Growth 90 Episode 1: Let’s talk about growth

Here's what the secret is to growing ANYTHING -~-~~-~~~-~~-~- Please watch: "Transitioning from freelancer to CEO: When do you stop doing and start delegating?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LK...

Full Transcript of The Video

Eric Siu: Okay, so we're going to try this one more time. Having some technical difficulties over here with the little simulcasting tool we have called a Wirecast. If you can hear me, hit like, comment, but I'm going to try to show you a quick growth lesson. Third time's a charm hopefully. Let me know if you can see my screen. I think I figured that part out this time, so the trick is I actually have to hit this button over here to show my screen to you guys. First and foremost, Happy New Year. Like I mentioned, if you guys saw my last video, I'm planning to do this for the next 90 days or so. We're going to talk about business. We're going to talk about growth. We're going to talk about just anything in general.
I can be talking about random products or something new that I tried because our bet is that video is going to get bigger and bigger. This is the first bet into it. It's a small investment for us to get this tool called Wirecast. It's about via $499 or $599, I forget. It's a one time cost, but if streaming does go well for us, which we're thinking it will, we'll probably invest in better camera equipment. We'll probably put this into office as well and we'll probably might even bring in people to interview too, so make it a lot more like a TV show. As of now, I'm going to do this every single day for the next 90 days or so, and then I'm going to trying to get this problem fixed if you guys can't hear me.
Now we're going to try to piecemeal things together. Let me know what you think if you guys have other ideas, specific struggles that you have at the moment. If you guys can't hear me on this one, I'll go ahead and leave like a brief overview of what I'm talking about. In general, I'm going to try to keep these about 5 to 10 minutes or so. Also, let me know since I'm going to try to put these on a more predictable schedule, tell me what time works best for you, and we'll set it up. Probably 8 or 8:30 pacific in the morning, that's probably going to be the time because that's right before I walk over to the office. Without further ado, I'm going to show you the growth of the two podcasts I've had over the last couple of years.
It's been three years or so, so I'm going to show you what we were able to do there, and then this growth lesson basically applies across the board to whatever you're trying to do. It doesn't have to be business related. It could just be anything related. It could be life related. I'm going to go ahead and switch over to my screen. To do that, still getting used to this tool. Let's do this, okay. I think you guys should be able to see my screen now and basically this is my first podcast. This is Growth Everywhere and for Growth Everywhere, I was able to grow it from about well zero, no audience at all, and we're getting about close to 80,000 downloads a month, but it was a long road there.
I mean I basically started in November of 2013, and you can see I was getting about 10 downloads a day. Right here, I'm getting six, okay. The thing is I spent a lot of time on this in the beginning, like me having to put myself out there, do this interview stuff, and then also reach out to people too was pretty nerve-wracking. At the time, I just came into Single Grain, which is the company I run now and so there's a lot going on. There's a lot to do for Single Grain and I decided to start this at the same time just because I thought I could give back and help the community and really talk with these smart people, ask them how they grew their businesses so we can add value to everybody else.
I knew I can do deep dives with people and really, really dig into how they were able to grow their businesses and what their photos look like, and try to draw out these growth lessons, and also personal growth lessons as well. I forward from November, let's go a year later. Let's go to November of 2014 and we go from about 10 downloads day to about a 172, which is not too shabby. That's a 17X daily increase, but still going from 300 downloads a month to let's just say for 4500 to 5000 downloads a month for the time I was putting into it. We're talking you're having to reach out to people, spending six hours of every weekend editing these, it was a lot of work. At this point, I figured out that I probably needed to delegate this out, but I still kept continuing on.
I was basically doing one interview per week and in the middle, I also added it short little segments called Growth By where I'll talk for five to ten minutes. Much like how I'm doing right now, but this is live and this is going live to both YouTube and Facebook at the same time, and hopefully we can go live to Instagram and Twitter too like I mentioned in the last video. Anyway, we keep trudging along, trucking along I should say and we go to 2015. We go from about 172 downloads in a day to about a 327 day, so 10, 172, 327. Okay, the growth is it's still not that crazy, right? It took basically we're talking two years to get to about 9000 downloads a month, which is not too shabby, but just shows that it takes a lot of time.
People when you guys invest in things, it takes a long time to get there, but oftentimes we expect to get there a lot faster. That's just not the case. If we fast-forward another year, let's go three years, then we're getting about 1900 a day, okay. A lot better, that's about 16,000 and you can see we're still growing. November was more than 60,000. December, it's a little slow month, but it just takes a lot of time. It took three years to get to 8000 month and just keep in mind, we have to put things in perspective here. Podcasts only have about 52 million people that listen, which is much smaller than the Facebooks of the world and much smaller than the SnapChats of the world too. Just keep that in mind, it is growing though.
We're talking 21% of Americans listen to podcast in I think it's 2016 and then if you go back one year, it was about 17% or so. Key lesson here is that growth takes time and that parlayed, I should say parlayed, it basically led to my next of my next podcast with Neil Patel because I interviewed a lot of different people, but I wanted to nerd out I'm working too because it keeps me honest, it holds me accountable too. You can see here we started this one in August of 2016 and right out the gate, we were getting about 4000 downloads in a day. Reason for that obviously I had built a small audience. Neil has a huge audience. He's been doing it for a very long time and we're able to grow it.
Four thousand a day to about 15,000 a day or so, and we have some spikes here there. If you want one podcast tip, one tip would be to show all of your episodes at once instead of just showing 100. ITunes by default caps you at a 100, show everything. That way you're going to have more people that can discover your stuff. I had people that will search iTunes literally and say, "Hey, like is this you?" They literally found my podcast that way. I've had people stop me in the elevators asking me if I was that guy from one of the podcast too.
That part is great, but I think the best thing about doing all of this or just building an audience just anywhere, the emails you get from people saying, "Hey like I was able to find my first job, I had no degree and then just podcast basically helped me get my first marketing job," or somebody else was like, "Hey like my partner and I, we were doing zero in revenue and all of a sudden we listened to your stuff and implemented some of the stuff, we just made $7500." That stuff's huge, that stuff validates what we're doing. The branding aspect is good too because the one thing is the brand aspect, nobody can take that away from you. It's something that's defensible and you can keep that for the long term.
Whether you're trying to grow a podcast, whether you're trying to grow some Instagram channel, whatever it is, you can just see that the growth to get to the 80,000 month, hopefully we're training for a couple hundred thousand for Growth Everywhere. For this one, marketing school, December was about 423,000 downloads. We want to get it to a couple million or so. We're going to see where podcasting takes us. It does take a lot of time. It is a big commitment. If you're going to do a daily podcast episode, like marketing school, I recommend that you batch it, record 10 to 20 episodes at once. That way you're ahead and you don't have to keep frantically pacing all the time.
For Growth Everywhere, that one is a weekly one. We'll figure out what to do with that, but yeah just stay consistent. I think that's the biggest thing. There's a lot of people out there I think get rejected quite a bit, right? You can talk about Peter Diamandis with his XPrize Program that rejected 150 times and Walt Disney's idea for Disneyland got rejected, I don't know how many times, but just over and over. Just got to keep going at it and ultimately all these people at the end of the day, it's not like they're super special or anything like that. It's just that they just kept going on it and it's a lot of grit.
Hopefully fingers crossed, you guys can hear this one. Let me know what topic ideas you have for ... Could be for the podcast could be for this, whatever it is exactly. Let me know what you're struggling with, so I can figure out how to best serve you, and we will see you in the next one while I continue to figure out how to use this tool. Don't mind me being a dork. Well, I'll always be a dork, but I'll figure out how to use this thing, so fingers crossed again, hope you guys can hear what was going on here, and we'll see what happens next.

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