Can I share a behind-the-scenes story about failure? My failure.
Almost two years ago we started working on a podcast here at The EDGY Empire.
As we begin to talk about putting together a production of our own, we began to throw around some really crazy ideas. Our dream was to put together a series based on the real life stories of ordinary people who lived life heroically.
When I wrote my book, we had developed over a thousand stories, so I figured sharing those stories via podcast wouldn’t be much more difficult than writing about them in a book or doing research.
Boy, was I wrong. In every possible way. Seriously.
Don’t get me wrong — the entire experience was wonderfully educational. Call it a trial by fire. We ended up doing 38 interviews and capturing almost 70 hours of interviews.
We would then listen to the audio and come up with a possible story arc before going back and chopping up the audio to tell that story. When that was done we would create a story narrative and draft voiceover copy that I would go into the recording studio and dictate.
My Chief of Staff would take all of this raw audio into his superhero lab and combine the interview audio with the story narration, adding in sound effects and music to create a single episode.
If it’s not clear, let me be a bit more candid.
Each episode we created took us about a month’s worth of work — over 100 hours to bring you a 12-minute episode. It’s no wonder that our Ordinary Heroes podcast only lasted one season.
Even with considerable plays and some great vibes in the podcasting community about our new brand of storytelling, keeping the podcast alive just became impossible. So I killed the project.
Not an epic failure. Just a disappointment. Thousands of dollars worth of recording equipment and audio software no longer being used.
Until a month ago.
I was having brunch with a new friend of mine who challenged me to kick-start the podcast again. But to do it differently this time.
“Just talk to people,” my friend said. “Teach them something. You get paid a lot of money from really big companies to either speak from a stage or sit in a boardroom advising very important people. What if you could take all of that experience and behind-the-scenes strategy and bring it to people who are going about their daily lives?”
For some reason, that conversation struck a chord with me.
Here’s what I heard my friend say, that he never actually said out loud. “Don’t do interviews. Everyone else is doing interviews. Stop trying to copy them. Don’t make the podcast so complex that you can’t get the episodes out the door. Use your talents and assets and experience to help people with simple, contagious insights.”
Just make it happen. Stop thinking. Do.
I called my Chief of Staff on the way home from that breakfast meeting and told him that we were going to relaunch the podcast.
Here’s the kicker: we decided to go live in exactly one week. We had to be able to pull this off in a matter of days. Not weeks. Not months. A few days.
I’m proud to announce that we hit our goal and that we’ve got a great strategy for bringing you high-quality content on a regular basis.
We’re going to bring you as many episodes as you can stomach. We’re going to keep it simple.
Each episode will be under 20 minutes.
I’ll be talking to you from the heart, sharing stories, anecdotes, and real life lessons that I would share with the billion dollar companies that hire me on a regular basis.
There is no charge for this. No upsell planned.
Just me learning a lesson in bringing great ideas to life. Learning from my accidental failure.
So I am happy to be sharing with you the Edgy Conversations with Dan Waldschmidt podcast. The name isn’t a surprise. The guy behind the mic isn’t a surprise to you.
Listen in. Join the conversation. You’ll find our podcast in all the awesome online spots. Whatever you do, don’t do nothing ;-).