 What I want to share with you today is to have a conversation about building belonging through podcasting. And I want to chat you through what's worked, what mattered, what really ultimately didn't matter, and some of the challenges that we're still facing around building community, building belonging through podcasting. So the context for this conversation is really two-fold. It's building belonging through podcasting. So what do I mean by building belonging? And for me, it's the process by which we, both as individuals but also as a community, as a group, whether it's in this room or it's the entire word camp or it's your local meetup back in your neck of the woods. We as a community but also we as individuals create an environment where people feel welcome. People of any and all kind, I know that's kind of an awkward way to phrase it, but regardless of gender, regardless of sexual orientation, regardless of gender identification, of race, of culture, of language, all people should feel welcome in the WordPress community. They should feel welcome everywhere in the world. That's a little bit of a challenge these days, but if we can start with the WordPress community, we can build from that. So it's so that people feel like they matter, like they're valuable as individuals and their presence in our community is an asset to our community, both as individuals and as a group, as a community, through podcasting. So given the download counts of our podcast, I'm guessing that most of you probably are not listeners. Yes, thank you, sir. Give that man a prize. It's called hallway chats and shows available wherever you listen to find podcasts, but we're also online as you can see here at hallwaychats.com. I'll get into the specifics of that, but that's kind of the context. Signals at screen. Come on. There we go. Little tech issues on the screen here. So let me share a little bit about my own background in building community. And just like we heard from Raquel Lanfield this morning about how she became a community builder over time, in steps, in stages, my own journey was quite similar, not from mother and wife, but from non-community member to a community member. I first attended my first WordCamp in 2011 in Philadelphia and I went back, no, I'm sorry, in 2010. I went back the next year. It was such a great experience. I went back the next year. The following May, so May of 2012, I started the Philly-Berb's WordPress Meetup with the really the support and generous kind of push, if you will, from the Philadelphia WordPress Meetup. Kind of had one of those go to their Meetup. So, you know, maybe somebody was interested in, I don't know, maybe starting another Meetup, not too far from here. Oh, that go over. And they were very, very supportive. Started talking at WordCamps by 2014. I was involved in organizing them and I've organized WordCamp Philly 2014, 2015. When US came to town, we did 2015 and 2016. And then 2017 and again for 2018, I'm now the lead organizer for WordCamp Philly. I still run the Philly-Berb's WordPress Meetup and I talk and volunteer and attend more WordCamps than I should probably admit in public. But all of this is really just to say is that this can matter, this community matters a lot to me. I've invested a lot of my time and energy and money in it and I've gotten even more back from it. So, that's kind of where I've come at. I've done everything locally, not everything, but my focus has been locally. So, that's our context. But in January of 2016, 2017, I was going back and forth on Twitter with, God be the name of Joe Casabona, who runs a, if you started, and is the host of the How I Built It podcast. And he has something like 20,000 downloads a month. And what he does on his show is he asks people in the tech community, so how'd you build it? And Joe and ultimately Tara Clay is a friend of mine through the community. Didn't know her very well, but kind of met her at a couple of WordCamps kind of thing, maybe like you're making new friends this weekend. We were talking about wanting to do podcasts, but not really having an angle, not having an interest. We haven't found something that I felt that I could do weekend and week out or month in and month out, really be interested in, that other people might be interested in, and that would actually be fun. I didn't want the, so here's what Liam thinks this week show, because even my mother wouldn't listen to that. I mean, maybe one episode to say she did, but that's fine, son, that's fine. But then Tara, again, who I didn't really know that well, we were friendly but not friends. People kind of get that relationship. She messaged me and says, hey, I've got this idea. I'm kind of thinking about looking for somebody to do a podcast with. Would you be interested in getting together to talk about an idea? Of course. So Tara's on your left, I'm on the right. In case it wasn't clear. So over about six weeks, we held a lot of Zoom calls, went back and forth on Slack and on Twitter and email even, and we were exploring ideas about what we could do together, what would excite us, what would engage us, what did we feel would be of interest and value, and not only to us, but back for the WordPress community. And as we heard from Amy Copeland yesterday, the keynote speaker, we really wanted to help people. And as Amy said, helping people is where it's at. So we kind of wanted to do it as a gift back to the WordPress community because of everything that we've gotten. And to be clear, we didn't see it as kind of a pompous gift. Here you go, we're so magnificent. Here is a podcast that you may listen to. But more of, what can we create that the community would see as a gift? What could we create that would want to address that kind of community work that we were doing locally? How could we do that online? So took us about six weeks of going back and forth. Terra's office is generally very clean. Mine is a strategically placed camera. But there we go. So on June 1 of last year, we launched our first podcast. That's Jess Riley. She is a single mom. She's a web developer. And she has her own business. And I don't have a favorite podcast. But that's, if you're going to listen to just one of our episodes, my recommendation would be that one. Give it a go if you don't mind. So we've, we've now published 44 episodes. And if there's those of you in the room who could figure out that it hasn't been 44 weeks since June 1 of last year, it's been a little bit more, it's because we originally were going to do a fortnightly show every two weeks. But we got such a great response from this episode with Jess that we very quickly changed to become a weekly show. So our count is off, not because we're incompetent, but because we changed slightly. I mean, we are incompetent, or I am, but that's not why our count is off. So here's a little bit of our format, because I think it'll be helpful if you understand the show and how it works. And basically, as I said earlier, we're trying to interview folks across the entire WordPress community. We really didn't want it to be the friends of Terra and Liam Show. And we really wanted to talk with people who weren't so well known within the WordPress community. You know, to, to use kind of a boring phrase, we wanted John and Jane average. And not that they were average individuals, but that they weren't, you know, the, the, the people that are keynoting word camps that are on a lot of different podcasts and are doing things that in some ways might be seen as very, very successful. We wanted to talk to the folks who were, as we say, we're making a living with WordPress and we're just living. And we wanted to talk to whites. We wanted to talk to blacks. We wanted to talk to Latinos and Latinas. We wanted to talk to Asians. We wanted to speak to people in America. We wanted to speak to people in different countries. We only speak English. So that was our own limitation. But we have since spoken to and we look to speak with non-native English speakers. And so we've really, and we, we try to talk to developers and to designers and to project managers and copywriters and business owners and employees and employees of agencies and employees of businesses and non-profits. Really trying to, the same way of, if we all kind of identify ourselves by these various tags here at WordCamp Atlanta, we kind of want to talk to one of everybody. We'd love to talk to all of everybody, but from a logistical standpoint, we can't. So while our show uses WordPros, it's a focus. It's really more of a backdrop. Because what we talk about is success. And personal definition of success and a professional definition. And how do those come together for our, our guests? And what does their definition? And then how do they work to achieve or maintain or when they fall off the road towards success, how do they get back on it? So we talk about life and we talk about children if they want to talk about children. And we talk about their partner if they want to talk about their partner. And we talk about kind of the work-life balance and how it all comes together. And that's what our show is in a nutshell. And roughly 30 minutes or less. The show, not the talk. The talk will probably be about 30 minutes, but that's different. Okay. Oh. Actually, it is going to go on about 321 minutes. I have the director's cut with me today. So in the write-up to my talk today, the one that got posted on the WordCamp Atlanta website, I promised that I would talk through a number of how-to and insights and lessons learned. And before I actually get into that, I wanted to make it very clear to you folks today that the, the slides that I'm going to share, the content is not just mine. It is also from Tara. Tara and I started the podcast. Tara and I worked together weekly on it. And some of the insights and the lessons and the valuable points that we've extracted out of our experience were hers, some were mine. And I haven't really delineated who's our hers and some of mine because it's sometimes it would be, she would have an observation, oh yeah, I guess I do feel that way too. And vice versa. But ultimately, these slides are mine. So if there are typos or things do come across wrong, they're mine. And not Tara's. She's not here to defend herself or disavow it. She's actually in Japan right now. So here we go, here we go. So giving a voice to the unheard. And I hope that doesn't come across as really kind of too profound or too high on our own soapbox, so to speak. But really by talking to the folks who don't normally get the microphone, who weren't necessarily standing at the front of the room talking about this, that or the other thing. Who may, who may not be running the, the, the envy of the business community in their neck of the woods. We want to talk to those people and we want to, not that the other people aren't valuable, both intrinsically and instrumentally, but we really want to talk to the people that reflect the diversity and the value of this entire community. And the, the feedback that we got on social media, when we're at word camps individually, Tara and I, people come up to us. Tara even got the, oh I recognized you by your voice. I was a little jealous. But this is, this is a, this is a connection that a lot of people that we're hearing from really like. They like that, hey that's just like me. Hey, I recognize that person. I recognize myself in that story. Because we ask questions and we share the questions with our guests before they come onto the show, many of them have spent time preparing and thinking about how they want to answer it. Not only to, to do service to the show, but also with the understanding that it's a podcast that will be on the internet forever. They might want to think about what they say before they say it. But by serving as a story outlet, a storytelling outlet for them, we're really letting our guests, the individuals in this community share their own story and their own words. So we ask questions and they respond. We don't then, you know, tell the story in our words or rehash it in any way. It just is there. So they own their story, they own their words, they speak at their own pace and in their own way. Some of our guests have been very, very candid about some very challenging points of time in their life. Others have been less so, but it's, it's just they, we welcome them to share as candidly as they feel comfortable doing. And that seems to strike a connection with listeners. Shining the spotlight on the guest. The show really isn't about terror. It is not about me. It is about our guests. And Tara and I sort of have this view that what we think of the show doesn't matter. What we think about the topic that we're talking about doesn't matter. As far as the show is concerned, I'm not saying our opinions are of no value generally, but we really want to know what the individual's thinking, how they came to this, how they manage that, how they deal with this, how they respond to that. And so by, by serving as effectively a validation tool for our, for our guests and therefore for the wider community, by shining that spotlight on those individuals, we're able to make it very clear to the community that there are more people like you, like you, like you, like me, like anybody here. There's somebody out there who has some kind of similar or shared experience. We focus on life, not just work. Work's a big part of our lives as adults, but it's not the only part. And by, not just focusing on work, we both think that where people are connecting with that work isn't who they are. It's just a part of what they do. Might be a big part of what they do, but it's not who they are. Their value doesn't come from their role as a web developer, their role as a designer, their role as a project manager. I spoke a little bit about this earlier when I was talking about the kinds of show that Tara and I were trying to create. And certainly as hosts, it's really fun to talk to people who have hugely different experiences that we have. And we're not even really trying to compare. We just want them to share their experiences. And that then helps the wider community. There's somebody out there like me. I've been through that. I wish I had known that bit of advice that they just shared, because that would have been really helpful to get me through that similar situation. But by talking to people in different countries, we've been to Canada, virtually of course. Canada, the Netherlands, Jamaica, Costa Rica, Australia via Tasmania. And we're always looking to talk to new people. So we really have gone pretty far. So what's mattered? What worked really well? The written transcripts of our show. We originally wanted to do them really just for an accessibility, to be able to let people who might have hearing challenges read the conversations. But we've been really surprised that more than one, we're going to have a huge listenership. So not thousands. But we've had a handful of people who are fully hearing say to us that they love just reading the transcripts, because they can read very quickly. So they can get through the transcript. And if it's engaging enough, then they'll listen. But that was something that never even occurred to me. And to have that, and then to be able to serve a community in a way that we didn't expect has been really interesting. Yes, that was our focus for doing it originally. But the point that I was sharing was that those who don't have those needs were also engaging in a way that we didn't expect. Terra is very organized. And the flow with which we bring guests onto our show, we let them know the schedule, we let them know the questions we're going to ask, we give them a sense of the tone that they're going to take, that we take on our show. We don't expect them to listen to all of our episodes in advance. The follow-up that we do after the show has really made it easy for our guests, they tell us this, to be engaged with it. As I said, we don't talk to people who are on loads and loads of podcasts. So they don't really know what to expect. They're not sure if this is the right way to go about it or not. They're not sure how to answer things. So by making it, by treating them really as the stars, I don't mean that in a superficial way, but really kind of catering to their lack of knowledge, their lack of experience and trying to support them through the process, it makes it very enjoyable for them as guests and very easy. Regular publication, I don't know how all of us listen to podcasts if we listen to them right, then they come out. But there is definitely a notable portion of the world that listens right when the show comes out. And the fact that we publish at the same time every week, at the same time on the same day is valuable to them. In retrospect, I wish I didn't make the choice to publish at 5.30 in the morning. But we do. Because we're not a live show, we can stop. So in our before we record conversation with our guests, we chat about kind of the we're going to talk for 35 minutes here, that's going to work technically. But we make sure that they understand that they can share as candidly as they feel comfortable doing. We remind them that this is a podcast. This will be on the internet. But that said, it's not live. So if they get halfway through an answer, and they realize, I'm no longer comfortable saying it this way. Or I don't want to talk about that person in my life in this way. Or I don't want to say it this way, they can stop. Okay, we'll just ask the question again, we'll keep the audio recording going and we'll just take the bit that you want. And what we found is that to really help people be much more candid than they might otherwise be, because it's not live, they don't have to measure their words as closely. This really, really, really surprised both Tara and I. So for each of our guests, we send a handwritten thank you note. And the positive feedback, the sense of value that they get because we went to the trouble of sending a handwritten thank you note has made a huge, huge difference to them. And I suppose it kind of comes back to that human connection and that community sense and that belonging. But that was really surprising to us. You thought a couple of people might find it interesting, but that so many people enjoyed it at that level was helpful. Social media, one of the challenges that we have, because we're not interviewing people who are well known, is that nobody says, oh, I'm going to go listen to that show because I want to hear that woman's views on this. You know, because that woman hasn't done our show. She's done some other show. But the more that we tweet about an episode and talk about it and schedule things over a number of days, the higher our licentorship goes for that episode. And I'll talk about some of the challenges around that later on. But the more we engage on social media, the more that we augment the community work we're doing through the podcast with social media, the higher the number is the more engagement we get. This is a logistical thing. Having two hosts is really helpful. From kind of just getting a podcast live and running it on a weekly basis, having somebody else to do some of the work is really, really helpful. And Tara and I have fallen into a nice little rhythm where she handles her tasks and I handle mine. And we just kind of chose them on what we wanted, but everything gets done that way. And then kind of in a silly but very practical sense when we're actually during the conversation, if one of us spaces out or, you know, something, the lamp falls over, we can't, we don't really want to stop the recording, there's somebody else to jump in. And there's somebody else to kind of handle the hosting side of it. So that's been kind of nice. I'm sorry. Oh, okay. And we have gotten positive feedback about the flow that Tara and I have with our guests. So having some kind of dynamic between people, again, it helps make the conversation seem more authentic and build that belonging. So what didn't matter? When we were getting ready to launch the podcast, we were doing research in which microphone should we get and what equipment do we need and how are we going to record and there was a lot of emphasis in blog posts and YouTube videos and podcasts around sound quality, you've got to have great sound. And ultimately what we found is you don't. I mean, it's nice. And if you listen to like an NPR produced podcast in your car, it sounds a heck of a lot better than hallway chats. But if what we found though is that if the content is there, if the conversations are real, if they're genuine, if people, the listeners are making a connection with what they're hearing, they will tolerate whatever sound you give them. And I don't mean that in a condescending way. We try to for good sound. We do spend time and energy and money. But we just don't sweat it. We just don't care that much because it's much more about the story and the humanity of it than the quality of the sound. And this is a similar point. When we were starting, we were trying to do all sorts of different apps and recording GarageBand and so we could have the speakers voices were all on separate tracks so that we could edit them. And if if I cough, we could take that out of the podcast or if Tara said something and then we could just blip that out. But ultimately, we ran into kind of the challenge of, oh, use a PC. OK. Well, then you have to get Audacity. Tara and I don't have Audacity. We don't know how to use it. So it was all these kind of the logistics of, we just want to talk to you. What can we do? So we just kept coming back to, it doesn't really matter. As long as we can get decent sound, suitable sound, they won't care. So we use Zoom. We do a video call with Zoom and Zoom will output both the video and the audio separately. So we saved the video for posterity and for when NPR has us on. We can have a little video montage. But all we do is output the audio and we have a sound a sound post production sound person who takes care of it for it, cleans up whatever we need to do and that's how we do it. So it's simple. It doesn't, it's about belonging. It's about community. It's about people. It's not about technology. Correct. Correct. Z. So what challenges have we faced? To talk to the lesser known people who are not friends of terrors and friends of mine automatically means we don't know them and we don't know where they live or how to get in touch with them. So that's a challenge. So we rely on social media. We rely on coming to word camps and talking about the podcast and we rely on email and we rely on just trying to get the word out so that people know about it and it's a real, real challenge. And it's not impossible but as Tara and I are both doing this really just as a side project from a creative and community gift perspective, it's difficult because we don't have I'm going to go travel to three or four word camps in Europe this summer so I can meet people. We'll have some thousand dollars to do that and we'll like traipse around for three or four weeks in Europe. And because we're not interviewing people with huge Twitter following their huge social media presence, we don't get any kind of amplification. When our host, I'm sorry, when our guest has 43 Twitter followers and they long on to Twitter every three or four weeks whether or not they need to, you know, they're tweeting about the show three weeks later and that's okay. It's not their responsibility to promote the show. I don't mean that and they need to do more way but rather it's how do we build the community as Raquel was telling us this morning. It's about meeting in real life but the very nature of a podcast in building community is we don't meet in real life and if we have to meet everybody in real life we will be limited to locations that Tara and I can get to. So it's a challenge and Tara and I only speak English. She speaks French probably well enough to do a podcast with some polishing I could speak Spanish enough but you know, unless we had three or four translators it would be a difficult live, multi-language 30-minute podcast so we just challenged in that way. When Tara and I were thinking about putting this show together we were both very adamant individually and then we agreed collectively that we this was not going to be a business for us we did not want to make money out of this. You know, if some big company said hey this is a great show and I want to give it a million dollars would you guys do this full time you would probably consider that. But we didn't really want sponsors we kind of toyed with a little bit we chased it a little bit but we had already done the budget we knew what it was going to cost we agreed to split it 50-50 it's not free but it's not a huge amount of money and we both looked at it as a marketing business cost and we both let's just do it and then you know we'll assess on a regular basis do we want to keep doing it but because there's no money in it it's difficult to get done from time to time and that's not a complaint it's the very nature of if we love it we'll find a way to make it happen and we're still loving it so we're still making it happen. Go ahead, question. Open to something like a Patreon so people could donate to patronize the podcast as... Yeah, that's a great question and I'll repeat it just for Mike and audio. So the question was are we interested in doing anything like a Patreon connected to the podcast and what Patreon is is a way for the general public to donate and support our our effort without having us to set up like a PayPal donate page or anything like that and the short answer is no we have I mean we've thought about it and we don't want to do that I guess we're kind of waiting for that company to say here's a million dollars and if they don't we want to keep going well I think that's kind of it I mean you're joking all or nothing but it's we want to do it to build community and once we start to make real money out of it even if it's not a million you know if we're getting five hundred or a thousand or two thousand a month you know that's not retirement money and it's not even full time money but that's a fair amount of money then are we doing it for the money or are we doing it because we love it and we're trying to make sure that we do it because we love it okay great I want to hear it I totally want to hear it okay yes thank you thanks well I'm almost done so um but that's the challenge is how do we run it as a side project how do we commit to it when we both have our own businesses and families businesses to run and families to support so I guess wow we're done so thank you all I really welcome your questions and your constructive feedback and if it's not in this group setting you know I'll be here at least for another hour or two before I have to go feed the parking meter uh but thank you very much that didn't come off very well thank you thank you question two questions first what is your budget and second do you find that people are downloading the transcripts and using Google Translate for their particular language so what is our budget I should have had that but it's give me just a second it's about 45 dollars per episode 50 bucks per episode plus the equipment that we want plus domain name registration plus if you throw in like part of the reason I got a paid zoom account it's not just for client work but also for podcasting so all in all I think we kind of were looking at around $2,000 a year split two ways maybe it's $2,400 or maybe it's $1,800 I can't remember off the top of my head but it's about $1,200 per person per year so the question was are we hand transcribing is no and that's where our cost is we pay a service to transcribe we share the audio file with them before the episode gets published they type it up send it to Tara somehow I don't know I'm not involved in that and then she copies it and pastes it into the podcast blog post I'm supposed to be in person with somebody and doing an interview if you found any challenges doing it via zoom on a video call so versus real life we've only done one episode in real life and that was at WordCamp US and we were lucky to interview Bianca Welds who was in from Jamaica and that was actually harder because we were just in a hallway and we only had our laptop and kind of the environmental control plus the people walking by and the sound on the overhead was more of a challenge but the reason we do zoom for the video is so we have that face connection and so that we can see that she's ready to ask us something or she got stunned by that question I'm going to keep talking so that she can think about what she wants to answer that kind of thing so we also have a run up to it so we talk for 10 or 15 minutes before we start the show I'm going to go with the back the gentleman in the blue and I'll come up one then I came in a little bit late I just wanted to know where the podcast is found hallwaychats.com you can find the podcast at hallwaychats.com and Pam how much time would you spend? there is a fair amount of time and this is another reason to have a co-host because when my week is crazy Tara does most of the work and when Tara's week is crazy I like to think I do most of the work but there's not here to say I don't but any episodes an hour is what we book so there's a little bit of run up there's a little bit of the courting itself and then the follow up, the recap the prepping the files, getting them out to transcribers and to the post production team to do that for us there's social media there's preparing the post itself there's reviewing that, Tara preps it all and then I go in and review it and add the audio file keeping things straight some weeks we'll record three episodes other weeks we don't record any then there's social media and sometimes I remember to schedule things and sometimes it's oh, okay, yes, I will tweet about that how about now? so anywhere from maybe an hour to maybe four or five depending I'm going to come here and then go there your equipment did you go online determine what equipment if that's worth for you so the question was about what kind of equipment that we went with and I went to Joe Casabona because Joe writes about it and he podcasts and he's willing to spend more money than I am on podcasting equipment so he said, Joe, what did you start with not what do you have today so if you go to Joe Casabona if you Google him, he will have written blog posts about what to get I have a blue Yeti Mike I don't know what model anymore and I have a little Mike stand there you go, blue Yeti Lauren, one is $85 thank you, go ahead social media, when we do it it helps coming to word camps really helps the handwritten thank you notes to the guests that really encourages them I think I haven't asked them directly but our past guests seem to be very supportive of us, if they're on Twitter they support us, they retweet us, they like it they comment on some episode not every guest every time but that kind of thing really, really helps we thought about doing stuff like newsletters and it was until we get the million dollar grant we're just going to keep it the way it is go ahead do you make them sign anything like a release form? we will now no, we don't have anybody sign any kind of release for being on the podcast but you raise a good point of course, why shouldn't we, why don't we I suppose one could argue legally that by the fact that they applied to be on the show we interviewed them, if we don't know them at all we'll do a little prep interview are you articulate, can we understand each other do we like each other, do we want to talk so the process that we walked them through I suppose if we had a good lawyer she could argue that this is, that's enough of an agreement, there's a contract there I'm going to go right here and then to the back there did you primarily use Twitter or you said social media but all you mentioned was Twitter yeah, because I can't stand Facebook even before I don't hate Facebook, that's such a strong word anyway, but I, yeah, mostly just sold Twitter and that was a decision that again, kind of Tara and I were thinking how can we contribute how can we share, how can we do it in a structured way that doesn't overwhelm us Michael how did you find a transcription service you liked I asked Tara there's enough people blog, podcasting in the WordPress community, they're all on social media and ask him I would go back and I would ping Joe Casabona on Twitter, I don't know that he does transcripts but other people do I can certainly figure out who we use and let you know go ahead do you have any techniques for capturing a good take, or is there any way that you can convey to the editor like we want to make sure that this piece got in here we don't do a lot of takes unless there's kind of like a verbal trip and I can't pronounce my own name or hallway slaps wait, sorry, we're going to start over again but it kind of goes back to not being live we allow our guests a little bit more time if they want to think about it and they want to come up with it and we'll rephrase it what's the best thing that you do what's a really good thing that you do let's take the stress of best what's something that you do we don't do a lot of takes we called it hallway chats because we wanted to mimic the hallway conversations that you have at a word camp you don't do a take in a real life conversation it's not the same thing exactly but no we don't do a lot of that we do some of that and then Tara lets the post production sound team know hey can you get rid of that at about this time stamp there's this and something else but it's mostly as you hear so are you guys marking it through the time stamp or is she going back and re-listening and marking I guess I guess it kind of depends if Tara will have us do some kind of clap or something to create the sound but she handles all that side of that I have a different role so I'm going to go over here and go ahead so we have the video on zoom but we don't want that stress for the conversation so you know we come to word camp and we shower and we get dressed up and we go in nice and we as nice as we feel like we're not right but then my face and my movement is going to be on the internet forever and we just didn't want that stress we use zoom so that we can see each other and have that personal connection and have that eye contact but not because we wanted it to always maybe I'm old fashioned or new fashioned but I like seeing guests talk and react like you were talking about before I would agree that there's absolute value in that but to come back to the guests that we have is most of them have not been on podcasts before much less video casts and we didn't want the stress of that to be off-putting you had a question and I was going to ask you the way to the end and it's been the end did you want to ask again what that question was? I felt bad I kind of jumped around I wanted to come back it was so cool I was just thinking with regards to your community and also there's a podcast I listen to lore and they talk about a way to cultivate the community through Patreon so that people who pay and get additional things but there's obviously no pressure on that now mind you they do have sponsors on the podcast so I guess my question statement brainstorm was I'm interested to see if there's a way to cultivate some way of differentiating the cost to you guys something you're doing on the side while you're like hey thank you so much for being a Patreon here's I don't know maybe the video or some little action and I like that idea and I like where you're heading and the challenge I think is the wrap up time to get Patreon to the point where there's value versus what can we create without adding another one to four hours per week so that's kind of the way to be perfectly blunt about it the way that Tara and I look at it is the lessons that we learn from this from a marketing standpoint will deliver commercial return to our businesses so that is your ROI the ROI is also the community kind of that but in a financial sense we will learn more about podcasting we will learn more about how to market things we will learn what works on Twitter and what doesn't in this and that and get better at that kind of non-cash way yeah absolutely I'm going to come here and then I'm going to swing this way yeah so there's a lot of different formats that work and I think live has a great dynamic to it and the engagement of having people tweet in or chat in questions can be really fun and exciting kind of throw a spanner in the works and where is this going again thinking back to the audience we're talking to people who aren't typically in front of an audience and so we're trying to craft an environment in which they feel most willing to step into but yeah I think those formats definitely can work, it's not a format that we chose but they can definitely work I'm going to come down here and then jump to the back sure yeah I mean those I don't know that it would come from that specific angle but we shared those kind of concerns we wanted to be genuine and authentic without feeling like it's a big show we wanted a real conversation not a PR piece if you will it can be, yes it can and then we go all the way at the back there okay excellent job done okay yeah that's a great idea that's great okay and there was a third point that's an option I'm going to come over to Kathy and yeah no thank you and that's that's a great example of it and I remember you being in the car alright here we go no it's not that I have an issue in making money I'm pretty cool with making money no it's more the am I doing this because I want to make money from it or am I doing this because I want to contribute and build a better community and if I'm doing it because I want money that's not the right motivation that's not the right intent if I can focus on community and money happens in a way that is transparent and genuine and appropriate well yeah that would be wonderful I'm going to make a big comment say we love the community that you're doing here's 2,000 what is your bills what are your monthly out costs we will cover that we're not going to pay your time but yeah of course I'd be interested in that but once it starts to make enough money where it becomes job-ish then I need to be very careful because community is more important than money Jody correct if we have no idea like if I've met some people here I might say hey you should be on the podcast so I'll have met them but where do they live what's their story no I don't know do you have a set of questions we do no we have a range of questions the 2 that we ask are what is your definition of success in some phrase we'll ask that be a personal professional combination of both and then the other question that we ask always ask is the best piece of advice that you have been given and implemented in your life so those are the 2 that we absolutely go with but then we have this list of other questions and as we tell kind of in the run up to the show while we're chatting with them is we are going to let the conversation go where you the guests lead it and within that range we will try to get to as many of these questions as we reasonably can which is kind of nice right it's very nice we do we don't know them at all we'll do a little 10 minute, 15 minute chat beforehand just like can this person talk do I want to talk to this person kind of thing and that's about it and we kind of deliberately don't research because it's not you know Jody come tell us about this great thing you did that one time that was really interesting on your bio page it's oh my gosh this woman that we just met wow and in fact if you listen to the episode that we just published in Caba the Cameroonian moved to Nigeria to learn English became like an award winning journalist and then moved to the US and he's running a WordPress driven news site focusing on Africa if you listen to that episode he kind of finishes his intro and tear on like oh crap where do we go with that that's just wow there's so much there we don't even care about WordPress ugh and it was so neat and he was saying these things so I'm googling like is this real because holy crap this isn't time but yeah he is wow so it's that kind of it's that wow factor the kind of same way in the hallway where you meet somebody like oh my gosh you went through that wow thank you for sharing that wow kind of thing so yeah we like that we haven't been stung by it yet I wonder at some point if we will go ahead yes yes and we also have a version of the form that says I think you should talk to this person and then one of those questions is do they know that we now know who they are kind of thing because we don't want to be like hey your friend said that like who so uh yeah so that's how that's how we we get new people that we don't know yeah thank you yeah I'm getting back to that legal appreciate that you got me covered awesome I like you yeah yeah that is awesome that is awesome who else anybody thank you so very much for your comments and your questions and your feedback thank you thank you