Deep conversations with a light-hearted touch

Hey I'm Kyrin, your typical Aussie bloke and host Mere Mortals with my long-time high school friend Juan. Our podcast revolves around topics that we find interesting and progress we are making in our lives. One episode might be about marathon running, the next on cryptocurrency and then we're diving into a silly hypothetical. The main topics that come up though are goal setting, fitness, meditation and keeping a sharp mind. Our listeners come from all varieties, the most feedback I get is from middle aged women (which I completely did not expect to find as a target audience!).
 

In 2018 I was travelling through Central America but would have these weekly chats with Juan and another friend via Skype that are essentially exactly like the current podcast. I myself listen to quite a few and make a habit of listening into other small Aussie podcasts on the regular. I enjoy giving them a shoutout and leaving a review on Itunes as I know how much one nice interaction like that can make someone's day.

Initial motivation was just to give it a go and have some fun, try something new. We started in Sep 2019 and released the first episode as soon as the editing was done. That being said there was a lag of a couple of months of dillydalling between the initial idea of starting one and then actually pulling the trigger.
 

I'm in the fortunate position that I saved a lot of money working in the mining industry here in Australia and also being a minimalist, so can survive off not much. So I have no fixed job and have made podcasting my job. I have two other podcasts apart from this (both book reviews, one in English and one in Spanish) so I release something daily (sometimes even more). Timewise each episode will take a couple of hours to fully complete but most of that is spent on video editing as all our episodes go up onto YouTube as well.
 

Financially nothing, actually it costs me money haha. Maybe in the future I'll monetise them but I would rather grow an audience first and I don't particularly like the advertising model so will avoid that as much as I can. Outside of money it has taught me many things about marketing and promotion that I wouldn't have learnt elsewhere. I am also way better at communication (from simple things like eliminating ummm, errr, like, etc., to knowing how to tell a engaging story and direct a conversation).
 

2 x cameras, 2 x USB mics that feed directly into a laptop where I use the Adobe suite. Basically the same setup if I'm doing it indoors in the studio but I have an additional mixer and will use XLR cables. Prep work for the podcast is minimal now, a couple of notes on the phone during the week beforehand and then Juan and I will mostly converse from these. When we have a guest then yes there will be an hour or two of prep to learn about them more deeply and have a couple of conversation pathways ready and written down.
 

Probably the most valuable marketing tool has been a physical A-Frame board. We do our podcast outside in an area with a lot of foot traffic so we constantly will get a couple of hundred people per episode see the board and our logo. Other than that we learnt that sticking to one social media platform and giving that your attention was better than spreading thin (for ourselves at least) so we pretty much only use Instagram.

Most would be through simple search on the platforms themselves so we have a split that mostly reflects where people are listening from already. Therefore predominantly Apple and Spotify.
 

You've heard them all before (have consistency, just start, no fancy equipment needed, pretend as if nobody is listening, etc.,) so I'll try and add a personal story. I had a really fixed idea coming in of what the podcast should be. It's going to be serious, all done in one take with no editing, I'll do research before each episode, and a whole list of things I all wanted. This helped me to get started but I had to let go and relax pretty soon afterwards. As you progress you'll find out what you actually enjoy doing, what other people find interesting and that in reality (at the start) no-one cares about your show so therefore if you switch things up or change it really doesn't matter.
 

Two best places to go to are the website and Instagram. Website if you want easy links to all the best places to watch/listen and Instagram if you want to personally get in touch. Thanks for reading all the way to here and hope to see you in the Mere Mortalite community! Much love, Kyrin.