Hits you with its blunt and uncensored take on pop culture, entertainment, politics, sports, science and few more things…

Well our childhood friendship for over a decade grew into telling the story, we are passionate about pop-culture, love good discussion, have a spark to philosophize for hours, and try to feel the vibe. We wanted to prove, and personally I think we are doing good, that you do not need nor hi-tech studio and big money, nor to be a celebrity, to create a fun, honest and lovable show. You can see already that our podcast is all-arounder, we talk about sports, pop culture, history, women, politics and everything else beyond and under The Sun, so there is something for everybody. As well the question I hate the most is “What is your niche?”, and that is because it is to simple our niche is the World, our audiance are most devoted Democrates as well as 'Obama Clones' conspiracy theorists, our listeners are fans of both UFC and chess, but all of them respect the free thought and enjoy to learn something new. But our analytics says most of them are from USA, but from 40 more countries as well, and mostly young men between 16-39, but we have at least one listener from any age from 7 to 107.
 

Why podcast? Because we do not need nor personal connection in the government nor degree. With podcast we have a way to express ourselves, opportunity to go genuine, uncensored and unscripted. We don’t consider podcasts just an entertainment anymore, they are the competition now. We listen to the various podcasts like Joe Rogan (who doesn’t), Stone Cold Steve Austin, Ben Shapiro and indie podcasters like us. Our goal was to be heard, spread some so-called wisdom, and who knows maybe one day dethrone Joe Rogan, but more than anything else we just want to talk, meet people, and if we are good enough influence and motivate others, I don’t want to sound clishe, but to be themselves, try their best and explore. We started this podcast in the September, 2021, after long reckoning, we had one previous journey back in 2015, but fortunately it died out of cringe, but it gives us a right to call ourselves pioneers of podcasting industry. One day we were at the bar, and it was some kind of the bet between me and Luka, if I do *something*, let’s start a podcast again, and now here we are, according to you among the TOP 1% of the podcasting world, the top of the echelon.
 

We release regulary every week, no metter the circumstances our episodes will be on air every Wednesday at 5PM CET (11AM EDT). We record on the same day and publish the episode, unless it is the guest interview episode, than we adjust schedule to our guests. Well some things have to pay for podcasting, not just our wallets, for example our spare time, we are both students so, when the time for finals come it knows to be tough, but will, dedication and hardwork prevail always. The most time goes on “backstage business” and that is arranging schedule, booking guests, creating content for social networks, than recording for couple of hours, brainstorming once a week, networking, etc. so we spend at least 2/3 hours a day for our pod. And yes, we fund it from our pockets, so not as many things we wish to implement we can, we are little limited with money but have enough to have everything running smoothly.
 

We had a couple of meetings with potential sponsors, but we do not focus on sponsorship deals so much, we focus on the quality and improvement of our content and don’t want to put so much of ads and overflood the content. We are in couple of the affiliate partnerships, but don’t stress so much over it on episodes, as they are mostly runned on our social networks (Instagram, Twitter & Pinterest), our episodes can be called ad-free. When we got InterCar Rent-A-Car for a sponsor, we had less than a thousand downloads, today we have a few zeros more on that number, and we are charted in India, Japan, Denmark, Switzerland and Croatia on Apple Podcasts. Podcast benefits us more in all the other ways than financially, our popularity skyrocketed, we are reckognized in the town, we had articles written about us, and every week we learn new stuff, it is never too much knowledge, we meet people who are A-Listers in their fields like for an example Jeff Jarrett (WWE Hall Of Famer), Lawrence Krauss (Cosmologist) or Esad Ribic (Marvel’s Leading Artist) etc.
 

Every now and than we order something on the ebay for the pod. We started with our personal devices: laptop, couple of iPads, old microphone and a quiet room, but now there is so much cables around in the so called studio, we got 2K cam, couple of microphones, headsets, we subscribed for softwares like Canva, for designing purposes, we are building our website, using anchor.fm to host a podcast, use Adobe for video editing, so we had to expand the team as well (5 people at the moment), we have many thing shipped like some new 8.1 audio cards, microphone arm mounts, lazy sofas and few things more. We find guests by doing a freaking too much networking, we learned and memorized the pool of publicists, agents and managers, and now some names are repeating themself on the mailing list. It is hard to get in touch with the celebrities and we send out around 30 emails weekly, and get a response on around 6-8 of them, and just 1-3 are willing to do an episode, but the most frustrating part is when we don’t get a feedback, even telling us to f*off is better than that. We mostly call the people with whose work we are familliar with, as we do not like, and do not want to talk about the things that we do not know about, we do a little reserch as well, prepare some questions and on the recording day just go with the flow, and try to create that bohemian atmosphere. Things would be much more interesting if we had a capability to interview our guests in person, but we are in the middle of nowhere in the Europe, and they are from USA, UK, Asia, Spain, Canada, all over the world so we record remotely, mostly via Zoom, and try to make the magic.
 

Vast majority of our listeners are on the Apple Podcasts, more than 80%, than Spotify with around 10% and then Google Podcasts, Amazon Music and Deezer. We also are trying to get featured on the websites like moon.fm, goodpods, podtail, and of course Listen Notes. We are as well proud of our branded posts on Instagram, and we started using my personal channel on YT, which accumulated more than a 1M views before using it for podcast, as well our guest are resharing us, we also spread a word from mouth to mouth, run promotions on FB and Google AdSense etc.
 

Everybody can find a thousand reasons and justifications why not to do something, but for us one reason why to do it was enough, and if you are here for money, than just drop everything and go, and that is what almost everybody asked us first “Is there some money in it?”, “How much are you earning?” but that’s absolutely on the bottom of our priorities, some things you just do for passion. My best advice would be don’t try to be who you are not, don’t try to make a fool of youself, respect yourself, respect your show and respect your audience. They are various helpful resources Listen Notes, PodBean, OwlTail, Goodpods etc, so mcuh discord servers and Ikuzo’s Unscripted Podcast, if you want tips, help, promotion, anything in our power we will be there for you, don’t hesitate to ask, we know how starting this journey can be tough, oh and one more thing just try not to cause any brain damage and make people die from cringe xD.
 

You can check out all our valuable links on lintr.ee/ikuzo_unscripted you can email, ikuzounscripted@gmail.com and ask us whatever you want, you can enjoy video version of our interviews on our YT channel (https://youtube.com/c/Ikuzo), soon you’ll be able to visit our website ikuzounscripted.me you can follow us on Instagram account @ikuzo_unscripted and I promise you won’t regret, you can check out our collectibles and artworks on Pinterest (https://pin.it/QIEwqDh), but most importantly use your search engines and type Ikuzo’s Unscripted Podcast and we are sure you will stay tuned.
All the best, IKUZO!