Weekend thoughts: improving the podcast

At the start of most years, I do a post where I look at my Yet Another Value “empire” (for example, here’s 2022’s post) and talk about my plans for the upcoming year.

I didn’t do one this year because… well, I don’t know why. Maybe it was a little bit of writer’s block, maybe it was a little bit of laziness, and maybe it was a little bit of my “no navel gazing” rule.

But just because I didn’t do an empire post this year doesn’t mean I wasn’t thinking about building out and improving my empire!

Unfortunately, many of the improvements I wanted to make ran into a simple problem: I didn’t have the time to make them. Almost every improvement I wanted to make were along the lines of “post more often” or “post higher quality stuff,” but my empire is generally a one man show and basically every improvement I thought of ran into the limitations on my time and would start cutting into my time reading fantasy books. Certainly can’t have that.

As Taylor Swift would say, I realized I’m the problem. It’s me.

To start to solve this time issue, last year I brought on our office manager, Angela, to help me out with administrative stuff on the blog side. She’s been an enormous help in freeing up extra time for me to do the stuff I really like to do (research and sometimes write up stocks).

So as I was thinking about my empire in 2023, I thought why not get some help on the podcast side? Bring on someone who can handle more of the administrative burden (marketing, editing, uploading, handling advertisers, etc.) and give me more time to spend connecting with potential guests, researching their ideas, etc.

With that in mind, I’m happy to announce that my friend Bobby Kraft is going to be taking over everything administrative for the podcast. Marketing, editing, sales (yes, sales; if you’re interested in advertising on the podcast, feel free to reach out!), etc. These are all behind the scenes roles, so as a listener you really shouldn’t notice any changes. The podcast will still be on all the same feeds / available in all the same places (Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, as well as several others). I’ll still be hosting the podcast, bringing on guests, and desperately trying to add value. But those are the only roles I’ll be focused on doing with the podcast, so hopefully I can do it a little better with all of the support Bobby will be giving.

Now, I’m kind of breaking my “no navel gazing” rule by posting this. But I’m doing that for a reason. Several actually.

First, I’m excited. I think this is going to be a really fun partnership that will help take the podcast to the next level.

But, more importantly for you, dear reader / listener, is that bringing on a new person means now is the perfect time to make changes. If you’ve got any suggestions for how to improve the podcast, Bobby and I are all ears. Feel free to lob them in, and if any of them work within what we’re trying to do with the podcast, we’ll certainly consider them.

Let me dive into that “work within what we’re trying to do” statement.

The podcast is always going to be focused on talking to sharp investors about their favorite ideas. That’s just the only way doing a podcast makes any sense for me, both in terms of time investment and what I’m interested in doing.

But if there’s a way to do that better, I’m really open to hearing how.

For example, at the start of the year, I had Tidewater’s management on and then followed it up with Judd Arnold coming on to talk about the offshore space. Those were two of my favorite podcasts; it’s really hard to do (getting a management team to come on the podcast is tough), but if listeners like that paired management / investor podcast combo, I can try to lean into that.

Or some of listeners’ favorite podcasts seem to be my monthly podcasts with Chris and my almost monthly podcasts with Jeremy Raper. While those podcasts often have one stock as the core focus, we also often just bounce through a bunch of situations. If listeners are more interested in those “quick hits across a bunch of things” podcasts, I can certainly try to spin up more of those.

Here’s another thought I’ve had: consider my post on bidding wars and trophy assets (MANU and WWE). Would it be interesting to spin up a podcast that is just me solo talking about a post and adding some more color to it? I could perhaps add a livestream Q&A to it.

I don’t know! I feel like that doesn’t add a ton of value… but I’ve talked to several people who have blogs/podcasts and they say some of their most popular episodes are just them reading blog posts, so maybe there is a lot of value there!

Those are just a few examples off the top of my head. But when one thing is getting changed, that’s often the best time to stop and inspect the product as a whole and see if anything else needs changes or can be improved. And with Bobby coming on, I want to take the opportunity to improve anything else that can be improved.

My podcast has a small but (I think) enthusiastic following, and I’m really grateful for that. So I wanted to give everyone the heads up about the change and note that if you like that podcast and think there’s something that can be improved…. well, now’s the time to say something!