The Independent Creator's Playbook

Highlights, Takeaways & Quick Wins:

Show Notes:

Aaron: We both really loved Cal Newport’s Deep Work book. When did you get interested in the idea of intense focus and structuring your life in a way to make sure you get your best creative work done? When did you find that book or that idea and really start working on that?

Shawn: I think I found the idea years ago. When I was a creative marketing director, like I mentioned, I was doing 80 hours a week. Part of my schedule was that on Fridays, I would come home and work from home. I wouldn’t be on email or answer the phone. I had an assistant, and anyone who needed to get ahold of me needed to go through my assistant. She would screen anything and see if it was urgent or important for the day. If it was, she’d let me know.

I set up this distraction-free work time for myself on Fridays, because as the director for the marketing and all the creative stuff we were doing, it was on me to make sure that our marketing campaign for this big, end of the year, 25,000 person conference was going to happen. It was all on me. I had to drive that. You can’t do that in 10-minute time blocks scattered throughout your day.

For big projects, you need long stretches of uninterrupted time to think, process, come up with ideas, and work on stuff.

That was my first experience of going, “I have to have this. If I don’t, I won’t be able to do my job, and I will always be in reaction mode.” That was my first experience, and that was in 2008 when I came across that idea. It was born out of necessity for me. Obviously, that’s not new to the world, but it was new to me. When I quit my job and started blogging for a living, I came to that same spot of saying, “I need to set aside time every day to write without distractions, intentionally.”

That has evolved as we’ve had kids, schedules have changed, and seasons of life go up and down. I need uninterrupted stretches of time on a regular basis to do my most important work and to focus on the stuff that’s not urgent today but is very important. If I neglect it, those things will become urgent, or the needle is going to start going backwards and I’m going to start losing ground.

Why Deep Focus Matters

Shawn: Focused time has always been important. Then I came across Cal’s book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You. I read that in 2015. That’s a fantastic book. There was this chapter in there on intentional practice, and that resonated with me so much. It’s very similar to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book, Flow.

He has a lot of books on very similar topics on finding flow, getting in the flow, whatever. He has one book called Flow and another one called Finding Flow. It’s the idea that not only do you need those times of uninterrupted work, but when you’re in that moment, if you can get into the flow, it’s challenging, it’s hard, etc, but you feel more rewarded. You feel better. You have a higher motivation about the work you’re doing. You feel like you accomplished something.

I don’t know if anyone listening can relate to this. You spend your whole day in reaction mode, bouncing around between your email inbox, your Twitter feed, your Facebook feed, your Instagram feed, back to email, back to Twitter, back to Instagram, back to Facebook, back to email. You’re bouncing around all these inboxes, and then you’re like, “Wow, I just spent four hours. I haven’t done anything.”

Aaron: You read a bunch of short emails, maybe you replied, maybe you sent some tweets, maybe you saw some articles.

It’s so easy to spend all day doing short, quick tasks that don’t really change anything.

Shawn: Exactly. They don’t change anything, and you feel zero satisfaction afterwards. You don’t feel like you got anything done, as opposed to if you took those four hours and, instead, spent it focused on something intentional, something that was challenging. If you set aside time to do deep work, when you come out of that time (even if it’s just one hour or half an hour), if it was distraction free and you’re focused and being intentional, you come out feeling better.

After spending intentional time working on something without any distractions, you feel more motivated and you have more energy. It’s this muscle. You have a focus muscle that you have to work on, as opposed to the distraction muscle.

Why is Creating Focused Time So Hard?

Shawn: The hardest thing for getting into that focused work time, getting into the flow, is called the Activation Energy, just getting started. The first five minutes of focus time are the hardest. Something I like to do is have a set time every day when I am going to have my focused writing time, and before I even get there, the day before, I write down what my single most important thing is that I’m going to be writing about. I have the time on my calendar, and I have the challenge, project, or task that I’m going to be working on.

As Cal Newport would say, what’s the artifact that I’m going to try and get from that focused time? Then I come, sit down, and do the work. I know that the first five minutes will be hard and I probably won’t be into it. I have to power through those first five minutes, and then you get into that flow. Time begins to get lost. Anyone who has been a painter, artist, musician, whatever, you can usually relate. You say, “I was just in the flow. I was in the zone.” That’s where your best work is going to be created.

That’s where you’re going to feel the most satisfaction with your job. That’s where you’re going to increase your skill level as a creative person. You’re going to level up your ability to do stuff. Sean has talked about this so much with his Learn Lettering course: he did 9,000 hours of intentional practice! That’s what he was doing every day. He had this focused time where he was practicing letters. You have to put in the time.

How to Stop Procrastinating and Do Your Best Work

Aaron: Everyone should read Cal Newport’s books, So Good They Can’t Ignore You and Deep Work. Both of those books are phenomenal. It’s so important as podcasters to pick a day to outline and record an episode, and write the topic in advance. Say, “I’m going to spend 30 to 45 minutes at this time writing about this thing, and then I’m going to record an episode.”

Otherwise, what ends up happening, and this is true of so many areas of life, is that you will spend a lot of time thinking about how you should do a thing. I’ve been thinking about how I should record a screencast for three weeks now. “Hey, I have to record that ‘introduction to limiting’ screencast for my Logic course,” and I’ve been thinking a lot about it, but I haven’t done it yet. It’s so silly, but that’s how procrastination works. You spend more time thinking about how you should do a thing instead of just doing the thing.

Pick a task, pick a time, and do the task at that time.

That’s such a simple version of an idea presented in Deep Work that is so life changing. I talk about that book all the time because I love it, and I know there are still some people who haven’t read it yet. It is a book that anyone who wants to create stuff for a living professionally needs to go listen to. Shawn, you should do a whole series of videos or interviews where you talk about deep focus for creative people.

Shawn: I do. I did some stuff, like the TheFocusCourse.com/margin page. I interviewed Cal Newport, and we talked about this. I interviewed a few other folks and wrote some articles, and it was on this topic of having margin in your life, the breathing room, so that you can do your best creative work. That’s our mantra over there at The Focus Course: Show up every day and do your best creative work.

I think margin is a huge part of that. The deep work, the focus, it’s a huge part of it. Otherwise, you’re just working on your email inbox all the time. That’s no fun.

Push Through Fear

Aaron: The first question I want to talk about is this one from Mariali. She asked, “How did you overcome the insecurity of giving birth to a new idea you weren’t sure people would respond well to?” I think this was about a book but it could be about anything, really.

Shawn: I didn’t overcome the fear. I put it out there and stuck to the plan. The way that worked with my Delight is in the Details book, was that I had done it as a podcast mini series for my members only. It was a little five part podcast, and I got a lot of positive response from people. I had teased it out, and I got a positive response, so I thought, “I should sell this for maybe like $5 as a sample for the Shawn Blanc membership thing.”

I thought, “I should rewrite it, so it’s a little bit more structured. I’ll rerecord it so it doesn’t have the welcome in it, so it’s a little bit more of its own product.” As I’m doing that, it goes from five episodes to like 12. There were all these extra chapters that I ended up writing. Then I thought, “Gosh, if I’m going to to this, I might as well interview some other people, and then I can charge more for the thing.” Instead of charging $10, I could charge like $20. That would double what I’d make from it.

So I made the book, and when I was getting ready to sell it, that was the hard part. That launch day, I just felt super insecure. I felt bad and sick to my stomach. I texted a few friends of mine. I was like, “This book is coming out in an hour. People are going to hate it.” Everyone was like, “Stick to your plan. Put it out there.” The people I trusted, who’s opinions I cared about, all said, “You’re fine, keep going.” I listened to them, and I did. I kept going and it. I pushed through that fear.

I never overcame the fear—I just pushed through it.

I kept going. You begin to learn that the fear becomes this mile marker for you, a sign post that you’re probably doing something that matters and creating something that matters. Now I’ve learned that when I feel that, “This might not work,” or, “Holy crap, what am I doing? I’m in over my head!” I should probably keep going, because I might be on to something that matters at this point.

Aaron: That’s fantastic advice.

The Market Decides What a Product Is Worth

Aaron: I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I talked about this in the Fired Up Mondays podcast this morning, which is that the market decides what’s valuable. People will complain when they see a product that they don’t think is worth as much as the company is charging for it. Let’s say that you look at a Lamborghini, and you’re like, “I don’t know why anyone would ever pay $400,000 for that car. Why would you want that car? You could just buy a 1999 Toyota Camri that has 140,000 miles on it for $4,000.”

“This ’99 Camry works great. It gets me everywhere. Good gas mileage, pretty comfortable. Not the most amazing sound system, but it does have a Bose sound system in it, so it’s fine. Why would anyone spend $400,000 on a Lamborghini?”

The way you feel about a product doesn’t change how much it’s worth, which is how much the market is willing to pay for it.

There’s somebody out there willing to pay that much money. They have that much money, and it doesn’t matter what you think about that product. Somebody else went out and made that, and they’re going to make money from that while you’re at home complaining about how somebody else is spending $300 for a picture book from Apple. How you feel about the price of a product doesn’t matter.

Shawn: It’s how the people that are buying it feel that matters. To say, “I’m not going to start a Lamborghini company because used Toyota Corollas exist,” that’s silly, but that’s how we feel.

Aaron: Relating to my courses, which I’m getting close to wrapping up, pricing is interesting for me. If I hadn’t met Sean and the people in the seanwes Community, I think I would have charged a fraction of what I’m planning on charging. I probably would have charged closer to $20. I would have put all this time and energy into it and not priced it high enough, because I didn’t realize that there are people out there that sell courses for $1,500 and $10,000.

Don’t Undervalue Your Products

Shawn: I bought a course recently that cost me $2,000.

Aaron: So many people don’t know that. A lot of us still think that $2,000 is a ton of money. For a lot of people, it is. That doesn’t mean that you have to apply such a low price to the product that you’re making, just because you feel like $50 is a lot of money.

Don’t charge too little for your product because you feel like a higher price is a lot of money—that’s an easy trap to fall into.

Shawn: That’s very true. You have to step back. This course I bought, for me, it was a no brainer. I bought the book that was written by the guy, and I went through the book and implemented some of the stuff in there, and it helped me launch my time management class. That did $20,000 its first launch week. I spent something like $18 on this guy’s book, and it helped me make $20,000. So his $2000 course was a no brainer for me.

This master class version of that book, the online course version of it, that was a no brainer for me. There were a ton of videos, all this implementation stuff, coaching, and all this stuff that was involved in it. There were all these things you can do that can increase the value of your stuff. Don’t increase your price just because. Start with your basic price and then double it and double it again. Now you’re probably at a decent starting point.

You’re so prone to under-valuing your own work. You don’t just jack the price up because people say so. You need to look objectively and say, “Alright, am I providing the value?” If someone comes in and takes my Focus Course, for example, we charge $350 for it. It’s not a lot, but it isn’t a little, either. If someone spends $350 and goes through this course, are they going to be able to walk away with at least, ideally, $700 worth of value? I want them to get at least double the value they’re paying for it.

Can I get it to be even more? Can I get them to walk away with $3,500 worth of value, 10X the amount of value that I’m providing? You charge that, and if people take it seriously, they’ll walk away with something that wil literally change the way they spend their time with work, family, health, and finances. This is across the board for their life, and you can’t put a price on that.

Objectively ask yourself if you’re delivering on your promises and providing the value that you say you are.

With your stuff, Aaron, with podcasting, if you can help people get a podcast off the ground, they can turn that into a full time business. That’s worth $50,000 or $100,000. Someone could say, “Thanks to your stuff, I started a business that’s now thriving. I do this as my job.” That’s worth so much money! To charge $20 for it? Don’t undervalue your stuff.

First Steps to Improve Your Focus

Aaron: I want to answer Kyle’s question here in the chat. I’m going to read his question and I’ll let you take a stab at it, Shawn. Kyle asked, “Is there a best first step to improved focus? I can think of so many directions I should go: exercise more, eat better, write down what I’m doing the next day, sleep better, etc. Trying to do all of it at once isn’t sustainable. What should I start with?”

Shawn: This is great, Kyle, excellent question. I feel like there are two best first steps (which obviously doesn’t make sense, you can only really have one first step, but play along). We talked about this in the Focus Course. On the very first day of the Focus Course, there’s this super dorky assignment. You have to set out your clothes for what you’re going to wear tomorrow. Tonight, when you go to bed, pick out tomorrow’s outfit. It’s super dorky. You can do it in two minutes. In the morning, you have to wear the outfit you picked out the night before.

You have to actually follow through with your commitment. You set this thing out, and you say, “I’m going to wear these pants and this shirt,” etc. In the morning, you wake up, and you have to wear it. You’ve made a commitment to yourself the night before. In the morning, you wake up and you follow through on that commitment. It’s a small step towards strengthening your personal integrity, which is your ability to follow through with your commitments to yourself. That’s super powerful.

The other component to setting out your clothes the night before and then putting them on is that it’s your current self helping your future self. You’ve saved your future self five minutes in the morning. The quality of my time in the morning is super valuable. My mind is fresh, it’s the beginning of the day, there are no fires happening yet. That’s my best chance to get my best work done, early in the morning.

Protect your morning productivity time and your mental energy by setting out your clothes the night before.

It’s this idea of helping your future self. Once you get your toe in that water, you begin to see all the other areas of your life where you can begin to help your future self. We were talking during the podcast about this. Kyle says, “Yes, I’ve done this.” That’s awesome. As Aaron and I talked about earlier, when you have that deep work focused time, try to decide ahead of time what that focus is going to be. This is your current self helping your future self.

It’s so powerful. For me, I write down my topic that I’m going to be writing about tomorrow when it’s time for me to write. I have the topic ahead of time, so I know what to write about. Then, when I sit down, I don’t have to think about. I have the singular focus to write about this topic that I’ve already chosen. That can really help with improving focus.

Be ahead of your own curve and help your future self.

Those of you who are registered for the Creative Focus Online Summit will get to hear Josh Kaufman and I talk about this. He talks about the importance of going on a walk in the morning and having 30 minutes where you leave your phone at home. You go outside, you’re moving, you’re getting sunlight, but also, it’s 30 minutes of thinking time where you can be undistracted. You can just think. He calls it “noodling.”

You let your mind “noodle.” He talks about how when you have a productivity system and a focus system that gives you space to think and to be uninterrupted for a little bit, you’re going to be far more productive than if you have a system that doesn’t give you space to think. For him, he says that that is the number one, single most important component of being more productive and focused—actually having carved out time on a regular basis where you can just think.

Be distraction free. That’s why he says to take a walk. You can combine that with movement, being outside, getting sunlight, and things like that. It’s easier than sitting on your couch and staring at the wall for 30 minutes. I don’t say that to put that idea down, but it can be easier to be undistracted when you’re outside walking around and you leave your phone at home. As opposed to, you put your phone next to you on the couch and you hope that it doesn’t buzz.

You can put it in airplane mode, obviously, but it’s still right there. You want to grab it and take it off of airplane mode. So coming back to Kyle’s question: You have so many directions you want to go. Exercising, eating, writing down what you’re doing the next day, sleeping better. Right? People say, “I want to improve my relationship with my spouse. I also want to get better at budgeting my finances. I also want to get better at budgeting my time. I also want to read these books.”

You look at it, and there is so much stuff that you want to do. You can’t do all of it right now, so pick one thing. What’s the one that’s most exciting?

Build One Habit at a Time

Shawn: Kyle, you listed exercise as the first thing on your list, so I would start with that. Not to pitch my course, but I’m going to pitch my course. We go through all the core areas of your life: your job, your relationships, your finances, your “down time,” your physical health, and your inner or spiritual life. These are the six areas of your life. We go through each one of those and spend time on each one, where you list out what’s important to you in this area of your life.

What’s a goal that you want to have or a lifestyle practice that you want to implement, and how can you move the needle forward toward that goal? You come up with six goals and six action plans, one each for the main areas of your life. Spoiler here, at the end of the course, you pick one.

Focus on improving one area of your life for six months and ignore the other ones.

Don’t ignore them in terms of ignoring your wife for two months while you’re focusing on work, but you pick one area to build a habit, a routine, a lifestyle practice, that has you making meaningful progress in that area of life. A lot of people say that it takes 21 days to build a habit. Actually, if you’re a habit building master, you might be able to do it in 21 days, but it takes most people 60 days to build a habit. That’s the average. That’s two months!

I think a lot of people are probably familiar with the Jerry Seinfeld productivity tip with the calendar. You write a joke every day and you put a big X on your calendar, and you don’t want to break the chain. It’s the same with this new habit of yours. Say, “What’s one thing I can do on a daily basis that’s going to help me move toward my goal of exercising more, of being more physically active?” What’s the minimum dose, the smallest thing you can do?

You’re going to go walk for 20 minutes, or whatever it is. Do that every single day for two months. It’s a small start, but now you’ve done it. You’re two months in, and now, instead of it being this thing you are trying to get the motivation for to move forward, you’re doing it. It has become routine for you, which requires far less activation energy, far less mental energy. It has moved into your life. It’s there. It’s something that you’re doing on a daily basis.

Now, you pick the next thing. “Okay, I have the exercise thing.” Keep that and layer the next thing on top of it. You’re doing that for your physical health. What about for your inner life, your spiritual life? What’s something you would want to layer on top of that, something you could do? Now, during that walking time, maybe you’re going to think about something. If you read a Bible or something like that, you could say, “I’m going to have a Bible verse that I think about during my 30 minute walk.”

Maybe you’re trying to improve your relationship with your spouse. Bring them along on your walk. Now, you can incorporate this. Say, “I’m going to do this on a regular basis,” and you do that for two more months. Then you pick the next layer. Maybe it doesn’t build on that 30 minute walk itself. Maybe it’s an entirely different part of the day, but the core is the same.

Pick one thing, do it for two months, and allow yourself to suck at all the other areas of your life—after that, pick a new thing.

This is why New Year’s resolutions never work. We say, “I’m going to go to the gym for five hours a day every day starting on January 1st, and I’m going to start budgeting, and I’m going to stop eating chocolate, and I’m going to go on date nights every week, and I’m going to read a book a week.” January 1st, go! It’s so much. You’re going to run up and try to push a truck, but you don’t have the energy, the strength, to move and change that much that quickly.

With the truck analogy, if you’re driving a car and you want to try and tow another car, you don’t gun it with all this slack on the tow line. You’re going to rip both of the bumpers off. You start super, super slow. You slowly build up that speed. That’s how you do it without getting in a wreck. You actually make that momentum. Start with just one thing.

The hard part is giving ourselves permission to pick one thing and focus on that for two whole months.

That’s the hardest part, really. It’s not in the doing. It’s in the not despising those small beginnings. That’s the crash course of the Focus Course right there. This is the value. If you stick around for the after show at seanwes, this is what you get.

Aaron: I’ll agree with Shawn and say this: pick one action you can do tomorrow morning that will get you closer to the most important goal. I know how many goals you have right now. I know, because I have that many goals, too. Pick one thing and write it down. Get a little calendar. Make a big X. Do that every day.

You’ll get other stuff done, too, but you need to think about doing one important thing first thing in the morning right after you wake up. Get that thing done, and then pat yourself on the back, feel good about it, and move on to the next thing.

You can follow Shawn Blanc on Twitter @ShawnBlanc, and be sure to check out his website at www.shawnblanc.net.

Shawn Blanc is a writer, small-business owner, productivity coach, and creative entrepreneur living in Kansas City with his wife and their three sons. Shawn has been teaching and learning about creativity, diligence, and focus for over a decade, and his online courses have helped thousands of people do their best creative work while learning to thrive in the midst of life’s tensions. A while back, Shawn sent an email that caught my attention. He wrote about the importance of creating a customer avatar and developing a content strategy to connect with them and help them achieve their goals. I liked the email so much that I emailed him back and asked him to come on my show to talk about his journey to making a living through writing online and what he’s learned about growing an audience. Shawn also shares my passion for productivity and deep focus; so much so that he’s gathered 12 incredibly smart people for a free 5 day online summit about the power of focused life. In this episode, Shawn shares how he was able to make a full-time living by writing online, and we discuss how you can grow your audience by creating a customer avatar (your ideal listener) and creating content that addresses their needs and desires.

Highlights, Takeaways & Quick Wins:

Show Notes

Aaron: Shawn Blanc is a writer/small business owner/productivity coach/creative entrepreneur living in Kansas City with his wife and their three sons, and Shawn is a member of our Community. He’s been teaching and learning about creativity, diligence, and focus for over a decade now.

His online courses have helped thousands of people do their best creative work while learning to thrive in the midst of life’s tensions. A while back, Shawn sent an email that caught my attention. He was writing about the importance of creating a customer avatar, that’s knowing who you’re creating for and what you want to help them achieve, what kind of person you want to help them become.

I thought it was really interesting, so I sent him an email right back. I said, “Shawn, do you want to come on the show to talk about this? I think podcasters need to hear about this idea of customer avatars and also content strategy.” Shawn agreed, and he also shares my passion for productivity and focus, so much so that he has gathered 12 incredibly smart people for a five day online summit about the power of a focused life, and that’s going to be starting, I believe, as this episode comes out.

If you’re listening to this in your podcast player, it’s starting today, I think. I’ll give you that link later. In this episode, I want to talk with Shawn about why you as a podcaster need to create a customer avatar, know who you’re creating for, develop a content strategy, and then also the benefits of deep focus, what we call deep work.

A few small changes in your daily habits can lead to big improvements in your productivity and creative output.

Shawn, that’s one of the longer intros I’ve ever done. Thanks for joining me today. I really appreciate you being here.

Shawn: Thanks, Aaron. I love it. Super excited to be here.

Shawn Blanc

Aaron: I think of you, Shawn, as a writer and as the creator of an online course called The Focus Course, which is great. You’re so much more than that. Do you want to give everyone a quick introduction, how you got here and where you came from? I would also like to hear what your biggest struggles have been over the years of getting to the point where you’re at right now.

Shawn: Absolutely. I’m in Kansas City. Originally, I’m from Denver. I’m a Colorado guy at heart. I’ve been married for going on 12 years, and my wife and I have three boys. It’s insane at our house. We used to call the first two the Twin Tornadoes, but we just had our third eight or nine weeks ago.

Aaron: Congrats!

Shawn: It’s awesome. Love it. I love being a dad. I used to be a drummer. I know that we have a lot of musicians around here. Sean McCabe plays a little bit of music, I think.

Aaron: Yeah, he used to write music, just like he used to do lettering. I still play drums.

Shawn: I used to play drums for a large ministry here in Kansas City, and I ended up transitioning out of that. It’s a long story, but I ended up becoming a marketing and creative director. I ran a team, an in-house design team, with about 17 people—web developers, print designers, web designers, writers, editors, project managers, whatever. We did a bunch of stuff. One of our huge things was that we would host a conference at the end of the year that I was running.

25,000 people would come out for that. I did that for several years, and then my wife and I got pregnant with our first kid. I was like, “I don’t want to do this work as a dad.” Part of it was just super demanding. Anyone who has experienced working in the corporate design scene knows that it’s a very demanding spot.

Everything is urgent all the time. I was doing like 80 hours a week, and I really enjoyed it. I had a lot of fun, but I was like, “There’s no way. I don’t want to do 80 hours a week as a dad.” I had that, plus I had this little blog on the side, where I had been writing about marketing stuff. I felt like, “This would be a good opportunity to quit what I’m doing and take a leap, see if I can take my website full time. Could I blog for a living?” That was the thought.

I was doing about $1,000 a month in advertising and some affiliate stuff. I figured that if I could give it 40 hours a week, I could get the revenue up to a spot where it could pay the bills. I figured that it could grow from there.

Aaron: How old were you at this point?

Shawn: I was just about 30, not quite 30, like 29, when I made that jump. I asked everyone that was reading on the site. I said, “I’m quitting. I’m going to do this thing full time.” I asked people if they would be interested in supporting me to write the site for a living. I was like, “If you like what I’m doing, I’ll write more if you want to give me some money to do it.” I did this little membership drive. I was going to charge $3 a month for membership. I was doing a daily podcast as a perk of membership.

Aaron: You aren’t still doing that, are you?

Shawn: It’s on hiatus at the moment. We’ll see. I’m going to be diving back into the podcast scene starting early 2017. I miss podcasting. It’s fun.

Aaron: You decided to ask people to support you, give you $3 a month, to go full time with your writing?

Shawn: Basically. I figured if I could get 500 people, at $3 a month that’s $1,500, plus the other $1,000 I was doing, and that would be $2,500 a month. That’s not a ton, but I figured that would be enough to cover the bare necessities. I figured that things could grow from there. People signed up, and I hit the 500 person mark by the end of the month before I had even quit.

I started my new job, April 4th 2011, basically fully funded as an independent blogger.

Aaron: I bet that was exciting.

Shawn: It was really exciting. I felt like I got this permission slip from my audience to go for it. As a creative person, sometimes you need that. Sometimes you want to be like, “Do you guys care? I’m here. I’m making this stuff.” A lot of the work we do as creative entrepreneurs is for your audience. I know that we’re going to talk about this in a little bit, the customer avatar profile. It’s for these people that you really want to serve. When you hear back from them and they go, “Hey, we like what you’re doing. Let’s keep the relationship going,” it’s like having a DTR with your audience.

There’s something cool about that kind of permission slip moment. It’s like when you sell your first product, or whatever it is. People are interested. You get your first positive review on iTunes or whatever. Obviously, there’s going to be the junk that comes later, but whatever.

Aaron: Some of the haters that come later?

Shawn: You forget about that stuff and you keep moving on.

Aaron: That’s awesome.

Asking for Money

Aaron: When you think back, do you remember any big struggles or hurdles that you really had to overcome about that period in your life?

Shawn: There were so many. It’s hard to say, “If I could do it differently, I would do it this other way,” because who knows? If I had done things differently, maybe it wouldn’t have turned out the way I thought it would. One of the biggest struggles for me was asking for money. It was a huge challenge related to the membership drive. I was asking folks to support me on a regular basis to write for a living. I was like, “Who am I? What kind of a dork says, ‘Give me money so I can blog for a living.'”

Aaron: Nobody pays for things online anymore. Nobody wants to pay for writing.

Shawn: Exactly. That was a huge challenge. It has continued to be a challenge for years. I have been doing this for almost six years now, full time. When I came out with my first book, it’s called Delight is in the Details, and it was an eBook package thing. I did some interviews.

I charged $29 for my book, and I felt like this huge hypocrite.

It was this feeling of, “This is information. Information should be free on the internet. Why would anyone ever buy this?” I felt like there was no value in this thing that people would pay for. I was like, “I have to do it. I’m going to charge for it.”

Aaron: Sorry to jump in, but at the time, did you really feel like $30 was a lot of money?

Shawn: Oh my gosh. I woke up feeling sick to my stomach the day I was going to launch it. I was like, “I can’t believe how much I’m asking for this.”

Aaron: What did you think was going to happen?

Shawn: I thought that people would buy it because they trusted me, and then they would read it and come and burn my house down because I had ripped them off so bad. I charged so much money for something.

Aaron: It was your first time launching a product, right?

Shawn: It was. It was my first product launch ever. It ended up bringing in like $5,000 in that first 48 hour launch window. It made $5,000 that first couple of days. In hindsight, it was this huge inflection point for me. I think I spent about 100 hours building the thing, made $5,000 from it in the first week, and I thought, “Woah, that was a great return on my time investment! Now I have this product that I can continue to sell.”

Since then, in the last four or five years that I’ve sold it, I want to say that it’s sold $50,000 over the years. That’s awesome. There’s something great about creating a product, and it changed a lot.

Producing and selling a book changed my relationship with my audience.

Now I’m creating products for them to buy.

That initial hurdle was huge. $29 was so much money. I think that was probably the biggest struggle, of being able to properly identify how much value I’m providing people and to price it correctly. That’s just hard. I think that’s why you should start selling stuff as early as possible, because you have to learn. There isn’t a formula for how much value you’re providing and how much you should charge for it.

You can’t just plug your stuff into a worksheet and get a number back. You have to feel out the market, your market, your audience, your skill level. How much polish are you doing? How much depth of information are you providing? Whatever skill, service, or product it is you’re providing, you have to learn how to make money and price your stuff! It’s hard to do it when you’re starting.

The biggest challenging for me at first was becoming comfortable asking for money and learning to accurately price my products.

Aaron: The other thing is that once you launched that book and got familiar with all that stuff, that was a stepping stone to your future products, your future books and courses, and everything else that you’re doing. I’m sure, at that point, you felt like, “Okay. I’ve done this once before already. Now it’s like riding a bike. I just need to get back on and keep peddling, keep going.”

Shawn: Yeah, absolutely. It really was a huge stepping stone. One thing I loved about creating and launching a product was that there was a start and an end date to it. This thing has to ship. I worked on it, and I was done. I put it out there. Boom, now it’s there. I’m done. It’s out in the world. Obviously, you iterate on it. A year later, I added some new interviews. I added some new chapters. I created some videos. I remastered all of the audio for the audio book.

Product Launch Hiccups

Shawn: Super random story related to this. It was the relaunch of Delight is in the Details, a year after it had come out, and I put it out there. People are buying it during that relaunch period. I get an email from someone going, “I was just listening to the audio book, and the last chapter sounds like it’s not edited correctly. Something is weird about the last chapter. You should check it out.”

I recorded the audio book and edited it by myself. I go and I open up the audio book for the last chapter and I’m listening to it, and it is the original take that I did of the book. The way I did the audio book, I’m reading it into my microphone in GarageBand. If I goofed up in the middle of a paragraph, I would just take a pause, say, “Okay, again,” and then I would start talking again. That was my marker. The last chapter of the book was that track, the whole thing.

The audio track should have been 10 or 12 minutes for that chapter, and it was 30 minutes because of all my edits, retakes, and pauses. The whole thing. What’s worse is, it was there from the very beginning. For a year, I had been selling that thing. I was mortified. For a year, I had been selling my book with the last chapter all messed up, and I was mortified.

Aaron: Nobody said anything??

Shawn: They didn’t. Either no one listened to it, or when they listened to it, they just assumed… I don’t even know. I was so mortified. There you go. What worse thing can happen? Earlier, I had been so concerned about selling something that people weren’t going to consider valuable. Here’s this huge, huge mistake. What a goof!

Aaron: I need to remind everyone that this audiobook is called Delight is in the Details.

Shawn: The irony, right? That was one of the selling points of the book, too. I was like, “If you buy this book, it’s a case study in sweating the details itself. You’ll see all the areas where I’ve sweated the details in this product.” Whatever. Oh man. I was mortified.

Aaron: Thankfully, no one came and burned down your house, and it was over a year before anyone even said anything. A lot of us are so curious about people who do such good work, so when a mistake does happen, it’s almost humanizing. It’s like, “Now I can relate to this person, because they’re not 100% on top of everything all the time, either, like I struggle with. I make a lot of mistakes, so it’s kind of nice when you see a really awesome musician on stage mess up a part and then jump back into it. You’re like, “Oh, they are humans, too.” That’s really cool. Nobody burned your house down, thankfully.

Shawn: That’s why it’s so helpful to ship early. You get stuff out the door and you start learning. I love it.

Aaron: I tell people this a lot, too, when it comes to podcasts. If you’re thinking about making a podcast, there are so many things you can tweak, improve, or work on forever, but it’s so much better to say, “What’s the minimum I have to do? I want to try and do a good job, but let’s do this, ship it, and iterate and improve on it every single week.”

If you don’t ship something, you'll just pick at it and tweak it endlessly.

Before you know it, it’s been a year and a half, and you’ve got three or five episodes you recorded 18 months ago that you’re still working on. In the meantime, nothing has happened.

Start Moving

Shawn: As well, we have this picture of what we want something to look like and what we want it to be, but we have zero experience. I like the analogy of those lifesize mazes. Especially around Halloween and Thanksgiving, there are those corn mazes. They’re these giant things. Imagine someone standing at the entrance of this life size maze, staring at the entrance to it, and in their mind, trying to figure out how to get to the end so they can get straight to the end the fastest way possible without making any mistakes along the way.

Impossible! Not going to happen. You have to go in the maze and go left to realize that you should have gone right. Then turn around. You have to go through the thing to make it through. I like the phrase, “Action brings clarity.”

Action brings clarity.

You’re waiting for clarity before taking action, and it’s not going to happen—you have to start moving.

You just have to get going and you adjust course as you go. You start to realize what you should major on and what you shouldn’t.

Aaron: That’s an incredible analogy. I’m totally going to use that in the future now. It’s perfect. You sit there and you imagine yourself being at the end of the maze. That’s where you see a bunch of other people. Your friends have gone through the maze and they’re at the end, so you’re like, “I have to get to the end fast. I can’t make any mistakes. I can’t take a wrong turn, because that’s where all my friends are, and that’s where I want to be.” You do have to go through it. That’s really incredible.

Creating a Customer Avatar

Aaron: Shawn, you sent out an email and you were talking about this. I want you to explain how you think about customer avatars, and then if you did something like that for yourself when you were just starting, or if this is something that evolved over time. Customer avatar and content strategy, go!

Shawn: This is great. When I first started as a writer, I was doing ShawnBlanc.net. My entire job was publishing articles and links on my website. I didn’t have a customer avatar or a customer profile, what I had was an ideal reader. I think, in terms of podcasting, it’s very similar. Who’s your ideal listener? For me, I actually had a person who was my ideal reader, who’s name was Shawn Spurdee.

He was a really good friend of mine. He and I had become friends through the blogging Twitter-sphere back in the day. When I wrote articles or links, I had him in mind. I thought, “Is this something he would find interesting? Is there a story in here that he’s going to want to read? Is this a link to something he would like?” You had that ideal reader. John Gruber wrote about this for his site, Daring Fireball.

He talked about his ideal reader, and he called it “a second version of himself.” He goes, “This person is interested in all the same things I’m interested in, and he cares about what I care about. All the design decisions I make on the site, all the articles I choose to link to, the stories I choose to tell, all of that stuff is with this ideal reader/listener in mind.”

It was instrumental for me to have an “ideal reader” for all of the work I was doing.

You know who you’re trying to target. I’m still the writer for sure, but we’ve switched a lot more of our focus onto direct sales, building a customer base, and selling products to our audience. I still don’t have that ideal reader. Who am I writing this for? Who is this product being created for? It has gone beyond just an individual person that I know. We did a customer profiling thing. I have a guy who works for me full time, and his name is Isaac. We took a couple of big, giant sticky pad things, two feet by three feet, they’re huge, these giant sticky notes.

Aaron: Where do you get those? Can you get those on Amazon?

Shawn: You can get a lawnmower on Amazon, so I’m sure you can get sticky notes. We got ours at Office Max, an Office Depot kind of thing. It’s weird. You drive to this store, and you can walk in, and they sell products on their shelves. You have to pick it up with your hand and drive it home yourself.

Aaron: It seems like a waste of time.

Shawn: For this customer profiling session or whatever, basically, we had these four quadrants. What do they think? What do they feel? What do they want? What do they say? Something like that. You’re trying to get this picture of this person. Who is this person? What are the things that they say? Like, “I love my family. I like to watch Netflix.” Whatever.

Aaron: “I want to learn how to make a podcast.”

Shawn: Exactly. It’s not just business, it’s just life. What are the kind of phrases they might say? If you ask them what they care about, what things would they list? What are their pain points that they’re feeling in life? For us, creating this customer avatar, we named him Brian. We found a random picture of somebody and stuck it up there to begin to humanize the person.

Your customer avatar is a real person that exists out there.

We talked about, “Here’s Brian,” and we came up with this stuff. Brian has a job that he kind of likes, but he’s got these other creative ideas that he really wants to pursue. Maybe he wants to take it full time. Maybe not. That’s not really the most important thing for him. The most important thing for him is getting his best creative work out there and being able to do it and feel like he’s making progress on the areas of life that matter to him. He’s also a dad and a husband, and he cares about his family quite a bit.

He cares about his kids. He still wants to be available for them. When he comes home from work, he’s really tired, so the evenings don’t feel like a good time to do his creative work, but he’s not a morning person either, so he doesn’t know when he’s going to get the time. These are some of the scenarios, the stories, that begin to emerge as you begin to write stuff about this person. What are the pain points that they feel?

When they look around, what do they see? What kind of car does Brian drive? Does he like minivans? Does he have a minivan? How many kids does he actually have? You really kind of start to come up with this stuff, and there’s a lot you can do to get to a higher level of doing these customer profiles. You can actually do interviews with your customer base.

Aaron: I do this! I try to meet people and talk to them, especially when it comes to podcasting.

When you interview your customers, you can actually begin to get a real life picture of your real life audience.

Creating an Empathy Map

Shawn: There’s this thing that we did, an empathy map, and you take the empathy map to create your customer profile. We ran this survey to our email list, and we ran a separate one to our customer list. It was, “When it comes to focus, what’s your single greatest challenge?” It was just this open-ended question where people could write stuff down.

Some people say, “Time.” Or, “I can’t focus. I’m distracted.” Then you get some people who go, “I’m trying to build my photography portfolio website on the side because I love photography and I’m trying to grow it. I’m working this other job, and when I come home in the evenings, family is first. I spend time with family, so by the time the kids are in bed, I’ve only got about an hour left in the day. I’m so tired, and I don’t want to spend time trying to work on my photography website, so I don’t know where to get started.”

The person who gives an in depth answer to the challenge like that, vs. someone who just says “time”, they’re really in touch with their pain point. There’s a book called Ask by Ryan Leveque, and you can find it on Amazon. He teases out, “You ask these questions, and you separate the people with the longest answers. You put their answers up at the top.”

You cut the list at 20%. The bottom 80%, forget about those people, and look at the top 20%, these “hyper-responders.” What are their challenges? What are their pain points? Aaron, you could do this. You could say, “When it comes to building a podcast, what is your single greatest challenge?” You’ll probably have someone who says, “Building my list.” Or, “Building my audience.” Or, “Technical stuff.” But then you might have someone who really gives this heartfelt, in-depth answer.

If someone gives you a heartfelt, in-depth answer, they’re hungry for a solution.

That person is going to pay for a solution. That person is going to digest this, and when you give them something, they’re going to check it out. Look for these hyper-responders and cater your response to them. That’s what we did. That’s how we figured out that our biggest pain points for people who go through the Focus Course are one of four primary buckets, so to speak. It’s time management, getting traction on their business or side projects, finding clarity on what’s important to them and what they should be doing about it, and a lot of people also feel overwhelmed by all that’s already happening in life.

Or, they look at the thing that they’re trying to make progress on, and they feel overwhelmed. They don’t even know where to start. Really, all of these things feed off of each other. When one is in a rough spot, the others start to be in a rough spot as well. We go, “Okay, these are the main challenges we’re going to address as part of the Focus Course, in all of our writing. This is it.” The people that fit within these four buckets are the ones who are willing to pay for a solution.

Use Your Audience’s Language

Shawn: Read the actual responses, the answers, and take the language that people are saying and use it in your articles. Answer their actual questions in podcast episodes. You use it in your marketing language. The landing page for your product, or your podcast, or your sign up, or whatever—use the actual language of your hyper-responder customers. Now, not only are you listening to them and you know who that ideal customer is, but you’re also even speaking their language.

A) it’s going to be cool because hopefully you’ll do more sales, but B) you’ll actually get to connect with the people you want to connect with. That’s the whole point. That’s why we’re here.

That’s one of the huge benefits of having these customer profiles. It can help you stay focused on who you’re trying to talk to and what it is you’re trying to talk about, to help them.

Aaron: That’s mindblowing. That’s fantastic. At the core, I kind of know this stuff, but hearing you explain it made it even more clear to me. I love that. I want to take it in this direction.

How to Grow Your Audience & Create Deeper Connections

Aaron: One of the most common questions I get about podcasting is about growing an audience. It’s always, “How do I get more attention? How do I get more listeners? How do I grow an audience?” I love what you said right here.

Use the language of your customer avatar in your content to create a deep connection with them.

That’s where listeners come from. So many people think that they’ll magically get 100,000 people to listen to their podcast, and they won’t have any idea of who these people are. They’re nameless, faceless avatars on the internet. No! Especially in the beginning, you start small. You develop relationships with people who care passionately about the thing that you’re talking about.

By investing in them, getting to know them, and asking them questions—regardless of whether you’re doing some kind of business thing or not—by just talking to them and getting to know their language, that’s how you’re going to resonate with them and even more people. What methods have you found effective for growing an audience and developing deeper relationships?

Shawn: I think that’s a great question. Everyone wants to know the answer to this. For me, there are three primary keys to growing an audience:

1. Consistency

Shawn: Consistency is core. This is a phrase in the seanwes Community, and it’s a phrase I like to use, and that’s this: show up every day. That’s consistency. We’re just people of habit. The internet is a thing of habit, so you have to have that consistency where you’re in people’s regular cycles. Sean McCabe talks about this a lot. You want to be in people’s weekly cycle at a minimum.

Show up on a regular basis. Also, that’s how people know you’re going to be there. There’s something about that consistency. One of the ways you develop an audience where people are tracking with you and paying attention when you’re showing up consistently.

When you show up consistently, not only do you earn people’s trust, but you create an anticipation of future value.

You want to have that. That’s huge. People are like, “I want to know what’s next. I want to follow this story and be here.” Consistency is huge.

2. Honesty & Transparency

Shawn: This comes out in a lot of ways. In some ways, you want to have the transparency like Nathan Barry talks about, to “teach what you know.” Share what you know. Also, there’s a human element, passion and persona, who you are as an individual. Humanizing yourself is so helpful. We don’t want to connect with brands, we want to connect with people. As indie entrepreneurs or indie creative folks, when you are running your own thing, you are a brand but you’re also a person.

You’ve got to keep the person aspect of it, the human aspect of it, you have to keep it there. Allow your mistakes to show through. Allow your passions to show through. For me, at ShawnBlanc.net, I cut my teeth and grew my audience originally by writing about Apple stuff. I wrote tons of product reviews. It was super nerdy, gadgety stuff. I would also write about coffee, camera gear, books I was reading, music, and things like that.

Aaron: Stuff you cared about.

Shawn: Exactly. Other interests that were related to Apple gear because it was my site, and I can write about whatever I want. That humanized the work that I was doing. So many people came to my site because of the Apple stuff but they stayed because of the coffee stuff.

Your focus, your niche, is going to draw your audience, but your ancillary interests will keep people interested.

You’re a real person with real interests who is not just this robot spinning off the same thing all the time.

3. Relationships

Shawn: This is huge. I stink at it, but I’m trying to reply to emails. When people email me, replying back to them. Also, here’s a prime example, having me on your show, Aaron. The practicality of it is that when this show goes live, I’m going to tweet about it. I’m going to link to it. I’m going to point the people that track with me over to your stuff. That’s a way for you to grow your audience, but it’s also a way for me to grow my audience.

Your listeners, a lot of people, don’t know who I am. Now, hopefully, some of them will come check me out and sign up for our stuff. There’s a really cool dynamic here of introducing your group to someone else. Hopefully, that person will also introduce their audience to who you are.

Doing guest-based podcasts is an awesome way to grow your audience.

I did some back in the day, when I was first starting my site. I did interviews, blog interviews. The whole thing was conducted over email, and it was just this back and forth email. I did one with Daniel Jalkut, who used to work at Apple and then started Red Sweater. He has the best blogging app on the planet for Mac, MarsEdit. It’s a super great app. I emailed him and did an interview with him.

I did an interview with John Grubar. I did an interview with Brett Simmons, all these people who are super famous Apple people. I’m going back and forth with these guys and posting their interviews. They link to me on my site, and I get this influx of new readers. Or you find software that’s awesome. I would do super in-depth reviews about this stuff, and then people would link to those reviews. Honoring other people, connecting with other people, and doing stuff that’s worth talking about.

Then the word will spread. That consistency, being transparent and honest about who you are, having that passion and that human dynamic to the work that you do, and then just trying to connect with other people. Do things that people are going to want to talk about. Another example is the summit that we’re doing, the Focus Summit. I’m punching way above my weight class here with some of these folks, and it’s a chance to hopefully get some of their audience to discover the work that we’re doing and visa versa.

I hope that people who sign up for this summit will get introduced to some new people and that they’ll find some incredible resources. It’s just fun. We’re all just folks trying to do our best work, right?

Aaron: Absolutely. I love that. That’s one of the best answers for building an audience that I’ve ever heard.

The Importance of Investing One-on-One Time in Your Listeners

Aaron: The thing that I’m working on, and I just want to share this, is investing more time in my listeners. It’s hard sometimes, because you can spend all the time in the world talking to people on the internet, as I’m sure you know, Shawn. I’m sure people are constantly emailing you, asking for your thoughts, your advice, and your feedback on stuff, and you try to stay really focused. Something I’ve wanted to do is spend a little bit of time every day, like on Twitter, reaching out and telling people that I appreciate what they do.

Or, if somebody emails me, having a conversation. In depth, giving them 15 or 20 minutes of focus time to reply, and even asking them questions. Someone says, “Hey, thanks for doing your show. I really appreciate this thing.” I’ll reply and say, “Thank you so much. How is your podcasting journey going? What are you working on right now? What do you want to get better at?” Some great conversations have come out of that.

I’m trying to invest a little bit more in my listeners. I’m at the point now where I’ve started inviting some of them on the show. “Hey, you sound like you’d be a cool person to talk about podcasting with. Would you like to come on the show?” It just spreads.

It’s the building of community that will eventually attract people to you.

When I started, I had 30 or 40 friends, maybe a couple hundred followers. Every new person that finds my show and gets to know me as a person, who respects the work I do, they might have 200 people that follow them, and they share my show with those people. It just spreads out from there. It becomes this big net.

You can eventually reach people that are far outside of your social circle just by connecting with the people you can connect with right now.

Let them do the work of sharing your stuff with their people, too.

Shawn: Yeah, exactly.

Focus Summit & Products

Aaron: That’s fantastic. We’re getting close to the end of the episode. We need to wrap it up. I told everyone in the beginning that I would get you to talk about this Focus Summit that you’ve got coming up. What’s the deal with this? Tell us a little bit about that.

Shawn: The summit! I’m so excited about this. We have Jocelyn Glei, who just wrote this book called Unsubscribe, which is a fantastic book. It’s about email distractions and stuff like that. We’ve got Josh Kaufman, who wrote The Personal MBA. Anyone who is trying to do anything related to business, you need to read The Personal MBA. It is a bargain.

Aaron: So much good advice.

Shawn: It’s like a $35 book, and that book is so packed. Excellent, excellent stuff. Sean McCabe is on it, and Sean and I talk about how quantity leads to quality, which ties right into this stuff on showing up every day. The summit is going to be really, really cool. When this podcast drops, the summit is going to be kicking off. Here’s the link: The Creative Focus Summit.

After the summit wraps up, we’re opening up registration for our Focus Course. That has become my flagship product. It changed everything for me, in terms of what I was focusing on. I came up with this course as the next product in a series. I had done Delight is in the Details, and I wanted to write a book about diligence and productivity. I wrote the book, and then, long story short, I realized that it needed to be a course.

I felt like the way that I wanted to get these ideas across wasn’t a book that someone would read, highlight, think was cool, and then puts back on their shelf and returns to life as usual. I want something that’s really going to effect change. I knew that a book would probably go farther, broader, and reach a total number of more people. I would rather fewer people go through the course but have a higher number of them really get real impact.

For me, the book ended up turning into the Focus Course, and we’ve had close to 1,300 people go through it. It’s basically productivity training for creative people and entrepreneurs and leaders. It’s way, way more than that. It’s not tips and tricks. It’s what I call “meaningful productivity.” It actually gets to the core, the heart, and the foundation. What do you really care about? How are you really spending your time?

This is not a “Five Life Hacks That Will Help Me Go Through My Email Inbox Better.” It’s hard questions that will make me challenge my assumptions about my family, my work, my down time, and my rest time. Anyone that thinks that taking a nap will improve productivity, the Focus Course is for you.

Aaron: That’s me!

You have to have a healthy life to do your best work.

Shawn: You can’t sprint this. This is a marathon, so you have to have that breathing room. The Focus Course opens up after the summit is over, and I’m super excited about it. We’re going to have a whole group of people cruising through in January. We’re doing a winter class for it. We’ve got some forums, so everyone can share their progress. It’s going to be a blast. I’m really excited about it. The summit is free, and the Focus Course itself is going to be something we charge for, obviously.

Aaron: You have to charge for things, or else people won’t take it seriously.

Shawn: It’s so true.

Aaron: You have to invest.

Shawn: That’s something else. We didn’t get into that earlier when we were talking about the pricing stuff, but that’s another reason to charge for your work. Someone is actually going to have skin in the game. They’re going to find value for it.

Aaron: They have to ask themselves, “Okay. Do I think this is going to help me enough in my life journey to actually put money towards it?” If they answer that question for themselves and then make the choice to give you that money, they are going to say, “I told myself, I believe, that this is worth my time, so I need to invest my time in it.”

Shawn: Exactly. Very true.

Aaron: Where should people go if they want to follow you, connect with you, or ask you questions?

Shawn: Twitter is a great spot. I’m @shawnblanc on Twitter.

Martine Ellis joins me to share her podcasting journey and how she created a detailed checklist to help streamline her podcast workflow. We discuss how niching down can help you attract a dedicated audience and how to spend less time creating a podcast without sacrificing quality. We also walk through Martine’s 9 step podcast workflow checklist and discuss our favorite podcast tools and tricks.

You can find Martine at https://martineellis.com/. The link to her 9 Step Checklist is currently broken (I'll email her), but you can grab a PDF of my process here.

I’ve been watching an online audio mastering course on Creative Live called DIY Mastering (by Jesse Cannon). In it, he was talking about how he always checks his work on cheap speakers and Apple earbuds, since that’s what most people use to listen to music. It got me thinking about the importance of good headphones, and how much they really matter. Are expensive headphones really necessary for mixing podcasts? Do you really need the best gear to make great work, or are you just procrastinating?

My goal for this episode is to encourage you to do more with what you have and not fall into the trap of believing that better gear is the secret to success.

Don’t fall into the trap of believing that better gear is the secret to success.

I’ve been going through an online course about audio mastering from a mixing and mastering engineer, Jesse Canon. In this course (DIY Mastering) he talks about how he always checks his work on cheap speakers and Apple earbuds.

He said, “It’s because that’s what most people use to listen to music these days.” He mixes the music on expensive speakers and headphones, but then he checks on cheap headphones because he wants to know what it sounds like. This set a lightbulb off in my head, and made me wonder: Do you have to have expensive gear when you’re making podcasts? And are expensive headphones really necessary for mixing podcasts?

Mixing and mastering are all about making choices about how to make audio sound. Better headphones and speakers let you hear more detail in your audio so you can make more informed decisions about how to shape those sounds, how to do EQ, compression, reverb, and special effects.

Podcasts are not that complicated. Most of the time, a podcast is just a single person talking. You don’t use a bunch of effects (unless you’re making a show like Radiolab or Deep Vault). There aren’t a bunch of changes in volume and dynamics. It just needs to be consistent and pleasant to listen to. Much of that comes down to recording with a good mic, setting input gain levels correctly, using good mic technique, and not recording in a noisy room or a room with a ton of natural reverb or echo.

Most people listening to podcasts are probably either using Apple earbuds, cheap earbuds, less than $100, or listening in a car. I would be very, very surprised if the number of people listening to podcasts on audiophile quality, expensive gear was higher then 5% or 10% of the overall population. I don’t think you need great headphones or speakers that are made for mixing music to make a podcast sound good.

I’m an audio nerd. Before I got into editing podcasts, I was studying recording, mixing, and mastering music. I want great audio gear, but these days, I mix a lot of podcasts on $10 Panasonic earbuds.

Even though I mix a lot of the seanwes podcasts I work on on cheap earbuds from Amazon, we haven't gotten complaints from listeners.

In fact, in most cases, people talk about how great the sound quality is. That’s because Sean invested money in some great mics, like the Shure SM7Bs, and some pre-proccessors, the DBX-286s. He knows how to set input gain levels correctly and he uses pop filters.

The only bad thing I can say about the recordings that Sean makes is that he doesn’t have sound treatment in his room. I can hear a little bit of the room sound, but it’s not enough to bother the majority of his listeners. I don’t think most people even notice it. I notice it because I’m a nerd, and I pay attention to things like that.

Everybody is different in their motivation and what they want, but if I can break it down a little bit, I think that beginners want expensive gear because they see their idols using it. They see a pro using it, that pro is doing great work mixing for great bands or doing great podcasts, and they think, “If I get the same gear that he/she has, I’ll be successful like him/her.”

They think the gear is why the pro has had success. So they drool over the gear, over the expensive microphones, the expensive computers, the expensive headphones, the expensive plugins, or whatever the pro is using. They’re forgetting the years that the pro invested in learning everything, making mistakes, going through processes, putting out work, trying, experimenting, failing, and trying again.

Why do the pros buy expensive gear and headphones? People who listen to a lot of audio develop their “ear” over the years, so they can hear subtle differences in the headphones—in the way that music sounds and in the way that podcasts sound. It’s nice to be able to hear everything really clearly. The $300 pair of Sennheiser HD 600 headphones that I have sound better than the $10 earbuds.

Here are the top four reasons I think pros invest in quality headphones:

Do expensive headphones sound way better? Maybe. Will they help you make a podcast that sounds drastically better? Probably not.

The difference between cheap and expensive headphones is subtle, but some people want and need that subtlety.

More expensive headphones are often more confortable. These HD 600s I have are stupid comfortable. I can wear them for 12 hours, they sound great, feel great, and they’re pretty lightweight. They’re a joy to wear.

Also, quality gear usually lasts longer than cheap gear. The cheap $10 headphones that I buy will often break after six or eight months. A good pair of headphones should last you for years, maybe even decades.

If you’re going to spend some money, ask yourself, “Should I buy three pairs of $10 earbuds or a pair of $30 headphones that will last the same time as the three pairs of cheap headphones?” I think that’s a tossup, but reliability and quality are worth paying for.

Finally, you also get to feel fancy when you have expensive headphones. That’s more about your ego, but it does feel good to have great gear.

I like having nice things, and it’s fine for you to want that too. It says something about you, that you’re willing to invest in quality gear for whatever kind of work you do. If it’s audio work, it’s nice to be able to have this gear, and there’s nothing wrong with a little bit of showing off, taking pride in the stuff that you invest in.

Terrible sound quality can ruin great content, but great sound quality won’t make terrible content interesting or compelling.

Crappy gear can ruin great content, but great gear isn’t going to make average or boring content interesting or compelling. Time spent looking at and lusting over fancy gear you don’t have is time you could have spent making stuff with the gear you do have. It’s a distraction. It’s procrastination.

Time spent looking at fancy gear is time that you’re not spending creating. The thing you’re giving attention to is taking up your headspace, so it blocks out everything else from your life.

Let’s use notebooks as an example. I know a lot of people write and a lot of people draw. What benefit does a $40 notebook have over a $3 notebook? They’re both paper, and you can write on either one of them. Will a $40 notebook help you write better than a $3 notebook?

What about writing apps? Do you have to pay $40 or $50 for Ulysses or $100 for Scrivener, or could you write a book or a blog post in the TextEdit app in your Mac? It might not look exactly how you want, but you could get the job done.

When I started podcasting, the microphone I had was a $150 Shure PG27 USB microphone. I thought I was fancy at the time. I have $250 BETA 87A now, running into a $500 interface… I have so much more now than when I started.

The point is that I got started with something, with what I could afford at the time. It didn’t sound amazing, but it sounded okay. I had to go through the process of learning all the different pieces that make up podcasting.

Eventually I got to a point where I wanted to get better at my craft and I invested in a better microphone. But what really made the difference in my sound quality was learning how to do things like EQ and compression, mixing and mastering.

If you have to choose, invest in educating yourself rather than investing in better gear.

Don’t get distracted by the gear. Don’t procrastinate by spending a bunch of time reading reviews and drooling over expensive gear.

At the end of the day, all the expensive gear in the world doesn’t make a difference if you’re not creating stuff.

If you don’t have an audience now, buying super expensive gear isn’t going to magically bring you a ton of listeners, viewers or readers.

I do believe that there is a minimum threshold of quality you should strive to meet, but it’s in the range of hundreds of dollars, not thousands or tens of thousands. If you’re just getting started or you’re a year or two into it, buying a $10,000 mic is not going to make your podcast better than buying a $250 microphone. You’re not going to know how to use it to the best of of your ability. You may have other problems with your podcasting setup and your workflow that you’re not even aware of yet.

Improve what you can, and don’t spend all your time looking at gear.

I’m sure some of you have heard of Tim Farriss before. I don’t like the way he starts off his episodes with five minutes of ads, but that’s my only complaint. Other than that, he has a lot of great content. It’s not always stuff I’m interested in, but you can’t argue that he’s a very interesting person, and he’s producing very interesting content, especially on self improvement.

That being said, based on his sound quality, it sounds like he’s using a $100 USB microphone.

Most of the time it sounds like he uses a Skype call recording when he interviews people. He doesn’t have the most amazing sound quality on his podcast and he starts every episode with minutes of ads, which is kind of annoying, but it doesn’t matter that much.

Tim Farriss has a huge audience because he’s producing interesting content all the time. He’s focused on making great content and not having the best gear or sound quality, and he’s doing well because of that.

Another example is Robert Rodriguez. I heard him on an episode of Marc Maron’s podcast. He was talking about how he made his very first movie (El Mariachi) with a $7,000 budget. It was a tiny, tiny budget, but the movie blew up and ended up making $2,000,000 in the US. I watched it, and it was obviously low budget—but it was enough to kickstart his career.

He said that because he had so little money, he only shot a take or two for each scene. He did the best he could with the constraints he had, and he didn’t wait until he could afford the best movie gear.

You can create great work with constraints, and oftentimes it even helps.

If I had access to all the most amazing microphones, the best headphones, computers, audio interfaces, and all that stuff, I still couldn’t sit down in a studio with a band and make a record that sounded as good as someone who’s been doing it for 20 years. There’s too much that I don’t know. The gear isn’t what’s holding me back, it’s the knowledge. It’s practice and years of experience.

Remember that most people are listening on affordable headphones or Apple earbuds. You don’t need expensive headphones to make a podcast that sounds good.

It’s ok to get to know the gear and invest in good gear if you want to, but don’t trick yourself into believing that good gear will guarantee you success. You have to put in the time to learn and hone your craft.