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Dash: I moved to another state. I moved to Minnesota because they have protections for trans people. I can receive medical care here, but I miss my home. You know, it's. It's a very interesting tension of missing the place. That also was a pressure, a formative pressure on you.
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Sam Sethi: Now, what we've done in the Podcasting 2.0 community is come up with a new contacts tag. And the idea behind this tag is that you can have multiple different options. One might be how you can give me feedback. One might be how you can email me or how you can actually book to become a guest.
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Claire Waite Brown: So it's a bit like a link tree that you see in social media places as well, where you go to one place and you see all the different links. You choose the one that you need. I think it's really fun. Welcome to Creators from TrueFans, the podcast that, like TrueFans itself, showcases and supports independent podcasting. I'm Claire Waite Brown, Head of Community at TrueFans.
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Sam Sethi: And I'm Sam Sethi, the CEO of TrueFans.
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Claire Waite Brown: Download the TrueFans app to not only listen to podcasts from around the world, but interact with their creators and start paying the shows you value.
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Sam Sethi: Click on the Big purple Become a Fan button to be notified or emailed when new episodes of this podcast are released.
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Claire Waite Brown: And follow Ruef TrueFans FM on Instagram or threads to be kept up to date on all the latest TrueFans features designed to improve discovery, interactivity and monetization opportunities for podcasts and their creators.
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Sam Sethi: Hi, Claire.
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Claire Waite Brown: Hi, Sam. How are you doing?
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Sam Sethi: I'm good, I'm good. Now, Claire, who are we featuring on this episode?
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Claire Waite Brown: I'm chatting with Dash today. Hi, Dash, how are you?
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Dash: I'm well. How are you, Claire?
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Claire Waite Brown: I'm very good, thank you. Start by telling me the name of your podcast and what it's all about, please.
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Dash: Yeah. I'm one half of the co hosting team and producer of Queer Next Podcast. It's hard to describe, but we're basically a buddy chat show about what's it like Coming up Queer in Appalachia. The context of both of those things is a big influence on the creation and trajectory of the show. Appalachia is a region in America that is perhaps its most impoverished, and it's often viewed in a larger American United States Zeitgeist as regressive and very conservative politically. And it certainly has those elements, but it also is one of the most diverse regions in the country. And so we found ourselves kind of positioned to tell an interesting story. About where we're from, but we also, due to politics in the US Right now, have had to leave. So I. I'm a transgender man, and so it's not very easy or possible at all to receive medical care where I am from. So they, like, are in the process of outlawing that in a lot of states in the US Right now. They've removed employment protection so you can be fired now. And in an economy like this, people are looking for an excuse to fire. So I moved to another state. I moved to Minnesota because they have protections for trans people. I can receive medical care here, but I miss my home. You know, it's. It's a very interesting tension of missing the place. That also was a pressure, a formative pressure on you throughout your development. And so I started looking for, like, where can I find those stories, that representation? And there's no podcasts, and there's not media. It's very niche, if you find it. And it wasn't funny. All the times I want to tell stories about where I'm from, it's the trauma, right? It's the opioid epidemic. It's the. The hardship of living as a person of colour or a trans person where I'm from. And that stuff is totally valid. I experience those things. But I don't want to think about only that all the time when I think about my home, My family still lives there. And so I had this friend that I happened to meet when we went for our PhD program was somewhere outside the region, too. And I met her, and I was like, where are you from? We sort of recognized each other. And I remember we always laugh whenever we talk, even when we're talking about the hard things. That's part of our culture is we relate to one another. We support one another through humor. So I messaged her, and I said, hey, what do you know about podcasting? First of all, because neither one of us are podcasters, but it was the only way I could think of to bring this to fruition, because we are states away from each other. I said, here's what I'm thinking. We just get on and talk like we normally would. We lightly structure it with some recurring segments. I teach myself how to edit, and we go from there. And so that's what we did. And there are folks who resonate with both of those identities, like queer Appalachians who listen. But we have actually a pretty large number of listeners who are neither queer nor Appalachian who just are interested in what we have to say.
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Claire Waite Brown: Yeah, what a lot of people find is that to communicate what they want to communicate, the best way is through a podcast because you can do it your way and then you can distribute it and people can find it, they can listen anywhere. There could be Appalachians all over the world that are interested in like you are remembering home and feeling a bit of home. You have a, a very free style and it comes across really well. It comes across conversationally, but not wasted. You're not wasting my time. How much planning do you do before you get behind the mic for your recording session?
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Dash: That's good to hear because we do worry about that because there is a lot of just completely off the cuff improv. But we do, you know, try to without killing the vibe or, you know, crushing the spontaneity of it. We do in advance plan a couple of little things that folks can always expect to hear. One of the first kind of jokes we made was that a sponsor is never going to touch us with a ten foot pole. Right. Like we are problematic as all get out. Like people are more likely to support a queer podcast than they are an Appalachian one. There's a whole complex history to why the region we're from is the whipping boy of the whole country. Our stories aren't going to want to be heard and unfortunately for the people who aren't interested in hearing about that, I have a PhD in explaining why that is. You know, I. My doctorate is in cultural studies and I'm very familiar with the history of white supremacy in the US Anyway, so we started making the sponsor thing in advance. We just thought it would be funny to make up what a sponsor of a podcast of ours like might sound like. And we just, you know, try to have fun with that. The other one is what if we found something interesting that people might not? Because we have a lot of listeners from outside the region. So what about some sort of fact about Appalachia that people might be surprised by? So we prepare those in advance, of course, every week. And I'm often scribbling I'll be watching something or be on my walk. So it's. I'm pretty isolated where I live now and I'll be thinking of things I want to talk to Beck about. I'll think of a dumb question to ask her or I'll say something that made me think of her or I'll remember a story she told me. And so I'm kind of like jotting down things it might be fun to revisit with her or to, to get new insight from her on with an audience See what happens in that way. I'm not sure about her process, really. She's the talent, you know, I didn't ask her to be my co host because she knows a lot about podcasting. She is just. You never feel, like, invisible when you're with her. She has this way of telling stories about her own life that invites you in.
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Claire Waite Brown: You must tell her a little bit about what you're going to talk about.
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Dash: Usually.
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Claire Waite Brown: No, no, no. Okay, brilliant.
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Dash: I'll hit her with it. If it works, then it stays. If it doesn't work, then I cut it out and do something different.
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Claire Waite Brown: And you both are working full time. How are you fitting this in? Especially you. If you're doing the editing, for example, and stuff around it, do you find that problematic? Easy.
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Dash: It's tight. A lot of times, especially having had to kind of teach myself how to do this from a cold start. I'm also hearing impaired, so it's likely that the quality varies from episode to episode. I depend on certain tools to tell me what's happening. I used a script to edit. Yeah, the time, it. It can be a bit of a crunch. And that's one of the reasons why a lot of it is so unstructured, because I don't want to add prep time. One of the things I'm conscious of is the fact that the show remains doable because it stays fun. The people who do like it, what they like about it is the fact that we're clearly having fun. So I don't want to introduce any extra work that would maybe squash that. So that kind of helps. But the work, you squeeze it in into your off hours, you try to chip away at it throughout the week. You try to remember what you were on about the last time you logged in to look at it. And you just do your best. If you're getting something out of it and a couple few people who are listening to it are getting something out of it, it's worth staying up a little late a couple nights a week.
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Claire Waite Brown: Yeah. You spoke about the people who listen to it, like, certain things. Does that mean you've had some interaction with listeners? And if so, how has that come about?
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Dash: Yeah, there's actually a few places where we have, like, little communities, so we get regular comments on Spotify. So each episode will have a couple comments under it. And I. I would say in the show, like, hey, y', all, just so you know, Spotify lets you comment on it, and I'd maybe ask them a question. So far, they aren't answering my questions. They're just kind of bringing up things that they relate to or answering other questions that I didn't realize I had asked. This week's episode, we were talking about Jehovah's Witnesses, and a queer ex Jehovah's Witness commented on it with some insight. I love that kind of thing. Our listeners, they have their own, like, experiences on YouTube. There's three or four people who comment regularly on pretty much every episode. And it's kind of cool because it's like we're having a conversation. One of my favorite comments of all time was someone commented, I just love this channel because I know that I'm gonna get a feeling like I had when I was young without having to worry that I'm gonna be, like, sidetracked over into reliving trauma. And it, like, hearing that, like, reading that, I suppose, was so validating because it's like, exactly what we want. We want to be able to, like, go back to those shared experiences, acknowledge that they were hard, but not relive them as though they are still limiting us. And then we actually have a pretty active Facebook friend group, I guess you'd call it. It's not a Facebook page either. It's just because I didn't know how to do that. I didn't know how to make a page. So I just. It's a profile. And so people started adding us as friends. And so sometimes now I'll post something silly on there or ask a question. If we want to review a film, I'll post it on there. Like, hey, what would be funny to hear us talk about? And we got like 20 something responses of all these movies. And so that's how we started to introduce the film review. That was not on our radar at all when we first started talking. It wasn't even six months into the show that we started to get to have those kind of experiences. And then we set up an email so folks could contact us. A distant cousin contacted me, was like, I heard you mention something on a show. Is this person you're talking about? And then I talked to my mom. I said, hey, do you recognize this name? It was literally a distant cousin was listening to my podcast. Somebody I'd never met was so cool.
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Claire Waite Brown: Yeah, that's really good to have that connection, because often podcasters talk about shouting into the void and, you know, not getting any response back. So that's really good that you do. The other thing we often talk about in podcasting, and I don't call it monetization, I call it financial Support. Do you have any mechanisms in place for getting financial support from your listeners?
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Dash: There's a couple little ways. So I use Captivate to host and there's a thing on there you can set up with tips. I have not really done it. Somebody sent us one. It was actually the cousin sent us one and that's how I found out you could do it. And we have a coffee. It's not really about financial support. We used it for the bot to plug into a discord. So when we first started out, because we are not an easy topic for some folks to tolerate, we were review bombed. So folks who didn't listen to the show were going on to Apple specifically and just rating us one star. No review or anything, just one star. One star. One star. And I traced it and it was from Reddit. I was participating in Reddit, so I stopped doing that. But anyway, so we, we created a discord for an event for Halloween and I didn't want it to be open to everybody. I've never done something like that before. We're not streamers. I don't know what I'm doing. So I created a coffee as a way to kind of vet people who came into the discord and a person gave us $10 on it. So that's the only monetization we have. It's one of the many things that I don't know anything about.
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Claire Waite Brown: Cool. We might come to some more things about that later. Let's go to podcasting. Whether your experience or what you see when you see other podcasts, what is one thing that frustrates you about the podcast world and one thing that excites you?
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Dash: So far, what I have experienced about the podcast world is that it is classed as poor white trash. I have infiltrated my share of middle class, white collar spaces. Right. I went to grad school, I got a job at a university. So I'm accustomed to that gap. And it's nearly impenetrable in the podcasting world. The base assumption of the level of knowledge and the level of resources that a person has to enter into podcasting is incredible. So I'm a teacher, I'm a professor, but I'm not like rolling in it. I don't know about over there. We don't, we don't make riches. So my operating budget is posting and recording software and stuff like that. So if you want to say go to one of the places to learn about podcasting, one of the conferences or something, hundreds and hundreds of dollars. So it's like often when I'M looking at something I could learn from. I'm deciding. I'm like, okay, so that's my mortgage. Or I could go and pursue my passion. And the indie podcasting world has disintegrated, maybe due to this kind of stratification. I don't know. But right about the time we started to get into it, the online indie podcasting communities began to just go away. There's a. A lot of, like, grinding your gears and trial and error to learning to be a podcaster without connections and resources.
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Claire Waite Brown: When did you start? I forgot to ask that.
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Dash: We started a year ago, actually. We celebrated our year whenever we reviewed the Foxy Merkins.
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Claire Waite Brown: That was the one I was listening to today while walking the dog. Sorry. So back to what about something exciting then? Let's pick it up.
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Dash: Yeah. I love the Connection piece. I'm a communications person at heart. It's what I studied in grad school. And I am obsessed with storytelling. I think a medium like podcasting was inevitable. But there's these jokes about, like, oh, God, another podcast, maybe. Sure. Of a certain type. If you want me to believe that there are too many podcasts out there, you're gonna need to make a better case that there are enough voices, because there are so many experiences that should be in people's ears that just aren't. So. I love the potential of podcasting for that kind of thing, especially in a place. In a place like where I live. That's my context. I'm sure there's plenty of other geographic locations that can relate to this as well, but, like the 21st century diaspora of people, my generation is the first one to move away from Appalachia, and I'm struggling to figure out what that looks like. My mother is sick right now. I'm thousands of miles away. I don't know how many miles. Yeah, probably. And I gotta figure out, like, okay, when does she become ill enough that I pause my life and, you know, there's no roadmap for the life we're living right now geographically, and I love podcasting for that.
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Claire Waite Brown: Yeah, I completely agree. Nobody says there's too many books in
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Dash: the world and there's some really bad ones out there. Right. Like, there's some terrible books. Nobody's ever read a book so bad. They went, that's it. That's the last book that should ever exist.
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Claire Waite Brown: Yeah, exactly. And then in my. My personal podcast, Creativity Found, I speak with people who have found their creativity later in life, and I'm speaking to people all over the world who are now I say ordinary people because on the telly we see actors and celebrities, whereas these are stories that any ordinary person can also relate to because it's another ordinary person that's telling it and they're having the opportunity to tell it and it be heard anywhere and by who knows how many people. It's a wonderful medium. I'm going to move on to Podcasting 2.0 and what do you know about Podcasting 2.0? About any features or anything at all?
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Dash: Nothing functional. I know what its goals are which is this cross platform connectivity centralization opportunity. Don't know how it works.
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Claire Waite Brown: People started coming up with ideas for extra things that you could wrap around the audio and they are great ideas. For example, I know you do transcripts and a lot more people have taken that on. But not all the apps or hosting companies support all of the Podcasting 2.0 features. So it does get a bit muddy. You were talking about comments in Spotify. Can you answer those comments in Spotify?
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Dash: There's an a creator specific portal so I can answer them there. Spotify excels in that in a way that Apple does not, in my opinion.
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Claire Waite Brown: That made me think of comments as part of Podcasting 2.0. So there is a tag, it's called boosts. And the idea was, was that you could leave a comment for a show and attach a micro payment. So a small payment to that comment and then the podcaster can read that comment and anybody else that is listening to that show, looking at those comments can see those comments and answer those comments. Which is a lot of fun when you like we were talking about interactivity and you've done well to get interactivity. The ideal was that at some point the comments from the different apps would all be readable across the different apps, which we haven't quite got to yet. But from a TrueFans point of view, we have it set up so that people can comment on your show. They don't have to attach a payment. They can if they want to, any payment they like and then you can answer it. And so that gets that bit of interactivity there. The other one I always like to promote is Podroll. I don't know if you know about that one.
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Dash: I've seen it mentioned in one of the newsletters I follow.
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Claire Waite Brown: What it is is your recommendations. So on your show you put your recommendations for shows that you obviously recommend. But what it shows is that these are podcasts that this host respects and trusts.
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Dash: Awesome.
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Claire Waite Brown: And equally you can return the favour with other shows recommending you now, with Captivate, I know that they don't have Podroll. Podroll is something that you can do with TrueFans on its own, if you wanted to. When you claim your show, which you're going to want to do, and I'll tell you why in a minute, you can then access this Creators Dashboard and you can do some other extra things in there. They'll only show up in TrueFans. They won't go to the other apps. But that's just some extra stuff that you might want to have a look at. And then the other reason I want you to claim your show is because I have been streaming micropayments for every minute that I listen to your episode. What that means is what will happen for you as a creator is you can go into TrueFans. You find your show on your cover art. There's a little icon on the top right, and it says, claim your show. And you can click on that. And this is where you put in your email address that is connected to your RSS feed. So that proves that you're the owner of the show. TrueFans will give you a digital wallet that you can put money into using Stripe. You can also take money out of it when you earn lots and lots of money in the future. And what you'll find then is I've been streaming those payments to you, and TrueFans has been keeping them safe for you in a wallet until you claim it. So it's just another way that maybe listeners might want to support you quite easily and without thinking about it, by setting a very small payment. Don't expect to get much more than a couple of cents from me personally.
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Sam Sethi: But.
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Claire Waite Brown: But just to show you how it works. Does that make sense?
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Dash: Yeah. So I was trying to read about Podcasting 2.0, and I got to that and I was like, okay, I don't understand what's happening. Cause it's something to do with SATs or something.
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Claire Waite Brown: Yes.
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Dash: And I was like, all right, I've reached my limit of understanding.
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Claire Waite Brown: I think that is what a lot of people do. I did a podcast called Podcasting 2.0 in Practice, which breaks everything down little by little. Boosts comes quite late in the series. And the reason that they used sats, which is a very small part of Bitcoin, is that because you could use very small amounts. So rather than saying, I'm going to give you $10, you can use. So, for example, I set it as five sats per minute, which is a very small amount. But what TrueFans does is it takes that element of it away from you. So you don't need to know unless you want to. The SAT value, you can look at it in dollars and cents value and you pay into the account in dollars and cents and you'll be able to take out from the account in dollars and cents. You're not on an Albi wallet. You're not on a Bitcoin wallet. You're on just a TrueFans wallet. Have a little play around, have a listen toPodcasting 2.0 in Practice it'll make it a bit clearer, but a lot of people turn off when you mention bitcoin. Yeah, thanks so much for speaking with me today, Dash. Tell me again the name of the show and generally where people can connect with you.
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Dash: Yeah, it's been great. We're queer Next. It's all one word. You can email us@mailbagqueernecks.com friend us on Facebook, whatever you want to do, and come hang out with us. We're just two old friends chatting on the front porch and we'd love to have you.
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Claire Waite Brown: Thank you so much. If you'd like to chat with us about your indie podcast or how you can help independent podcasters, send a comment or super comment in TrueFans to any Creators episode by clicking on the Speech bubble icon or on the comments tab. Look out for future guests, including Denise Hamilton Mace, talking about her podcast Mindful Drinking and Moderation in Midlife.
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Sam Sethi: Any questions for me this week, Claire?
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Claire Waite Brown: Yes. You see, I've noticed a new feature in my advanced tab in my Creators Dashboard for all of my shows. This pops up there is the word contacts with a plus sign. It says where listeners can reach you. The link can be URL, mail to tel or SMS address. Can you explain to me about this new feature, please?
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Sam Sethi: Yeah. Alex Sanfilippo, who we know very well, and Daniel J. Lewis have both been pushing for a booking tag and a contacts tag. The idea was we took our email from RSS feeds about two, three years ago, which was a big mistake by the industry. But a lot of people want to know, do you accept guests? And then if you do, how can I then become a guest on your show? Now what we've done in the Podcasting 2.0 community is come up with a new contacts tag. And the idea behind this tag is that you can have multiple different options. One might be how you can give me feedback, one might be how you can email me or how you can actually book to become a guest. And the easiest way is to then have an external link. There's no link currently onto the podcast page or to any other page in your profile, but it's just an external link to some method. It could be to WhatsApp, it could be to your email, it could be to anything else. And it's a very flexible tag. So it's a nice way to allow you to put your information out for people who want to connect with you. Now we've put that icon, it's the icon on your podcast page underneath the Become a fan or support this show button. You click on that and then choose one of the options and connect with the podcaster.
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Claire Waite Brown: Yeah, I think it works really well. It's like on websites often in the header, in the footer, people will have their social media links and everything. So it's really easy to find. And this is similar to that. So I've added it for this show so you can go and have a look. You can choose your link, you can choose how that link is described. I have added for this show, you click on that symbol be a guest, which links to where you can contact me to be a guest. Submit to be featured on the TrueFans home screen, which is something I've spoken about before. It's a submission form and I've added Join, our demo of the network feed. So that's the booking page for our new live event. So it's a bit like a link tree that you see in social media places as well, where you go to one place and you see all the different links and you choose the one that you need. I think it's really fun.
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Sam Sethi: I think it's version 1.0. I think what we wanted to do is put it out early. It hasn't been fully approved by the podcast 2.0 community. So that's the next phase. But also within TrueFans itself, we've got features in the Creators Dashboard which you can set for Yes, I accept guests. No, I don't. And we're thinking now if you set that, no, I don't accept Best, then we just don't put the booking option within your contacts. Right. Or for example, we've got your social media links on your profile. Do we automatically populate this as well so you don't have to do it twice? So little things like that that I think we will just have a five second breather and have a look at the functionality of it all. But I think we can improve it. But I think it's a good first option.
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Claire Waite Brown: Yeah, do let us know if you've given it a go. Anybody listeners out there at any point in the future, tell us what you've used it for, tell us what you've liked, tell us what you think could be done differently. Is that okay to ask that?
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Sam Sethi: Sam Absolutely, yeah. No, I mean we had, we had somebody already ask can we add another option for collaboration? I'd like to collaborate with you on X. Do you accept that? And if you do, how do I connect with you?
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Claire Waite Brown: So yeah, brilliant. Thank you.
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Sam Sethi: Claire. Have we had any messages since the last episode?
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Claire Waite Brown: We have had two from Martin Lindeskog. First, he says, I will follow Stephanie Fuccio's tips and suggestions and go back to old episodes of my first podcast, Ego Netcast. I started podcasting in 2006. Goodness me, Martin, I wasn't born then, he continues. My podcast is now powered by Beamly, so it will be interesting to see what could come out of it in the future. I have added episode two, season 10, a Welsh expat in Denmark, the album that helped him settle in to my playlist. Q. Here are some ducks in a row with Tutu Tutu Satoshis.
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Sam Sethi: Lovely.
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Claire Waite Brown: Stephanie, who was our guest last time, talked in particular about ways to keep the flame alive for older episodes by looking at titles, show notes and transcripts, for example, and updating them. So the episode Martin mentions there is from Stephanie's podcast geopat, which she sunsetted four years ago, and she is applying her experiments to it now and reporting on them on her substack. So that's the episode that Martin is referring to that he's going to listen to of geopat. Second comment from Martin. This is in relation to you, Sam, who last time you were getting slightly frustrated about the lack of marketing for Podcasting 2.0. Moi?
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Sam Sethi: Never.
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Claire Waite Brown: Martin says, I will continue to talk about Podcasting 2.0 in different ways in episode 28 of Tea Party Media. I go through funding Tag, Location, Pod, Roll and Social Interact. Claire and Sam, keep up your great work. Here is a Super comment with 1701 Satoshi's starship booster gram. Thank you so much Martin.
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Sam Sethi: Thank you. Yes, Martin's brilliant. He is a real cheerleader for Podcasting 2.0. He does it not just with this show, but he does it on Podcasting 2.0 with Adam and Dave Jones does it with your shows. He does it with power. He is a real person who connects with a lot of different people and is a real supporter. So thank you for doing that. I think my frustration at the Lack of marketing hasn't obeyed. I still think it's there. And there's a really interesting interview in Podnews Daily with the CEO of Blubrry talking about is Podcasting 2.0 fringe or is it mainstream? Because I think it has jumped from being fringe into mainstream. We are seeing so many more platforms using some, if not all of the tags. I just think we need as a collective to promote and to cheerlead a little bit more. You're very good at this, Claire. I know there's lots of other people who do, but we need to get out of a little bubble and get into more people doing it as well.
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Claire Waite Brown: Yeah. The key to it is being able to tell people why it's good, how it's going to help you. Then we have the matter of how easy is it to do the thing, which is the next step if you're unTrueFans, it's very easy. You can do anything and if not,
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Sam Sethi: you can ask us.
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Claire Waite Brown: Yeah, this isn't a fanbox. This is something I wanted to talk about and it's about our submission to be featured on the TrueFans home page. There is a link in the show notes if you would like me to consider your podcast for a feature you can apply to be featured in the Podcasts We're Loving and all the close to home lists. But I have added a new stipulation to this which is that you need to have claimed your show to be featured if you submitted a form before the end of September this year, 2026. That stipulation wasn't on the form then it is now. So you will need to check that you have claimed your show because if you have not, I will be a very mean person and I will unfeature your show. And we don't want that. No, these as I mentioned are open to indie podcasters and the way that it works is podcasts will appear at the front or front ish of those lists whenever a new episode is released. So it is not a time specific feature and then you disappear. Instead you will keep popping up for audiences to see as long as you keep releasing new episodes.
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Sam Sethi: And why do you want podcasters to claim their shows, Claire?
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Claire Waite Brown: It's a two way street, Sam. While I am very happy to showcase quality, creative, innovative independent productions so that the TrueFans listeners can more easily, easily discover them, I would also like those podcasts to give a little something back in return by claiming your show. The way I see it is you will start to really explore what TrueFans has to offer for you as creators. From discovery tools such as Podroll and our new network feature, to interactivity features such as transcripts, comments, chapters and of course, monetization opportunities. From subscriptions, premium content, attaching payments to comments and reviews, and streaming small payments for time listened, which is something I do for all the podcasters I interview on creators. Then there are the options to add blog posts, merch events, the new contact feature that we've just talked about, and soon send your newsletters directly from TrueFans. Once creators experience the opportunities they can glean from being more involved with TrueFans, they can encourage their audience to become fans of their shows over here too, because they'll know what the advantages are both for listener and creator. Claiming a show requires you to open a free TrueFans account and then claim the show, of course. And I have added a link in the show Notes to a blog post that shows you exactly how to do this. I think that this little bit of commitment hopefully will start to build a better relationship between us as the app and them as the creator. And I have been lucky enough actually Sam, to have a number of one to ones with podcasters who have submitted for a feature which has just been lovely. If you want to do that too, there is a link in the show notes and I can tell you about specific stuff, you can ask me questions, whatever you want to know. I also. Last bit for me, I will shut up soon. I also like to share about our featured podcasts to our Instagram stories and collaborate on posts sometimes too. So the relationship does not stop when I click on that featured toggle. This is a continuing supportive partnership and I want to get to know you better and build our community. So that's. Why is that okay?
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Sam Sethi: That's brilliant. No, I. I think it's called value for value. Right. We would like to give you value in promoting you, featuring you on our home page and talking about you. And I think it's little to ask to open an account for free and just sign up. We don't ask you to do any more than that. We're not asking you to switch your hosting, we're not asking you to do anything else. But as you discover more of our platform, we would love you to do that. Of course we would. Or certainly experiment with some of the tags. TrueFans is the only podcast app that supports all of the new Podcasting 2.0 features. Tags, whatever you want to call them. So I think you know, that's a fair exchange.
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Claire Waite Brown: Thank you. Anything happening in the podcasty world, Sam, let me think.
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Sam Sethi: Oh, yes, we've got our own event coming up, haven't we, Claire? Tell me more about it.
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Claire Waite Brown: We have, yes. So I'm really excited about this. Another one of our discovery features is our network feed. And the way I thought would be best to show people how this works is to do it in real time with you saying all the right words and me hopefully doing all the right things. So the network feed on TrueFans, I see it as another shop window. So this might be for you as an established network, this might be for you as a collaborative group, as a community. Maybe you just want to connect with other people in your niche and promote other podcasts that way. So that's what our network feed can do. It can give you that shop window where people can see the shows they like, see what other shows are in that network. That event is on the 29th of October, 5pm UK time. And if you would like to be part of the demo, or at least have the chance to be part of the demo, you do need to have claimed your show. So go back to the last chapter and find out how to claim your show.
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Sam Sethi: Excellent. I know. I'm looking forward to that. I think once people begin to understand the power of what network feeds are, if you're talking about a topic and you've got other podcasts in your network that talk about the topic, fans might like to also hear from those other podcasts. So it's, it's a win, win, win really. And we just want to show you how easy it is to set them up and how easy it is to invite others into your network and manage them and in the analytics, see the effect of your network. Yeah, and that's it for this week. Claire Audio is recorded on Riverside. It's edited by you, and we're hosted
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Claire Waite Brown: by TrueFans on the TrueFans app. Click on the purple button and become a fan of this podcast to be informed of when new episodes are released.
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Sam Sethi: You can support us by streaming sats from your True Friends wallet. Like Martin Linderskog. You can click on the currency or bitcoin icon under the play button, or leave us a super comment by clicking on the speech bubble icon.
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Claire Waite Brown: We would love to have you follow us on Instagram or threads @truefans fm. You can find out more about how to use the features of the TrueFans platform by listening to our sister podcast, Fanzone. You can also find a lovely selection of blog posts at TrueFans.FM/Blog and I am adding to those as we speak.
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Dash: I moved to another state. I moved to Minnesota because they have protections for trans people. I can receive medical care here, but I miss my home. You know, it's. It's a very interesting tension of missing the place. That also was a pressure, a formative pressure on you.
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Sam Sethi: Now, what we've done in the Podcasting 2.0 community is come up with a new contacts tag. And the idea behind this tag is that you can have multiple different options. One might be how you can give me feedback. One might be how you can email me or how you can actually book to become a guest.
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Claire Waite Brown: So it's a bit like a link tree that you see in social media places as well, where you go to one place and you see all the different links. You choose the one that you need. I think it's really fun. Welcome to Creators from TrueFans, the podcast that, like TrueFans itself, showcases and supports independent podcasting. I'm Claire Waite Brown, Head of Community at TrueFans.
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Sam Sethi: And I'm Sam Sethi, the CEO of TrueFans.
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Claire Waite Brown: Download the TrueFans app to not only listen to podcasts from around the world, but interact with their creators and start paying the shows you value.
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Sam Sethi: Click on the Big purple Become a Fan button to be notified or emailed when new episodes of this podcast are released.
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Claire Waite Brown: And follow Ruef TrueFans FM on Instagram or threads to be kept up to date on all the latest TrueFans features designed to improve discovery, interactivity and monetization opportunities for podcasts and their creators.
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Sam Sethi: Hi, Claire.
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Claire Waite Brown: Hi, Sam. How are you doing?
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Sam Sethi: I'm good, I'm good. Now, Claire, who are we featuring on this episode?
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Claire Waite Brown: I'm chatting with Dash today. Hi, Dash, how are you?
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Dash: I'm well. How are you, Claire?
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Claire Waite Brown: I'm very good, thank you. Start by telling me the name of your podcast and what it's all about, please.
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Dash: Yeah. I'm one half of the co hosting team and producer of Queer Next Podcast. It's hard to describe, but we're basically a buddy chat show about what's it like Coming up Queer in Appalachia. The context of both of those things is a big influence on the creation and trajectory of the show. Appalachia is a region in America that is perhaps its most impoverished, and it's often viewed in a larger American United States Zeitgeist as regressive and very conservative politically. And it certainly has those elements, but it also is one of the most diverse regions in the country. And so we found ourselves kind of positioned to tell an interesting story. About where we're from, but we also, due to politics in the US Right now, have had to leave. So I. I'm a transgender man, and so it's not very easy or possible at all to receive medical care where I am from. So they, like, are in the process of outlawing that in a lot of states in the US Right now. They've removed employment protection so you can be fired now. And in an economy like this, people are looking for an excuse to fire. So I moved to another state. I moved to Minnesota because they have protections for trans people. I can receive medical care here, but I miss my home. You know, it's. It's a very interesting tension of missing the place. That also was a pressure, a formative pressure on you throughout your development. And so I started looking for, like, where can I find those stories, that representation? And there's no podcasts, and there's not media. It's very niche, if you find it. And it wasn't funny. All the times I want to tell stories about where I'm from, it's the trauma, right? It's the opioid epidemic. It's the. The hardship of living as a person of colour or a trans person where I'm from. And that stuff is totally valid. I experience those things. But I don't want to think about only that all the time when I think about my home, My family still lives there. And so I had this friend that I happened to meet when we went for our PhD program was somewhere outside the region, too. And I met her, and I was like, where are you from? We sort of recognized each other. And I remember we always laugh whenever we talk, even when we're talking about the hard things. That's part of our culture is we relate to one another. We support one another through humor. So I messaged her, and I said, hey, what do you know about podcasting? First of all, because neither one of us are podcasters, but it was the only way I could think of to bring this to fruition, because we are states away from each other. I said, here's what I'm thinking. We just get on and talk like we normally would. We lightly structure it with some recurring segments. I teach myself how to edit, and we go from there. And so that's what we did. And there are folks who resonate with both of those identities, like queer Appalachians who listen. But we have actually a pretty large number of listeners who are neither queer nor Appalachian who just are interested in what we have to say.
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Claire Waite Brown: Yeah, what a lot of people find is that to communicate what they want to communicate, the best way is through a podcast because you can do it your way and then you can distribute it and people can find it, they can listen anywhere. There could be Appalachians all over the world that are interested in like you are remembering home and feeling a bit of home. You have a, a very free style and it comes across really well. It comes across conversationally, but not wasted. You're not wasting my time. How much planning do you do before you get behind the mic for your recording session?
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Dash: That's good to hear because we do worry about that because there is a lot of just completely off the cuff improv. But we do, you know, try to without killing the vibe or, you know, crushing the spontaneity of it. We do in advance plan a couple of little things that folks can always expect to hear. One of the first kind of jokes we made was that a sponsor is never going to touch us with a ten foot pole. Right. Like we are problematic as all get out. Like people are more likely to support a queer podcast than they are an Appalachian one. There's a whole complex history to why the region we're from is the whipping boy of the whole country. Our stories aren't going to want to be heard and unfortunately for the people who aren't interested in hearing about that, I have a PhD in explaining why that is. You know, I. My doctorate is in cultural studies and I'm very familiar with the history of white supremacy in the US Anyway, so we started making the sponsor thing in advance. We just thought it would be funny to make up what a sponsor of a podcast of ours like might sound like. And we just, you know, try to have fun with that. The other one is what if we found something interesting that people might not? Because we have a lot of listeners from outside the region. So what about some sort of fact about Appalachia that people might be surprised by? So we prepare those in advance, of course, every week. And I'm often scribbling I'll be watching something or be on my walk. So it's. I'm pretty isolated where I live now and I'll be thinking of things I want to talk to Beck about. I'll think of a dumb question to ask her or I'll say something that made me think of her or I'll remember a story she told me. And so I'm kind of like jotting down things it might be fun to revisit with her or to, to get new insight from her on with an audience See what happens in that way. I'm not sure about her process, really. She's the talent, you know, I didn't ask her to be my co host because she knows a lot about podcasting. She is just. You never feel, like, invisible when you're with her. She has this way of telling stories about her own life that invites you in.
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Claire Waite Brown: You must tell her a little bit about what you're going to talk about.
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Dash: Usually.
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Claire Waite Brown: No, no, no. Okay, brilliant.
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Dash: I'll hit her with it. If it works, then it stays. If it doesn't work, then I cut it out and do something different.
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Claire Waite Brown: And you both are working full time. How are you fitting this in? Especially you. If you're doing the editing, for example, and stuff around it, do you find that problematic? Easy.
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Dash: It's tight. A lot of times, especially having had to kind of teach myself how to do this from a cold start. I'm also hearing impaired, so it's likely that the quality varies from episode to episode. I depend on certain tools to tell me what's happening. I used a script to edit. Yeah, the time, it. It can be a bit of a crunch. And that's one of the reasons why a lot of it is so unstructured, because I don't want to add prep time. One of the things I'm conscious of is the fact that the show remains doable because it stays fun. The people who do like it, what they like about it is the fact that we're clearly having fun. So I don't want to introduce any extra work that would maybe squash that. So that kind of helps. But the work, you squeeze it in into your off hours, you try to chip away at it throughout the week. You try to remember what you were on about the last time you logged in to look at it. And you just do your best. If you're getting something out of it and a couple few people who are listening to it are getting something out of it, it's worth staying up a little late a couple nights a week.
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Claire Waite Brown: Yeah. You spoke about the people who listen to it, like, certain things. Does that mean you've had some interaction with listeners? And if so, how has that come about?
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Dash: Yeah, there's actually a few places where we have, like, little communities, so we get regular comments on Spotify. So each episode will have a couple comments under it. And I. I would say in the show, like, hey, y', all, just so you know, Spotify lets you comment on it, and I'd maybe ask them a question. So far, they aren't answering my questions. They're just kind of bringing up things that they relate to or answering other questions that I didn't realize I had asked. This week's episode, we were talking about Jehovah's Witnesses, and a queer ex Jehovah's Witness commented on it with some insight. I love that kind of thing. Our listeners, they have their own, like, experiences on YouTube. There's three or four people who comment regularly on pretty much every episode. And it's kind of cool because it's like we're having a conversation. One of my favorite comments of all time was someone commented, I just love this channel because I know that I'm gonna get a feeling like I had when I was young without having to worry that I'm gonna be, like, sidetracked over into reliving trauma. And it, like, hearing that, like, reading that, I suppose, was so validating because it's like, exactly what we want. We want to be able to, like, go back to those shared experiences, acknowledge that they were hard, but not relive them as though they are still limiting us. And then we actually have a pretty active Facebook friend group, I guess you'd call it. It's not a Facebook page either. It's just because I didn't know how to do that. I didn't know how to make a page. So I just. It's a profile. And so people started adding us as friends. And so sometimes now I'll post something silly on there or ask a question. If we want to review a film, I'll post it on there. Like, hey, what would be funny to hear us talk about? And we got like 20 something responses of all these movies. And so that's how we started to introduce the film review. That was not on our radar at all when we first started talking. It wasn't even six months into the show that we started to get to have those kind of experiences. And then we set up an email so folks could contact us. A distant cousin contacted me, was like, I heard you mention something on a show. Is this person you're talking about? And then I talked to my mom. I said, hey, do you recognize this name? It was literally a distant cousin was listening to my podcast. Somebody I'd never met was so cool.
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Claire Waite Brown: Yeah, that's really good to have that connection, because often podcasters talk about shouting into the void and, you know, not getting any response back. So that's really good that you do. The other thing we often talk about in podcasting, and I don't call it monetization, I call it financial Support. Do you have any mechanisms in place for getting financial support from your listeners?
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Dash: There's a couple little ways. So I use Captivate to host and there's a thing on there you can set up with tips. I have not really done it. Somebody sent us one. It was actually the cousin sent us one and that's how I found out you could do it. And we have a coffee. It's not really about financial support. We used it for the bot to plug into a discord. So when we first started out, because we are not an easy topic for some folks to tolerate, we were review bombed. So folks who didn't listen to the show were going on to Apple specifically and just rating us one star. No review or anything, just one star. One star. One star. And I traced it and it was from Reddit. I was participating in Reddit, so I stopped doing that. But anyway, so we, we created a discord for an event for Halloween and I didn't want it to be open to everybody. I've never done something like that before. We're not streamers. I don't know what I'm doing. So I created a coffee as a way to kind of vet people who came into the discord and a person gave us $10 on it. So that's the only monetization we have. It's one of the many things that I don't know anything about.
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Claire Waite Brown: Cool. We might come to some more things about that later. Let's go to podcasting. Whether your experience or what you see when you see other podcasts, what is one thing that frustrates you about the podcast world and one thing that excites you?
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Dash: So far, what I have experienced about the podcast world is that it is classed as poor white trash. I have infiltrated my share of middle class, white collar spaces. Right. I went to grad school, I got a job at a university. So I'm accustomed to that gap. And it's nearly impenetrable in the podcasting world. The base assumption of the level of knowledge and the level of resources that a person has to enter into podcasting is incredible. So I'm a teacher, I'm a professor, but I'm not like rolling in it. I don't know about over there. We don't, we don't make riches. So my operating budget is posting and recording software and stuff like that. So if you want to say go to one of the places to learn about podcasting, one of the conferences or something, hundreds and hundreds of dollars. So it's like often when I'M looking at something I could learn from. I'm deciding. I'm like, okay, so that's my mortgage. Or I could go and pursue my passion. And the indie podcasting world has disintegrated, maybe due to this kind of stratification. I don't know. But right about the time we started to get into it, the online indie podcasting communities began to just go away. There's a. A lot of, like, grinding your gears and trial and error to learning to be a podcaster without connections and resources.
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Claire Waite Brown: When did you start? I forgot to ask that.
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Dash: We started a year ago, actually. We celebrated our year whenever we reviewed the Foxy Merkins.
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Claire Waite Brown: That was the one I was listening to today while walking the dog. Sorry. So back to what about something exciting then? Let's pick it up.
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Dash: Yeah. I love the Connection piece. I'm a communications person at heart. It's what I studied in grad school. And I am obsessed with storytelling. I think a medium like podcasting was inevitable. But there's these jokes about, like, oh, God, another podcast, maybe. Sure. Of a certain type. If you want me to believe that there are too many podcasts out there, you're gonna need to make a better case that there are enough voices, because there are so many experiences that should be in people's ears that just aren't. So. I love the potential of podcasting for that kind of thing, especially in a place. In a place like where I live. That's my context. I'm sure there's plenty of other geographic locations that can relate to this as well, but, like the 21st century diaspora of people, my generation is the first one to move away from Appalachia, and I'm struggling to figure out what that looks like. My mother is sick right now. I'm thousands of miles away. I don't know how many miles. Yeah, probably. And I gotta figure out, like, okay, when does she become ill enough that I pause my life and, you know, there's no roadmap for the life we're living right now geographically, and I love podcasting for that.
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Claire Waite Brown: Yeah, I completely agree. Nobody says there's too many books in
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Dash: the world and there's some really bad ones out there. Right. Like, there's some terrible books. Nobody's ever read a book so bad. They went, that's it. That's the last book that should ever exist.
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Claire Waite Brown: Yeah, exactly. And then in my. My personal podcast, Creativity Found, I speak with people who have found their creativity later in life, and I'm speaking to people all over the world who are now I say ordinary people because on the telly we see actors and celebrities, whereas these are stories that any ordinary person can also relate to because it's another ordinary person that's telling it and they're having the opportunity to tell it and it be heard anywhere and by who knows how many people. It's a wonderful medium. I'm going to move on to Podcasting 2.0 and what do you know about Podcasting 2.0? About any features or anything at all?
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Dash: Nothing functional. I know what its goals are which is this cross platform connectivity centralization opportunity. Don't know how it works.
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Claire Waite Brown: People started coming up with ideas for extra things that you could wrap around the audio and they are great ideas. For example, I know you do transcripts and a lot more people have taken that on. But not all the apps or hosting companies support all of the Podcasting 2.0 features. So it does get a bit muddy. You were talking about comments in Spotify. Can you answer those comments in Spotify?
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Dash: There's an a creator specific portal so I can answer them there. Spotify excels in that in a way that Apple does not, in my opinion.
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Claire Waite Brown: That made me think of comments as part of Podcasting 2.0. So there is a tag, it's called boosts. And the idea was, was that you could leave a comment for a show and attach a micro payment. So a small payment to that comment and then the podcaster can read that comment and anybody else that is listening to that show, looking at those comments can see those comments and answer those comments. Which is a lot of fun when you like we were talking about interactivity and you've done well to get interactivity. The ideal was that at some point the comments from the different apps would all be readable across the different apps, which we haven't quite got to yet. But from a TrueFans point of view, we have it set up so that people can comment on your show. They don't have to attach a payment. They can if they want to, any payment they like and then you can answer it. And so that gets that bit of interactivity there. The other one I always like to promote is Podroll. I don't know if you know about that one.
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Dash: I've seen it mentioned in one of the newsletters I follow.
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Claire Waite Brown: What it is is your recommendations. So on your show you put your recommendations for shows that you obviously recommend. But what it shows is that these are podcasts that this host respects and trusts.
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Dash: Awesome.
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Claire Waite Brown: And equally you can return the favour with other shows recommending you now, with Captivate, I know that they don't have Podroll. Podroll is something that you can do with TrueFans on its own, if you wanted to. When you claim your show, which you're going to want to do, and I'll tell you why in a minute, you can then access this Creators Dashboard and you can do some other extra things in there. They'll only show up in TrueFans. They won't go to the other apps. But that's just some extra stuff that you might want to have a look at. And then the other reason I want you to claim your show is because I have been streaming micropayments for every minute that I listen to your episode. What that means is what will happen for you as a creator is you can go into TrueFans. You find your show on your cover art. There's a little icon on the top right, and it says, claim your show. And you can click on that. And this is where you put in your email address that is connected to your RSS feed. So that proves that you're the owner of the show. TrueFans will give you a digital wallet that you can put money into using Stripe. You can also take money out of it when you earn lots and lots of money in the future. And what you'll find then is I've been streaming those payments to you, and TrueFans has been keeping them safe for you in a wallet until you claim it. So it's just another way that maybe listeners might want to support you quite easily and without thinking about it, by setting a very small payment. Don't expect to get much more than a couple of cents from me personally.
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Sam Sethi: But.
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Claire Waite Brown: But just to show you how it works. Does that make sense?
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Dash: Yeah. So I was trying to read about Podcasting 2.0, and I got to that and I was like, okay, I don't understand what's happening. Cause it's something to do with SATs or something.
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Claire Waite Brown: Yes.
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Dash: And I was like, all right, I've reached my limit of understanding.
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Claire Waite Brown: I think that is what a lot of people do. I did a podcast called Podcasting 2.0 in Practice, which breaks everything down little by little. Boosts comes quite late in the series. And the reason that they used sats, which is a very small part of Bitcoin, is that because you could use very small amounts. So rather than saying, I'm going to give you $10, you can use. So, for example, I set it as five sats per minute, which is a very small amount. But what TrueFans does is it takes that element of it away from you. So you don't need to know unless you want to. The SAT value, you can look at it in dollars and cents value and you pay into the account in dollars and cents and you'll be able to take out from the account in dollars and cents. You're not on an Albi wallet. You're not on a Bitcoin wallet. You're on just a TrueFans wallet. Have a little play around, have a listen toPodcasting 2.0 in Practice it'll make it a bit clearer, but a lot of people turn off when you mention bitcoin. Yeah, thanks so much for speaking with me today, Dash. Tell me again the name of the show and generally where people can connect with you.
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Dash: Yeah, it's been great. We're queer Next. It's all one word. You can email us@mailbagqueernecks.com friend us on Facebook, whatever you want to do, and come hang out with us. We're just two old friends chatting on the front porch and we'd love to have you.
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Claire Waite Brown: Thank you so much. If you'd like to chat with us about your indie podcast or how you can help independent podcasters, send a comment or super comment in TrueFans to any Creators episode by clicking on the Speech bubble icon or on the comments tab. Look out for future guests, including Denise Hamilton Mace, talking about her podcast Mindful Drinking and Moderation in Midlife.
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Sam Sethi: Any questions for me this week, Claire?
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Claire Waite Brown: Yes. You see, I've noticed a new feature in my advanced tab in my Creators Dashboard for all of my shows. This pops up there is the word contacts with a plus sign. It says where listeners can reach you. The link can be URL, mail to tel or SMS address. Can you explain to me about this new feature, please?
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Sam Sethi: Yeah. Alex Sanfilippo, who we know very well, and Daniel J. Lewis have both been pushing for a booking tag and a contacts tag. The idea was we took our email from RSS feeds about two, three years ago, which was a big mistake by the industry. But a lot of people want to know, do you accept guests? And then if you do, how can I then become a guest on your show? Now what we've done in the Podcasting 2.0 community is come up with a new contacts tag. And the idea behind this tag is that you can have multiple different options. One might be how you can give me feedback, one might be how you can email me or how you can actually book to become a guest. And the easiest way is to then have an external link. There's no link currently onto the podcast page or to any other page in your profile, but it's just an external link to some method. It could be to WhatsApp, it could be to your email, it could be to anything else. And it's a very flexible tag. So it's a nice way to allow you to put your information out for people who want to connect with you. Now we've put that icon, it's the icon on your podcast page underneath the Become a fan or support this show button. You click on that and then choose one of the options and connect with the podcaster.
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Claire Waite Brown: Yeah, I think it works really well. It's like on websites often in the header, in the footer, people will have their social media links and everything. So it's really easy to find. And this is similar to that. So I've added it for this show so you can go and have a look. You can choose your link, you can choose how that link is described. I have added for this show, you click on that symbol be a guest, which links to where you can contact me to be a guest. Submit to be featured on the TrueFans home screen, which is something I've spoken about before. It's a submission form and I've added Join, our demo of the network feed. So that's the booking page for our new live event. So it's a bit like a link tree that you see in social media places as well, where you go to one place and you see all the different links and you choose the one that you need. I think it's really fun.
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Sam Sethi: I think it's version 1.0. I think what we wanted to do is put it out early. It hasn't been fully approved by the podcast 2.0 community. So that's the next phase. But also within TrueFans itself, we've got features in the Creators Dashboard which you can set for Yes, I accept guests. No, I don't. And we're thinking now if you set that, no, I don't accept Best, then we just don't put the booking option within your contacts. Right. Or for example, we've got your social media links on your profile. Do we automatically populate this as well so you don't have to do it twice? So little things like that that I think we will just have a five second breather and have a look at the functionality of it all. But I think we can improve it. But I think it's a good first option.
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Claire Waite Brown: Yeah, do let us know if you've given it a go. Anybody listeners out there at any point in the future, tell us what you've used it for, tell us what you've liked, tell us what you think could be done differently. Is that okay to ask that?
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Sam Sethi: Sam Absolutely, yeah. No, I mean we had, we had somebody already ask can we add another option for collaboration? I'd like to collaborate with you on X. Do you accept that? And if you do, how do I connect with you?
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Claire Waite Brown: So yeah, brilliant. Thank you.
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Sam Sethi: Claire. Have we had any messages since the last episode?
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Claire Waite Brown: We have had two from Martin Lindeskog. First, he says, I will follow Stephanie Fuccio's tips and suggestions and go back to old episodes of my first podcast, Ego Netcast. I started podcasting in 2006. Goodness me, Martin, I wasn't born then, he continues. My podcast is now powered by Beamly, so it will be interesting to see what could come out of it in the future. I have added episode two, season 10, a Welsh expat in Denmark, the album that helped him settle in to my playlist. Q. Here are some ducks in a row with Tutu Tutu Satoshis.
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Sam Sethi: Lovely.
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Claire Waite Brown: Stephanie, who was our guest last time, talked in particular about ways to keep the flame alive for older episodes by looking at titles, show notes and transcripts, for example, and updating them. So the episode Martin mentions there is from Stephanie's podcast geopat, which she sunsetted four years ago, and she is applying her experiments to it now and reporting on them on her substack. So that's the episode that Martin is referring to that he's going to listen to of geopat. Second comment from Martin. This is in relation to you, Sam, who last time you were getting slightly frustrated about the lack of marketing for Podcasting 2.0. Moi?
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Sam Sethi: Never.
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Claire Waite Brown: Martin says, I will continue to talk about Podcasting 2.0 in different ways in episode 28 of Tea Party Media. I go through funding Tag, Location, Pod, Roll and Social Interact. Claire and Sam, keep up your great work. Here is a Super comment with 1701 Satoshi's starship booster gram. Thank you so much Martin.
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Sam Sethi: Thank you. Yes, Martin's brilliant. He is a real cheerleader for Podcasting 2.0. He does it not just with this show, but he does it on Podcasting 2.0 with Adam and Dave Jones does it with your shows. He does it with power. He is a real person who connects with a lot of different people and is a real supporter. So thank you for doing that. I think my frustration at the Lack of marketing hasn't obeyed. I still think it's there. And there's a really interesting interview in Podnews Daily with the CEO of Blubrry talking about is Podcasting 2.0 fringe or is it mainstream? Because I think it has jumped from being fringe into mainstream. We are seeing so many more platforms using some, if not all of the tags. I just think we need as a collective to promote and to cheerlead a little bit more. You're very good at this, Claire. I know there's lots of other people who do, but we need to get out of a little bubble and get into more people doing it as well.
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Claire Waite Brown: Yeah. The key to it is being able to tell people why it's good, how it's going to help you. Then we have the matter of how easy is it to do the thing, which is the next step if you're unTrueFans, it's very easy. You can do anything and if not,
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Sam Sethi: you can ask us.
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Claire Waite Brown: Yeah, this isn't a fanbox. This is something I wanted to talk about and it's about our submission to be featured on the TrueFans home page. There is a link in the show notes if you would like me to consider your podcast for a feature you can apply to be featured in the Podcasts We're Loving and all the close to home lists. But I have added a new stipulation to this which is that you need to have claimed your show to be featured if you submitted a form before the end of September this year, 2026. That stipulation wasn't on the form then it is now. So you will need to check that you have claimed your show because if you have not, I will be a very mean person and I will unfeature your show. And we don't want that. No, these as I mentioned are open to indie podcasters and the way that it works is podcasts will appear at the front or front ish of those lists whenever a new episode is released. So it is not a time specific feature and then you disappear. Instead you will keep popping up for audiences to see as long as you keep releasing new episodes.
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Sam Sethi: And why do you want podcasters to claim their shows, Claire?
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Claire Waite Brown: It's a two way street, Sam. While I am very happy to showcase quality, creative, innovative independent productions so that the TrueFans listeners can more easily, easily discover them, I would also like those podcasts to give a little something back in return by claiming your show. The way I see it is you will start to really explore what TrueFans has to offer for you as creators. From discovery tools such as Podroll and our new network feature, to interactivity features such as transcripts, comments, chapters and of course, monetization opportunities. From subscriptions, premium content, attaching payments to comments and reviews, and streaming small payments for time listened, which is something I do for all the podcasters I interview on creators. Then there are the options to add blog posts, merch events, the new contact feature that we've just talked about, and soon send your newsletters directly from TrueFans. Once creators experience the opportunities they can glean from being more involved with TrueFans, they can encourage their audience to become fans of their shows over here too, because they'll know what the advantages are both for listener and creator. Claiming a show requires you to open a free TrueFans account and then claim the show, of course. And I have added a link in the show Notes to a blog post that shows you exactly how to do this. I think that this little bit of commitment hopefully will start to build a better relationship between us as the app and them as the creator. And I have been lucky enough actually Sam, to have a number of one to ones with podcasters who have submitted for a feature which has just been lovely. If you want to do that too, there is a link in the show notes and I can tell you about specific stuff, you can ask me questions, whatever you want to know. I also. Last bit for me, I will shut up soon. I also like to share about our featured podcasts to our Instagram stories and collaborate on posts sometimes too. So the relationship does not stop when I click on that featured toggle. This is a continuing supportive partnership and I want to get to know you better and build our community. So that's. Why is that okay?
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Sam Sethi: That's brilliant. No, I. I think it's called value for value. Right. We would like to give you value in promoting you, featuring you on our home page and talking about you. And I think it's little to ask to open an account for free and just sign up. We don't ask you to do any more than that. We're not asking you to switch your hosting, we're not asking you to do anything else. But as you discover more of our platform, we would love you to do that. Of course we would. Or certainly experiment with some of the tags. TrueFans is the only podcast app that supports all of the new Podcasting 2.0 features. Tags, whatever you want to call them. So I think you know, that's a fair exchange.
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Claire Waite Brown: Thank you. Anything happening in the podcasty world, Sam, let me think.
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Sam Sethi: Oh, yes, we've got our own event coming up, haven't we, Claire? Tell me more about it.
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Claire Waite Brown: We have, yes. So I'm really excited about this. Another one of our discovery features is our network feed. And the way I thought would be best to show people how this works is to do it in real time with you saying all the right words and me hopefully doing all the right things. So the network feed on TrueFans, I see it as another shop window. So this might be for you as an established network, this might be for you as a collaborative group, as a community. Maybe you just want to connect with other people in your niche and promote other podcasts that way. So that's what our network feed can do. It can give you that shop window where people can see the shows they like, see what other shows are in that network. That event is on the 29th of October, 5pm UK time. And if you would like to be part of the demo, or at least have the chance to be part of the demo, you do need to have claimed your show. So go back to the last chapter and find out how to claim your show.
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Sam Sethi: Excellent. I know. I'm looking forward to that. I think once people begin to understand the power of what network feeds are, if you're talking about a topic and you've got other podcasts in your network that talk about the topic, fans might like to also hear from those other podcasts. So it's, it's a win, win, win really. And we just want to show you how easy it is to set them up and how easy it is to invite others into your network and manage them and in the analytics, see the effect of your network. Yeah, and that's it for this week. Claire Audio is recorded on Riverside. It's edited by you, and we're hosted
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Claire Waite Brown: by TrueFans on the TrueFans app. Click on the purple button and become a fan of this podcast to be informed of when new episodes are released.
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Sam Sethi: You can support us by streaming sats from your True Friends wallet. Like Martin Linderskog. You can click on the currency or bitcoin icon under the play button, or leave us a super comment by clicking on the speech bubble icon.
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Claire Waite Brown: We would love to have you follow us on Instagram or threads @truefans fm. You can find out more about how to use the features of the TrueFans platform by listening to our sister podcast, Fanzone. You can also find a lovely selection of blog posts at TrueFans.FM/Blog and I am adding to those as we speak.
