Speaker Meeting for Recovering Addicts. Speakers come from all addictions, faiths, and backgrounds and have over 1 year sober.

I am a son of my God and a recovering addict. I have been very active in the rooms of recovery for over 9 years and have previously hosted the Know and Do Podcast and the Journey Through Life Podcast.

Reco12 is an organization of recovering addicts of all backgrounds, addictions, faiths, nationalities, etc, coming together to learn the similarities of addiction and the similarities of recovery. We invite a recovering addict with at least 1 year sobriety and who is actively working his or her recovery in any 12 Step fellowship to share their experience, strength, and hope on the recovery topic of their choice. They speak for about 25 minutes and then the live Zoom audience has the opportunities to ask questions of the speaker for another 25 minutes.

Our speakers are invited to seek guidance on what to speak on so that they can reflect light which inspires hope, meaning, worth, and growth in the listening audience.

Reco12 records live, every Friday, at noon central time. To get on the invitation list, you can send an email to reco12pod@gmail.com. Reco12 listeners are addicts and recovering and recovered addicts, as well as loved ones of addicts who want to learn more about addiction and the recovery therefrom.
 

I was previously hosting a long-form conversation podcast called Journey Through Life. A podcast where I interviewed ordinary people with extraordinary stories.

In late 2019, I felt drawn to do a 12 week series on each of the 12 Steps of Recovery and so I found a bunch of recovering addicts who were willing to talk to me about these steps. After that 12-week series, my passion for Journey Through Life waned and I really wanted to dig further into recovery topics. I found such power and hope and light and honesty in these men and women that I wanted to just meet more and more of them from all backgrounds.

I started podcasting in 2017 with a one-person daily reflection podcast called Know and Do. That podcast evolved into the Journey Through Life Podcast in 2018. Then in 2020, I started this new podcast called Reco12 (Recovery 12 Step) Speaker Meeting Podcast.
 

Reco12 holds a new meeting each Friday and releases the episode in podcast form within a couple of hours of the live meeting. After spending hours and hours and hours editing the Journey Through Life Podcast, I learned how little I like editing. So, with Reco12, it is pretty raw. I only edit out long dead air and if there is gratuitous cursing, I will sometimes edit that out too.

Reco12 if a self-supporting podcast and service. We do greatly appreciate donations which can be done through the links in the show notes. It costs me roughly $1000.00 per year for all real expenses. Of course those expenses do not include time invested. This is not a project that I expect to make any sort of financial profit. It is a project of the heart.
 

While Reco12 does not have sponsorship, we recently started accepting an ad through the podcast platform we are on (Buzzsprout). Those ads are paying for the monthly podcast platform fees right now and nothing else.

Downloads are currently at about 900-1,200 per week per Buzzsprout's analytics. This is growing quite rapidly right now.

We may create some merch at some point in the future to help fund the podcast, but that won't be in the immediate future.

From podcasting I have gained and continue to gain new friends all over the world who bare their soul to me and I bare mine to them. These connections have also opened new doors with others around the world that I am honored to be connected to.
 

Reco12 records live on a Zoom webinar. The hardware on the host's end is the Zoom H4nPro and mic. Video is stripped out and audio is then edited in Garageband and combined with an intro and an outro. We then upload it to podcast format on virtually all podcast platforms within about 2 hours of finishing the recording.

Recently we also added a YouTube channel where the audio for each of the episodes are also uploaded to within a day of release.
 

Marketing is mainly by word of mouth. Our guest speakers share it with their recovery networks, and our audience shares with their recovery networks.

We do have an email list that sends out the reminders and the links for the live meetings each week. There are about 500 people on that email list currently and it is growing by 8-12 names per week.

We also have a private Facebook page that has about 160 members right now. It is a low-key presence for now, but the hope is that people will use it as a place to ask recovery-related questions and answer others' questions.
 

Don't worry about getting the top of the line audio equipment. I started out with my iPhone earbuds and microphone and graduated to a headset about a year later, and now to a basic external mic and interface. The sound, while not AMAZING, is generally quite good.

I learned everything that I have learned about podcasting through YouTube and the school of hard knocks. No better way to learn than from other peoples' experience, strength, and hope and from my own mistakes.
 

https://www.reco12.com
https://reco12.buzzsprout.com/
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reco12/id1516031026
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/journey-through-life-podcast/id1262931412
https://www.facebook.com/groups/291099645261990
reco12pod@gmail.com
https://www.reco12.com/support
https://www.paypal.me/reco12
Venmo: @reco-twelve