3 Lessons From My 3 Week Podcast Sprint
Photo by Goh Rhy Yan on Unsplash
I'm excited to announce that I'm working on a podcast! It's called Talk Burnout and the idea behind the podcast is to talk to experts across different industries about how to avoid or overcome burnout. I've been working on the technical details for the podcast for a few months now but I have been procrastinating when sending out invites to potential guests. I am a naturally shy person so the idea of asking a stranger to show up on my podcast is pretty nerve-wracking. I knew that it was a hurdle that I needed to get over though. Getting podcast guests is a numbers game - not every person I invite will be interested and even if they are interested they may not have bandwidth to appear. In order to get over this hurdle, I decided to do a three week sprint where I sent out an invite every day.
Here are the main lessons I learned from my sprint:
It turned out that sending an invite every day wasn't a realistic goal, but writing an invite every day was. The first time I wrote an invite I would usually end up with a good invite ... but not necessarily a great one. Instead of sending the invite immediately after I wrote it I liked to sit on it for a day or two just to see if I can come up with a more effective email. Once I had two or three emails I was proud of I would send those off in a batch, which I think was more likely to result in guests saying yes. The ultimate goal of the sprint was to get more guests for my podcast after all.
I have a much better idea of which guests I want to have on my podcast. There were some cases where even though I initially thought someone would be a good guest, but when I sat down to write the invite I found myself stuck and grasping at straws to come up with reasons for them to come on the show. After I struggled with the invite for an hour I would be unhappy with it and just decide not to send it (because honestly I wouldn't accept that invite even if I sent it to myself). The invites I was happiest with were the ones where the guest seemed like a perfect fit and the invites just sort of wrote themselves. Those guests were ones that were already familiar with the concept of burnout and had done their own research on how to be happy at work.
Courage is a muscle and will grow as you work it out. I was extremely nervous the first time I sent out an invite. I was still pretty nervous the second time, but less so. Now that I have sent over ten invites I am much more comfortable inviting people to join my podcast. I think there will always be some amount of nerves involved with sending out an invite - I want people to say yes and I want to make sure my invites are as good as they can be. At this point though I am able to handle those nerves.
I'm happy to say that I was able to get three interviews scheduled as a result of the sprint! I would like to have ten interviews recorded before I launch the podcast in order to start off with a consistent publishing schedule. I still have a lot of work to do but I feel like I have a more solid footing now.
What do you think about my sprint method? Have you found sprints to be an effective way to accomplish something? Let me know in an email.
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