How I Grew My Podcast To 300 Million Downloads (My Exact Playbook + Mistakes)

The $100 MBA Show - Omar Zenhom

Omar Zenhom shares his proven playbook for growing his podcast to 300 million downloads, revealing failures, key strategies, and lessons learned from building a sustainable, high-impact show.

Key takeaways

• Start with a clear competitive advantage

Transcript preview

This podcast has over 300 million downloads and counting, over 2,800 episodes, and we were awarded Best of Apple Podcasts and been mentioned in pretty much every publication, from Forbes, Inc. to entrepreneur to Time magazine to Huffington Post. That's all great and all, but I want to tell you something that most people in my position would not say out loud. I almost didn't make it. Not because of the competition, not because the market was too crowded, but because my first podcast was a complete failure. And everything I'm going to teach Every principle, every strategy, every lesson in the playbook I will share, got us to that 300 million downloads. It came from understanding exactly why that first podcast failed. And what to do differently with this podcast? So let's start there. scale your business. If this show has helped in any way, it would be amazing if you could drop us a quick review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast right now. It helps me and my team bring new episodes every week and more importantly more entrepreneurs will be able to discover our podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. Thanks so much. This podcast isn't my first podcast. My first podcast was called People Who their shit. It's a pretty good name, right? But unfortunately the podcast is shit. The concept was pretty simple. We interviewed interesting people in business. We asked them to share their knowledge and we published it. And we thought it was a pretty good idea. The problem is that every other podcast was doing exactly the same thing. We had no differentiator. And on our best episode we had Gary Vanertchuk on and we had 400 downloads, which wasn't so impressive because I was getting more people to my blog post back then. Now. Now around this time, gig that she had to do in New York. And we were living in San Diego and we drove across country so that we can save some money and have the open road to discuss why this is not working. Why is this podcast failing? We took this opportunity of the open road to just get honest with ourselves. We looked at the top business podcast at that time. There were players like Tim Ferris for the Tim Ferris show who has five New York Times best selling books. All this guy does is win is a huge audience, right. We had. We had people. We had people like pat Flynn, had a huge fan base and was podcasting way before us. You have people like John Lee Dumas of entrepreneurs on fire who was publishing a podcast episode seven days a week every single day without missing a single episode. We had people like Jordan Harbinger of the Jordan Harbinger show who was podcasting before the iPhone in 2006. I mean who was even listening this is crazy. So we had to really just take a honest look in the mirror and be like how are we gonna compete with these other interview podcasts. And it really just dawn on us. we're not really leveraging any of our strengths. And that's really the biggest takeaway that we got from this whole reflection exercise. Nicole and I are former educators, right? We taught in the classroom for over a decade each. And I asked myself, why am I interviewing? Maybe I should be teaching on this podcast. Maybe I don't have all the clout of the other people that we mentioned and we looked at. But I probably am a better teacher than the rest of those guys. You know, I have a master's education. I've taught. classes five days a week for 10 years. So I'm pretty good at breaking down complex ideas and making them digestible and easy to understand. The other thing that we realize is that we needed to add something to the genre of business podcasting. Try to innovate a little bit. You know, Nicole loves language learning and one of their favorite podcasts is Coffee Break French. She also likes Coffee Break Spanish, which are small bite-sized language lessons. And we thought, hey, no one's really doing this in business where you can learn a quick lesson. implement and come back for more. I start with this story because before you launch your podcast you need to ask yourself what's your competitive advantage? Why will somebody listen or watch your podcast? It's much easier to succeed if you're actually fulfilling a specific need for a specific person because you're really going to be able to speak their language and with the hundred-dollar ratio we built a crystal clear answer to that question you know who are we speaking to. Well we're speaking to small business owners that are looking to small business owners that better every day and try to grow and actually they were growing with us because every time I learned a lesson in my own business I would share it on the show. The other thing we realize is that entrepreneurs are busy right we're all busy so we don't have a lot of time to go through a three hour interview so we wanted to make sure our episodes were bite-size 20 minutes so you can listen to an episode on your commute try to implement it and then come back from more the next episode. So the point of me sharing all of this is that you really ask yourself the question what's the question what's the question what's the question what's the adding to your show. Why will people listen or watch your podcast episodes? Maybe it's your experience, maybe it's the format, maybe it's even just your personality, but you have to add something unique that makes people want to tune in. Because everything else I'm going to teach you today will not work because if you market your show and then no one comes back, you're really just filling up a leaky bucket, right? You're gonna lose your listeners as fast as you gained them. Now having said that, let's start with lesson like you mean it. Launching your podcast for the first time is an opportunity that only happens once, right? You only get to launch once. So you want to make sure that you make it count, you take advantage of this situation. And a lot of people, they just kind of launch in a whisper and they kind of tell their friends and they put it up there. And they're almost like not proud of what they put out there. You need to be super proud of what you put out there and make sure that you tell as many people as possible and market that first push because this is your chance to learn about your show, learn about your story, and get subscribed. What we did is we made sure our first five episodes were the best episodes we could ever create. I literally re-recorded these five episodes probably over a dozen times because I wanted to make sure that when our listeners first listened or consumed our show, they wanted more. They really felt like, hey, this is really valuable. And like they say, you only have one opportunity to make a first impression. You want to make sure that you nail it. Number two, when you want to watch your show, everyone you know. I'm talking about literally everyone. I literally went in my phone, I scrolled into my contacts, and I looked at everybody, family, friends, people I met once at a conference, I either called them, I either sent them a text message, if I had their email, I emailed them, if I didn't have their email, I didn't have their email, I didn't have their email, I didn't them on social media. I added them on posts. Literally I had no shame. Why? Because I only have one chance at this. of positive feelings towards me and you like me or you met me and you had a good impression, then this is the one thing I'm asking you to do is to subscribe, follow, give us a review. I literally wanted to make sure that anybody who ever met me in my life knew that I was launching this show. Now a lot of people skip this step and it's a huge disaster if you do so. Why is this a big mistake? Because when you launch your show the algorithm is trying to find your audience, whether it's Apple or Spotify or Spotify or Spotify or whatever might be whatever might be. them as many signals as possible. I want to give the algorithm a chance for them to see, oh, there's people interested in this, the people are subscribing all of a sudden. And what I decided to do in this moment is when I shared it with everybody, I asked them to try to subscribe, try to review all in the same week so that it was a compounded effect, so it created a great strong signal. Let me tell you a little story. Nicole and I wanted to learn more about who are the people that will be listening to our show, who would subscribe, who would subscribe, who would subscribe, and not friends, and not friends and not friends and not friends and to talk to strangers. So what we did is we filled up our esky or our cooler with ice and we went to the supermarket and filled it up with soft drinks, cocholas and sprites and then we went to the boardwalk in San Diego, California at the time and we just stood there with a whiteboard we literally just pulled off our wall in the office and wrote on the whiteboard, free cold drinks for iTunes. And at the time podcasts were on iTunes and we just held up this whiteboard and people just walked by the board walk by the board and there's like hundreds and there's like hundreds And they're like, hey, I asked them, would you like a cold drink? And they would open up the cooler and