Rob Walling On How To Podcast For 10 Years Straight

Motivation is a fickle thing. Some days it’s front and center, driving you to produce your best work. Others it’s no where to be found and things that used to be a priority can fall to the wayside.

The rollercoaster of motivation is a central theme in our latest episode of Audience. Craig sits down with Rob Walling, found of Drip and TinySeed, who has produced over 500 podcast episodes. His show, Startups For the Rest of Us, has been on the air for 10 years. Throughout that time, the show has experimented with new formats, went from co-hosts to a one man show, and spurred a successful live conference series.

Given Rob’s passion for and success with podcasting, he’s just the guy to help you maintain or re-spark your motivation. Throughout our interview, he describes his biggest podcasting regret, how to talk ad nauseam about the same topic, and why fostering a community with his listenership is his biggest legacy.

Listen to the full episode to learn how a podcaster with 10 years of experience under his belt finds the motivation to keep going.

How Startups For the Rest of Us Has Changed

A lot has changed in the podcasting industry in 10 years. And the same thing can be said for Rob’s podcast, Startups For the Rest of Us.

Starting out, Rob describes feeling nervous behind the mic. He wrote out, word-for-word, a script of exactly what he wanted to say for each episode. It took about 250 recordings to find his voice and feel more comfortable talking candidly with his co-host. And then he and his co-host hit the complacent years. Both in the midst of building their start-ups and family life, they stopped experimenting and trying new things. They still showed up each week, but had lost the motivation to innovate.

It was just within the last year, at episode 448, that things started to change. His co-host, Mike Taber, decided to take back from recording every episode. And with that shift, Rob rediscovered his motivation to start innovating again.

He ushered in new formats, more experiments, and pushed the show to excel beyond its original success. Now surpassing 500 episodes, Startups For the Rest of Us continues to inspire bootstrapped entrepreneurs.

Talking About The Same Topic For 10 Years

After settling on a podcast topic, the realization that you may be talking about same subject for years to come sets in. If you’ve taken the advice from successful podcasters, you chose a topic that you’re passionate about. But how do you find new ideas and angles about the same general topic week after week?

Rob’s advises to “peel the onion”. The podcasts that make a splash bring new perspectives and voices to the table. Your focus, whether you’re on episode 10 or 100, should always be how can I add something different to the conversation?

For Startups For the Rest of Us, Mike and Rob started building episodes from content they’d previously written about in books and articles. But then episode 30 hit and they ran out of things to say. That’s when they realized listeners had submitted questions via email and Twitter that they never addressed. A new episode format was born and they continued consistently publishing new material.

In the years when their other professional ventures dominated their time, they reduced how frequently they published episodes. Moving from...