Danny Miranda: On Storytelling, Newsletters, and Growing A Podcast

Key Takeaways

[Music] everything [Music] what's going on everyone this is Ethan and this week we have a special episode of the coffee blogger podcast I had an opportunity to sit down and chat with podcast host and newsletter writer Danny Miranda if you've not heard of Danny yet you're definitely going to he is an up-and-coming voice in the world of Storytelling and as I mentioned host of the Danny Miranda podcast this is a show that's been around for about a year and a half and he's already 200 somewhere between two and 250 episodes in and the list of guests that he's had on there has been absolutely incredible just to give you an idea not only all the big names uh from sort of my world the newsletter world that's sampar sahil Bloom Cody Sanchez all the rest but I'm pretty sure Gary vaynerchuk was episode 30 or 40 of his show just really impressive out of the gate and he's only getting better Danny came online radar recently with a new business that he launched he recently created a paid newsletter that's going to be tracking how he's growing his podcast from 25 000 downloads per month all the way up to a million very cool journey and so we got together this time or this afternoon really to talk about a whole bunch of stuff we talked about his background uh his origin story how he got into content Creation in general talked about creative burnout how to find your thing like how to find uh your priority as a Creator uh we talked about interview strategy and how he gets news stories and new insights out of these incredible guests who many times have been interviewed dozens or even hundreds of times you talk about the tools that he uses the strategies he uses the tactics that he's using right now to manage all this content creation and other things too like the highest Roi decision that he's made and his approach to Quest questions and how to ask better questions of your guests interviewees all kinds of things if you give this a listen I think you're really going to see why it is he is becoming so well known these days super interesting thinker great Storyteller genuinely good guy I really enjoyed this conversation so give it a listen let me know what you think and you can check Danny out over at his podcast that's the Danny Miranda show you can also find him on Twitter I believe his handle is hey Danny Miranda uh d-a-n-n-y-m-i-r-a-n-d-a and of course the new newsletter is Danny miranda.substech.com a newsletter is called in the DM okay so we were talking about Austin for a little while and it's cool that you're moving here when are you when are you getting down here by the way you have like a timer on that yeah hopefully in a week just gonna get an Airbnb for a little bit and then figure it out from there that's awesome man do you uh any particular part of town that you're eyeing right now uh I stayed a little bit in East Austin and I really loved that I went to Squatch Fitness Sasquatch Fitness all the time and it was like a three minute walk from my place and it was amazing but just open and just gonna text my friends like looking at this spot in this place though right on that's awesome man yeah Sasquatch Fitness comes up all the time so East Austin definitely one of the like one of the main places to be I always recommend people who are moving here they're like well what part of town is a good part of town I'm like well you can't go wrong on like on like East 6th through 12th right now there's still like some semi-sketchy areas in there but for the most part you grab a spot in there use your time to explore and you're going to get a real good feel for like how the city is but anyways that's exciting man I'm I'm stoked for it I'm excited to connect with let me know when you get here uh and I'm excited to have you on so thank you for being here I mentioned before we press record that there's a whole bunch of stuff that you're working on that I'd like to talk through specifically you came on my radar well you've been on my radar for a little while uh you've interviewed a bunch of friends of mine I think we maybe even talked the first time you were going to come to Austin because you were looking to do uh interviews like Sam par and stuff and I'm connected with those guys but you've been on like you've been on radar for a while but you came back on with a recent launch of this paid newsletter so we're going to talk about that but before we get into it you're at this really interesting point in your career where it seems like you're at a real inflection point Danny Miranda the name is getting out there more and more I'm a subscriber to your newsletter so I know what the views are on the podcast YouTube all those things are taken off and so I was excited to connect at this point in time because it is such like a a kind of a hockey stick moment before we get into sort of the nitty-gritty of how you're building out these this media engine for people who maybe haven't heard the name yet would you mind just giving a quick rundown of like who you are and how how did how did this come to be your thing your your two years into the podcast game now like what what originally started that journey and and yeah well let's start there so I'm trying to think about how far back I'd like to go with this because the truth is the origins of the newsletter and the origins of the podcast started when I was probably seven or eight or nine years old when I was writing my first newsletter called The Sunny times and I would sell it to the neighbors around the block and I've been doing this forever honestly like it's crazy because if I look back at me reporting on Sports in in high school and me doing different blogs when I was 13 when I was 15 there was always the seed of looking at the world covering the world and trying to show other people it through my own lens and now I'm just doing it in a way that one I'm more disciplined with I stopped doing the the time management blog at 13 when I was uh after like three months because I got upset when some woman who was 40 said that I should stop and like said I should go play in school and then I must be not actually 13. so it made me feel bad and I stopped 15 I I did it for a year and a half but the point is that the podcast started two years ago because I put out on Twitter two and a half years ago who wants to talk on the phone who wants to have a conversation and I ended up having such great phone conversations with people that I said I gotta record these there's more people in the world who will gain value from this conversation and it's such a simple little switch of going from this is just a private conversation between Danny and Ethan to now it's a conversation entire world can access and they can access forever and that concept like really stuck with me like oh wow my grandchildren might be able to access this conversation between us like they probably won't care but the fact that they could just really excited me and filled me with so much possibility so I started saying all right I'll do one podcast a week and then I said wow I really enjoy this before I had even one podcast out I had 20 in the backlog because I was just enjoying talking to people and learning about them and their stories and that's how I started the podcast and yeah that that's kind of like I've just been slowly building on it over time and making a little better day by day and now we're here that's fascinating I'm so curious what prompted you to post that on Twitter in the first place I mean who wants to talk on the phone not necessarily a common tweet especially these days right like nobody talks on the phone these days what what led to that original post it was July of 2020 so it was kind of peak lockdown I was filled with such joy in my own life from the own my own habits that I'd been building at that time the only my things that I was doing I was going inward I was learning about myself I was meditating I was working out I was growing as a person and I wanted to share that Joy with other people and as well as learn about their own stories and I figured what better way to do that than a phone call so that's kind of what prompted the tweet and it led to some amazing conversations with people who I still consider friends to this day that's fascinating we're um going back to those earliest conversations where a lot of them with people that you knew or did did that prompt conversations with strangers right out of the gate what was that like yeah it was mainly strangers that turned into friends and it was just people who were in difficult times themselves people who were having great times in life themselves like it was a mix of different experiences and I was learning so much about them and honestly those were like my friendships at the time like you ER my connections like you know how like people will work in the office and they'll have like a water cooler talk like this is my equivalent of water cooler talk at the time in July of 2020. I wasn't thinking like I'm gonna start a podcast I was like oh wow I enjoy talking to these people okay like let me record it oh that's a podcast sort of thing bottom up instead of top down that's so interesting yeah I was listening to the conversation you had with uh sahil Bloom earlier this morning and there's something interesting about him I noticed at first with him when I was listening to a podcast another podcast he'd done in the past I've studied sahil's work quite a bit like we've written about his approach to growing his Trends or sorry his uh his Twitter community so I've always been very interested in his work as a professional and so one of the one of the things that I noticed about him which I've also noticed now about you and I think you guys both have this in town with Sam too so maybe this is a trait that's similar that's common across like successful storytellers is this predilection for action and sort of like a I'm gonna I'm gonna use the word unreasonableness but I mean it in a good way which is like I don't think a lot of people would make their first their first go-to even during lockdowns first go-to would be like the public to publicly ask for phone calls there's something that you did there which is like unusual but it led to these great insights and as a result I think you carry that forward in your work and we'll talk about some of the ways that you approach that but you bring people into conversations that are unusual moving forward so there's this like unreasonableness or unusualness which is really unique and tends to lead to Great content creators one of the other things that kind of interested me about um uh sahil and you as well now is this sort of inherent feeling that what you're experiencing or what you're creating is worth other people's time I think that is I won't say unique but it's like common among successful creators that you start from this place of saying like oh this actually could be really interesting for somebody else this isn't just for me this somebody else needs to see this where do you or do you agree with that assessment and then if so where do you think that that line of thinking comes from in your life yeah I mean if I look back I've always felt that and had that to some degree I mean when I was 15 years old I'm sending a message to the next PR team and saying hey can I go to Media day to interview these NBA players like to me there's no there was no hesitation to do that there was no like oh do I belong here or not it was just like I have this website I think it's pretty good these people also think it's pretty good so therefore I should at least ask for the opportunity to interview these people and when I interview them the NBA players more people are going to want to see that so I didn't realize it like from that perspective when I was doing it but it's just like always been in my nature to be like okay I'm having this experience and there's someone out there who could benefit from me documenting this in some way and I think a lot of people get caught up on the imposterness of it who am I to put out my perspective on the world guess what the internet gives you the opportunity to do so it's like the printing press is in your hand at 1500 you now have the opportunity to put what's in your mind into the world I look at it the same way with writing with audio with video we have this opportunity for the first time ever do you think George Washington would have wished he could just put his face into as many different people's minds as possible I think he would have to get his message across but he didn't get that opportunity I do so that makes me incredibly grateful and that gratitude leads to me wanting to share my experience more that's so interesting okay so you started with these phone calls and then at some point you're like uh this is a podcast you start the podcast you're really enjoying it from the outside it seems like the podcast is your full-time thing right now is that true and if so at what point did it become the the thing that you were doing yeah so I look at it like it's my full-time Focus right now I'm doing so many different things I don't even know if it's sustainable I don't know if it's I don't know what the hell I'm doing and I I don't want it to appear as if I do so let me break down like okay so I have the paid newsletter and I'm doing clips for other people and it's like this person wants Clips this person wants Clips you know and so do a Cliffs for myself somebody's helping me out with Clips just who likes doing it for free um it's like it's non-stop there's so many different things in my head at one time right now and I'm just building this ship as I'm creating it eventually I hope to get to a point where the podcast itself people will I will be able to show companies that I like that I respect that I appreciate and use them as sponsors and I'm not at that point yet and I don't want anyone to think that I am at that point but I'm trying to build this ship as I'm as we're sailing and sometimes it breaks and sometimes I get back and you know it's just the process of having a little bit of uh empathy for myself in any given moment because I know I don't have it all figured out I'm just trying to build this thing and as it's growing that's one of the key ideas behind the newsletter which we're going to get into in a minute I uh very keen to talk to you about that but I want to dig a little bit deeper on like the real turning point for you because you mentioned that you had been creating content in one form or another storytelling for most of your life and some of those things you had picked up dropped at some point so but with this it's very different it's very obvious I think especially to anybody who works in this field that you take this really seriously and I'm curious to know a little bit more about like what was the turning point there where you said this is going to be that's it like this is gonna be my thing I'm not going to drop this one I mean I wrote today about burnout somebody asked me about burnout and they said like how do you not get burned out you're doing so much and I said it's not for me it's not so much about not getting burned out it's about what's the thing you want to go back to after you're burned out and so I've had a couple of periods myself of I think from December 15th to January 15th I didn't publish a single podcast episode from um in July of this year I published two podcast episodes right so but then it was like in August wait like some part of me is missing then in January of 2022 was like wait like I don't feel whole unless I'm doing this so I think it was the process of not doing the thing and then realizing like oh wait that's actually a piece of my soul and I can't not do it that's super interesting wow yeah it's like what are the things in your life that you can't not do those are the things that you should be pursuing with everything and guess what I couldn't have possibly known that for sure unless I stopped so I think it's worth maybe stopping some things and not intentionally but when you feel like wow I can't I can't keep going or maybe stop like and then see what happens do you continue with that I've started so many different things in my life I had e-commerce stores I had um different marketing agencies I had this I had that but I stopped doing them and I didn't go back to them why because I think inherently those things weren't a part of my soul it's such a great lesson there too uh I mentioned from the outside it looks like this is the full-time thing and they're they're you know from one person in media to another often there is such a disconnect between what things look like from the outside and what they really are or what it really is like to work in this industry on the inside and what you said there I like and I hope people will pull out of this which is you gave Yourself room to stop I think people who are sort of just hearing your name might assume that like at some point you made this the podcast and just like bang bang bang bang haven't missed a day since what you're saying is like no the reality is actually a little bit more messy than that but in that messiness I was able to find what the priority is you know so that's it yeah that's really cool speaking of the podcast so I'd love to dig into how you do that and just so I'm clear uh you mentioned we'll get into some of the clips and stuff in a bit but you're doing those not just for yourself but for other people too is that almost like an agency type service is that how you're how you're making money right now is by doing clips for other people exactly and I'm I'm not trying to like brand it as an agency because I don't want to be doing it three years from now basically right on this is so smart okay well I'll save the news that for later do you actually we'll talk about it now so do you do you know of the newsletter the newset I don't it's basically like um it's kind of like morning Brew for but strictly for women professional women so um they'll cover you know business and uh pop culture stuff like that all through the lens of like what professional women are sort of interested in and it's a killer business they did 40 million dollars in Revenue in 2021 with a team of like 15 people uh the founder is she's just an absolute rock star and she's monetizing way above her weight class they have uh 500 000 subscribers which is like basically they are punching at twice the level that morning Brew did at their size it's it's a crazy business but one of the ways that they're doing it is they have the content the media business on the front end and that's what everybody sees and then on the back end they actually have a tick tock agency called Newland which at the time Tim and I talked about it a couple of weeks ago at the time this may have changed since then but at the time you couldn't find the website for Newland at all and what I said at that point was I actually expect to see a lot more creators go this Direction with like content creation on the front end monetizing that way and then potentially the surfaces on the back end because as a Creator you're already so good at it you have the entire infrastructure in place and people will pay you a hell of a lot of money to do the exact same thing for them so it's really cool to hear that you're doing that but you said it's you know that's not the main focus for several years from now yeah I hope I hope I'm not in a way I hope I'm not doing that because it feels like just the thing to do to pay the bills not the thing to do because I love it and because I can't not do it like if the podcast was paying me equal amount to the agency I would be like okay like I'm gonna stop doing the agency and so I think because of that I I realize I need to do some things I don't like to get to the place that I want to be but I hope it's not forever well and just skills that you have right like I mean like you mentioned there's a lot of people looking to do short form these days uh not a lot of people have that skill set so let's talk a little bit about the podcast and how you're currently tackling that uh on the on the creation side there's sort of two directions that I want to go with this one is your approach to interviewing which I think is really interesting and the other is like more tactical how you're managing the podcast every day so let me start with a higher level and your approach to interviewing one thing that I think a lot of people are most surprised by when they kind of come across your name is that you've had killer guests on the show you talk a lot about how you land these killer guests and you break it down really well for people uh so check Danny out on Twitter if you're interested in that he's done a lot of really good posts on how he does this but for the most part people stumble across your name they're like I've never heard of this guy and he's interviewing pop he's interviewing Sam par he's interviewing sahil like he's got all these crazy people on the on the podcast one question that comes to mind is like these are people who are big names but they've also been interviewed a lot and they create a lot of their own content how do you go about getting the most out of those conversations with them because I gotta say listening to you guys talk there is a lot that comes out that normally wouldn't come out in an interview so talk to me a little bit about your approach to interviewing and how you prepare and ask questions to somebody who's already so well known yeah I think the funny thing is I feel as if it's almost easier to get them to say things that they've never said before if they have a lot of content out it's kind of a weird Paradox and the reason for that is because everything that somebody says is its own podcast we could probably do 30 minutes on me 13 to 15 years old in my blogging days like what happened how did you get garyvee to call your mom when in this situation what happened with right there's so many different Avenues we can go down and so the more content someone has out the more interesting things that I can latch onto and that I can ask about and someone could be like wait sampar you you biked across the country wait what happened you you stayed at people's houses on Tinder I've never heard him talk about that because that's deep in his archive he's written about that but I could have never brought that up if he never put out the content to begin with so it's like this weird thing that happens and I just care a lot about the people that come on I care about a lot about them having good experiences and I care a lot about them learning something about themselves from the conversation so my questions and my the statements that I end with or lead with are statements that are trying to get them to learn something about themselves and I do that often by complimenting them by making them feel comfortable by looking deep into their past by listening to at least two podcasts that they've done prior if not 10 right and it's not like I can always do that for every guest but if there's some like I've probably spent 50 to 100 hours of my life if not more with Sam part so it's like because of that I have deep familiarity and connection with him that can let his guard down when we do go into topics that are a little bit more dicey right so it's a it's a really interesting game that I can play if I have a lot of familiarity with someone it leads me to so many different nuances and things that wouldn't get uncovered if they had zero content out so interesting you said something there which and I've talked to a lot of people about this game but I've never heard anybody say this one of your goals is to get somebody to learn something about themselves inside the questions that you ask can you talk to me a little bit more about how you think through that and that seems like a bold that's a bold stance to take but also I mean it's it's fascinating and kind of profound how do you think about that when you're preparing questions for somebody yeah so I've actually never spoke about this but I'm so happy you're giving me the opportunity too it's not that if they if they don't learn something about themselves I'm not upset so let me start with that if they do that's the goal and that's a win for me because it is about the other person coming at the other end of that and leaving and talking to their partner at the end of the conversation and being like yo I spoke to this kid Danny Miranda and I like what he did was crazier I had such an enjoyable conversation then it breaks down right like why is the conversation enjoyable a conversation is usually enjoyable because we come to a new realization and if it's about ourselves even better we're more happy because we've gained New Perspective on the world so how do I go about doing that I go about doing that by trying to get to know the person better than they know themselves in any given moment which you might say to yourself is impossible to do but if you pulled up my blog posts from 2015 or 2012 you would know me in this moment better than I knew myself because I can't remember what that blog post is like and if I read that if you read that to me then I'll be like huh I didn't realize I said that that's fascinating and then I'll be able to make it a connection to it in the present moment so deep research is like the biggest thing but another big thing is literally putting yourself in that person's shoes imagining you were you were going through life as they were going through it and asking yourself okay like how would I have handled that situation what's going on there why did that person think this instead of that and sometimes those people have never answered that question themselves they just acted and that's really remarkable when you can get someone to say huh I didn't realize I did this because of this and so a big part of that is how can I draw Connections in that conversation to something the person has previously done um and that's a big one as well that is so interesting you oh well as you were explaining that you made me think of an experience that I've had that I think maybe a lot of people have had which is you find an old journal and or like maybe an old list of goals or something like that and you go back and you read it and you're like oh my God I never it's almost like you're reading something that somebody else wrote and then you and there's this sinking in feeling this feeling where all of a sudden you realize that you today and that person who wrote that other kind of the same and uh there's a connection that's made there and what you're saying is you can actually basically spark that connection by finding that old journal for people just by purposely looking at what they did deeper back in their archive that's super interesting yeah I I had that feeling last night like I I was going through all the journals I was like huh I wrote this down wow this came true in this way so yeah people's old journals if they have a lot of content is out there for you to explore go back if you're an interviewer go back to 2017 2018 like look at those things because that person doesn't even remember what they wrote down I certainly don't remember everything I wrote down then but it's there so often on the internet that's fascinating what are some of your favorite methods for doing that deep research I mean I know the sort of the obvious thing would be like Google's person's name look up their blog go back in the archives I've heard you say that you use advanced search on Twitter quite a bit um can you talk to me about maybe that or any other favorite tips that like tactics that you have to get the good stuff absolutely so tweemex is a nice plug-in for Chrome t-w-e-m-e-x that populates any person's most popular tweets over the past I don't know year five years before all time and so that's just a sidebar that basically just pops up which is really helpful but it's really just like it's brute force and like if it seems like how do you know that or how do it's just because I spent the additional 30 minutes or the additional hour whatever it is to like go through the extra podcast go to the seventh page of Google like it's not like I have anything more at my disposal it's literally just effort and a lot of times one helpful thing is like asking the person's spouse or someone they've worked with like are there any interesting things that I can bring up in this conversation that will make the other person smile is like a good way to frame it and uh that usually gets good responses that's awesome yeah ah dude you've really give me something to think about here in terms of this framing on conversation so I thank you for that I'm curious to Pivot just a little bit and hear a little bit more about how you manage some of the Tactical stuff so I had actually funny enough I think we have some similar uh approaches to some of the interview prep in fact you this came up in our conversation in the back in the in the behind the scenes um when you and I first booked this call I mentioned to the trends audience I said hey I'm going to be talking to Danny Miranda soon uh anybody got any questions and I I misquoted some of your stats so I appreciate you correcting me on some of those but one of the questions that came up from that post is somebody it's sort of a multi-part question so I'll just kind of lay out the background somebody said from the outside it seems like he was focused he was focused primarily on content creation rather than distribution and only recently changed to focus more on distribution so the first question is um do you agree with that assessment and if so what was it that made you switch to focus more and more on distribution so it's a great question and a great observation what I realized is okay I really love having conversations with people so let me make it as easy as possible for me to have those conversations and I'll explain what I mean so the first 38 Episodes of the Danny Miranda podcast were Audio Only on Skype with no video no production no anything just two people having a phone conversation basically over Skype Audio Only then Gary vaynerchuk says he's going to come on the podcast episode 39 and I say to myself okay well I guess I'm gonna have to record video for this and I was very uncomfortable recording video it wasn't like I was putting myself out that was the first real video that I'd put out on the internet of myself oh my God so it's like to the big stage right so it slowly became okay now I have video all right this is cool how do I like get this more in the hands of people okay let me add timestamps then it was like okay like I have time stamps and I have video how can I make this in person to increase the experience okay now I'm in person how can I get the the distribution of this episode to more people okay I could chop it up at the clips what you see now might look to you or anyone like a well-oiled machine but the truth is it just started from doing Audio Only podcasts 262 episodes ago and so I think that it's like yeah of course you have to focus on the content at first make sure it's good if I try doing everything I just talked about in the beginning it never would have worked there's no chance because there's so many little nuances to each piece of what I'm talking about from the interview itself to them recording a video conversation taking in someone's eyes and how they're interacting with it to then going to the time stamps to then going like there's so many little pieces of it and I did it slowly but surely just one percent better every day and when I fell got back back up again and that's really the the moral of the story there that's fascinating and I think it uh actually leads perfectly into the second part of this person's question where they said tactically how are you currently managing it all I mean just to throw out some stats I think you listed this in the and we'll talk about the newsletter in a minute but you said in the newsletter That You released was it 86 shorts last week or something like that and you said you could even make a case for doing more than that so you're doing that you're recording shows you're tweeting you're writing just I know it's chaotic like what does the average day currently look like and and do you have any systems that make the lift easier or is this just like you're on the grind set on the grind set I mean I'm sure the things that I've picked up have helped me but I will say I'm only in the first week of the newsletter like I've I've had the newsletter for one week so I I wouldn't say that that's like a part of my routine but one thing is I'm keeping ideas so that I can just create posts very easily from the day before another thing that really helped me was like Anthony pabliano talking to him and being around him and just like watching his Star Rise is be like oh no you actually can do more like you actually can create more content you actually can use your time more effectively to build and I've just been very inspired by him and because of that I I said okay he could do it he's a human being I think I have similar work ethic and capabilities what makes me different let me try this as well and we're gonna see we're gonna see if it works out we're gonna see if I can sustain the pace but that's uh the big thing another thing is like this guy who just really enjoyed the podcast started creating Clips himself and started to just send me them for free for no cost and I'm like oh my God like when or if I'm ever in the position to hire someone like this guy is going to be the first guy so that's one system in place that's really helped me out in this moment it's him just creating clips for me uh because he likes the podcast he feels like he's learning something and he he thinks or is betting on the fact that one day I'll be able to pay him I guess and and one day I'll be able to return the favor that he's currently giving me that's awesome that's awesome do you uh do you want to shout him out at all is he having a public presence or is he is he is this something that he just does in his spare time yeah no I think this is he doesn't have a public presence and I don't know if he wants to be public or not got it got it got it well that's really cool of him to do that I think that's a huge um voter support when people start not just like saying that they're enjoying the content but really engaging with it in such a manual way well it goes from not just consuming it but then creating something off their consumption that's like another level of appreciation someone can give it's like I not only loved it I want to create now because I loved it and that is when whenever you see things that are inspired by other art where art inspired by other art that's like the greatest sign that that art left some significance on them there's one more part to this person's question and I'm going to ask it now because I think it'll actually take us directly into the newsletter so they said you know of all the things that you're doing what have you in order to grow distribution what have you found to be most effective at the high level and uh I I know because I'm a subscriber what some of those things are but why don't you just talk through it real quick and we'll use that as the on-road into the uh into the newsletter yeah I think that the thing that's helped the growth the most is going viral which might surprise some people might not but I had a couple of different clips on Instagram get over a million views one over a million another over four million and the times when I've gone viral on Tick Tock as well have been led to the most growth I think that I don't know what's going to go viral I could not tell you at all but I could tell you that the more you put out the greater chance you have of something actually hitting people in a real way so yeah that's been the biggest driver is like literally just getting it's like 20 of the things you put out are going to get 80 of the attention it's probably like even the five percent of what you put out is going to get 95 of the attention so it's like that that sort of thing is pretty remarkable and because I know that I literally just I'm trying to put out as much as I possibly can at this moment so this is something that you've talked about a couple of times in the newsletter so far so why don't we talk about the newsletter and I I I got to say I don't usually I guess newsletters are like a um a focus of mine I work for a newsletter but also uh I've done a lot I spent a lot of time researching them so I'd say they're like a passion maybe a specialty something like that there's not a lot of newsletters that I recommend to people and in fact if people go through the archive I try to dissuade you from doing one because you posted about it and I said do this as a course don't do it as a newsletter so I'm going to go on the record now and say I think I was wrong and here's why so this is great man for people listening Danny launched this paid newsletter well there's free and paid it's a newsletter about how he's building a podcast from twenty five thousand downloads per month where it was when he sort of first launched the newsletter uh up to the goals a million right downloads per month and a couple I think it was it wasn't that long ago two weeks ago you posted on Twitter and you're like hey I'm thinking about doing a newsletter for this and my response was like do this do this as a paid course and the reason I said that was because I said everybody who already likes you and wants to understand what your journey is they'll they'll buy it whether it's a course or a newsletter and one of those things is like ongoing content uh responsibility and the other one doesn't make it once you sell it a bunch of times and your response was yeah but I can take people on a journey with a newsletter I can build something that's like more meaningful and so I was like whatever well let's see let's see what you think and you launched it a few days later I think I was one of the first people to sign up because I like I said I'm like hey I'm buying I'm buying it either way and I gotta say there's something really refreshing about the way that you write this and I was trying to think about what it was and this is what I think it is and I'll stop um like fanboying after this but here's what it is there are so many people these days who are creating content in order to create money and it's like they it's because it's become popular because storytelling is in demand there's a lot of people and I fall into this trap myself sometimes because I mean like I'm in this as a in the the industry my job is to create stories so many people creating content to create money not necessarily to figure something out and the way you're writing this newsletter is you really are writing it like there's something you're trying to figure out and you're just thinking out loud as you do it so it's really refreshing I wanted to throw that out there and just say like it's been a fun fun read can you talk people through some of your thinking behind creating it in the first place though I mean where'd the idea come from what made you pull the trigger even though some people who will remain nameless said don't do it like just talk through that for a second so I appreciate all the kind words the origin of the podcast started from my friend Zach pograb at Behavior hack on Instagram one of just a great person for me to have as a friend as somebody who I can bounce ideas off of he said basically like what could you do that could make you money that could be useful to the world and he was like one of them is just like a newsletter like updating people of like how you're growing this thing and I said you know what you're right and I also said to myself this is something that I was doing when I was seven years old writing is always something been core to my being so like I really could see this working out um so that's where the idea started but it's really just and then I was like okay I'm gonna do one newsletter a week and then I was like well like I enjoy writing so let me make it let me do it more how many does pop do okay pump does five week I could do five week then so yeah and and I realized like okay the more free stuff that I give people the more people learn something from the free stuff the more likely they're going to be to pay for a subscription and also like I could the more chance for people to come into the ecosystem I mean that Austin post is getting shared by people I don't even know and it's like they just love Austin and they feel like it's a good representation so it's like you don't know what's going to hit people but you have to put the effort to put it out there so yeah I mean that's like that's the origins of it and listen I I don't know what this is going to lead to I don't know like how if I'll still be doing it three years from now but I do know that like right now in this moment one week into it I'm really enjoying it I'm learning a lot about myself and I'm growing and I'm not doing it to like for the wrong reasons like I really am doing it because I genuinely want to figure out how to get to a million downloads a month and I want to show people like yo I was at 30 000 downloads a month last week and now I'm at 48 000 it's like okay what happened here how'd this hat so yeah that's kind of the the overview of the newsletter I wanna run through one of these issues real fast just to well not to show people what's in it well we're going to show people what's in it please but to talk through some of the things because there's some the process of charting this journey you've touched on some really interesting ideas one which you mentioned again just a second ago for like maybe the second or third time in five minutes is this concept of like not knowing what's going to hit so let me just share my screen real quick we'll talk through some of this and by the way what's the what's the the name is the the DM right in the DM is the name and that's like a play on a lot of the things that happen are in the DMS oh that's awesome and it's yeah so people what's this Danny miranda.substack people who are interested that's right Danny miranda.subsack.com okay so I wanna I Wanna Lay this out for people and I want to get into it in like technical terms why this works as a as a newsletter uh specifically as a paid newsletter because you mentioned you kind of came into this project thinking I'm gonna do one post per week that quickly went up by 400 to a post every day and I kind of watched that happen in the background because I signed up early I got the first post it was great it was all about how you grew to 19 000 followers on Instagram and mentally I kind of prepared myself for like one post a week and then I started seeing them trickle in like every two days and then every day and then at some point you're just like hey did this just become a daily news like you said in the text like this just become a daily newsletter like I think so so I wanted to say that's it's interesting it's impressive from a content creator standpoint it's also something like one of the reasons why I typically advise people not to go with a paid newsletter first is because there are very few people who actually like have the capacity to crank out enough content to really make this business work like and actually I'm gonna challenge myself on what I just said because what your point is actually everybody has the capacity of the question is whether or not you're going to do it let me say why I think this works you're building the audience on the front end so you've got a pretty big distribution net through the podcast or your Twitter all that kind of stuff the key thing that I think is driving this like why I am happy to be a subscriber is that you are breaking down a process that's incredibly valuable for people we're working on growing this podcast just being able to see your numbers and see how somebody else in this space is thinking through a lot of the same challenges that we're going through there's a clear line to the business value of that for me so it's like no-brainer this would be a lot harder if you said hey I'm Danny Miranda if you like my podcast sign up for my paid newsletter which is what a lot of people do yeah a lot of people do that that's where a lot of people went wrong so I'll pause there because I just said a lot but like talk me through a little bit of how you thought about what you actually go into this from a Content perspective I wanted to say to myself what are the things that I would kind of be uncomfortable if I created a Twitter thread around these things because I just wouldn't want to put my business so openly out into the world I wouldn't want to share private messages with people I wouldn't want to you know put people's you know responses to me in certain things but if it was the case with where this was private and I knew that only people who really liked me and supported me what could get this then I would give access to those things for For Your Eyes Only basically and so you know I I said to myself listen the the current numbers of the podcast I kind of share them but I don't I don't go into specifics I don't say what is working and why it's working I don't go into my own YouTube dashboard I don't say how this video this short blowing up did it lead to more growth if for the YouTube full length episode like those are things that you really wouldn't know or you really wouldn't figure out if I was just tweeting them because one I'd feel uncomfortable doing it and two it's pretty in the weeds of the media business so yeah that's kind of it was like my brand is around sharing and authenticity and it's like how can I even take that to another level in in the newsletter the paid newsletter that is just for people that I really trust and respect that's awesome I think there's a great lesson there again and you've crystallized it nicely for people it's like look this works for pretty much any business that you're in it could even work if you're an employee you can be provided that you're not giving away anything that's going to like damage your your employer so you got to clear that with them but the the idea here is clear it's like a lot of people are trying to do the same thing that you're doing if you pull them behind the scenes and share some of the stuff that most people don't talk about in public very often that's going to be a recipe for Success inside of any particular Niche and while the free version of this is sort of like a more General hey if you're a follower of Danny you're going to like this people who are going to pay for this are trying to grow a podcast like that's what they're doing you know so and people listening to this episode can take that and apply it to pretty much anything that they're building I think the lesson transfers so I'm scrolling through here and and just to kind of follow up on what Danny was saying for people who are listening so I'm scrolling through uh a version this is a paid version of the newsletter he's got all the numbers for the current podcast laid out then there's kind of like a um a uh an aside here which is like unexpected by Rowdy this is one of the key reasons you feel like you're seeing some of this most recent growth and so you mentioned a particular podcast episode that went viral and then you break down two really important things which I thought was interesting which is one what the the graph of views looks like on this episode it didn't go viral straight out of the gate it's like a it was like a timing thing where all of a sudden this person that you interviewed there's a lot of interest in their brand maybe some controversy whatever but you happen to have some content already created with them and so what you showed is how that's taking off now I think that's an important lesson again backing up this statement that like you never know what's going to take off and then later uh you answer the question you ask you shout out bar shop here which is does that virality have an impact on overall was this like overall subscribers to the channel or what was it so full episode yeah yeah so the the first graph was a short that broke down something very specifically about something that a lot of people are curious about and that has just exploded in popularity I think 50 000 extra views on that short over the past 10 days which was just a lot for me but you see if you scroll down that oh wow like this actually had a very minimal impact on the full-length episode so it's interesting to note and it was just insightful for me to point out not only to myself but to everyone and it doesn't mean that I'm going to stop creating the shorts it just means that I could see that it didn't have a one-to-one impact on the actual episode you can see it did go up a little bit but not that much all things considered right yeah and this is actually uh sort of corresponds with data that we've seen come out of HubSpot so Jonathan barshop he he shares some of the data on like how my first million grows every single month and recently he said the same thing he's like shorts are driving a ton of our overall views of content but it's really hard to track what the connection is between the short and either full-length episodes or even subscribers to the RSS feed and so for people listening to this like it definitely seems like shorts are worth investing in but it's a longer term play you're getting your name out there and you're getting awareness uh it's kind of yet to be seen or it's difficult to measure sometimes the connection between that and subscribers and so th