Sports Talk For Those Who Aren’t Normies

I'm Francisco and my co-hosts are two of my old law school friends Andrew & Charles. We wanted to do something that had nothing to do with our day jobs.

Our podcast is called SPORTS GOOFS. I always wanted to make a sports talk show and was tired of the mainstream sports media that just talked about the same things all the time. So I asked two of my friends to join me and we have been coming together almost every week to talk nonsense for two years now.

Our listener base is small but for some mysterious reason we have a following in Russia and Texas. I'm as confused as you about it.

Originally our show was a live show on YouTube and it is recorded live still. But starting late 2020 I made a push to convert the shows into a podcast by editing our live show.

I had no goal really. I just wanted to have fun talking about sports and luckily found two friends that were willing to join me.

The show officially started in 2018.

I had wanted to do the show prior to 2018 but law school took up that time. It finally got off the ground after about a month of planning.

Time is something that took all of us a while to get down consistently due to our work schedules. But starting in 2019 we finally got it down to a weekly Tuesday evening recording session with a break every four months.

Moneywise I have funded everything. But usually by utilizing things I wanted anyways. I have bought a new PC to power the show, a new microphone, etc. Hosting costs are none as there are plenty of hosting sites that will do so for free. Marketing is all me through social media and the show is on every platform imaginable from YouTube to Spotify.

We have sponsorship. About a year into the show we got ads added to our live video shows. This year we added sponsorship to our audio shows. The goal was never really money. And we don't make enough to even write home about.

Downloads are small for now. Maybe around 300 at this point now that we converted into a podcast. So just starting out.

The show is fun. It's a creative outlet for us. We have even had guests who are legitimate sports reporters. We have the heart of a big sports talk show but enjoy the small niche we made for ourselves. Anything more than that is just cake.

I utilize a suite of tools. Recording is done on a tower gaming PC as it is powerful enough to carry the visuals for our live show. OBS is the streaming software we use and Restream.io is the streaming service that distributes it to about 10 different video platforms at once. Anchor hosts the audio show and is also where I do my editing to chop the video show into a podcast friendly variety.

Andrew is our guest wrangler as he is very personable and has no fear in asking people to join our show through his contacts on social media. He is a college football writer on the side so he has notable friends in the business.

I do a prep about two days before. Mainly writing a show sheet of topics to discuss and notes. From there I prep visuals, social media posts, and production. Andrew and Charles just call in and talk while I make sure the whole operation doesn't crash.

We have everything through calls. I run the show out of my home and 2020 has stopped our in-person sessions.

I don't have a listener acquisition breakdown but our podcast so far is mainly listeners from Apple Podcasts and Overcast. I do not know how they find us. Just dumb luck I suppose.

Twitter is always great. I spam posts like crazy but it's the only way I know to get notice. I do not pay for promotions. This is just a hobby and I enjoy the grind.

I guess the one thing I have learned is that you will get better. Our show started back in March 2018. When I was converting all of our old video shows to podcasts I re-listened to the first episode and I was amazed at how much had improved and changed (equipment, personnel, personality, timing, format, mistakes). So just keep doing it if you're having fun.

I don't have any resources but everything is just a quick search away. That's how I ended up writing this. Just keep looking for platforms, tools, advice, sponsors and you will find it.

I guess our Anchor site would be the best place as it has all the important links to some platforms that host us, our social media accounts, you can message us and it has a donation jar if anybody wants to help us along the way.

anchor.fm/sports-goofs