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Your Show Is Supposed to Lose Before It Wins · Your Mic

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  you will not stop me from geeking out over the 4th of July, especially this year because it's the
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  250th anniversary of these United States of America. So what I want you to do right now is picture
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  24-year-old George Washington. He's running for his first seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses.
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  George, my man, finishes 3rd out of 3 with a whopping 6.88% of the vote and yet George still came back.
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  This is your mic. My name is Freddie Cruz, founder of Speak Podcasting and if you've got an idea
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  for a podcast or if you already have one and you're about to quit, don't, don't you dare. Let's
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  help get you back on track. Hit me up. Freddie at SpeakPodcasting.com. So let's go back to George.
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  Two years after that, humiliating experience. He decides he's going to play the game and he's
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  playing it by spinning almost his entire campaign budget on booze. Not just a little bit of booze,
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  we're talking about roughly 144 to 160 gallons of rum punch cider beer and wine rolled up
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  to the polling place. For how many voters? 391. That's close to half a gallon per voter. Imagine
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  you're standing there sober and George's people are like, hey, here's your content strategy.
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  Get the electorate hammered. He swills the planters with Bumbo and surprise. This time he wins.
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  Now, if you're a podcast host, this is where you screw up the lesson. You hear that story and you go,
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  cool, I just need more booze, aka paid ads, promo swabs, giveaways, vanity PR, and that's where you're
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  wrong. You see, Washington did not win because he bought shots. He won because after his first L,
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  he actually studied the game he was playing. He realized this is not a meritocracy.
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  This is a messy human system with unwritten rules. And if I want to play, I have to understand it
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  and then exploit it. For your show, booze is leverage. Yeah, you've got ads. You got newsletters.
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  You got casting clips, SEO partnerships. And if you blow money on ads before you understand
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  who you're talking to, why they should care. What episode actually hooks them? You're just pouring
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  rum on the floor and hoping democracy slips on it. So accept that your first election is your
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  first season. That's your 6.88 percent phase. Use it to figure out who listens all the way through
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  which topics hit where discovery is actually happening. And then when you spend booze money
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  on ads, editors, video, guest booking, you know exactly what you're trying to buy. Don't be the
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  rookie candidate soberly lecturing in the corner while the other guy is handing out punch. But you
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  don't also want to be the drunk who cannot find the ballot box either. Now let's follow George
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  to Barbados. He gets wrecked by smallpox quote strongly attacked in his own words out of action
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  for almost a month. Later in life, he likely had an anthrax infection from handling sick livestock.
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  Historians point to him as the only president known to have survived anthrax. And here's what matters.
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  Illness didn't just make him miserable. It gave him immunity that later let him ride through
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  outbreaks that crippled entire armies. He took a biological L and turned it into strategic armor.
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  Your podcast equivalent is going to be this. Your show is going to get sick. A guest is going to
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  ghost you. Your job blows up. Kids get sick. Downloads fall off a cliff. You publish what you think is
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  your magnum opus and crickets. Most people treat that like proof. See? The universe doesn't want me
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  to do this. Washington on the other hand had every signal in the world that the universe didn't
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  care. Even if he died in a Barbados bedroom instead, he acted later as if he's still there
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  and that had to mean something and that he was going to use it. And he does. What does he do?
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  He orders mass smallpox inoculation for his troops during the Revolutionary War. A brutally
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  controversial move that ended up being one of his best strategic decisions. Your version is less
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  bloody, but the principle is the same. Decide your show is bigger than your week. Hard week of the
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  day job does not get to vote on whether you hit publish. A bad month is your inoculation, not
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  your show's obituary. And guess what? You don't build that mindset by reading motivational quotes.
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  You build it by shipping episodes specifically on the weeks you least want to. You inoculate
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  yourself by walking through fire, not journaling about how hot it is. Now we're going to fast
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  forward to 1778. The army is clumsy, under-equipped, losing battles, enter the Conway Cabal.
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  Senior continental officers and members of Congress whispering about replacing Washington
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  with Horatio Gates. Letters are flying around. Washington is overhyped. He's not aggressive enough.
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  Gates is the real hero after Saratoga. No formal vote removes him, but there is a real circle of
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  influential people effectively saying this guy has got to go. He knows about it. He reads the
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  letters. He sees the promotions going to guys he thinks are clowns. If Washington were a podcaster
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  today, this would probably be like your friends privately mocking your download numbers.
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  Listeners telling you, love the guest. Wish somebody else hosted this show. It might be people
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  in your niche quietly steering sponsors away because they don't think you're it. Washington
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  doesn't launch a counter coup. He doesn't just rage post. He just keeps doing the thing. You know,
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  commanding, being George Washington. So what does he do? He answers with restrained
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  icy letters. He keeps showing up to the next miserable encampment. He lets time, outcomes,
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  and his behavior do the talking. Your show is probably going to have a Conway phase.
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  Somebody you know will start a better show. Get the guests you want it. They'll probably catch
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  a viral clip doing sloppier work than you. And that is going to present you with two options.
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  You switch out the general. You burn down the house. You tear it all down. New format every three
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  weeks. Reboot pivoting yourself into oblivion or you can stay in command. You keep the through
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  line. You adjust tactics. Not your identity. If you believe what you say your why is, you don't
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  let a couple of disillusioned officers with threads or Instagram or LinkedIn accounts push you
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  out of your own army. Now we're at Valley Forge. The troops. They're underfed. They're underclothed.
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  They're sick. They're freezing. They're badly trained. Men literally die from exposure and disease
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  while Washington tries to hold this whole thing together. But why don't they just walk? Well,
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  some do. But enough stay because they believe in the cause. They believe in him believing in the
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  cause. Your podcast, your troops are your listeners. And if you're building a business around this,
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  that would be your clients and your team. Your Valley Forge is the long flat middle where growth
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  slows feedback as quiet and everything feels like cold mud. If your why is thin, you know,
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  I want to be famous or I need a funnel. Your troops are going to desert and they should. But if
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  your why is what you think it is, then you've got an obligation not to your ego, but to your troops.
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  Again, we're talking about your listeners and your clients. Washington, he walked those frozen
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  lines, listened to complaints, pushed for supplies, brought in von Stubin to train them properly.
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  He didn't just yell, work harder. He improved how they worked for you. That's going to look like
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  walking your camp every week, reading every single DM, looking at completion rates, not downloads.
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  And then you got to ask yourself, where are they actually freezing? Where in the process are things
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  getting choked up? Where's the bottleneck? You see, your why is not just a pretty paragraph
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  on your website? Here's the wildest part of Washington's arc. He wins. We knew that. We know
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  that story goes. He leads a revolution against the biggest empire on earth at the time. And then he
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  walks away from absolute power. After the war, he resigns his commission and goes back to Mt. Vernon.
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  Have you ever been to Mt. Vernon? I've been there twice. And I love it. Oh, I love it. It's
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  magical. Anyway, later as president, there are people who'd have been perfectly happy to see him
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  as something like a king. He serves two terms in a world obsessed with clinging to power. George,
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  my homeboy, he gives it back. Now, here's the podcast version of that. This is not your show.
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  It's their show that you happen to host. You win your own revolution when somebody starts a show
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  because of yours. When somebody subscribes to your newsletter, when somebody tells you how inspired
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  that last episode was, when somebody gets discovered because of your show and they took a huge step
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  because you inspired them to take that step and make that bet on themselves. And instead of
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  turning that into a personality cult, you give the power back by making decisions based on what
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  your listeners do and not what the download count says. You give power back by saying no
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  to sponsors that would a road trust, even if they pay well. George, well, he could have taken the
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  crown instead. He chose president over ego. You can treat your listeners as peasants feeding on
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  your download stats or you can treat them as the reason the show exists at all as the reason your
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  business exists at all as the reason your nonprofit exists at all. The difference is everything
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  pondered this. Your first episode, if you haven't launched a podcast, it's going to suck.
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  And that's okay. It's cool, actually. Washington's first election sucked really bad. So you're in
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  really good company. You got to know your booze. Not just the literal booze. You're going to
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  probably drink this weekend if you drink, but you got to know the booze before you dump money
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  into promo. You got to understand your voter. You know your listener, your troops. You got to know
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  the unofficial rules of your niche. You got to use hardship as inoculation. You're going to have
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  bad weeks, bad reviews, bad guests. That is your smallpox and anthrax. Survive them and you're going
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  to come out harder to kill. You got to ignore the cabal. You got to let the critics whisper. You
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  got to stay in command of your army and your mission. You got to keep your valley forge in mind.
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  Think about your listeners. Where are they freezing? Where are they suffering? You got to find them
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  in their journey because your job is to train and supply them. Not flex on them.
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  You got to win and then you give it away. Any status your show earns is borrowed from the people
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  who listen. Give it back in the form of service, transparency, and real help because the point
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  is not to become the king or queen or whatever your industry is. The whole point is to build a
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  scrappy little republic of people who choose week after week after week to listen to you.