A podcast where we explore the relationship between design, happiness and wellbeing.

I'm originally from the island of Curaçao, which is in the Caribbean. But I'm currently living and studying architecture in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I'm also very interested in psychology and neurobiology. I would love to understand more about how our brain works. Last year, when the pandemic started, I began investigating the topic of happiness and wellbeing. Since then, I've been pretty much obsessed with this topic. And being an architecture student, I decided to explore how our built environment can affect people's wellbeing and happiness.

About two years ago I got into the world of podcasts. The first one I ever listened to was Crime Junkie and nowadays I have about 20 podcasts that I listen to. I believe this, together with my ongoing obsession with understanding happiness and wellbeing, kind of inspired me to start my own podcast. The idea just suddenly came to me and I said, why not try it out? I immediately started thinking about how I wanted to do the podcast, how to even start a podcast, looking for tips and planning things out. About a week later, I published my first episode which served as an introduction while I was conducting interviews with people for the future episodes.

I publish new episodes once a week. So I try to do several interviews with people and then edit those into episodes and schedule them on my hosting platform. I'm a full-time student and besides I'm currently doing an internship. So sometimes it does get complicated to find the right time for both my guest and me.
In my case, I spent money on two things. One was a microphone to make sure the audio quality is good and the other one was a website that I'll be working on for the future as the podcast grows. Both of these came from my own savings.

My main goal right now is not about making money with the podcast. Of course, it would be great to be able to do so, but first I want to make sure things are going well and to grow my audience. I'm using Anchor as my hosting platform and they allow you to start monetizing your podcast from the beginning. You don't need a minimum amount of downloads in order to use their sponsorship services. So I'm currently using that as I focus on growing the audience. What I want to gain from this podcast, is learning more from my guests about what their opinion and thoughts are on this topic of happiness and wellbeing. And how architecture can affect us.

Since I interview guests for the show, it's much easier to do so on Zoom and record the call. Later on I use the Adobe Audition program to edit the audio. Luckily there's not much to edit, since I only have to add an intro, an outro and split it into several parts. Splitting it into parts allows me to easily add sponsorship segments in between these parts later on.
Happiness, Wellbeing and Design are the main topics of this podcast, which is why I try to find people who mainly work in those areas. Professionals who have knowledge about what it means to be happy and/or have experience on designing spaces and products that improve people's wellbeing. These may be people I already follow or people that I read about online when researching the topics. I then contact them to see if they are willing and available for an interview and if they are, I do a more in depth research about them in order to prepare good questions for the interview. But I don't want to only interview professionals. As architects we design the spaces, but we're not the ones who will be inhabiting those spaces. Which is why I also want to interview random people to understand how they perceive the spaces they inhabit and how those spaces affect them.

Using Anchor makes it way easier to distribute my podcast on many platforms. If I find other platforms, I may manually add my podcast to it if it's not already on there. Up until now though, most listeners are on Spotify (30%). Apple Podcasts has a total of 7% while 13% listens on the Anchor website. There's a 30% for "Other" which (sadly) I have no idea what platform those may be using.
Right now I use mainly Instagram and LinkedIn to market my show. Of course, tagging the guests in those posts also helps with reaching more people. The guests will be notified once the interview goes live and they will probably share it with their friends and family as well.

My biggest advice is to just get started. If you think too much about it and doubting yourself, you will never start. Once you start, you will also start learning more from your mistakes. I would also recommend you to listen to several podcasts because this helps to inspire you on things you can do for your own podcast. There are some podcasts that give tips on starting your own podcast. And last but not least, don't worry too much on getting the best microphone. The most important thing is focusing on having good content in each episode. Nowadays most people have a pretty decent microphone on their phones. I would recommend starting out with that if you don't have the budget to buy a microphone.

You can follow the show on Instagram: https://instagram.com/dfhpodcast
You can also get in touch with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bkoots