Podcasts Don’t Have The Niche Technical Information You Need To Grow Your Business

Podcasts help me avoid newbie mistakes as I grow my e-commerce company, and I love listening to podcasts when I’m cooking or walking. Especially if you’re new, podcasts are incredibly helpful for understanding the zeitgeist of your industry. (For example, I learned that owning a customer ‘list’ is darn important for an e-commerce business.)

But over time, I realized that most information in podcasts is too high-level to be useful if you’ve been in business for a few years.

Either the information is perpetually too general (“How to find your first product”) for a mass audience, or it’s hot click bate news with no consequences, or the truly useful information is held behind a pay gate, or the show becomes a biased advertisement for products and services.

The core problem is that every industry has more newbies than experts, and podcasters need to attract as big an audience as possible with high-level entertaining shows.

• Top e-commerce merchants aren’t watching “How to find your first product.” videos.

• Elon Musk didn’t launch rockets by reading “How to get into backyard rocketry.”

• Bill Gates probably learned how to write a calculator program when he was 3 months old, and he’s didn’t watch those basic videos when growing Microsoft.

I’m sure they spend a lot of time reading and learning, but the content they choose doesn’t draw enough downloads to support a podcaster’s dreams. (How many people are searching “How to win NASA contracts 2019”?)

In fact, their ‘content’ (whatever they’re thinking about) would probably only be understood by a small group of engineers.

If You’ve Been In Business For A Few Years…

First, I’ve discovered that simply thinking about my business and how to improve it is often more beneficial than outsourcing my thinking to someone far far away.

Second, I’ve found that written step-by-step information that directly allows me to try something I’ve never done before leads to true experimentation. (Because I’m doing something new instead of just listening to something new.)

Third, when I do listen to podcasts, I carefully select 1-2 episodes instead of running through all 20 like a season of Game of Thrones. Then, I use them only as a stimulus for action, searching for an idea so that I can pause the podcast and immediately try something new. (The goal is to do something new, not finish the podcast.)