse entrepreneur dot com. Um, across the top you'll see all the logos for all the social medias. Or if they want to check out the other podcast, that's your success dot com and some unapproved thinking dot com. Again, all out there, all the socials will be at the top. You can, you can reach out to me. Love it. Tracy. Thank you for the time. I truly appreciate the conversation for everyone else. Like there's nuggets here. He gave a lot of nuggets. I'm going to summarize these and I will be right back. Stay tuned. I love the honesty that Tracy has there to me that that is that thing that is just it has to shine through in podcasting. Otherwise, why the hell are you doing it? Now? What I found interesting is his use of AI tools to build the other podcast. That to me is one that's that's interesting. It's something that I'm keeping an eye on because, look, I don't know where the industry is going to take this. Now I see good things and bad things in that he's able to bring up conversations and able to do a lot of the work without necessarily having to spend the time on it. That's, I mean, hugely helpful. What I see is the flip side of that is really podcasting is about disseminating information. And if you're disseminating information that's already out there, that that's fine. That can work. But really it needs to be your own ideas is the part that I really love about it and the part that I buy into it. If you're regurgitating AI stuff to AI, I'm wondering about the effectiveness of it. Now, that being said, Tracy has built some really great stuff. So this is one of those things where the jury's out. We have to see what plays out. The biggest, biggest, biggest thing that I love from this is find your people and work with your people. The numbers will tell you where to go. Keep looking for your audience because you will find out who they are. Really this, this is that his talk about get a couple of episodes in, then get a couple episodes more in. Ask those questions of those initial people. You have to find people that will be honest with you. Your mother's going to love everything that you do, so maybe don't include her in that group or just include her if you need that moral support. But really at find a group of people, a small group, four or five people that you can ask that will say, hey, you're annoying, hey, your topics suck. Hey, I would much rather hear about this than that. Find that group of people that is willing to give you that honest feedback. Because once again, if you start that pivot to find that correct path, five, six, seven, ten episodes in, you are so far ahead of the game from most other podcasters, so many other podcasters, they get twenty, twenty five episodes in before they really start to figure out who their audience is, what they're talking about, and where they should be going. It's a, it's one of those things that you need to start, like get that direct feedback. And if you can't get it from your audience, get it from people that are like your audience that are willing to put the time in for you. Him the other one where he says, give them the offer that they would feel stupid refusing. Find a way to do that in your podcast. Find a way to make it like, hey, look, there's so much good material here that you're, you're going to miss out if you don't listen. You. How could you not listen to this? You're going to gain great information from it. Those are my big takeaways from this week's podcast. The authenticity one is one that almost every episode I've been talking about, and that to me is what makes podcasting great. That being said, do me a favor. Take care of yourself. If you can take care of someone else too. I will see you very, very soon.