Two bald chicks navigating life with Alopecia.

I’m Kristen and I have had Alopecia for 20 years now. Last year I met Paige in a support group! She has had Alopecia for around 7 years. We formed Those Bald Chicks together a little over a year ago. We wanted to do more for alopecia awareness so people could learn about this disorder that effects millions of people but is mostly hidden and not talked about. Alopecia is an autoimmune disease, causing hair loss on the scalp, and on other areas of the body depending on the type of alopecia you have. 6.8 million people in the U.S. are affected by this and it has a lifetime risk of 2.1%. People of all ages, sexes, and all ethnic groups can be affected by Alopecia.

Our podcast is about our daily lives with hair loss - we discuss the ins and outs, relationships, and currently have a variety of guests coming on to discuss their stories and experiences with hair loss. Our listeners are a mix of the hair loss community and people living with people that have it (ie. moms of children with alopecia, spouses etc).
 

Kristen wanted to do more for the alopecia community by finding an avenue to further spread awareness, which is when she contacted Paige and the podcast was born! We both needed an avenue to get our story out there and we chose social media along side our podcast platform.

Initial and continued goals are to continue to promote alopecia awareness and to make sure that no one on this journey feels alone like we did at first. We also want to show people with alopecia that there is a community to rely on and that will have their backs no matter what.

We started our podcast in February 2021 and released our first episode less than 2 weeks after recording it!
 

Currently we do this in our spare time as we each have other daily careers - we fund this ourselves and do all our own work. We have branched out and have gotten quite a few partnerships in the first year and in 2022 we are looking into sponsorships as well. We release episodes bi-weekly and it takes 3-5 hours to produce the episode from recording, to editing, to scheduling, and creating social content. This also depends on how well the equipment and internet is working for both parties as we live in different areas (US and Canada). These hours do no include growing our social media, creating a website, searching/prepping/scheduling for guests, collecting hair loss facts, creating content, hosting giveaways, and completing partnerships. We schedule everything in a content calendar and make sure we show up because it is so important to the both of us to be punctual and provide reliable and relatable content for our listeners!
 

We would love to be sponsored! Currently we have partnerships and it includes gifted products in exchange for social content. We have received head wraps, wigs, and beauty products.

Podcasting benefits us because we get to see the impact we are having on the hair loss community. We receive reviews explaining how we’re helping people in their hair loss journeys and that is everything to us. The fact that we are helping people from their kitchen, cars, or walking around campus is incredible to the both of us! We have also gained a life long friendship. We really didn’t know each other and now we couldn't imagine not being in each others lives.

We started selling merchandise last year and 100% of the proceeds from that went to a local animal shelter as well as the Trevor Project.
 

We both have professional microphones and noise cancelling headphones. We use Audacity to edit and Podbean as our RSS feed to push out the episodes. We live in different countries so we always use Zoom to do our podcasts together.

We find our guests by reaching out through social media - Instagram and Facebook.

We prepare for each guest episode by making sure we have information about them that we collect from their socials. We also learn a lot about them as we talk to them. For regular episodes we have a topic, thoroughly research, and then talk about our experiences with that topic.
 

Listeners can find our show on iTunes, Spotify, iHeart, Google, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, DirectMe, Wix, etc.

35% of listeners come from Apple podcasts, and 32% come from Spotify. The remainder of listeners come from a variety of other websites that Podbean pushes our episodes out to.

Our most useful marketing channel is Instagram. We organically have over 1500 followers in just one year. We use Instagram to reach out to guests, put out fun facts, display partnerships, update people about our episodes, and communicate any news when it comes to the podcast. We receive beautiful and heartwarming messages and are so grateful for our followers and listeners. They are the reason why we do what we do!
 

This is a lot more work than we thought, but once we got down a routine, it made it much easier.

Make sure you have the correct equipment - good internet, good mic, and noise cancelling headphones. Otherwise, you will be editing out background sounds forever.

Teamwork makes the dream work! Having a team that you can work off of is key in your success.

And lastely, not everyone is going to like what you do but just make sure YOU love what you do! Paige's husband to be, Damon, has been our best resource with everything tech. He has done a few podcasts and knows all the ins and outs of podcasting!
 

You can find all of our links to everything via our DirectMe
https://direct.me/thosebaldchicks