I'm pausing my podcast after publishing 100 episodes
I’m reinvesting all of that time and money into 2 new places
In July, I published episode 100 of my podcast, Growing Forward.
And I’m using the milestone to hit pause on the show.
I don’t have a plan for when (or if) I’ll pick it back up. But I’m using the word pause somewhat intentionally. Because if the creative itch returns someday, I want to leave the door open to restart it.
This decision took me about a year to make.
And since this show was always about the behind-the-scenes stuff, the honest stories instead of the polished ones, it feels right to share the behind-the-scenes on this.
I started the show because every growth podcast sounded the same
Four years ago, all the popular podcasts in the growth and marketing space were people sharing their best playbooks, their biggest case studies, or their favorite frameworks in an academic vacuum.
And frankly, once you listen to a few of those, they all start to blend together.
The moments I found interesting were when someone slipped and shared a mistake they made along the way, and what they learned in the process.
That was the content I wanted more of, and I wasn’t seeing enough of it online. So since no one else was making that show, I decided to make it.
I also partly made it for myself.
I’ve made so many mistakes in my own career. One of the first times I presented a growth strategy, a thing I’d worked on for weeks, I basically got laughed out of the room and I had a panic attack in the process. Another time, I sat through a brutal performance review where the executives told me, as a member of the leadership team, that I wasn’t doing a great job.
For years I wondered: does everyone have moments like this? Or is it just me?
I wanted to make a show for myself and for the people silently suffering with that same question.
(And sure, I figured I’d land some sponsors and make a little money doing something I was passionate about. More on that below.)
The episode that proved the whole thesis
My conversation with Joanna Lord is probably my favorite of the 100.
She’s someone I never would’ve had the chance to talk with if it wasn’t for the show. It gave me an excuse to reach out, and it probably gave her a reason to say yes to spending 75 mins chatting with a stranger.
She told a story about being up for a CMO promotion.
She didn’t get it, because a peer she’d need to work closely with was so competitive with her that this person said she’d leave if Joanna got the role. The painful lesson she took from it: if you’re too competitive with your peers, it can stop your own career from progressing.
She shared it so honestly and vulnerably.
When I filmed that episode, I remember thinking it wasn’t my best interviewing. But it was exactly the kind of storytelling I wanted to share when I started the show.
But I hit a plateau
Growing a podcast subscriber base is brutal
For most of the show’s life, the audience grew modestly, about 3 - 5% month over month. Last summer, I was sitting just shy of 1,000 subscribers, and I felt like I was working so hard for every one of them.
On the audio platforms especially, you gain subscribers 1 or 2 at a time. With Spotify and Apple, I was clawing and scraping for every single one.
YouTube is a little streakier. One outlier video can bring in 100 subscribers, then the next 5 videos bring a handful each.
A few times a year, I try to take a step out of the business and re-prioritize where I’m spending my time. When I did, it was clear the hours I was putting in just weren’t matching the outcome.
So I gave myself an ultimatum. It was time to shit or get off the pot.
Either make a real investment in the show (to break through) or move on. I felt like I had invested so much already that I didn’t want to walk away until I had turned every stone over.
I doubled down.
I hired a podcast coach. I rebranded the show from Delivering Value to Growing Forward. I revisited the premise of the show, it’s positioning, the questions I was asking, the guest prep, the production value. It was a lot of work!
At the end of Q1 this year, I picked my head up to evaluate the results.
There’s an expression from my HubSpot days: “the data don’t lie.” And the data wasn’t lying. I got a nice audience pop when I rebranded (I did a bunch of marketing around it), but after that I was growing at more or less the same clip as before. While spending more hours on the show than I ever had.
Here’s where the show stood when I published episode 100:
1,392 subscribers (739 on YouTube, 467 on Spotify, 186 on Apple)
Somewhere north of 35,000 plays across all channels (my best estimate)
Just north of $100K in total sponsorship revenue over 4 years
The hard costs were manageable. I spent about $1,750 on gear when I first got started:
a Shure SM7B mic ($700)
a Canon EOS R50 ($700)
a mic stand ($150)
a teleprompter ($200)
Those were one-time costs. And I paid roughly $375 per episode in post-production support.
But the real cost was the time.
Guest outreach, interview prep, setting up the camera and lights and mic, editing instructions, writing the promo content, the LinkedIn posts, sending assets to guests.
Every episode was a long tail of small tasks. Time I could’ve spent in other ways.
The confusing part: the podcast kinda worked
By a lot of measures, the show worked.
Of my 100 conversations, probably 90 were with people I’d never met before. And there’s an amazing connection that forms when you spend an hour in pure listening mode while someone shares their most vulnerable stories. You’re not jumping in to top their story with your own (like I tend to do in my non-podcast-host life). You’re just listening.
The network that came from those interviews and relationships is hard to quantify.
Some of those guests led to members of my group mastermind. Plenty of my coaching clients reached out saying they’d listened to the show. It was great for relationships. It just wasn’t great for top of funnel or monetization.
Meanwhile, something unexpected was happening on YouTube.
With just a handful of episodes living on a platform with built-in discovery, people started reaching out to work with me. I never thought that would be part of this journey. It was a very pleasant surprise.
So the sunk cost was real. Walking away from the show means walking away from my best excuse to reach out to people like Joanna. That’s the part I’ll miss.
What I’m doing instead
I’m reinvesting all of that time and money into YouTube and email.
YouTube was already more than half of the show’s audience (739 of the 1,392 subscribers), and it’s got discovery built in. It makes sense to double down on something that’s already working and just adjust the format a little.
And the early data backs that up.
I’ve published a handful of solo videos, and my YouTube channel jumped from 739 to 1,077 subscribers. That’s 338 new subscribers in about a month, on a show that took 4 years to claw its way to 653 across Spotify and Apple combined.
And unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve seen what’s happened to LinkedIn reach.
I can’t speak for everyone else. But my reach is down around 70% from last year, by my estimate. So I want to invest in channels where I own the relationship with my audience and can go deeper: sharing more of my thoughts, longer-form, with people who actually want to hear from me. That’s email.
That’s also the challenge with a b2b podcast.
You essentially need to grow 2 audiences: one on a discovery platform, then point those people to a relationship platform, which ends up being Spotify and Apple. Where you’re clawing for every subscriber and still renting the relationship.
And the content I’ll be sharing will be coming from my own lived experience and client work.
Because at this point I’ve worked with 100+ clients: people at some of the largest most companies you’d recognize and plenty of small startups with big ambitions. Spending 1,000+ hours of calls with Directors, VPs, and Heads of Growth helping them…
Stress test their strategy
Prep for a team restructure
Set up their operating systems
Deal with a micromanaging boss
Work through imposter syndrome
Figure out where AI actually fits into this job
Navigate anxiety attacks and board presentations
Decide if they want to leave the people manager track and become a one-person growth engineer.
I’d bet I have more real-world data points on this stuff than almost anyone else.
I’ve spent 4 years telling other people’s stories.
Now it’s my turn to talk.
ps. if you were a guest on any of the 100 episodes, thank you for trusting me with your stories. If you listened to even one, thank you for that too.
pps. if there’s a topic you want me to go deep on, hit reply and tell me.
ppps. if you’re interested in working together, I have 1 coaching spot available in August. Apply here —>