Download Numbers Don't Matter #ChangeMyMind

Brandi Starr [00:00:35]:
Welcome to another episode of Revenue Rehab. I am your host, Brandi Starr and we have another amazing episode for you today. So today I am thrilled to be joined by Jonas Woost. Jonas is a media entrepreneur and co founder of Bumper, a data driven agency helping enterprise podcasts growing. With 20 plus years in digital media, Jonas has shaped the branded podcasting space from the ground up, including leadership roles at Pacific Content, Telus and Last.fm. He brings a sharp eye for what makes content resonate and how to actually get it heard. Welcome to Revenue Rehab. Your session begins now.

Jonas Woost [00:01:24]:
Hi Brandi, thanks for having me.

Brandi Starr [00:01:25]:
I am excited to have you. As a podcaster myself, it is so important for us to really think about how we are measuring the effectiveness of our podcast and whether we should still be doing our podcast. What are we accomplishing with it. And so the position on the table today is that more downloads always equal more business value for a B2B podcast. So here's your opportunity to change my mind. You've got 60 seconds to convince our audience why they should rethink their current.

Jonas Woost [00:02:07]:
Belief that 60 seconds. Okay, so as you can imagine, I hear this a lot. More downloads is better. There's two things actually that I have problems with that sentence. First of all, the download. The download is actually very, very poor way to measure podcast success because a download means basically nothing. A download is not a listen. A download does not mean that anyone listened.

Jonas Woost [00:02:30]:
And of course, for anyone, and especially B2B marketers that have podcasts, they want to see actual engagement with an audience. Most of the time, the download doesn't actually measure that. So that's the first thing we need to talk about, the download and how that's problematic. And also the idea of with more. Lots of people think that they need more. Bigger audiences, more listeners, more downloads, more whatever. That's not. Especially for B2B marketers, that's not necessarily the case.

Jonas Woost [00:02:55]:
It's about the right audience, the right people. Maybe that's a big number, but maybe that's just a small number because you have a very niche offering. So we don't always need more and we definitely don't need downloads.

Brandi Starr [00:03:06]:
All right, I am definitely with you in this belief. And it is one of those things that can be really Challenging, because when you get started, you know, you see some of the big podcasts out there and you know there's opportunities, especially as a marketer, if you've ever considered sponsoring or advertising on a podcast, they send you all their numbers, they talk about the big download numbers and follow numbers, and it's the example that we have to go on. And so it is very counterintuitive to say those sort of things don't matter. And so I'd love to hear you frame for the audience how we really should be thinking about a B2B podcast.

Jonas Woost [00:03:58]:
So maybe because you mentioned that a lot of the times, the sort of yardstick we use or maybe the currency that we use when we transact the podcasting, we buy ads or we tell someone else how big our podcast is, we use the download number. So maybe we can start there and just kind of take that apart a little bit. It is quite easy for me to sit here and say, like, downloads don't matter. But the truth is that for years and years and years, everyone, including us, we thought downloads matter. Downloads are file transfers. It means an MP3 file is being sent from a hosting provider, from a server somewhere to someone's device, often a phone. It doesn't have to be a phone. It could be a desktop computer, could technically be another website.

Jonas Woost [00:04:38]:
But a file has been transferred. There's actually no confirmation that someone's listening. Just because a file was transferred somewhere doesn't mean someone hit play. There are downloads happening all the time that are never being listened to. Apple podcasts, for example. Often, not always, but often auto download stuff overnight. Last night, my phone was downloading a whole bunch of episodes. I don't have time to listen to all those episodes today.

Jonas Woost [00:04:58]:
I won't listen to one, maybe even two, but not the 20 that were downloaded last night. All of those shows up. They show up as downloads in people's dashboards. And frankly, it was only a few years ago when we did a lot of analysis with our clients, when we realized, whoa, there's a big gap between downloads and actual listens. A significant gap. In fact, most downloads that occur in the world today are not being listened to. We didn't know that, frankly. We always knew, like, of course not all downloads are being listened to, but we just sort of assumed it's going to be a reasonable amount.

Jonas Woost [00:05:29]:
Like, I don't know, like 5, 10, 15% of downloads are not being listened to. That's fine. I think that's sort of a normal amount, but that number is significantly higher. So from that we started thinking about, well, if downloads don't tell us if someone's actually engaging with your content, how what can we do? Like, how should we figure out whether someone actually listened? Which made us turn to the actual listening platforms. So right now, for those people that are. That are listening, that might have podcasts already, like you have a hosting provider and that this is kind of your CMS for your podcast, and in there you get that download number and it seems to be like a convenient place, right, to see how many people engage. What we've learned is that it's actually the wrong place to look. Instead of looking at your hosting provider, you need to look at the listening platforms.

Jonas Woost [00:06:20]:
Spotify knows how many people listened. Apple knows how many people listen. YouTube, of course, knows how many people listen. In fact, I can see it, right? There's a view counter, like publicly available. So that those are the places where we need to check how many people have engaged with our content. So the analogy that we think about a lot is that when we write a book, in fact, you have a book right behind you there, Brandi. Like, I see that the paper copy.

Brandi Starr [00:06:44]:
Yes.

Jonas Woost [00:06:45]:
You wouldn't ask the printing press, whoever printed that book, so how many people read the book? They wouldn't know. The printing press just printed the books and shipped them off. That's what we do with hosting providers. We're asking the hosting provider. Maybe people listen and it's not their job to. Normally people listen. In fairness to them, they are CMS and they ship MP3 files all over the place and they do a great job. We've just been looking at the wrong place.

Jonas Woost [00:07:07]:
And it's the big mind shift that we are at bumper. We're really trying to get our industry to think differently about those numbers. Not because we want to disrupt stuff or we want to tell people that they're not smart. We want to make sure we have a sustainable industry for the next year. Five years, 10 years. And the way we do it right now, and frankly, the way we measure right now, we sell our podcasts right now because we do this based on downloads. Advertisers are going to turn around and say, like, well, you're selling me all these downloads, but are those listens? And it's an awkward answer to say like, well, you paid for a million downloads, but actually only 40% of those were listened to. That's a very awkward response and not a response that builds trust between the podcast industry and advertisers.

Jonas Woost [00:07:51]:
I'm sorry, Brandi, that wasn't even a Question. I think I went in a totally different direction.

Brandi Starr [00:07:55]:
No, it is very useful. And, you know, you and I had a discussion previously, and following that conversation, not only did I look at what I could see in your tool bumper, but I also actually went and logged into Spotify for creators, which is the back end of Spotify, which I had never done. Like, you know, we. My team logs in and that's how they set up certain things. But you're right in that that's not where we report from. We are reporting from our hosting provider.

Jonas Woost [00:08:32]:
And.

Brandi Starr [00:08:32]:
And when I logged in to Spotify, I was first shocked at how much information is there that I didn't know existed. And then I was a little excited because I felt like I had found this gold mine of information. And then I was a little disappointed because I, you know, I knew, like, where our download numbers were. And the exact example that you gave of me making the assumption that, you know, they're not all getting listened to, but that by and large, the majority are. The numbers definitely not. Were not where I wanted them to be. And it was a bit, you know, it was an uncomfortable sort of conversation to have with myself to really actually see what impact we're having. And obviously that's just on one platform.

Brandi Starr [00:09:29]:
And, you know, I will take the time to look at it on other platforms, but I definitely agree that I don't think anybody is looking in the right place. And so setting aside this notion of downloads and big numbers and more, how can we effectively measure, like, what should we be considering? Because podcasting is a lot of work. No matter what format you do it in, how frequently, how long, it's a lot of work. And, you know, we want to make sure that we are putting our efforts in the right place. So what's an effective way to measure?

Jonas Woost [00:10:14]:
I'm going to answer that question very much with B2B marketers in mind, because there's, of course, different answers for different people. People podcast for all kinds of different reasons, and we work with Fortune 500 companies and independent podcasters and nonprofits, and they all have different reasons. Podcasting for B2B marketers, most of the time, we think about the following. Podcasting is not a great way to reach as many people as possible. It is, we call it not a reach medium. It's kind of hard to get the numbers up, but it's an amazing engagement medium. If you just want to reach a million people tomorrow, no, don't do podcasting. That's really, really hard to get to that point.

Jonas Woost [00:10:55]:
But if you Want to truly engage with people. And what I mean by that is if you have a message or a point of view or a story or you want to tell something, you want people's attention. Not just a second or five seconds as people scroll by you, but actually get 20 minutes with them, half an hour with them. Maybe in your case, Brandi, right? Because you've been podcasting, you have a lot of episodes out there. You have people's attention for multiple hours as they listen to multiple episodes. Where else do you get that? Where do you get it? Especially thinking for, like, potential customers or clients or partners or other stakeholders in your industry, whatever your industry is, where else do you. Are you able to get hours of attention? That's really incredible, and it's really awesome. And you can actually change someone's mind about an issue or about your point of view or about your third.

Jonas Woost [00:11:47]:
The way you think about it, whatever you want to do, sometimes it takes time. Right? We all know this world that we live in where often it's just about the headline and people just read the tweet or they just read. They don't even make it all the way through the blog post. Well, life's complicated. Business is complicated. It's not all about a headline. Sometimes there's nuances, or actually, I'm going to say most of the time there are nuances. And having that time with people and getting that time with people, people actually listen to you for half an hour.

Jonas Woost [00:12:13]:
That is an incredible opportunity. Podcasts are great at that. And the good news is, the best news about all of this is. And you mentioned already that you logged into, you mentioned Spotify for podcasters, and the same exists in Apple. The same exists also for YouTube, is that you can measure, sure, how many people and where are they, but also how long. How long did they stick around for, either in average or even in total. And you can get numbers like total minutes or hours or for many of our clients, is measured in years of attention. How much attention did you get? That is an incredibly powerful number that allows you to measure, sure, how many people, but also, like, how deep is that engagement? It allows you to measure that from episode to episode.

Jonas Woost [00:12:56]:
What was the average completion rate for this episode versus last episode versus the episode before that? And how does that shape your editorial decisions, your marketing decisions, your business decisions, all of that? The sort of engagement data is super valuable, and we're actually in a very fortunate place. Lots of people say data and podcasting is complicated, and it is, but there's actually quite a lot there that we can, when we look in the wrong places, we can get. And this is sort of, again, I'm going back to the downloads. Getting the downloads is easy because it's really one number and you see it at your hosting provider when you make the effort like you did, you log into Spotify, the back end of Spotify, you log into Apple, you log into YouTube. There's a lot more you can find, especially on the engagement side.

Brandi Starr [00:13:35]:
Yeah. And that, you know, you talked about time on the episode, like how long they are listening. That was also a really interesting aha. For me, you know, thinking about it, talking about the editorial calendar and what topics, you know, you go after or plan for. And that was one thing that triggered an immediate change looking at that data because, you know, thinking about again, going back to the purpose of the podcast and I'll just use mine as the example, but when we started the podcast, one of the things that was really important to me as the host was really to speak to the whole person. So when we are looking at the marketing leader, not just the things that they need in terms of actually leading marketing, like the practice of doing the job, but thinking about the fact that we are also humans and all of those things. And that was really important to me. However, the numbers don't support that.

Brandi Starr [00:14:39]:
When I dug into all of the listenership, there were a few of those, you know, more person focused episodes that had some good numbers. But I also think it was based on the promotion plan for those, like when we did things with Mental Health month or you know, International Women's Month and things like that. But if I just look outside of those boost, it is the topics that relate most to driving revenue, changing revenue, go to market, that are consistently getting the higher percentage of listens. And when we're talking about some of the other topics, although, you know, anecdotally I know people find them valuable because I've gotten one on one feedback on them. But the numbers are definitely showing that by and large, if we stay sort of on brand in terms of topic, the number, you know, the listenership goes up in terms of percent. And so when I shared that with my team, it was like, you know, I talked to my content marketer and I was like, okay, we gotta go back to the drawing board on some of the things that we've planned and we've got to actually narrow. And so, you know, just being in the seat and, and doing the things, I really see how even though I never set out for huge download numbers, like I thankfully had someone Tell me out of the gate, like, you're not aiming for big numbers. I still was looking at the wrong number.

Brandi Starr [00:16:17]:
And so I know that you guys do this with clients. And so I'd love to hear. Because sometimes it's hard to really think about, like, what do we do next? So I'd love to hear, based on what you've seen with some of your clients, what are some of the pivots that they've made as a result of starting to look at the right data?

Jonas Woost [00:16:37]:
And this is. I want to just highlight what you just went through, which is your listeners will do this all the time, and we just want to always highlight. This is also possible in podcasting, when we think about making decisions around our podcast. How can we make it better, maybe? How can we make it bigger? How can we make it meet our business goals? Whatever it is, there's no right answers. There is no playbook to say, hey, in order to grow, you have to do X or in order to, I don't know, increase conversion from your listeners to potential customers, you need to do. Yeah, doesn't exist. Everyone needs their own playbook. Everyone needs to figure out their own plan.

Jonas Woost [00:17:13]:
However, looking at the data, the right way is the sort of the closest you can get to creating your own to having a playbook. Maybe it's the. The one shortcut we could find, because there is no shortcuts. Obviously, there's no shortcuts in business overall and in growth. But, you know, in. In addition, lots of people contact, say, like, hey, what's the trick? How can I get my numbers up? And it's like, it doesn't exist. There is no shortcut. There's.

Jonas Woost [00:17:35]:
The data is the one. It's not really a shortcut because it sort of creates other work, but it's the one path we could find. Like, looking at the right numbers, the right way can really make a difference. So there's we. So we encourage. When we talked about data already and we talked to clients about data all the time, and it went up, it went down. But the most important thing is that we say, like, it doesn't matter what the number is. Could be really high, it could be really low, it could be growing, could be decreasing.

Jonas Woost [00:18:00]:
I don't care. The chart goes up, the chart goes down. I have zero opinion about it. All I care about is can we find the actual insight? So this whole idea, like, it has to keeps going up. Well, maybe, but, I mean, we had a bunch of clients where the numbers kept going up, but they were reaching the Wrong people. That was very clear. But from the analysis that we did, like, well, that's great that we're reaching all these folks, but you don't actually care about those folks. That's not your target audience.

Jonas Woost [00:18:23]:
So you're growing, but not with the right people. So kind of what's the point? So it's all about what is the actual insight? What decision are we going to make in the future based on the numbers that we're seeing? And so, Brandi, I think that was your question, right? What did we do there? So there's two, maybe three big buckets of decisions that we're making. I think it was one you already mentioned editorial or production decisions, who we're talking to in our next episodes. When are we going to release the episode? How long should it be? What's the format? What's the music? Who are the hosts? You know, all those kind of editorial production decisions. There's a lot of stuff you can find in the data to help you keep improving your show. You try something new and you look at the data and realize, hey, that really didn't connect with audiences. Or you look at the data and you see, like, wow, that really made a difference. The retention rate went up.

Jonas Woost [00:19:10]:
Like, people stuck around for longer because I had a new intro. I'm making this up. Or, you know, we had a different type of guest that we normally don't have, and look at that. Really connected with an audience. So we can make these kind of decisions every day. In fact, we recommend to our clients to make decisions like that all the time based on the data, you're making decisions in the future. So there's an editorial or production point of view. That's, of course, also a marketing point of view.

Jonas Woost [00:19:33]:
We're trying different stuff to grow the show. We're leaning into social, or we try doing more video. We're like, we had a big billboard campaign, by the way. Brandi don't do billboard campaign. It's not. It hasn't. Hasn't worked yet. But, you know, you get the idea.

Jonas Woost [00:19:47]:
You have marketing decisions. You do stuff tactics in order to grow the show or reach the right audience. And you can see in the numbers whether it worked or not. And downloads might go up or down maybe. But what I care about is we're reaching more people. Are they listening for longer? And that's sort of. Lastly, the last bucket is sort of business decisions for those people that maybe monetize the podcast through advertising or they want to see conversion from the podcast to lead generation or whatever. They want to do.

Jonas Woost [00:20:11]:
So those are the three buckets. Editorial or growth and marketing and business decisions. However, I want to say one thing that's very, very important, and it sort of contradicts maybe everything I said already. When we help our clients make better shows or allow their shows to be more successful, we always say data is super important, and it should be one of the decision factors that goes into what you're going to do tomorrow. Shouldn't be the only thing. Can't be the only thing. It can't all be based on data. It's a piece of the pie when we make decisions.

Jonas Woost [00:20:46]:
Maybe it's a large piece of the pie for some people, maybe for someone smaller. If we only do stuff based on data and sort of chase the best number, the biggest number, it doesn't lead to great storytelling. It doesn't lead to doing something extraordinary. It doesn't lead to telling important stories. I can tell you right now, many of our clients are telling stories, maybe on every episode, about diversity initiatives or about climate change. You know, you can imagine this sort of organizations, big organizations that talk about business. That one episode is about, you know, the importance of making climate change decisions that are, you know, that help with climate change. Those episodes, unfortunately, never perform quite as well as the episode that talks about how you can get rich tomorrow.

Jonas Woost [00:21:29]:
It is what it is. I'm not happy about it, but we see it every single time. So does that mean that client shouldn't talk about climate change next week? Of course they should, and of course they will. And they. So data is very, very important, but it's not the only thing. It's sort of. It's a piece of the piece.

Brandi Starr [00:21:44]:
Yeah. And I think those sort of data anomalies is something we all have to be cautious about because there will always be something beyond our control or sometimes within our control that causes, you know, an outlier spike. And that's one reason I like to look at trends a lot. One question I, you know, was at an event and I was chatting and I was talking about the fact that I was going to be interviewing you, and a question that came up in that discussion and has come up multiple times is, you know, if we think about, like, SEO, there's, you know, we're thinking about search and people are searching the web, and it's very easy for our content to get found. And, you know, now everybody is chasing, how do we get AI to identify our content? One of the things relating to podcasting that seems a little elusive to most podcasters I've talked to is how do you get Spotify and Apple podcasts to recommend your episodes to new relevant users? Is there any secret there?

Jonas Woost [00:22:57]:
We don't think there's a secret. There are some very common sense SEO considerations. If you have a big guest, a big name guest, sure, you want to use the name of the guest in the title of the episode. I think that's sort of common sense stuff just for searchability, like, you know, so if someone searches for the guest, it comes up. That's pretty sort of standard stuff. We don't believe there's a, a secret sauce that we can uncover it. I mean, this. The related question that you haven't asked is, you know, how can I get the YouTube algorithm to pick up my thing versus another thing? A.

Jonas Woost [00:23:34]:
We don't know and they would never tell us. I think for us, what it comes down to, and we know this works, is the following. It's okay to not ignore sort of the, the, I'm just going to call it the algorithm. But it's okay to really think about the listener or the viewer because if you make a piece of content that resonates, completion rates go up, people listen for longer. It gets shared around, it gets passed around sort of organically, your numbers are going to go up. And we do know for a fact, and this is, I think knowledge as sort of public, is that, yeah, if you have a YouTube video that works well and has momentum behind it, the algorithm will pick up the fact that there's momentum behind it and then sort of recommend it more. Right? Sort of. Success seemed to yield more success when it comes to algorithms, but that success was not manufactured.

Jonas Woost [00:24:24]:
You had the success because you had a piece of content that resonated with an audience. So the shortcut to that answer is for me is like, just make good content, make good stuff and it's going to get picked up. The thing to kind of keep in mind is that we're in a funny space right now when it comes to recommendations. There are three in the, in the western world, in the English speaking world, there are three big podcast production, sorry, consumption platforms. Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. Those are the big ones. Depending on the client, anything between 75 and 95% of all listening for our clients happens on those three platforms. Okay.

Jonas Woost [00:24:58]:
What you keep, what you want to keep in mind is like on YouTube, very. The recommendations are very algorithmically driven. So yes, there is a sort of, you know, you have to, or you, you want to be able to make sure that the, the algorithm picks up your content and recommends you more. And that's. We do this mainly by making sure we have great content. Spotify sits somewhere in the middle. Meaning Spotify has some algorithm recommendations, but they also have people that will editorial teams that will boost your if. If you are so lucky, boost your content and sort of pass you around.

Jonas Woost [00:25:28]:
So there's sort of half algorithms and half human intervention. And then on Apple podcast they basically have close to zero algorithmic recommendation. It is all about an editorial team that makes decisions. So this is kind of what my point is like SEO is one thing, but just making great content and pitching it to the right people. At Apple you can pitch to a team. At Spotify, you can kind of pitch to your team. At YouTube, you can't do it at all. That is really something to keep in mind as we think about how can we make our content discoverable on different platforms.

Brandi Starr [00:25:59]:
That is awesome. I think that is like the best nugget because I don't think most podcasters understand that like it. It is very elusive in how you increase listenership through the actual platforms as opposed to just like social media and those sorts of things. Okay, so we have explored the issue. Now time, it's now it's time to give some advice to fix it. So this is the lightning round. Fast answers, only four questions. So number one, what's the first sign a company is facing a podcast tracking problem, but hasn't named it yet?

Jonas Woost [00:26:43]:
The first thing that most people get wrong is that they don't actually know what they want to measure. This is the first step. What do you actually want? No one wants downloads. No one wants a number. People want business results, especially your audience, B2B podcasters. They want some sort of result. At the end of the day, we need to start there with result. What do you want? This is about reputation.

Jonas Woost [00:27:02]:
This is about lead generation. This is about whatever. And then go backwards from there. As opposed to starting with like we want downloads in order to maybe have something else in the past. Starrt with the solution, with it, with the. With a solution that you have in mind and then go backwards from there.

Brandi Starr [00:27:16]:
What's one mindset shift that unlocks progress?

Jonas Woost [00:27:20]:
Definitely think about consumption. Really this is the most important thing. Understand that downloads do not represent consumption. The printing press does not know who read the book or did they make it to chapter two even we have no idea. Think about, we have to think about focusing consumption. The places that know who and when and for how long people have consumed, listened or watched your podcast are the different platforms. Apple, Spotify, YouTube, focus on those three. It's easy enough.

Jonas Woost [00:27:49]:
That's a great starting point.

Brandi Starr [00:27:51]:
What's one common trap leaders fall into when trying to solve this?

Jonas Woost [00:27:57]:
Try and be perfect. And what I mean by that is we haven't touched on this. This is going to be a slightly long answer. I can already tell you that the beauty and the problem of podcasting is that you can listen to podcasts only on all kinds of different places. Last time I checked, Netflix was available on Netflix. You want to watch a Netflix show, you have to go to Netflix. There's an app, there's a website, but really it's Netflix. Podcast is the opposite.

Jonas Woost [00:28:19]:
It's an open system. You can go on Apple, you can go on Spotify, there's a million other apps. Right? There's YouTube. And we try. We're trying to capture all the consumption everywhere. It's an open ecosystem. We're not going to be able to capture all consumption everywhere. Let's focus on the big ones to get directional data and it's okay.

Jonas Woost [00:28:35]:
Especially as people start this journey. Think about Apple, think about Spotify, think about YouTube. Yes. There's also Pocket Cast. There's also a bunch of other sort of places you can listen to. It's okay right now to ignore those just for the purpose of this conversation.

Brandi Starr [00:28:48]:
Okay. And what's the most underrated move that actually works to fix this fast?

Jonas Woost [00:28:54]:
Hmm. Hmm. I. People want to. And we have a product that offers this, that they want to have a solution and buy a solution for them to better measure their success. And yes, you can come to us and we have that solution for a lot of people. It's a spreadsheet. It's a spreadsheet people can put together.

Jonas Woost [00:29:12]:
And it doesn't have to be complicated. It doesn't have to be overwhelming. You really want to track like six different numbers. We update that spreadsheet once a month, every two weeks. So you spend that 20 minutes once a month on just like pulling in numbers from Apple. Pulling, you know, as I said earlier, and put it all together in a spreadsheet. That's totally possible. The nice thing about that is because you have to build yourself.

Jonas Woost [00:29:33]:
It allows you to really learn, like, what are you doing here? It's a great sort of exercise to track it yourself. And then there's also solutions out there like ours that can help you measure that automatically. Awesome.

Brandi Starr [00:29:45]:
So before we close, my last question is to have a little fun. So tell me what one book, podcast or tech tool has been a game changer for you in business lately?

Jonas Woost [00:29:59]:
I was so My friend Steve Pratt wrote a book called Earn it, which is a book for marketers that talks about, like, how the attention that we as marketers want, we want to earn that attention. We don't want to grab it or demand it or even buy it. Why not? Just earned it. And of course, like, for anyone who's listening who's got a B2B podcast, that's exactly what you're doing, right? You're earning people's attention. You can't force anyone to listen to your podcast. You're telling great stories, and therefore people listen and you earn your attention. Okay. It's called Earn it by Steve Pratt.

Jonas Woost [00:30:30]:
Great book. And there's one piece in there that's really changed my thinking and frankly, my thinking about our own marketing of our own company. And there was the sentence when he's talking about awesome over time, awesome plus time, and how we actually, I'm going to speak for myself. I try and think like I'm doing a thing. I try something, go to a conference or I write a blog post or I'm a guest on the podcast and I'm expecting results tomorrow. So let's see how that's going to go tomorrow and how for a lot of us, it's not about what's happening tomorrow or what's happening after you send out that newsletter. It's about building the relationship over time and how the awesomeness accumulates over time. And then in a year from now, we now see this all the time.

Jonas Woost [00:31:16]:
As I'm trying to get more patient, people get in touch and say, like, oh, I've been following your stuff for the last year. Great blog post. And you realize, oh, there's. There are people out there that follow what we do. You know that there are people, Brandi, that listen to your podcast right now every episode, and they've never been in touch. And they will get in touch one day and they're going to say, like, I listen to every single episode. Love what you do. And we think, like, because that person's not getting in touch today, I sometimes think, oh, it's not working.

Jonas Woost [00:31:41]:
Having that patience, especially in this sort of storytelling and reputation building, the kind of work that we're doing here right now, the patience is the magic ingredient that can lead to wonderful results, business results, but also making friends, also feeling part of a community. This patience, awesome. Over time, it's really unlocked a lot for me and sort of reduced the stress for me to feel like, oh, my God, everything has to come together tomorrow.

Brandi Starr [00:32:06]:
I love that. And it's so funny you say that because patience is not a virtue that I am great at. But you are so right. I mean, I just had two situations recently. One, an organization I'm a part of pairs you with people for like these 30 minute virtual coffees. And the lady I was talking to saw the book and she's like, oh, have you read that? We just finished it as a company. And I was like, yeah, I kind of had a hand in writing it. And then she grabbed it on her desk and saw my name and she was like, I didn't even make the connection.

Brandi Starr [00:32:42]:
And another event, somebody was like, have we met? And I was like, I don't think so. I'm like, your name nor your face seem familiar. And he was like, I feel like we've met. And then like, he came back a few minutes later because we were on a networking thing and he was like, somebody just sent me an episode to your podcast. That's why I feel like I know you. And so you are right in that, you know that awesome. Over time you don't always know that people are listening or following or watching. And then it's like that, you know, connection.

Brandi Starr [00:33:15]:
So super, super funny. Well, Jonas, I have enjoyed this conversation and before we go tell our listeners how they can connect with you and definitely give the shameless plug for Bumper.

Jonas Woost [00:33:29]:
I will do that. For those podcasters that are struggling to look at the right numbers all the time I mentioned earlier, you have to look at all these different places. It is quite time consum we build a tool that is a measurement aggregation tool that brings in the relevant data from the different platforms all into one place. So you can easily see like, how am I actually performing not based on downloads, but based on real consumption. It's called the Bumper Dashboard. It's an invite only tool right now, but I think your listeners are exactly the kind of people that should be invited. wearebumper.com is the place where people can read more and request an invite.

Jonas Woost [00:34:04]:
Would love to have your listeners and viewers check it out.

Brandi Starr [00:34:07]:
Perfect. And I can vouch for the dashboard. You were kind enough to let me tinker around with it and it was extremely insightful and definitely has yielded some changes for us to lean into some of the insights. So we will make sure to link to the website. So check the show notes wherever you are listening or watching this podcast so that you can connect with Jonas and Bumper. So thanks again for joining me. This has been such a great conversation.

Jonas Woost [00:34:40]:
Thanks, Brandi.

Brandi Starr [00:34:41]:
Thanks everyone for joining us. I can't believe we're at the end. Until next time. Bye. Bye.