Everyone tells us to start a podcast or a newsletter. Is that a real channel or a vanity project?
It is real, and it is slower than anyone selling it to you admits. The honest version is that you are building owned distribution: an audience you can reach when a platform changes its algorithm. Kyle Poyar took five years to get Growth Unhinged past 80,000 subscribers, and his top five viral posts drove only 14 percent of that growth while the merely good posts drove 55 percent. In India, Siddhartha Ahluwalia turned a founder interview podcast into Neon, a fund investing in B2B SaaS, which is about as direct a conversion from show to business as exists. The test is not downloads. It is whether your buyers can name your show, and whether they mention it unprompted on a sales call.
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Twenty five tactics from someone who did it over five years and shows his own numbers, including the deflating and useful finding that viral posts drove 14 percent of his growth while ordinary good posts drove 55 percent.
First Round built a half-million-reader publication with a two person team, so their curation is worth more than most agency advice. The single best line in it is Joe Coleman's: write down any question you hear from a customer twice, and you have a content plan.
The clearest Indian proof that a show can become a business: Siddhartha Ahluwalia's founder interview podcast built the relationships and deal flow that became Neon, a 25 million dollar fund for Indian B2B SaaS.
Twenty four minutes on what building an audience from India actually looked like: started in 2018 knowing nothing about venture, recorded 50 plus investors, and years later it became a fund backing SpotDraft, CloudSEK and Whatfix. The timeline is the lesson.
