Stacey Harris: Have you ever wished there was some place a little more private you could be sharing your podcast content? You’re going to want to listen to this.
Welcome to Uncommonly More with Stacey Harris. I am Stacey. I’m the host of the show and the CEO of podcast production agency, Uncommonly More. My team and I work with podcasters just like you to shift shows from frustrating time sucks to productive members of sales teams with professional strategic podcast production. You know what, I think that’s enough. Let’s get into the show and we’ll talk more there.
We’re doing something I don’t do very often today, and that’s to have a guest. Even more strange, a guest who is not a client of Uncommonly More. In fact, I am bringing you someone who provides one of the tools we use here at Uncommonly More. Lindsay Padilla, one of the co-founders of Hello Audio is joining me in just a second to talk about Hello Audio and private podcast feeds, and more than anything, we’re digging in on some of the ways you can be utilizing them. We’re talking a little bit about some of the features and the cool things they do, speaking to some of the things that might be concerning about a private podcast feed, but more than anything, we talk about free and paid ways to utilize a private feed, especially if you’re already a podcaster. Lindsay’s absolutely incredible. I’m super stoked to have her join me and bring this conversation to you, so how about this? Let’s just dig in.
I am super stoked. We have Lindsay with me now. I’m going to be honest, guys. This is mostly going to be us being like, “Hey, these are the really cool things that are possible.” But before we get into that and I get overwhelmingly excited, as I know I will, let’s start with saying hi, Lindsay.
Lindsay Padilla: Hi. I’m excited to be here.
Stacey Harris: I always feel like I’m waiting for the listener to be like, “Hi, Lindsay,” like I’m secretly running a preschool class in this podcast. Hello. Can you first introduce yourself? I know we know a lot of the same people, so I know many of the people who listen to the show already know who you are but introduce yourself and please also introduce Hello Audio.
Lindsay Padilla: Of course. I’m Lindsay Padilla, the CEO and co-founder of Hello Audio. In my previous life, I was a college professor and I accidentally started a business as many of us who end up in this digital marketing space do, and I realized that there was a lot of people creating courses online and they weren’t very good because they weren’t teachers, so I was consulting and helping people create course content for the first three or four years in this business world, left teaching to do that. In that journey, the reason people hired me, commonly, was, “Hey, how do I get my students to finish this course?” That’s cool. That’s a great question. I’m glad a lot of people ask that question. That’s an important question. I gave them as much as I could with lesson planning and ideas for engagement, and stuff like that from online teaching but I kept coming back to, “If no one logs in, it doesn’t matter how good the course is.” I was like, “That just bothered me.”
It was way higher than as a college professor, there’s a student who stops coming to class and they get an F, and we can’t make everyone show up, but that number is a lot higher in this space. I’m like, “There has to be some way to help these folks.” For me, actually, the idea came to me buying someone else’s product. It wasn’t because I had this amazing idea as a teacher but it was because I was in someone else’s course and it was set up in a WordPress site, which is kind of rare nowadays. This is like 2018. It was a WordPress site. She had YouTube videos, she has this amazing voice, and her content’s great but no slides. Nothing. It was about money mindset, like one of those mindset courses. I remember just being like, “Why can’t I just listen to this? Why do I have to look at you sitting on your floor? I don’t need to.” That was really like, “Why can’t we just listen to some of this stuff?” That was the first thought.
I went to my husband who’s just been a podcasting nerd for the last 10 or 15 years into RSS feeds and how they work, and blah-blah-blah. I was like, “Why can’t we just put it in a podcast app? That seems like the best way. This mp3 thing that people are giving is not a way to listen to content,” so lo and behold, we’re like, “Why is no one doing this? Why is this so difficult?” There are people whose husbands are coding stuff for membership sites. I was like, “Oh, there is a need.” It was in the very early days of private podcasting in about 2018, 2019 as we were thinking this through, then we were like, “I think we could build it. I think there’s a space for us to do it. I think this target market is very different from the podcaster market.” We knew we had to build it. That’s the beginning.
Stacey Harris: I really love that because I think oftentimes, we think that these big ideas will come through something we’re creating but I find most often, my best ideas come from my consumption of something else and I would take it a step further, my consumption of something completely outside of my business where I’m like, “I should do this. I could totally do a version of this.” I love that. I also like when we’re answering our own needs.
Lindsay Padilla: Yeah. That’s big. I think part of me going into the Hello Audio journey, I did not want to be a tech founder. I’ve never developed or coded in my life and I don’t have a coding husband. This is really important to say. There’s some other women who’ve gotten into the space that do. It was really new territory for me but I kept being like, “If I don’t build it, I won’t get this problem solved. I think I could probably figure this out.” I like telling that story because I actually think when I first got into the tech space and got into software, I underestimated how much I learned running my own business as a creator, like a consultant, like a digital marketer. I was like, “Oh my God, I have no idea what I’m doing.”
The reality is I actually did. In the tech space, what they don’t know how to do is sell their stuff. They know how to build things but they don’t know how to build things people want. For me, I did it in the bootstrappy marketer way as I said, “Hey, who wants to buy a lifetime license, so I can develop this thing?” I sold $30,000 worth of it. That’s not common in this space. Instead, they go to VCs and try to raise millions of bajillions of dollars, then they build a thing that no one wanted in the first place.
Stacey Harris: And they’ve given up complete control to someone else.
Lindsay Padilla: Oh, that too. From my perspective, I just want like anyone who’s listening to this, if you have an idea and there’s a problem you can solve in your business or you’re right now using it, and spreadsheets are trying to help and they’re connecting all these apps, there might be space for a product that solves that very specific problem and the margins are great on a SaaS, a lot better than consulting and hourly work. I like sharing that story because I had no idea what I was doing at the beginning and still figured it out as we do.
Stacey Harris: I love that. I think none of us know what we’re doing in the beginning. I’ll be honest, I’m somewhere in the middle 10 years in and I still only kind of know what I’m doing most days and even that’s not an everyday thing. We’re like, “Let’s just keep on keeping on.” I love that. Thank you for sharing that. I found Hello Audio last year. I, honest to God, don’t remember how. I think you and I are friends on Facebook and I think I saw you post something. I was like, “Oh.”
Lindsay Padilla: I used to listen to your podcast when I first started too, like on social media.
Stacey Harris: We’ve been near each other for a long time. First of all, I was mad that I wasn’t there for the lifetime beginning because I was like, “Oh, I would have done this sooner.” But literally, I saw Hello Audio. I was like, “Oh, oh, oh,” and I just had this whole thing. About eight days later, I had a private podcast.
Lindsay Padilla: Boom. I love it.
Stacey Harris: It has been an exceptional way for me to grow my list. It solved a problem I had been trying to solve for two years, which was, “What the hell am I going to do as an opt-in when I’m not trying to teach anybody anything?” There’s not a value for my clients. There’s not a value in learning more about how to podcast. They want to know precisely none of it. They want to know I know how to do it. I’m not selling a course. I’m not selling all the ways that on paper, it would make sense for me to have a private podcast. I went, “What if there was a place where I talked about the things where I wanted to be a little less public than my main podcast, which has thousands of downloads?” Think of it like a burner account on Instagram. I wanted a fitsta podcast like, “Where can I have real conversations?” We started a private podcast. We’re like, “Here, these are the three things I’m paying attention to right now, I care about right now.” That if I talked about this all the time on the regular podcast, you would think I was too nerdy and would immediately be like, “I don’t care.”
So we launched the private podcast and it’s been an absolute game changer. My favorite thing though is just about every week, somebody reaches out to me and wants to know how they can use private feeds in their business because a private podcast as an opt-in doesn’t make a ton of sense for everybody. I am a podcast producer who in most cases will tell you, “Don’t start to podcast. It’s a bad idea.” It’s irrelevant that we are launching a third this year. We don’t need to talk about that, but there are lots of ways that you can do this. We have worked with clients in doing it in a couple of ways but I wanted to bring you on mostly because I wanted to tell people what was possible because this space is still in its infancy.
Let’s talk about some of the things that become possible when you start creating private content that’s going out to a limited audience. First and foremost, the way I use it as an opt-in, I’m sure you guys see a ton of that. Where have you seen someone doing that in a way that was really impressive or really different? Is it that they’re separating their content? Is it that it is diving deeper? Is there something in that that you’ve seen? Because I know, again, you see tons of these feeds. Is there an example in that scope that we can think of that’s really a game changer?
Lindsay Padilla: Yeah. You can say whether or not it is mind-blowing to you or not. One thing that people are using it for is moving people through a sales conversation. We personally have one that’s called the Audio Asset Challenge. One thing that people all struggle with Hello Audio is like, “Well, what am I going to do with it?” We’re like, “Let’s help you create your first audio asset.” They’re like, “Oh, cool. What’s that?” You can listen to nine episodes. It was a challenge that we ran live. We edited some things out. This is what’s cool about audio, not video, is it’s really easy to switch it out, so you can change and update an episode, and it doesn’t impact anyone. It ends up in their player, the updated version. That’s really cool.
From a creation standpoint, like you said, “Oh, you shouldn’t have three podcasts,” audio is so much easier to create than video. You can talk a lot faster than you can type. When you think of those ways of creating content, it’s actually pretty great, then add in this layer of most likely, your listeners are already creating video content in some capacity, whether it’s a course, whether it’s a weekly live video, whether it’s a regular podcast, whatever, so you can repurpose that content in different ways in a private podcast setting. What I do like to say too in this conversation is just describe what a private podcast is really quickly just because some people are like, “I don’t really understand what it is.” When you say they opt into it and why you, as maybe a public podcaster, would want a private one, is you basically get someone to raise their hand and say, “You know what, I’m a podcasting nerd like you.” Now you know because you have their email address. With a public podcast, I’m sure you love every download and you jump for joy when you get a new download but you don’t know who that person is on the other side. With private podcasting, it’s tied to an email address, so we protect that content from the creator’s perspective and we can do really cool things with delivery that can’t be done in a public podcast.
We can do things like Drip it. We can do things like give the episodes to people. We call it our membership feed, like a person signs up in December, they don’t get anything prior but they get everything moving forward. That’s stuff we can do when we control individual level access, then we also can tag and segment. We’ve really created the first listener relationship management system like Mailchimp for audio. We are keeping track of individual listeners. You can do really cool things and segment them, and you can send them audios that are relative to them, depending on where they are in your customer journey, so you can get really ninja.
To your point, because people are probably like, “Whoa, that’s really crazy,” to your point like this is really in its infancy, so people are experimenting. The people we attract are people who enjoy marketing. They see it as an experiment. They like doing fun things. They like serving their people. In private podcasts, most people are just like, “Oh my gosh, I’m so glad I don’t have to watch another video or log into a site.” When you are creating a free piece of content, like a lead magnet, we’re sick of the books, we’re sick of the webinar series, and we’re sick of all the things that people have been doing, so when it’s something like, “I can listen to this on the go,” you’re basically opening up more hours of the day for your ideal customer to consume your content. By more hours of the day, not the one sitting at the computer. The ones driving, the one walking the dog, the one doing the dishes where you’re occupied and doing something else. You, as a podcaster, know that’s what podcasting is. It’s so great.
Stacey Harris: Yeah. I want to just add, and thank you for doing that. That’s exactly what I wanted you to say because they’ve all heard me say I needed someone besides mom to come tell them the thing they needed to know.
Lindsay Padilla: Exactly, exactly.
Stacey Harris: But the thing I want to add to there is this is especially true for somebody who’s driving traffic to a lead magnet with a podcast. Your ideal client, the people who want to buy from you, and maybe we add that nuance to this too, the podcasters who we work with, the kind of podcaster I am, are not just—and I’m using air quotes because it’s not that it’s better or worse but they’re not looking to create content, just from a consumer ad per sales perspective. They’re using this to drive people through a nurture process to sell them something.
Lindsay Padilla: To a good backend, yeah.
Stacey Harris: Yeah. When I’m looking at my download numbers, they’re great and yes, to me, each of them are people but they’re not people who I can go and introduce myself to right now. They’re not somebody who I can virtually shake hands or make a Zoom coffee date with.
Lindsay Padilla: Unless they reach out to you. They have to write a review or whatever.
Stacey Harris: Absolutely. But what happens is when I can go and send them to another piece of content that I know they’ll like because they liked this one, I don’t have to go, “I know you really like listening to me this way because you’ve been doing it for, in some cases, eight years but also, I want you to now go read this ebook or watch these nine videos.”
Lindsay Padilla: Which no one is watching.
Stacey Harris: Let’s all just be honest with ourselves and quit downloading them. That’s really what I’m committing to in 2022. I’m also not consuming them. What I love is I get to create more of what they’re already consuming, what I already know they like. I can just take it a step deeper. I think if you’re listening to this conversation and you’re a podcaster, and if you’re not, I’m questioning why you’re still listening to this podcast but we’ll step aside from that for now but look at ways you can extend the relationship you already have with them. You know the value of that being on a dog walk or being in the drop-off lane or being on the treadmill. I love the feedback I get sometimes. Somebody learned to podcast and hung out with me in this show while they train for a marathon.
Lindsay Padilla: That’s cool.
Stacey Harris: How cool is that? Now with a private feed, you can really take that a step further. You can really further extend that relationship because now you do have a name. Now you do have somebody who has said, “No, I really, really want to be here.” That’s so, so, powerful. It extends instead of changes the relationship you have with the listener.
Lindsay Padilla: A lot of the data, and you know this because you talk to podcasters, people who listen to podcasts are very loyal. They listen to most or all of the episodes. No other platforms can say that. YouTubers are happy if they get two minutes of a video. They’re like, “I made it.” It’s like, “What? It’s two minutes of a 10 minute video.” I’ve actually heard of someone who listens to podcasts regularly called that the sacred time. If you’re making it into their sacred time, the time that they’re literally training for a marathon or taking care of their kids, you’ve entered this other level where—and this is where they’re linking it with the rise of people listening to podcasts like mainstream, is like I’m wearing AirPods, you are too. The idea that we have AirPods has actually made podcast listening more prevalent. It’s like, “Tune out the kids, put on the AirPods, and like, ‘I’m choosing to be with you.’”
Stacey Harris: The noise canceling ones even.
Lindsay Padilla: The noise canceling, exactly. Like tune out the rest of the world. You don’t get that with YouTubing and scrolling on Facebook, scrolling on Instagram, and scrolling on TikTok as much as TikTok is awesome. It’s just different.
Stacey Harris: Most people are consuming Instagram stories and TikTok with no audio, that’s why you gotta have captions. They’re not even listening to them. I’ll be honest. I frequently watch TikTok while it’s running and I’m actually watching something else.
Lindsay Padilla: Same.
Stacey Harris: ADHD may play a part in that but that’s neither here nor there. But I love that idea of this being that—we talk about this a lot in podcasting—if you’ve ever heard anyone talk about podcasting, you’ve talked about the intimacy of being in someone’s ears, being in someone’s car. I love that a private podcast where they took an extra step to get access to it gives not only you access to them at another level as far as data and things like that but also they feel more a part of it. The feedback I get from listeners who listen to The Podcast Newsroom, which is the private podcast feed—insert plug here about signing up—but the thing about the listener feedback I get is those emails are two and three paragraphs long. The emails I get in response to one of these episodes dropping is a DM.
Lindsay Padilla: Except for this one. Except for this one.
Stacey Harris: This one clearly there were entire dissertations, but they’re Instagram DMs. I love them just the same but they are invested in the content in another way once they come behind the wall, whether it’s an actual paywall or not. Like I said, The Podcast Newsroom is completely free. Give me an email address.
Lindsay Padilla: Yeah. Just opt in. I guess to your original question about unique ways people are doing it, we have somebody who sells services and she does a pop-up podcast every month, and she’s able to sell out and fill her monthly calendar. Again, I think there’s a little bit of, “Oh cool, this is really unique.” She’s like architecting the conversation, “What do they need to learn and know about the problem that I solved that will make them want to buy my services in the end?” That architecture of the sales conversation is how people are using it. I would say behind the scenes content, a little like what you’re saying, the stuff I don’t want to say on my show, you’re choosing and opting into this because it’s deeper. It’s a little bit more nerdy. You’re basically asking people to raise their hand. That’s really common.
Stacey Harris: I love where you talk about nurture. I want to talk about that just a second because one of the things I like about it, we’ve set this up for a couple of our clients where essentially, when you opt into their opt-in, which isn’t actually a private podcast, they also gift you a private podcast.
Lindsay Padilla: There you go. It’s a great bonus.
Stacey Harris: So that if I can’t get you to click the email to go back to the videos in three days, I did show up in your podcast feed. I can use the podcast feed as a way, even if I’m still trying to send you back to videos or send you back to a workbook or get you to get out that scorecard, calculator, planner, a self audit, whatever that thing is, I can get you back there when I bonus you an audio because now I got two touch points.
Lindsay Padilla: I love that idea. We’re good at this and the value stack, and all the things. The audio is a really great positioning point from a like, “I’m adding more value.” From your perspective as the creator, it took you no time to create extra, that’s why it’s my favorite.
Stacey Harris: It’s literally the easiest part.
Lindsay Padilla: It’s literally the easiest part. I love that angle that you’re saying too. I just want to share this too, like your podcast player is an inbox that people aren’t realizing is an inbox. But at Hello Audio, we’re like, “That’s an inbox that no one knows.” Right next to Uncommonly More is that thing you bought or that really important thing, and that’s where it gets lost, like how often you just go to Thinkific and you have 18 courses you haven’t finished. You don’t just go to Thinkific but you do go to your podcast player if you listen to podcasts regularly and there’s your face or there’s the title of the content you bought. That’s what we love at Hello Audio.
Stacey Harris: Even if you get them over to your “insert learning management software here”, if you look at my LastPass at any one of those things, there’s 12 logins.
Lindsay Padilla: Don’t even tell, I can’t’.
Stacey Harris: I have to go to each one to see what I bought with that, whereas my podcast player is just my podcast player, so it doesn’t matter what brought me there. This is why things like show titles, cover art, and stuff like that, we’ll talk about them later, totally matter because you want to be like, “I don’t care why you got it, why you came. Here’s why we’re here now.” That’s incredible. That’s not happening in a learning management software because to your point, no one’s meandering over there, but also there’s not generally a central dashboard with all the things you’ve bought from inside of this infrastructure ever.
Lindsay Padilla: Like why haven’t they figured that out. Good job is the closest.
Stacey Harris: I love that. Yeah, still. Again, no one’s like, “You know what I could do this afternoon? Just cruise over to my kitchen, see what’s what.”
Lindsay Padilla: Yeah. I’m bored.
Stacey Harris: “Let me go find more work to do.” No one’s doing that. I want to shift gears away from the free stuff because I want to wrap this up with the paid stuff because this is actually where we’re shifting to a service provider role. This is where we’ve implemented this for clients the most and seen a real impact for them in not just a value ad but really accessibility for their clients so that they can actually see, and get the results that they wanted in the first place, really keep them looped in and oh, by the way, engaged current clients buy more stuff and refer more people, but it all works. I want to shift into this paid thing because where we’ve seen it happen is really like membership and course stuff. Can you talk a little bit about that dynamic, that side of things?
Lindsay Padilla: It’s also why I built the product. Originally, the thing was called podcastercourse.com. That’s what it was. I think it redirects to Hello Audio. It was called Podcaster Course, and that was how I sold those lifetime licenses. I’m like, “Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could turn like your favorite teachers courses into a podcast?” From a learning perspective, that was its original thing. A common question I get with that is like, “Well, what if my course is super visual? I’m a graphic designer. I teach Facebook ads.” As a teacher, I can say there’s actually still value. It’s all about how you position the feed. It’s about repetition. If it is a very visual course, you still want them to go to the video but you brought up it’s engagement and from an adult learning theory perspective, because this is the professor talking here, when someone feels like they’ve gained some information, they will not be able to launch an ad just listening to audio off of Facebook, but they can go in and now watch the video and they actually don’t feel as scared because they’re like, “Oh, I know where she’s going to talk about. Now I can see it.”
If you’ve ever watched how to run a Facebook ad video, it’s literally like you want to poke your eyes out. You’re probably sitting there watching, looking over the shoulder of somebody and you’re like, “Why is their screen different from mine? What did they just click on?” You’re stopping and playing. It’s like if you think about the emotion that the student is feeling, it’s overwhelm, so by saying, “Hey, just binge this and guess what, don’t do anything,” that’s the best thing ever. Like, “Yeah, I’m just going to listen,” so then you get the journey. You’re like, “Oh, now I know why I need to sit down and watch these videos.” You’re actually empowering the learner. It happens even if it’s really heavily visual.
Like I said, that first course that I was like, “This should be a podcast,” was not heavily visual, so it was really clear. But from a course perspective, it’s another way to basically handle the objection of, “I don’t have enough time.” Because we’ve all bought courses, we aren’t making the time to log into Kajabi. We’re not just sitting around going like, “What do I want to learn next?” It’s just not how we are able to navigate this space. There’s a lot of good content out there to learn. You can basically say, “Oh yeah, because of that, I provide a podcast feed and you can just binge it.” Now you’ve basically resolved that objection which is really huge. That happens also with membership sites too.
Stacey Harris: I love that. I’ve talked a little bit about this from an opt-in perspective, this idea of, “I’m training them to be clients.” We even talk about this with your course show, like teaching them the things they need to know. I don’t mean we’re trying to change who they are so they become ideal clients but give them the common language we’re going to use, give them the expectations, give them an understanding of how they need to show up. I love the idea and a front ending, any kind of course but specifically a membership with how to use this space. That’s absolutely a little mini podcast feed that you can run them. I don’t care what content becomes behind it because now you’ve onboarded them into what to expect. Instead of me logging into Kajabi, seeing your 247 videos, which you broke down into bite-sized pieces to make it easier for me to do–
Lindsay Padilla: Because everyone told you to do that.
Stacey Harris: And my poor little brain be like, “Nope, I’m out,” because we’ve all had that moment. I’m glad you brought up this objection because I’ve heard it a few times from clients who are, “I really like the private feed and I really like the idea of doing this but we talk about blah-blah-blah,” or “They really want to see my face.” It’s like, then offer both.
Lindsay Padilla: Yes, yes, yes, offer both and you’re the teacher, so you tell them how to use it like, “Hey, listen to the podcast first.” If someone writes in and said, “I haven’t had time to do this. Can I have a refund?” “Hey, why don’t you just binge this podcast first and don’t take any action, then let’s talk about it?” Now you have this tool in place that is a little bit easier to navigate. So Amy Porterfield is a user and she uses it for DCA. I think for her too, she didn’t want to give them the podcast to binge because she has this very architected experience. What she did was she would launch the videos and she wouldn’t release the podcast version until a week or something later, so it was always positioned as, “Hey, if you missed it, still trying to make you feel good, you’re not failing, why don’t you just listen to it first?” then always go back to her really highly produced beautiful content because she spent a lot of time on it. It’s all about how you position it as the teacher of the best way to use the audio version of the course.
Stacey Harris: What I love about that is it really goes back to what we were talking about using that podcast player as another inbox because if they avoided your video in the first place, when you sent the email saying, “Hey, this week’s video is available.” They were like, “Deuces, I’m out.”
Lindsay Padilla: “I already missed last week and the week before.”
Stacey Harris: They’re also not going to respond to you sending six more emails saying, “No, really come watch the video,” whereas they are generally using podcasts to avoid—this could be personal—using podcasts to avoid the thing they’re supposed to be doing again. Not naming names. A bunch of people just went like, “Oh, she’s talking about me.”
Lindsay Padilla: Yeah, me too.
Stacey Harris: Because we all do it. Do you have this other place where they’re like, “Okay, I can have the bite size version of this. I can ease in.” I almost like a beach entry in a pool. I can just like, “I can take my time. I don’t have to jump in.” I love that. Before we wrap up, now that everybody’s excited, I want to make sure we talk about one thing and that’s how incredibly cool Hello Audio is. I know you mentioned when we talked about what private podcasting was but I want to highlight some of these things. The Drip feed is something I want you to talk about really quickly but also I want to talk about removing access because that’s often something people are freaked out by when I talk to them. I’m like, “Cool,” so we’re going to give them this link, then if they get a refund, they still have that link or their membership ends and they still have that link. Can you talk about both the Drip feed option and how you close things out? Those are the two things for me that make private podcasting specifically really impactful.
Lindsay Padilla: Drip works just like a drip email sequence. Someone comes on, it’s day one for them and they get every day or every seven days or every two day, whatever sequence you want to set up but it’s the day that person opts in or they subscribe, then it gets dripped out automatically. We set up that. That’s an option of a type of feed that you can create in Hello Audio, which is really cool. We have really cool things where you can also expire those episodes. If you’re running a live launch or a challenge or something like that or a summit is another way people are using it where you can almost expire the episodes on a drip, like a backwards drip is a way to explain it. Literally, because we’re marketers and digital content creators that’s who built it, we’re just like, “What are all the ways that people release content?” and that’s what we built. We mirrored what the learning management systems do. We mirrored any click funnels stuff, deadline funnel, and the typical launch mechanisms that we all use. That’s cool. That’s how it works.
Stacey Harris: One thing I want to point out there is again pointing out that overwhelm. Giving someone a private feed with 200 podcast episodes in it is not going to help them fight off their overwhelm. That’s what I love most about the Drip feed, going back to that idea of using this in a highly visual course to onboard them into what’s to come, or maybe it’s a highly technical course that you’re putting them through. In COVID times, in initial quarantine, we did a lot of family classes, like cooking classes and things like that. If I had gone in and found 47 videos, “No, I need to start here. Just give me this one first.” We think about that a lot in video but we don’t think about it enough in audio. We’ve done 550 episodes of this show. When somebody opens up this feed, they’re like, “Hmm, okay, this week’s good.” We’ll just stop there. But with a private feed, you really can ease them in and very intentionally walk them through it. That’s what I love about the Drip and even the ability to expire it. I actually don’t want them to walk this far anymore.
Lindsay Padilla: Or like you’re forcing them to listen because it’ll go away, so you’re giving them a time bomb. Let’s talk about that expiring and not having access. Expiring is a little different than removing access. Let’s talk about the way that it works. When you create a private feed with Hello Audio, the email address is tied to a URL specifically that is allowed a subscription one click, that kind of thing, and you as the creator, you as the user of Hello Audio, you can actually decide, “Hey, I do want to give them two subscriptions so they can subscribe using a different app or a player, iPod versus something else.” Are iPods even a thing? I don’t even know. Anyways, iPad is what I meant to say. I think they still exist, I don’t know. That’s like on an initial thing so then you could be like, “Hey, did you listen to this episode that Stacey released,” whatever, and you go to share it and you think you’re sharing it but the person actually can’t subscribe. That’s how we manage it on our end. It’s not searchable in Google. It’s not searchable in any of the podcatcher apps that we’re familiar with, Spotify, that kind of thing.
Then you get to someone who bought something and maybe it was a course or a membership site, and they stopped paying or their payment failed or whatnot, or you just actually ended the content, which is something people are doing a little more now than they used to. The way that works, it’s a little nuanced here. Where Hello Audio hosts the content, because we don’t have a player, we send it out to all these other players. It’s Apple, it’s Overcast, it’s Pocket Casts. There’s a lot of them. We actually keep track of some of the most popular, so that end user gets to decide how their app works for them and how much space they want to take up on their phone, and all the things. What could be a setting that your user could set is that they download the episode to their phone. Most people don’t do that anymore because I don’t know about you, like I like really random screenshots just floating on my phone forever and ever, but I don’t see a value in downloading a podcast episode unless maybe I want to listen offline. For me, my settings are not set to auto download. It’s set to stream. Most people are set to stream. That’s a positive because the second that feed dies, we basically tell all those apps like, “Hey, this person isn’t allowed to stream it anymore.” They don’t have the code anymore. It kills it. It will die for them.
Anything that they have not downloaded will die. But I do have to say that if someone chooses to download every episode, you can’t un-download from their phone. It’s important that it is said out loud. The way I look at this as somebody who’s worked in the course space a long time, that comes up all the time like, “How do you get people to not download your videos and my sh*t ended up on these sites in Asia where you can download, and they sell it for $99?” It’s like you can totally create this very walled garden but it ends up being a very sh*tty experience for the people who are paying lots of money. You have to weigh that. It’s like the likelihood that someone is going to save that audio, do you want to just not offer audio for your people? That’s a choice that you can make, or you can recognize that you’re actually providing a great good for most people that like your content. I do like to share that because it is important with how it works.
Stacey Harris: I’m really glad you said that because most often, I go, “Anybody who works hard enough can steal anything.”
Lindsay Padilla: Anything, anything on the internet, anything, password protected on Wistia or YouTube, I’m telling you.
Stacey Harris: There’s really only so far, we can dig this hole before it’s not worth thinking about that much. I’m really, really glad you said that because I frequently also am like, “How about we don’t worry that hard about it? Let’s create an experience, a container that is secure for the people who are investing in it.” But also, I am not going to lose sleep on the person who downloaded that one video or that one podcast and it’s saved to their phone forever.
Lindsay Padilla: Because we know that there’s more value in just literally the access to the audio. The other part is like if it’s a course, it’s often accessed to you. There’s the whole thing. It’s not the audio itself that’s the only thing or the video and whatnot. That’s my little primer on that but what’s cool is we can actually like through Zapier, through some web hooks, if you want to get super fancy, depending on the platforms that you’re using, like auto disable their feed through some of those things, which is really cool, people really like that, so you don’t even have to do that but we also give you the manual button so you can go in and just check that button like, “Nope, I don’t want that person to have that feed anymore.” Then like I said, you can set it up by date to auto pull and stuff like that as well.
Stacey Harris: I love that.
Lindsay Padilla: Pretty cool.
Stacey Harris: It is a faucet. We can turn it on. We can turn it off. It just does mean sometimes leaks happen.
Lindsay Padilla: Totally.
Stacey Harris: But we can turn it on and we can turn it off.
Lindsay Padilla: But that’s pretty rare to the point like most people don’t have their phone set up like that with podcast apps.
Stacey Harris: Here’s the deal. I return to, “Anybody who works hard enough can steal anything.”
Lindsay Padilla: Literally anything.
Stacey Harris: Most people do not have poor intentions with our content or anyone else’s. Thank you so much for taking the time to join me and talk about this today. For the people who are really excited and ready to jump in, there is a link in the description of this episode that will take you right to Hello Audio to set up your account because, because, because it’s really cool. Also, if you go to uncommonlymore.com/helloaudio, it’ll redirect right there but most often, I find people just go into their podcast player and click the link. Maybe I’m most people. Thank you, Lindsay, for taking the time. Is there anywhere else they should be looking at? I know you guys have some great stuff over at Hello Audio.
Lindsay Padilla: I think our Facebook group is pretty cool. You do not have to have an active account. You can come in there and explore, and you can just be like, “I’m on trial. I found out about you from Stacey,” whatever. You don’t have to have a paid account. It’s no credit card trial by the way actually. We just switched that a couple months ago.
Stacey Harris: Oh, cool.
Lindsay Padilla: Because I think our product speaks for itself, we have this cool stat: 64% of new users have a feed up within the first 24 hours. That’s pretty good from a SaaS perspective, like get that value fast. Because for most people, it’s really easy, drag a video in, see if it works, set it up, send it to yourself.
Stacey Harris: Absolutely.
Lindsay Padilla: It is really easy to use. I’m not kidding. We don’t even take your credit card in order for you to see and play with it.
Stacey Harris: I want to emphasize how easy that is because we have set this up for several of our clients but this isn’t something we do.
Lindsay Padilla: Maybe we should talk about how easy it is. I’m just kidding.
Stacey Harris: No, no, no, no. It is.
Lindsay Padilla: The marketing behind it and what you offer is part of the company.
Stacey Harris: Also, we set it up. We don’t maintain them because that’s outside of the scope. In some cases, we produce the audio and release it there. But for the clients who have set it up, who they’re running this for the replays and things like that for their membership content, their existing team is who does it. We just set it up. We’ve got a backlog in there for us and now they run it completely on their own. This is something where you could get some help from us or someone else getting you going.
Lindsay Padilla: To get it started.
Stacey Harris: Especially if you have a backlog of audio content, as somebody who has done that for clients, trust me, have someone else do it. I would never do it for myself but have that set up. This isn’t something that you’re going to have to set up and never be able to manage on your own or have any understanding of the interface. For me, I’m always looking to set things up that our clients can use on their own if they want and or need to. I’m not building some mythical fence that only we can do these things. I actually really love that it’s hand-off-able. We can help you guys get it set up and nothing that’s created there is going to be too complicated for you to be able to manage it yourself.
Lindsay Padilla: We also just released the Audio Inbox. We secretly released it over like a break because we’ve been holding off. Right now, it syncs with Google Drive, and Zoom is right on the tail. We’re getting all the admin stuff of being in their marketplace. But essentially, what Audio Inbox is, is you hook up your drive account, you hook up your Zoom account, and it pulls in recordings into Hello Audio, so you can sign in, go to your inbox, and be like, “Oh yeah, that podcast recording I just did,” boom or that client call, that ends up in this private feed. We’re making it even easier where it takes seconds. The idea of having a VA, you don’t even have to. It could totally be you. It’s pretty great.
Stacey Harris: I’m all for creating things that you’re empowered to do yourself. You can automate a certain amount of it because here’s the deal, my expertise is sitting next to you strategically in helping you make the calls and get these things done in a way that supports you and the journey your clients are going on. That means the best use of my team’s time and my team is not dragging and dropping.
Lindsay Padilla: No, or downloading and all that kind of stuff.
Stacey Harris: I’m very excited to hear about that. That’s awesome. I want to dig into that later.
Lindsay Padilla: We’re excited about it. The Facebook group is helloaudio.community. The community kind of stands for .com. What is that called, the end of a URL?
Stacey Harris: I don’t know.
Lindsay Padilla: Anyways, helloaudio.community will redirect you.
Stacey Harris: I would like someone to DM us on Instagram or join the Facebook group and tell us what that means.
Lindsay Padilla: Community is like .com, whatever. That’s confusing but that should take you to the Facebook community.
Stacey Harris: I like it, awesome. Head over there. Join the community. I’m in that community as well. Thank you again, Lindsay, for nerding out about private feeds with me for a little while.
Lindsay Padilla: That was fun.
Stacey Harris: I had a good time.
Lindsay Padilla: Me too. Me too.
Stacey Harris: All right, we will see you guys next time. Thank you.
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