After close to 2000 podcast episodes, Joe Saul-Sehy knows a thing or two about growing an audience. 

In fact, his finance podcast, Stacking Benjamins, has amassed a massive following of 180k listeners, with shows averaging around 40k listens/episode.

Joe’s no stranger to awards, either. 

Stacking Benjamins was named Best Personal Finance Podcast 3 times by the Plutus Awards, it was called Best Personal Finance Podcast by Kiplinger and Bankrate, and it was awarded the Best Business Podcast title by the Tim Ferriss Show, Startup, and others from the Academy of Podcasters. 

Joe shares the details of his journey in this interview: how he initially struggled, what he did to grow the audience, and how “hockey-sticked” his results.

He talks about his recent struggles in podcasting and the events driving his decision to diversify with a view to serving his audience in multiple ways.

He also discusses standing out in a crowd, his ideation process, and why following his “north star” has served him well.

Watch the Full Episode

Joe starts off by talking about how he was a financial planner for 16 years, during which time he struggled personally with debt. He switched careers at 40 to teach high school and track but continued to work on his PR and financial side hustles on the side. 

He decided to start a blog with a friend, which was later turned into a podcast. Although the podcast struggled initially, it went on to be named the best financial podcast by several outlets. 

He then talks about launching his blog and making the shift to podcasting. He shares how they started and tweaked it and eventually found their rhythm and relaunched under a new name.

After about 50 episodes, Joe realized the need for more changes, and he talks about how he was able to make the appropriate shifts in his business. He also gives some great advice about figuring out how to stand out in a crowd.

As Joe publishes 3 episodes a week, he’s constantly ideating and creating new content. He talks about how he comes up with ideas and the important insights he learned at a podcasting conference, which led to a more formulaic, “quilt-like” approach.

Moving along, Jared asks him where his traffic comes from and how his business is monetized. Joe talks about monetizing his podcast, how he found sponsors, and how he determined his prices.

He eventually started to diversify by growing his Instagram and YouTube channels and branching out into other products and services, including guides and courses.

He talks about how he pivoted and figured out what else could work for his business outside of his successful podcast, which was bringing in $450k a year at one point. He shares inspiration from Alex Hormozi and discusses strategies to make his audience “stickier.” 

Lastly, Joe talks about what has surprised him the most on his journey and the important lessons he learned when he really leaned into following his “north star.”

Links & Resources

Topics Joe Saul-Sehy Talks About

• His background in finance
• His pivot in his 40s
• Starting his blog/podcast
• Finding what makes you unique
• How he gets content ideas
• How he creates that content
• Monetization
• Diversifying channels and products
• Pivoting 
• Trusting his “north star”

Transcript

Jared: All right. Welcome back to the niche pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Bauman. And today we’re joined by Joe Saul-Sehy with stacking Benjamins. Joe, welcome on board.

Joe: Hey, thanks for having me, Jared. Good to see you again.

Jared: I was going to say, so we’ll fill the audience in. We first met earlier this year at the convert kit conference.

Um, uh, and, uh, uh, really struck it off, you know, had a good conversation about business, ended up spending some time at the conference, going to a couple of the classes together. I told you at the time, I’m going to pursue you to get you on a podcast. Cause I really wanted you on. So. You know, here we are, we got you on and we’re going to tell the story.

We’re going to hear the story about you stacking Benjamins, this brand you’ve created before we do though. Maybe bring us up to speed and who you are and, um, what you were doing prior to stacking Benjamins.

Joe: Sure, and I think it’s a great place to start, Jared, because I think that what you’ll see is that what I’ve tried to do is lean into, uh, my unfair advantages, which if you’re just starting out on this journey, like thinking about where do I have an advantage that other people don’t is a key to winning and then also a key to really looking internally at what’s going to work and what’s not going to work.

So, um, I was a financial planner for 16 years. Uh during that that time I struggled with money myself at the beginning I was giving awesome advice and at the same time I was digging a hole of debt for myself I thought that the rules of the universe didn’t apply to me But I realized not just how to be a good coach, but how to take my own advice Not only did I get myself out of debt I also, my company was a franchise.

I sold that company. Um, that is a long story on its own about switching gears at age 40. Like when most people are going into their peak earning years, I am switching and, uh, decided I was going to teach. Uh high school and become a track coach Uh, I was really bored in school I started writing because I was doing public relations for the company.

I was with specifically american express and ameriprise I was one of 12 subject matter experts in the nation that did pr for the company So that was my advantage my advantage was I did those rubber chicken dinner circuit You know, uh, dinners that you see people get invited to all the time. I was the guy giving those two or three days a week.

So I had a lot of experience in front of, uh, people. I was the channel seven money guy in Detroit for nine years. Uh, I, so I, I had had FaceTime on television. I hosted a radio show. One of those. Radio shows where a company buys time. So my job was to be the host and i’d invite financial planners with our company from around The detroit area to talk about how brilliant we all were Uh, so I had radio experience.

I tv experience. I pr experience. I knew how the stuff was written And when I got bored in my teaching classes, I started writing for other people using that pr experience ghostwriting financial planners Newsletters, uh, writing their scripts for my friends that were on TV, decided to start a blog with a friend of mine.

That blog became a podcast in 2012. Uh, the podcast really struggled. I know we’ll talk about this. I’m sure later on about how we got around this podcast struggle at first, but man, once we hit it, Jared, um, the, the podcast hockey sticked in about 2014 Kiplinger called us the best personal finance podcast in America and their print magazine.

Um, Art of manliness, our avatar is not necessarily a man. We’re, we’re very, we’re about 55 percent men, 45 percent women, which is great for a podcast hosted by two middle aged men. Um, and we’re, we’re very proud of that, uh, that we have so many women that listen to the show, but art of manliness, uh, put us on their list of the top shows that men need to listen to.

Bankrate last year called us the best personal finance podcast in America. Fast company did a, did a piece about us and some other brands. Operate from the middle of nowhere because that’s, that’s where we are. I’m in Texarkana, Texas, which is not a place people think about when they think about. Big podcaster, you know, talking about wall street.

Jared: I love that. I I’ll quick plug. I love the convert kit conference because you walk around, you look at the name tags, right? And I walked in this year, really only knowing one or two people. And I looked at your name tag and I was like, Oh my goodness. I’ve been listening to your podcast on and off for quite a long time.

It’s definitely a pillar of the financial podcast industry, in my opinion, at least. And certainly you have the awards to back it up. Um, I do, I hope everybody listening. Enjoyed that pivot story because I think a lot of people who are listening have dreams of turning a side hustle into maybe a mainstream business or just pursuing a side hustle and seeing where it goes.

Um, let’s get into early days of stacking Benjamins. You talked about how hard it was. Was it always intended to be a podcast? Did it start with a different vision and then turn into a podcast and maybe fill us in a bit on that journey to how you decided what you did with the directions it went?

Joe: Yeah, it started off with me saying, no, actually, in the early days of podcast, you know, podcasting started around 2005.

So I think it was 2007. I started listening to podcasts. So I, I loved, I mean, even, even before iTunes, I was the old guy that would go, you know, you go and you put your little, little recorder device. I had the little compact recorder device. You plug it into your computer. Half an hour later, you’d have this one podcast that took up all the room on your device.

I’d use that to go mow my lawn. And so people kept telling me, they’re like, by 2012, it’s exploding. A lot of people know what it is and they’re like, you need to have a podcast. You should totally have a podcast. I was blogging and I kept saying. I had the media experience, but the only two people I knew that were big media names at the time doing what I was, that people were telling me to do in personal finance were Dave Ramsey and Susie Orman.

And the thing that I didn’t want to do that they do very well, they’re very good at it. I didn’t want people to call me and I yell at them about their money. That just, that never helped me. And You know, I mean, they’re doing great. I don’t want to, you know, throw any stank on on them. They’re huge brands and they’ve done really well.

What they do is just not my personality. So I knew I couldn’t do that. So I was kind of working over my head. What is that competitive advantage of mine that I mentioned earlier? And I’m mowing my lawn one day and I’m listening. To NPR and I I’m listening to the show called car talk. I don’t know if you’re familiar Jared with car talk Oh, yeah.

Yeah very much. So for people that don’t know who they are They’re these two brothers they call themselves click and clack just to have fun because you can’t remember their long italian name Click and clack and when people call in about their car, they go. Well, jared, is it making a Noise, there’s a going And they go it’s going more tick tick tick tick and i’m just laughing because these guys are hilarious and they’re talking about cars I realize I’m not learning crap about a car, but I’m having a wonderful time listening to this experience and I thought, wait a minute, there’s nobody doing this at the time when it comes to money.

We’re all so busy trying to give great quote, financial advice, and we’re taking ourselves so seriously. There’s nobody out there on the other side saying, you know what, you can do this, and this is so important to get right that we freeze all the time. I think the best way to not freeze is to go, Hey, you know what?

You make mistakes, big deal. You know, you went in and you couldn’t open up the Roth IRA. You tried to do something, whatever, just go try stuff. The more you try it, the quicker you fail. The more you get it out of your system, the better off you’re going to be. And that became the, the, the platform, the foundation of where I was going with stacking Benjamins.

We didn’t know what we were going to call it. I was blogging on this website called, uh, the free financial advisor. com. And my partner. Who’s another financial planner. And I, now he’s my cohost. He and I bought that domain specifically for SEO reasons. It was, it was open. Everybody was, was putting in free financial advice and SEO and neither he nor I believe financial advice that’s free is any good.

We both think you need somebody in your corner who is, uh, who knows you, who knows what your goals are. So buying the free financial advisor was a way for us to take that name and show people the value of having good coaches. I wasn’t a coach. I just was somebody writing about the nature of good coach. I wasn’t a financial planner anymore.

I didn’t have a product to sell No product behind me. I just uh had this blog and now we decided we wanted to podcast Well, we knew it was going to be really bad. So and we also knew that um, and this is 2011 I also was Confounded by, that’s probably the right word. I was confounded by how the hell do you get the fact that you and I, Jared, are talking right now and it somehow makes it to the, the, you know, to Spotify or to Apple.

So people hear it. And I thought that sounds really complicated. I was like, this sounds super complicated. I’m not going to get, we took a year because of the stupidity between my ears and I did nothing because I thought it was really complicated. You and I know how easy it is. I ended up with this company Libsyn, right?

Libsyn, one of the, one of the places where you just upload your podcast and they send it everywhere. It was the world’s simplest thing. And for a year, I didn’t even do a Google search. I just let that get between me and doing it. If I had that year back, I totally would take it back because if we would have started a year earlier, we would have been so much further ahead, but I didn’t.

So we wait a year. I finally figured this stuff out. I’m like, Oh, that piece is easy, but I still didn’t know what I was doing podcast wise. I knew I wanted to be like hard talk, but I didn’t know what the format was going to be. So we came up with this idea. I don’t have a name. I don’t have a direction.

This general feeling about where i’m ahead so, uh, We call it the worst of the free financial advisor because we know it’s going to suck I also decide it’s going to be 13 episodes long because i’m a baseball fan It’s going to be like spring training baseball. I’m going to create this show. It’s going to be 13 episodes I’m, just going to go play test it.

I’m going to try it out. See what the problems are find out where the friction is Uh through a use case scenario using myself as the guinea pig And so like everything we get seven episodes in, as you know, Jared, and I kind of know where all the problems are. You find out much quicker than you thought.

And this big demon between my ears has been completely tamed. I’m like, okay, we’re ready to go. So we, uh, at episode seven. Uh, then I start playing with the format and I realized the more ADD the format is, the more I like the show. Uh, I also did something that a lot of podcast editor people don’t do. A lot of people in podcasting now, when they get into it, they’re like, I don’t know anything about editing, so I’m not going to edit, I’m going to hire an editor and I’m going to have them put it out.

I would edit your own show. And the reason I’d edit your own show isn’t because you want to be a super editor. It’s because you need to listen to yourself and you need to give your, you’re going to be. You’re going to have the best feedback for yourself of where you stink and where you don’t, where you need help.

And as I listened to myself, I realized for, uh, OG, my partner and I, if we get in the weeds on a topic, our show gets boring in a hurry. It’s really, really boring. We’re better just as people, if we’re moving, man. So, uh, so I realized the segments need to be shorter. I also wasn’t giving people signposts from one segment to another is our early listeners.

Uh, we’re giving me feedback. They’d say well, you got to cut something and I’d say well, why what’s bad? And they’re like, what’s the point? None of it’s bad But I just don’t know where you’re going next And the show just seems to be like this three ring circus and we don’t know where the hell it’s going So I learned how to put put signpost in but I started really Really pushing the envelope and experimenting because I knew that this was playtime And I think that’s the importance just as an aside of also during this journey having a growth mentality, you know going What doesn’t kill me Will make me stronger.

And so i’m just going to play with it. I’m trusting that i’m going to find out where the weak points are So by the time we got to 13 episodes, we were ready. We relaunched as a show called two guys in your money and uh, And we had this Much more add fast paced format much more humor than we had at the beginning We realized the humor was very attractive and money I was I was a little surprised because I thought we could do a little humor You It turned out the more humor we had in the show, the more people liked it.

And I think it’s because it was the antidote from Susie Orman and from Dave Ramsey. They were so serious that you come to our show. People like, what the hell? Like, and still today, if you see our negative reviews, our negative reviews are, they screw around too much and I’m. You know, I gave you a lot of signposts to show you that we are going to screw around.

Our show starts with, um, this music that makes it sound like the tonight show. It’s modeled after the tonight show that tells you there’s going to be segments. There’s going to be guest. It’s very quick. It gives you a specific place. We’re live from Joe’s mom’s basement. That should also tell you it’s not gonna be Dave Ramsey.

I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, our announcer guy, Joe’s mom’s neighbor. What the hell’s going on? Like my goal from the beginning of our podcast is to mess with your head and give you signposts that this isn’t going to be hardcore. This is going to be relaxed. It’s going to be fun. It’s going to be comedy.

Um, so we experimented with that two guys in your money though, after, after. About 50 episodes. I realized it still wasn’t funny enough. It still was too highbrow. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t want to be dumb, but I was realizing our niche was accessibility. People liked us because it made money so accessible.

So I had to make the topics easier. I had to make it more for a beginner. I had to make it even more wide audience. They say to niche down, you know, niche pursuits. I had to, I had to widen. Like for me my my niche was going to be beginner So I need to widen the age range didn’t matter so it needed to appeal to a wide swath of people um so we We rebranded again.

I did the whiteboard thing with a lot of different names And I wanted the name to be punchy to be fun to be and my sister said something about stacking pennies Which is now a nascar podcast Um, and we had the guy the nascar driver on our show You Talking about going from stacking pageants benjamins.

His name is cordula joy but uh When she said, when my sister said stacking pennies, I said, well, let’s see a stacking Benjamins. There’s no way stacking Benjamins is available. Stacking Benjamins. com was available. Most unbelievable thing. Totally. So of course we grabbed that. We, we make the show, um, even lighter, but still we kinda, we got to about 2, 500 listeners per episode and the show kind of, uh, capped out.

So we were, we were, uh, We were where we were when

Jared: I just want to ask one more in depth question about this process because I hear you talking from the outset about how from the beginning, you realize the importance of being a little bit different. You talked about leaning into your unique skill sets that give you a competitive advantage.

You talked about differentiating and yet. You learned quickly as you went about the things that you didn’t think were important like humor and that you would add in Talk about as people are listening and they have their idea in their head. They have their business right now. They’re working on How do they determine what’s important?

To pivot on and differentiate themselves with, with their audience versus something that isn’t going to matter. And I know that question is pretty open ended, but I wonder how many other people are struggling with that and how to make their brand and how to make their business unique, yet how to know whether it’s just a waste of their time to focus on it.

Joe: I still struggle with it today, Jared. I mean, after all these years, we had a situation on our show. A few months ago, we had a big blow up between two of our contributors. Uh, uh, our audience was divided. One of our, one of our contributors left because they had a huge fight on the show. I probably shouldn’t have aired it.

Um, but I was listening to the wrong voices. I was listening too much to the critics and I had these, these critics in my ear going, well, you know, uh, I don’t like that show because they can’t have a serious discussion. And my feeling is always like, listen, if you’re dumb enough to think that just because I’m lightening it up, that we’re not having a serious discussion about this, about this stuff, then you’re taking yourself too seriously.

But I let that get in, get in. And when my contributors started fighting, I went, well, this’ll show them. This’ll show people that we can have a serious discussion and man, it can get granular. Now, at that time, I didn’t expect that one of our contributors is going to leave and it was going to. But what I learned is that my show is people’s happy place and stop listening to the people that I’m.

aren’t my audience. Like I’m, I’m totally listening to these people that aren’t my audience way too much. Um, instead of leaning into my North star. So I think number one is trust yourself and what you want to create. We took a social media course through M. I. T. There’s this great phrase that I like called, uh, that I learned from a group that I belong to called strategic coach and strategic coach always says, ask who, not how.

Don’t ask, how do I do something? Cause you’re going to end up in YouTube video. Hell just going, Oh my God, just tell me where to put the damn screwdriver. Right. Don’t do that. Ask who knows how to do this. And if I ask who, not how the, who not only. If they don’t know, I know them well enough to know that they know the person.

So they will get me to the answer quick. And that person will explain it in a way that I will understand quickly because they know me. So between the relationship and expertise, I get where I want to go far better. Plus the relationship value of me saying, Hey, Jared, how do I do this thing? People like to be asked for help.

They, they, they, they love that. Well, when, when I, um, was, was looking at our social media stuff, which still isn’t phenomenal, my, who was MIT. I was like, you get all these snake oil people telling you, Oh yeah, I can help you with your social media, right? I get this email 57 times a week. I’m like, yeah, MIT is going to tell me, but this, the professor Sinan oral to make the point Sinan said, trust that you’re not a snowflake.

Trust that your design sensibility is going to be attractive to other people too, because study after study shows that you’re not a snowflake and that you are very much like a, at least enough people that your brand will succeed if you just follow that north star. Um, so as an example, when we got the early advice or advice, we got the early criticism from people that we weren’t funny, right?

At what they’re telling me is I want you to be more like dave ramsay I want you to stop trying to be funny. What I read was my north star is funny And you know what? They were 100 right jared because i’ve been studying finance for over at that time well over 20 years And I had never taken a comedy class.

I had never studied comedy. I was just a guy that cracked his friends up And I was like, you know, really, in some ways, how dare me that there’s these people out there that I’m competing against for ear space who are working on the comedy craft all the time. I haven’t even tried. So, when I heard the, the, the criticism, you’re not funny.

I know what they wanted me to do was stop trying to be funny. Instead, what we did was started leaning into comedy classes, comedy courses, uh, finding as much stuff about good comedy, studying good comedians online. And I’ll tell you, the show’s gotten fun. I mean, the show’s gotten really funny over the past, uh, the, the, the, the past 13 years because of that.

So I think it’s, Have your north star first so that when you get the friction in the show that your users are going to bring to your brand, you know what to do with it.

Jared: I love that. I mean, 13, I’m glad you said 13 years in, um, you know, I’m looking here, you’ve got. I believe is it over 1, 500 podcast episodes now?

Yeah. And that

Joe: doesn’t include the 69 episodes of, uh, of, uh, two guys in your money in the 13 episodes of the, the worst of the free financial advisor.

Jared: You’re getting darn near close to 2000 podcast episodes. Um, my notes as we prepped here, audience size nearing 200, 000 shows are averaging 40, 000 plus listens per episode.

You guys publish, did you say three times a week? Three times a week. Yeah. That’s so I want to get in a little bit to your content creation process. If I could, I want to ask about how you ideate, how you come up with all this content, especially on the heels of you talking about really having such a clear idea of your avatar, your listener, what they What they struggle with the blend of comedy with it How do you figure out what to talk about in a way that keeps people engaged and you don’t just kind of run out Of steam

Joe: we we don’t trust that we’re going to come up with it on the fly Uh, that’s what we did early on and I think a lot of podcasters go through this you show up at the mic You’re like, oh crap.

I got nothing. What are we going to talk about this week? And that that just simply doesn’t work Um early on we did that a lot And then I went to, you know, you and I met at an industry conference. I’d recommend everybody listening, go to industry conferences just cause you meet cool people like Jared, but you also go to these great, um, you go to these great sessions.

You also though, I think there’s also value in getting, getting out of your brand and going back to the 10, 000 foot level. And looking down on your brand from a place where I’m not, I’m not in the trench working on it. I’m, I’m outside of it, looking at it much more objectively when you’re, you know, I’m in Boise, Idaho, where I’d never been before.

It’s easier for me to kind of look at stacking bedrooms from the outside. So, um, I went to this conference called Podcast Movement, and this changed everything for us. Like a lot of people, uh, I, I’m competitive. I look at the, I, I don’t look at the rankings much anymore. I used to look at the rankings all the time, podcast rankings, and I would always go, and I know there’s a lot of people listening to do this, I’m better than that one, better than that one, better than that one, and they have bigger numbers than I’ve got, right?

I’m like, those assholes, I’m so much better. And, uh, on the main stage was a guy named Roman Mars. Roman has a great show called 99 percent Invisible NPR Show. And Roman went through how he makes a show. And at the time, Jared, I thought I was pretty damn professional. I thought the show was doing pretty, pretty well.

You know, we’re at 2000 listeners and I think, okay, yep, uh, I do things really well. I’d read a bunch of stuff. He talks about how, They use a five week production schedule. They start thinking five weeks out about what they’re going to do. They, they come up with the general idea. Then they find the guest to fit the idea instead of, Oh my God, I need a guest next week.

And then we just talk about whatever the hell a guest brings up. Uh, that way they can make a fabric of shows that are either for them congruent. For me because i’m a variety show I can put ideas together and do it in a coherent way Um, if i’m working five weeks out that that truly makes it a quilt It’s I like the quilt analogy because it’s like a warm blanket, you know what the format’s going to be But inside of that warm blanket, you got no idea what the hell the quilt’s going to include Yeah, which which which is really the secret sauce of our show.

So he started five weeks out You They use some sound design. Um, they surprise and delight people along the way, but they give themselves enough time and enough piece of the process so that when they sit down at the microphone, while some pieces are extemporary, I don’t think any of it’s extemporaneous and 99 percent visible, but our shows made to be extemporaneous.

We’re working inside a much smaller box than we used to work. So we know where this box is headed. We know what points we’re trying to make. I’ve had some pushback on that from people, by the way, Jared, who say, well, this sounds like it makes you less creative, right?

Jared: I was going to ask that, you know, like, does the rigidity, does the formula, does the formulaic approach actually change the way you create?

Joe: I interviewed a guy named Don Hahn, who is the producer behind beauty and the beast behind Aladdin. He was a Disney Imagineer and now he was the producer over on the side, handling the money strings. And I asked him this question. I said, does going from the guy who’s the big idea Imagineer with Disney, you know, uh, going from that a creator to going to the guy who controls the budget is going, no, Jared, you got to stop now.

Like, uh, how does that change the game? He goes, he goes, it actually makes the game better. Constraints make the game better because if you give an artist unlimited time, they will never do anything. But if you have a set budget. of time and maybe money, uh, and a set clock they’re working on, you will create better stuff.

And true, we might not get that upside potential, that serendipitous moment where we go off the charts, but you know what? I exchanged that for no downside. It’s almost like going on your own to a country versus taking like a high end tour. You know, it’s funny because, uh, I was always the snooty guy going, I’m going to travel the world.

I’m never going to take a tour. Then I did. I did this high end tour one time. It was like 15 bags of money. And I realized, yes, I was trading the serendipity for the fact nothing was going to suck. And my time was really valuable and everything was going to be at least an eight on a scale of one to 10. I might not love it, but I like it a lot.

And that’s what I’m trading my money for to do. So that’s what we’re doing by, by, by that schedule. So I left this. This conference podcast movement with this big idea that we need a longer production schedule. We need to be working on multiple shows at the same time. We need a software systems so that we can, we can track and write out and script parts of the show more than we are now.

Um, and we also, during that five weeks, what I found later was it also gives me five weeks to become more creative about the segment. So instead of coming up with it. 10 days ahead, seven days ahead, because I’ve got over a month, my brain, when I’m out on a run, I go, Oh my God, I know what I’m going to ask this guest, or I know who a good guest would be for this.

Or I know this hilarious bit that would go with this. And also as I’m scrolling social media, like I do looking for. Content for our show because we use a lot of headlines. I’m also then tripping on funny stuff or stuff. That’s very, um, apropos for what we’re what we’re talking about. So, 5 weeks out, we come up with the idea.

The idea on a Wednesday has to be. materially different than what the idea was for Monday. So, you know, if on Monday I’m talking to people with money about investments and, and, um, uh, maybe wealth management on Wednesday, I’m probably gonna be talking about getting out of debt because I want to talk to a different piece of my audience then I’m playing with your head.

And then on, on Friday, we might talk about mindset. So we’re gonna talk to three different things Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and I set those up on purpose. I use a Google calendar color coded so that I can see the differentiation of topics that also allows me to differentiate between the people that bring those topics.

I know. That somebody is going to like me because i’m a guy with a certain background Um and of a certain age and so you’re more likely to resonate with me But another piece of my audience won’t resonate with that person So we go for diversity of people not as like a corporate checkbox but because it makes a wider audience more fun show and what’s cool is If I can get like a 50 year old white dude to trust me Because he likes what i’m doing inside that quilt.

That sounds kind of kinky. That’s kind of Because because because he likes we’re going with it Because he likes where my show’s going uh, he will then find that if i’ve curated a 5-year-old black woman who struggled with debt, he’ll still listen to her story. And I’ve had these cool ex, uh, experiences from our guests, these, these letters from our guests going, I can’t believe that I’m learning from these people that are so unlike me.

Which is fabulous, which is fantastic. But I think that’s, uh, I think that’s the five week production schedule. So week five and four, we’re coming up with the topic and the guests. We’re making sure it’s a quilt week three and two. If we have guests, which we call mentors, we are recording their portion of the show.

Then we get, we have a comedian, uh, that writes our show with us. We heard a woman who’s written for comedy central just because I don’t have enough time anymore. Um, She writes some of the scripted pieces. We have this great table read, uh, a week out of recording so that we kind of know where the funny beats are going to be.

We mostly focus on the comedy. We know personal finance. We want to make sure we get the comedy down. So people get the messages. We also then in the second half of that meeting, we design the structure of the show for three weeks out. So we, we do a table read for two weeks out. Then we structure three weeks out.

The writer goes and takes that for the next week’s table read. During that table read, we tweak. Then when we sit down at the microphones about a week before people hear it, uh, we are, we’re on point. We know exactly what we’re going to record.

Jared: Sounds exactly like how we do the niche pursuits podcast. That is so involved.

So in depth, but so precise. Uh, and so I think that that’s really interesting to watch you walk through it. And I think it’s important for everyone to listen or everyone who is listening to know, like, That’s after over a decade of doing this podcast. Yeah, right. Kind of aged into that and you built that up

Joe: over time.

There is a cool tool though, Jared, which is free that we use that I really like. I like the designers of it. I like that where it goes. It’s called podcast studio pro. We use podcast studio pro to build our episodes. Um, super easy free product. Uh, Nice job by that team. We highly recommend that.

Jared: Let’s take a step back and talk about how the business kind of monetizes and makes money because podcasts on their own, they don’t bring in any dollar bills, right?

Just on the own, press record, upload to Lisbon and call it a day. Like how is the brand evolved in terms of where you guys are involved now? I know you have a newsletter. That’s one of the reasons we were at the conference and we were talking a lot. Um, you guys have YouTube as well, and that’s evolved over the years.

Like where. Are the traffic sources coming from and how is the business monetized?

Joe: Our, uh, our show is ad supported and, um, I remember going to the first podcast movement conference and a guy named, uh, uh, uh, Chris Brogan, you know, Chris Brogan, Chris Brogan says, you cannot have a podcast without a business underneath it.

I said, Oh, that’s a bunch of BS. Cause I don’t think I need one. I think what I need is to have a really good podcast. A lot of people want to listen to, I will just be ad supported. That’ll be great. That worked really well until it didn’t. And what we found a

Jared: metaphor for life, frankly, I

Joe: should have realized the world was changing sooner than I did.

Um, in fact, it’s funny about five years ago, a friend of mine, a guy named Brian Preston at the money guys. Um, we have a really, you know, money podcast or a small community. So you know, everybody, Brian said to me about five years ago, he goes, you know what? I’m going to focus on YouTube. I’m going to get our YouTube channel going.

I said, Oh, how cute, Brian. That’s great. You go to your YouTube thing and I’m going to make a show people want to listen to. At that time we were kicking his butt and downloads. We were just, we were the king. Five years later, Brian is kicking my butt in audio downloads. Andy is half a million people following his YouTube channel, but even better than that, the quality of his videos of his YouTube, because he had five years of learning that I didn’t have.

Well, probably four years of learning. Cause now I’m a year into my, my game. Uh, he also had the algorithm when it was easier. You know than I did. Uh, I should have broadened out sooner. And this idea of multiple streams of income was something that I should have embraced sooner. Also, you know, people have been telling me all the time, you got to get your newsletter moving.

News, newsletter is core. It’s the only thing you own. Didn’t do that either. Our newsletter, our, our newsletter grew by a thousand people last month and it was all organic, which, you know, sounds. Okay, that might be okay. It might not be. We only had 11, 000 people on our newsletter. So the fact that we grew it by a thousand a month, I was, I’m very happy with the growth, the organic growth of our newsletter, but we had to tweak and tweak and tweak and tweak to get to, get to that point.

But with an audience size of 180, 000 people, why the hell is my newsletter only at 11, 000 people? It’s because I didn’t take. Any of that seriously. So I guess if you don’t mind, I’ll start with monetization of the podcast because in the early days of the podcast, another reason to go to industry conferences is you will see these booths.

And some of these are things that your audience might want as well. And so I go to money conferences. I’m at a conference called FinCon and I see Fidelity investments there. And I’ve had the Fidelity rep who’s in the booth on my show. And so I walk up to him and I said, Hey, have you guys ever thought about sponsoring a podcast before?

And he goes, no, we haven’t. What, you know, tell me what you’re looking for. And so I tell him a little bit about a show. I tell him the demographics and he just very, very casually goes, how much money are you asking for? And that was the first time I realized this huge company. And this is back when we had like a thousand listeners, right?

This huge company, Fidelity Investments might give me money. And so the first thing I do, Jared, is what most people would do. I’m thinking, you know, as many commas in this number as I can get, right? How can I charge as much money as possible? And then I realized that that are in the early days of my podcast, that is not my win.

My win is actually. To have my listeners take me seriously and to know that I’m a serious brand. And if I can just say the stacking Benjamin show is brought to you by fidelity investments. My listeners are going to go shooters. I mean, these people are amazing. People are great. I, uh, so I said, how about 200 bucks, 200, which by the way is a mistake on the other side.

Now, no, I’m, I’m, I’m saying so little that he’s not gonna take me seriously. And Ben’s the guy’s name. Ben goes 200. Is that for like, uh, for, for what period of time I go for a month. And he’s like, deal. I sent him a contract, they sign up for three months. So for three months, I got to say Fidelity Investment, The Stacky Benjamin Show is brought to you by Fidelity Investments.

And I got these notes and our show was, uh, our show grew after that. Like I had hoped because of Fidelity at the end of three months, by the way, they, they I think we were way too small and they let us go, but, but, but that was fun. So that was the early days of monetization. That wasn’t who I usually look for though.

The booth I usually looked for was an up and coming, they’re called fintech companies. Uh, these financial technology companies that are growing very quickly. They’re looking to get the word out. I, the, the, the, uh, the, the, The pitch that I made them was we’re growing together. I’m growing my show. You’re growing your brand.

Let’s grow together It’s going to be cheap for you now because i’m small It’s going to be more expensive as I get bigger But if we grow together then heck you’ll grow into it. What’s cool is I ended up with two advertisers from that That, um, that, uh, uh, approach that lasted, uh, at least seven years for both of them, one of them still with me, a brand called magnify money.

They got bought by lending tree. Now we do another brand of theirs, deposit accounts, but they stayed with me and those checks were very small and they’ve grown as our audience size has grown Haven life, which was, uh, Uh a mass mutual brand started off really small haven life, by the way a mass mutual killed them So they didn’t go.

Bye. Bye. They they frankly I think they’d still be with us today if mass mutual hadn’t taken the brand and and said we’re done with but um But that was initially I used cpm. Uh, which is uh cost per thousand Uh cost per milu and so it’s per thousand listeners and I went with the industry average of 25 bucks And the reason was And I don’t know if I agree or disagree with this Jared because I think there’s lots of ways to approach this For me, I was more interested in me If I can make it on the industry average If I can make things work on the industry average and I don’t have to ask for multiples Then then I know that my brand.

Um My brand is going to make it because this number is going to be acceptable to a wide number of brands. So if brand a goes away, brand B, C, D are going to do it. If I charge a premium, that’s great over the short term for me. Um, which I think is. Could be a wise way to go, uh, but for me I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on marketing.

I want to spend a lot of time on the on the craft So I went with what the industry average was besides that stacking benjamins Uh hasn’t done Hadn’t done anything frankly, to monetize the show. Because when you grow the show to the point that you’re bringing in, you know, at, at one point we were bringing in 450, 000 a year, um, on the podcast, I was making enough that I was having fun doing it.

Um, I was making enough money to support it. We were, uh, creating great shows. The things were going the way that I wanted to, and what could possibly go wrong? I’m just going, I’m just going to keep watching those check numbers go up as that audience just keeps going up and up and up, baby, because podcasting is never going to evolve.

And nothing’s ever going to change. So it was only about two years ago that I thought about how dangerous that was and thought we need multiple stages for the show, which is why we don’t call it the Stucky Benjamin’s podcast. We call it Stucky Benjamin’s show. So we started doing some lives on Instagram.

And building our Instagram, uh, because I realized we need, we were influencers, whether I wanted to be or not. Brittany Hennessy has a great book called influencer, which I really like. I’d recommend everybody read, uh, which made me realize that even though the term influencer made me gag that, uh, that I truly am one.

And I needed to lean into that so we could monetize our social channels, but I didn’t have any real social channels besides Twitter at 11, 000 people that I did more for my ego than anything else. Um, so, uh, started growing Instagram because that’s where more of our, our people were. And I, um, we started really taking our YouTube channel seriously.

Um, just, just a couple of years ago and it was maybe a year ago that I realized we really do need a business underneath this podcast. So now I’m flipping the business to be a podcast that might have these other stages and other things to being a financial education company that has a podcast, social and videos that support that.

So we’re in the process right now they’re scaffolding all over stacking Benjamins. We have our first Guide coming out. We’re going to be standalone guides. First one’s on using your hr benefits better Second one is on tax planning Third one’s going to be on setting up a better money Dashboard and how to actually set goals that work and then the fourth one’s retirement planning fifth one is college planning We’ll have five guides.

We have a signature course We’re building of build your own financial plan with help from guys that know what the hell they’re doing Um cfp and former financial planner because my co host is a cfp and then we have a white glove You a course where I actually take you through 10 sessions at a much, much, much higher, uh, rate.

Um, and I do it with a small group. So we cap it at 30 people and I take 30 people through 10 lessons on financial planning. You build your financial plan with me, not, not virtually. Um, And that’s what we’re building right now to try to make things better. Plus our our newsletter, which has a very high open rate Around 50 open rate.

I think that’s because it’s so small compared to the number of people listening to our show So right now it is just true fans of the show. We just started putting advertising Into the uh newsletter, but the newsletter much is much like morning brew uh, I looked at the hustle of morning brew and how they They, um, create their newsletters and, uh, monetizing that with ads, just based on our approach and who we are and how we write that newsletter ads in there does not take away from the user experience.

So I’m very happy with that.

Jared: It’s interesting to hear how you’ve started to stack different traffic sources, different monetization sources on top of this platform you built with the podcast. How much, um, You know, I think a lot of people listening might have gotten traction with one, maybe two areas. You talked about how yours was the podcast, maybe somebody listening, they’ll have a YouTube channel, but it’s just a YouTube channel or they’ll be driving SEO traffic to their blog, but it’s just SEO traffic.

Maybe. Walk people through how you’ve been able to pivot in the last couple of years in the ways you have, because you’ve done a lot the last couple of years. I know you and I talked a lot at the ConvertKit conference about that third, the 30 person kind of masterclass you did, and I thought it was brilliant.

Um, and it’s something that, that you talked about how it was both fun and interesting, but something that a subset of your audience got value of. How do people figure out what’s next? How, how did you figure out what was next from the podcast and any other things you’re working on now?

Joe: I think the thing that I would do, and um, I think about this right now, what is additive You know what, I’m gonna steal this directly from, uh, Alex Ozzi.

Um, who by the way, is about to be on the Stacking Benjamin Show, which is nice. Pretty cool. So, uh, but, but I think Ozzi said it best. He said, do things which are really come across as very additive to your audience, but don’t take a lot more time for you to produce. So the key for our YouTube channel has been.

Um, you know, a lot of people are going to, you know, you look at diary of a ceo, you look at a lot of these, uh, face to face, uh, uh, uh, uh, call her daddy is another one. I mean, I’m just thinking about all of, all the podcasts that are now on couches and they’re only face to face. I can’t do that, Jared. I can, but I would have to move because I live in the middle of nowhere.

Texarkana, Texas, right on the Texas Arkansas border. This little 60, 000 person town. I don’t want to move. I love being in the small community. So for me, I have to look at what. A, how do I cover that up? I make my video quality good enough that it looks like a news broadcast. It looks, it looks very polished.

It looks very good where the two window approach where we’re in two different places are going to look good enough that you don’t care that we’re not in the same place. So that took a lot of work and it actually took hiring people. So for me, I had to I had to hire a video editor, uh, uh, to take that on as a second thing, but even without that, I think AI is getting good enough now that, that, uh, being able to have these conversations, take an AI solution like Opus, which is where we start.

Opus gives me these shorts. Um, so they crank out shorts from what used to just be audio only. I then upload those shorts. I think if the content’s good and the messaging is good, they don’t have to be incredibly sexy with a video editor like I’m using now. I think if I can add video and it takes me not that much longer, I guess is my point.

That’s where I start to, to, to fan it out. I also think about what’s going to make my audience stick stickier. You know, in a bank, my wheelhouse talking about banks in a bank, the reason a bank gives you a teaser rate. Uh, For adding an account, the thing that they always want is direct deposit. And the reason they want your direct deposit is because direct deposit is sticky.

Jared: Mmm.

Joe: So, if I can make things sticky, what, what, what makes things sticky? And you know what, to a certain part of your audience, behind the scenes discussion, They want to know how you’re building it. They want to know what you’re thinking. They want access to your life and to talking more about you. I see creators that are very afraid to talk about their personal life or they think, well, my personal life isn’t interesting.

You’d be surprised how interested your audience is in you, but you are sticky. Financial advice is not sticky. I can get that anywhere, but Joe Saul CHI and getting to know Joe Saul CHI better is very sticky. So. If I can, if I can, if I’m going on a trip, my family has just realized this is a part of the deal living with Joe.

Now I go on a trip. We were just in Boston. We go a day early and I do a meetup. You know, and in the early days of meetups, it was sometimes three of us meeting up, but I got to tell you, those three people that were at that meetup, Jared, you know, this, they’re still with us today because the meetup makes it sticky.

So, focus on things that are sticky and focus on things that are additive. Like, if you can add video to an audio podcast and then distribute it in a place where video gets distributed. I’m using the power of live as well. So now that I can use Riverside to publish to Twitter, to YouTube and to LinkedIn, if I want to, we’re not doing that yet, but I can publish different places.

I can now make those recording sessions. We do, we can do those live and it’s extra social media content. And people think they’re seeing behind the scenes. They are seeing behind the scenes cause it’s not edited yet. They’re hearing the raw stuff. That’s additive. So whatever I can do that doesn’t take me a lot more time that can add to the experience.

I’m going to embrace,

Jared: uh, I’d love that. You called it out my last company. That’s exactly what I did. I would just do a happy hour meetup with clients or people I knew in that area. And the first few I would do, I would go into it. I’d go there for a different reason, a conference, a meeting, a vacation, but I do these meetups.

The first couple, I mean, I had two people and you’re, you’re like, is this, I’d be driving out to who knows where. And I’m like, is this really worth it? And the first thing is it was worth it for those two people because you’re right. You’re establishing those really great relationships. You’re getting one on one impact, direct feedback.

But by the time years later, I was done doing those and I was, you know, they were a hundred people strong sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was the rarity, but still 2030 was the average. Uh, and, and so I think that’s a really interesting point. Um, I think maybe as we close, like you’re going from being just a podcast to being, like you said, a show, and you’ve talked about all the different things you’re working on to build out that show and impact listeners at different stages.

Maybe just give us What’s been the biggest surprise out of all the different places you’ve been putting that energy? What’s been the biggest surprise in terms of whether it’s success, it’s growth, um, and maybe a couple of the reasons why.

Joe: Biggest surprise. Wow. I, um, feel like I’m always surprised. I’m always surprised by what, what people love, what they, what they don’t love.

You know what the, the biggest surprise for me. Initially was, this doesn’t surprise me anymore, but it was certainly a surprise. It was that the, the, the less I pull my audience and the more I trust that North star and make a show that I would like the, the. The bigger my audience gets, I feel like when I audience chase, when I’m chasing an audience, I lose them.

And when I don’t chase and I really get into cooking that I enjoy, I remember listening to Tim Ferriss one time, talk about this saying that my job truly is to lead my audience. And if. I’m interested in a Stradivarius violin. I mean, for people that don’t know the Tim Ferriss podcast, he’s talking about human development and growth stuff.

And he wants to talk about violins for an episode. It has nothing to do with this topic. He’s like, but if I’m truly interested in violins, I bet I can make a show that people really love. And they’ll learn to trust me even more because it, because it’s clear that I love it and it’s clear that it’s, um, that it’s something that, that I’m passionate about.

And, and I think, I think I found just that, you know, you, you certainly, I’m in all these, you know, Online creator forums and there’s people that have been doing this for four to six weeks and they’re asking how do I monetize? and and my first Thought every time I see that is create something that’s beautiful to you And then monetize it and don’t get me wrong.

I think building and you know we’re doing a sister show right now jared where we’re Where we’re building in some of the pain points around the creation of stacking benjamins into this this second It’s a it’s a travel adventure show Because I like to travel And so, uh, my, my spouse also gets excited about travel.

So we decided as a side project, we’re going to do that, but the show is made live without an editor. We, we, we, uh, are going to be, um, uh, performing it live without edits on YouTube, on Twitter, all the stuff I just said. So I get rid of the editing costs. Monetization is built into the product. We have gear of the week.

And so we do a quiz question at the middle where we hint at what our gear of the week might be. And at the end of the show, we, we tell you what our gear of the week is and there’s an Amazon store, but it’s part of the fun of the show because every person I know that travels gets into Great gear right here.

Ooh something that makes travel easier more fun. I totally want to buy that So monetization is part of the creation of the product And the fact that our show now is very hard to edit If I can make a show that’s similar, but it’s easy to edit It also goes out of multiple channels at one time like all the pain points are Are built in but but none of that matters as much as creating a product first that I love You If I, if I begin with a product I love.

So what surprises me is I thought I was gonna have to chase my audience. Instead, I have to chase my own curiosity. And as I chase my curiosity and don’t get me wrong, I get feedback from my audience to be funnier, you know, or don’t be funny. I want to be funnier. So yeah, let’s lean more into comedy. It’s part of my North star.

Follow that North star strongly was really the surprise about how quickly that can grow your brand and how quickly when it hockey stick, that one thing alone, being much more true to the North star. Hockey stick the brand

Jared: Joe. I can’t tell you how how glad I’ve been to have you on the podcast It’s it’s interesting because I think just in summary and I think a lot of people listening Uh will recognize this whether they consciously did or didn’t A lot of people will add a podcast on later after they’ve gotten an audience somewhere else Maybe they started a newsletter.

Maybe they started a youtube channel Maybe they started a blog whatever it is, and they’ll add a podcast on you know Reference tim ferris like his initial hit was his book and then the podcast came You And, uh, you started with a podcast and then leveraged that into so many other things. I just think it’s so interesting because the insights you have are so much on audience building, uh, coming up with a show concept and that, that meets your avatar.

And so I just think your insights are so unique in terms of that audience and how you build and how you speak to that audience compared to somebody who builds it in a different manner or a different order. So, um, I just appreciate you coming on where it can be. I mean, we’ve talked about stacking Benjamins.

Where can people follow along with your podcast, with all the other things you’re doing? If they want to go get financial, um, uh, uh, content with a little bit of humor, we can say like, where can people go?

Joe: We, we call it the greatest money show on earth, Jared, because it truly is a circus stacking Benjamin show three days a week, wherever finer podcasts are found like, like the niche pursuits

Jared: podcast.

We hope to be in the same crew, although our numbers are, are, uh, are, are, we don’t do three a week. We do two a week and I have to say that’s a lot of effort as it is. I was checking your, um, your podcast, hoping you were at like 10 minute episodes. So I can at least, no, you’re doing like full hour plus episodes too.

So we, we, we, we can’t hold a candle on that one. Two a week is hard enough, but congratulations. And thanks for coming on. Like I said, I hope to see you again next year at crafting. Thanks

Joe: for having me, Jared. And you know what a fan I am. I told you then I’m like, Oh my God, I love the niche pursuits podcast because I heard your voice.

We actually, it’s funny for people, uh, uh, hanging out with us. We were at five guys and you were sitting right across from me. And I heard your voice. I’m like, I know your voice.

Jared: So good. It’s true. It’s fun to have another podcast host on. I, uh, I felt the same way. Um, it’s, it’s fun to meet in real life and it’s fun to have you here and tell your story.

Thank you for sharing. And until we meet again, talk soon.