Birthing (and Monetizing) Your Authority Podcast with Alastair McDermott
You’ve been thinking about starting a podcast (or are just not happy with how yours is converting into leads and revenue). Prolific podcaster, author and coach Alastair McDermott shares how he created and runs multiple ongoing and evergreen podcasts:
Why you’ll need to start before you’re ready (and the advantages of failing faster).
How you might use an evergreen limited run podcast to fill a hole in your existing content or warm up your prospects.
Why the podcast you start may not be the one you end up with (hint: it’s normal to shift as you gain experience with the medium and your message).
Podcasting as a way to scale your business—what traction looks like and how long it takes to get it.
LINKS
Alastair McDermott LinkedIn | Amazon | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram
BIO
Alastair McDermott helps independent experts & consultants to earn more by rapidly building authority and visibility so that you can command premium fees, work less hours, and never have to suffer a bad-fit client again!
Alastair is an author, consultant & business coach. He hosts The Recognized Authority podcast, and has written a number of practical guides to building authority through content creation.
His most recent book is “33 Ways Not to Screw Up Your Business Podcast“ and he is currently working on his next book: “Recognized: How to Win & Retain High-Ticket Clients by Becoming the Prominent Authority in Your Field“.
BOOK A STRATEGY CALL WITH ROCHELLE
RESOURCES FOR SOLOISTS
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The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00 – 00:17
Alastair McDermott: I strongly believe in not waiting too long before you start. Like don’t wait till you feel ready. You know, start before you feel ready because you’ll never truly feel ready. So there’s a bit of that to it. But ultimately, I figured if I could make something that would interest somebody like me, then I would get people listening to it or watching it.
00:22 – 01:00
Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Life Podcast, formerly known as Soloist Women, where we’re all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I’m Rochelle Moulton, and today I’m here with my pal Alistair McDermott who helps experts to become known as the recognized authority in your field so you can command premium fees, work less hours, and never have to suffer a bad fit client again. Now he hosts the Recognize Authority podcast and he’s written a number of practical guides to building authority, including 33 Ways Not to Screw Up Your Business podcast, which by the way, I’m
01:00 – 01:14
Rochelle Moulton: proud to have written the forward for and he is currently working on his next book Recognized how to win and retain high ticket clients by becoming the prominent authority in your field Love that title Alastair welcome.
01:15 – 01:19
Alastair McDermott: Well Rochelle. Thank you so much for having me on the show. It’s great to be chatting with you again.
01:19 – 01:50
Rochelle Moulton: Yes, I’m so excited. It’s been a while. It’s been a while since we’ve talked. So 1 of the reasons that I wanted to have you on the show is to talk about, well, a little bit about how you’re birthing your newest podcast. But what folks may not realize is that you went from no podcast in, I think, 2021 to once this newest gets off the ground, I started to say 5, but then we talked in the green room, maybe it’s 7. You have a lot of audio options. So let’s start there. I mean, when did you
01:50 – 01:52
Rochelle Moulton: start your first podcast?
01:53 – 02:21
Alastair McDermott: Well, I first started planning it in July of 2014. And this goes back to the kind of the origin story of all of this. Back in July of 2014, I went quite a long way down the route of planning a podcast to the point of having written intro scripts, outro scripts, and having hired a voiceover artist to record the audio for those. I had this fairly far down the road of planning. And then I realized that I had a business problem in that I wasn’t niched down enough and that the podcast that I was planning was
02:21 – 02:51
Alastair McDermott: going to be garbage because it was going to be so bland, because it was going to be trying to address everybody. So I realized then that I had a business problem that I wasn’t niched down enough or niched down enough and I needed to specialize. And so that took me down the rabbit hole of doing that which probably took me another 6 years or so to execute and so I finally started planning in earnest in 20 20 launch in 20 21 so I think I begin this world record for 7 years and 77 years to launch
02:51 – 02:52
Alastair McDermott: a podcast.
02:54 – 03:04
Rochelle Moulton: Well, and when you say that it took you that long to niche down, is it really that you were experimenting and trying to make sure that you had a viable business model? Was that like the 6 years, how you spent that?
03:04 – 03:31
Alastair McDermott: Yeah, that was a lot of it. So I hate to admit this, but it took me 2 or 3 years to fully comprehend what the problem really was. And then once I understood that, it took me another probably 3 years to execute on it. There’s a lot of fears associated with niching down. I talked about this on 1 of my podcasts, the specialization podcast, and there’s a lot of fears that hold you back from doing it, being afraid of picking the wrong thing, you know, and so I didn’t do it for a long time and then
03:31 – 03:37
Alastair McDermott: I said okay I’ve got to do this, you know, so I eventually did but yeah I wish that I’d been able to execute that a bit quicker.
03:38 – 04:05
Rochelle Moulton: Well, you know, it’s 1 of those things that it’s really hard to do for yourself. It takes what it takes sometimes. You know, sometimes we can get lucky and find the right person to help us along the path. But it does take a while for the record. I think you were really smart to wait until you figured out kind of who you wanted to be before you poured all the energy into, into this podcast. But so once you decided you were going to do it, Like what was your strategy for the podcast? How did you see
04:05 – 04:07
Rochelle Moulton: it adding to your authority and growing your business?
04:08 – 04:15
Alastair McDermott: Well, my initial strategy was I like podcasts and I want to create a podcast. And that was about as far as it went.
04:17 – 04:18
Rochelle Moulton: I like it and I’m going to do it.
04:19 – 04:49
Alastair McDermott: That’s pretty much it. It was, I like this topic. I would like to talk to people about this topic and I want to make it for people like me. That’s kind of what I wanted to do. And that’s a fairly basic strategy, but it was good enough to get started. And I strongly believe, ironically, I strongly believe in not waiting too long before you start. Like, don’t wait till you feel ready. You know, start before you feel ready because you’ll never truly feel ready. Yeah, so there’s a bit of that to it. But ultimately, I figured
04:49 – 04:54
Alastair McDermott: if I could make something that would interest somebody like me, then I would get people listening to it or watching it.
04:54 – 05:21
Rochelle Moulton: Okay. Okay, that makes sense to me. So I just want to reiterate, you know, start before you’re ready, because it does feel like a big leap. And then after a while, you’re like, what did I wait for? This is way easier than I thought. So walk us through how you actually got that first podcast off the ground. I remember that’s around the time that I met you, because I think you’d asked me to guest on that 1, if I remember rightly. So how did you get there? How did you get it off the ground?
05:21 – 05:49
Alastair McDermott: Yeah, that’s right. You and Jonathan were some of the first guests I brought on. So I had been listening to a lot of podcasts. I think that actually helps. I think the people who listen to a lot of podcasts make for good podcasts just naturally because we know what we like to listen to. So I think that helped a lot. I had some pretty strong ideas about what I wanted to do and didn’t want to do. So I laid out a plan for the first, I think, 15 or 20 episodes. And I created a pretty full
05:50 – 06:18
Alastair McDermott: FAQ page for guests and planning that out actually helped me to like, I try to figure out what are all of the questions that a guest might have for me about the podcast. And that allowed me to plan the podcast. I didn’t have a lot of external resources, but I think that I had listened to so many podcasts at that point that I knew roughly what I was doing. Then I created a spreadsheet because I use spreadsheets for everything. I have a planning spreadsheet that has tons of stuff in there. I created like a workflow, what
06:18 – 06:33
Alastair McDermott: the workflow of recording and editing might look like. And I put in a bunch of guests who I would want to have on. And then I started reaching out to them like you and Jonathan. So I asked Jonathan for an introduction to you, for example, because I had worked with him as a coach.
06:33 – 06:35
Rochelle Moulton: That’s right. I remember that now.
06:36 – 06:59
Alastair McDermott: In fact, now that I say that, I had a coaching call with him specifically about planning a podcast. So he was 1 of those people who I talked to. I also spoke with some other folks who were podcast experts. I just did coaching calls. 1 of the great things about there’s a lot of coaches out there where you can just do a one-off call with them, pay for an hour of their time and you know soak in their expertise and I did that with I think 2 or 3 different people so that probably helped a lot.
06:59 – 07:08
Alastair McDermott: I did have a lot of the planning done and it was more about getting their feedback on the plan that I had in place and just kind of shaping it up a bit, but that really helped.
07:08 – 07:18
Rochelle Moulton: Well, and of course, 1 of the questions that non-techies always ask is, you know, how am I going to get this edited? Did you, When you first started, did you do it yourself or did you outsource it immediately?
07:19 – 07:48
Alastair McDermott: So at the very start I did it myself and I had enough skills to do that. It’s not something I’d really recommend to people because I think that it’s not a good use of your time if you’re an expert, if you’re a business leader. Your time is probably more valuable than you shouldn’t really be doing the editing. And then later on, for season 2 of the podcast, season 1 of the podcast was the first 100 episodes, season 2 was from 100 on, I decided to go to a live stream model, so where I do all of
07:48 – 08:15
Alastair McDermott: the interviews live and I don’t do any editing so I kind of took the editing step out of the workflow altogether. But I did that for a different reason. The reason I did that was because I was procrastinating about doing video because I recorded loads of video. I had videos from almost every interview I’ve done, but I wasn’t publishing it. And I realized that I was missing a trick because I didn’t have the video. I wasn’t able to do all the social media clips that you see people doing and not having video, I think. So I
08:15 – 08:34
Alastair McDermott: said, okay, how do I do the video? Well, I’m procrastinating about this So if I do the interviews live and everybody knows it’s a it’s being live streamed So there’s no editing it is what it is. Then I just removed that editing step altogether So that was how I did that later, But that was only after I’d done a lot. So I think I had that confidence from earlier.
08:34 – 08:45
Rochelle Moulton: But what I love about your solution is, okay, I’ve got this block. I know I’m not going to get over this easily, so I’m going to pivot and I’m just going to publish them live.
08:45 – 08:45
Alastair McDermott: Yeah.
08:45 – 09:01
Rochelle Moulton: I love it. In fact, I remember now, somebody in my circle that I’d introduced you to was recording on your show, and she didn’t know it was going to be live streamed. It was really funny. She loved it though. She absolutely loved it. So, I think it’s a great solution.
09:01 – 09:04
Alastair McDermott: Yeah, and she didn’t read the FAQ page.
09:04 – 09:06
Rochelle Moulton: Probably, yeah, probably. That’s right.
09:06 – 09:32
Alastair McDermott: Like I have the recording, the live recording. I have that process down after doing it so many times. Like the recognized authority is at episode 163, and then there’s all of the other episodes. So I’ve done this quite a bit now at this point, but you can, on a live stream, you can actually do all of the things that you can do when you’re editing a podcast. So I have a cold open now where it’s a cold open on the live stream, and then I play the intro, and then I introduce the guests, and then I
09:32 – 09:40
Alastair McDermott: have the guests join me. And I can do, I can replicate all of that on a live stream now so it gives a very similar experience that if it was actually edited.
09:40 – 09:49
Rochelle Moulton: Well I also I’m just you know interpreting from what you’re saying is that you’ve got a process that you follow I’m imagining since you’re a spreadsheet guy, you have a checklist.
09:50 – 10:01
Alastair McDermott: I’m like Jonathan, I’m a former software engineer. So I’m very process driven. Yes. So I have workflows and you know what, like I have a documented workflow.
10:01 – 10:01
Rochelle Moulton: Yes.
10:01 – 10:25
Alastair McDermott: And I have SOPs. I also have a full-time assistant as she’s been working with me for 3 years now So that that helps as well. It means that I’m I’m not doing a lot of the grunt work I’m able to to hand off a lot of that stuff as well, which really helps with you know with the publishing of the episodes and things like that. Yeah, I think having a solid workflow, figuring it out, I mean, you don’t have that at the start. You have to experiment a little bit and figure out what works for you,
10:25 – 10:38
Alastair McDermott: what doesn’t work for you. That’s where I think it goes back to start before you’re ready, because you will have to make mistakes and figure things out as you go. And if you wait until you feel ready, you’re still probably going to go through that learning process anyway. So you might as well just get started with that now.
10:39 – 11:12
Rochelle Moulton: Oh, yeah. I mean, the kind of SOP that I wrote for the first few episodes, I think I changed probably 25% of it after maybe 5 episodes. And I’m still tweaking it. You know, it just takes a while to get into this sort of dance of doing it where it’s comfortable. So, Alistair, how long did it take you to get traction? And by traction, I mean, you know, building a listener base, getting people to review you, getting the guests that you wanted. Like, do you remember how long that kind of took you?
11:12 – 11:42
Alastair McDermott: I’d say it took to get traction to the point where I was happy with it. I’d say it took me about 30 episodes, 40 episodes. And at that point, like I was able to bring on some pretty high profile people in my world. Like I was able to get Alan Weiss to come on, for example, David C. Baker, Chris Doe, you, people like that. So, and so I was able, like, for example, I put this in the book, I was able to invite Chris Doe on by saying, Hey, Chris, you know, do you know what you
11:42 – 12:14
Alastair McDermott: don’t have in common with Alan Weiss, David C. Baker, Ron Baker, and all these other people. I said, you haven’t been on my podcast yet. And he replied in 5 minutes and said, sure, let me book in. And that was because it’s because when you start to get some people on, you can then name drop those people to get the next people on and kind of hopscotch your way up the food chain, as it were. So you get higher and higher profile people. So yeah, really, I’ve had Bob Burg on, people like that. And by the
12:14 – 12:36
Alastair McDermott: way, those super high profile people don’t necessarily get the most podcast listens or downloads or even share it sometimes. So there is that aspect of it. It’s not just about getting high profile people to access their audience. Sometimes it’s the smaller people who don’t have as big an audience, but who want to help share the episode as much as possible because they’re not doing a podcast interview every week.
12:36 – 13:07
Rochelle Moulton: Oh, exactly. I’ve seen that in both of our podcasts. There’s certain ones where it’s incredible, the attraction you can get. And then the ones with this big name, you think everybody’s gonna be listening and it’s kind of like, and they didn’t share it with their audience because they do so many. Yeah, it’s always interesting to look at the stats afterwards. Maybe the most important question I should ask you is what kind of success did you see from podcast 1 that made you stop and say, yep, I’m going to do a second 1.
13:08 – 13:36
Alastair McDermott: Well, I started getting inbound leads from it. It wasn’t specifically the success that made me do the second podcast. So the second podcast that I did is called the Specialization Podcast. And the reason why I created that was because I realized that as I was doing one-to-one coaching with people who wanted to build authority, in my framework, I see that people go from being a novice to being an invisible expert who are really good at what they do, but nobody knows who they are. And then they go through the specialization step and they become a specialist.
13:37 – 14:04
Alastair McDermott: And then they start to publish and become recognized as the expert that they are. So that’s kind of the framework, the basic framework or overview. And what I realized was that people who had the problem of being an invisible expert who were still a generalist and hadn’t niched down, the step that they needed to go through was the specialization step, but I realized that they didn’t always make for a best fit client for me. So I wanted to create a resource That would help people do that so that when they finish that step They were then
14:04 – 14:35
Alastair McDermott: ready to work with me on the the next step of the equation Which is starting to publish and create content in some way So I wanted to create something evergreen kind of fire and forget and I heard Seth Godin and I listened to a podcast of his called Startup School that he created in December of 2010, and he published in December 2010, January 2011. I think there was 10 or 12 episodes of that, and it was a workshop that he recorded over a weekend and they edited and put it up online and they never touched it
14:35 – 15:01
Alastair McDermott: since and that podcast is out there generating leads for Seth Godin selling his books and doing all of those other things and he has never gone back and touched it and I realized okay well if he can do it I can do something like that So I decided to make 1 called the Specialization Podcast, just in part to associate my name with the concept of specialization and niching down, to take a little bit of ownership of that concept, so that if somebody introduces me, for example, you introduce me on the podcast, you can say, Aasya is
15:01 – 15:19
Alastair McDermott: the host of the specialization podcast. People will think, OK, he knows something about that topic. So there’s that kind of association. So I created that as to solve a problem of, these people are not quite the right fit for me. But if they solve this problem, then they become the right fit for me. So I wanted to create a resource for that. Does that answer the
15:19 – 15:51
Rochelle Moulton: question? Yeah, and that’s fascinating to me because if we were in big corporate America, we’d talk about the customer journey. What you’ve just described is your client journey. And so you could choose just to completely ignore that piece, or you could choose to create a low cost way to teach them, whether that’s a podcast, a book, some kind of a resource. So I think it was really smart of you to see where that empty piece is and be able to fill it with something that’s evergreen.
15:52 – 16:15
Alastair McDermott: Yeah, for me, the evergreen piece is really important. Everything I do in terms of content creation, I always try and make it evergreen. Even the latest podcast called the AI Power Thought Leader. I’m trying to make it, even though it’s addressing AI, I’m still trying to make it as evergreen as possible. And if you do that, it means you can always republish and reuse and repurpose your content and send people to it years later.
16:15 – 16:40
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, yeah. So I wanted to ask you about how you see all the podcasts really that you do helping to scale your business. And you know, you’ve talked about that a little bit. So obviously you’re building a pipeline of future clients and buyers. Is it allowing you to uptick your prices or dramatically change what you offer? How do you see the podcast helping?
16:41 – 17:08
Alastair McDermott: Yeah, so it’s a bit meta, but it’s doing what I espouse, which is building a body of work. The way I think of this, I think of the body of work that you create as an expert, as a thought leader, as an authority in your field. I think of that as being this kind of like almost like physical object that’s built up like of all these different bricks. And like every time you do an interview, so I’m doing this interview with you, every time you write a blog post, every time you do your own podcast, anytime
17:08 – 17:39
Alastair McDermott: you do a YouTube video, you’re adding just a little bit more to the kind of the edifice. You’re creating this surface area for people to come across you. So you’re increasing your surface area for look apart from anything else, you know, apart from things like SEO benefit and things like that. So you’re creating more for people to stumble across and find you and opt into your world and say, Hey, I want to listen to that person. So the more content that you create on that specialist area for that same audience. And so they come across that
17:39 – 17:58
Alastair McDermott: and then they opt in in some way and that could be following you on LinkedIn. It could be joining your email list. It could be subscribing to your podcast. And then they start to follow along, they get your email list eventually, and then they hit reply on 1 of your emails and say, you know what, I’d like to get your help with this. That’s the way I see it working. I think I kind of lost track of the question there, so I’m not sure if I answered you.
18:01 – 18:33
Rochelle Moulton: Well, yeah, I think you did. Because really what it is, it’s how do you monetize? And what I loved about your answer is that it wasn’t, I sell 5 ads per episode at a thousand dollars a piece. Because I think a lot of people think that you have to monetize your podcast in and of itself. That it should be a standalone monetizable thing. And in fact, when you’re dealing in authority, you’re dealing in expertise, it’s all part of your master plan. And so thank you for laying it out like that. Love it.
18:33 – 19:00
Alastair McDermott: I guess, and maybe, you know, I think this is a philosophy of business thing, but I think that maybe I’m not mercenary enough in some ways because I’m thinking, okay, I think that it is naive to think if I build it, they will come because that’s not quite how it works. But if you’re a bit more strategic about making content for the right audience and addressing the same pain points, there is an element of that that you do start to develop this audience over time. People who are interested in what you have to say. And in
19:00 – 19:13
Alastair McDermott: fact, this is where it comes into the AI thing. I think it’s going to be more important to do that in the future because at some point that whole AI train is going to come into the station where we’re going to be in real trouble if we don’t have a personal brand.
19:13 – 19:44
Rochelle Moulton: Well, you led me perfectly into where I wanted to go next. So talk about what’s behind your newest podcast launch, which is the AI-powered Thought Leader. And I just have to call you out on this because I was so impressed with your speed. You sent me a LinkedIn message, I think it was over a weekend, asking for a reaction. And then inside a week, I saw your profile updated with the name of the new podcast and you’d already recorded I think 3 episodes. Yeah. You are fast Alastair.
19:44 – 20:13
Alastair McDermott: Yeah so I’ll tell you I cheated a little bit. 1 of those episodes is actually repurposed from the recognized authority. It’s an episode that I, where I debated some of this stuff with a friend of mine, Joe Casabona, but it was 100% pertinent to what we’re talking about there. Yeah. So I do believe in moving fast. I think that there’s an accelerating effect to moving fast, which is I think a tautology, but there is something about moving fast that makes a difference. I think I just wanted to do something on this topic. Actually, the irony is
20:13 – 20:43
Alastair McDermott: I was thinking about doing this about 6 to 9 months ago and I couldn’t quite find the angle on it that I wanted to do. I didn’t want to be just a bland, here’s somebody else talking about AI, like you know, people talking about Bitcoin or people talking about social media kind of jumping on the bandwagon. But I did want to discuss, and I think it’s important to talk about it, I had to find the angle. I finally got that last week. I just realized, okay, I want to talk about this conflict, this inherent contradiction in
20:43 – 21:12
Alastair McDermott: AI and thought leadership and using AI to create thought leadership content in particular. I thought that was a really interesting subject area to have some interesting conversations with people. So that’s why I decided to start it. And then the other thing that this is a bit meta as well, 1 of the reasons I was able to do all of this so quickly is because I used AI. This is a video podcast and there’s a video introduction if you watch it and everything in that video introduction was AI generated from the voiceover to the music to the
21:12 – 21:38
Alastair McDermott: video, the different video scenes that you see in the background. And I kind of felt like I didn’t have permission to use AI to do that for my other podcast. But specifically because this is on the topic of AI, I thought it would be kind of feel like I have inherent permission to do that, which is maybe worth thinking about as well, because that kind of feeds in this very meta, but that feeds into the idea of, can we use AI to create thought leadership content? And so I’m just fascinated by this whole area. I think
21:38 – 21:39
Alastair McDermott: it’s really interesting.
21:39 – 22:06
Rochelle Moulton: Well, especially because there’s a lot of emotion around it right now. There are people who don’t want to hear about it at all. There are people who think it changes everything. There are people who get mad about it. So I kind of like that diving in and I can see the connection back to your authority work. So, you know, on the surface, It makes sense. I like the strategy behind it and frankly, I can’t wait to listen to this
22:07 – 22:37
Alastair McDermott: Well, let me tell you a little bit more about the connection then so I rebranded me you pointed this out before we we we got recording my show for the first 20 episodes the recognized authority was called marketing for consultants. And that’s really an engineer does branding. So marketing for consultants, because I knew I wanted to do marketing and my target market was consultants and I hadn’t really figured out the brand. So I just slapped that on the front and said, okay, I’m just gonna start. So I started, I got to episode 20. By that point,
22:37 – 23:04
Alastair McDermott: I had realized this is the kind of the brand that I wanna go for. So I decided to call it the recognized authority because I’m all about the authority part, but the recognition being recognized by other people. Thought leader was actually 1 of the other terms that I was considering, something like the thought leader marketing or the visible thought leader or something like that. But I decided to go with the recognized authority, but I always knew that I do want to use the word thought leader in something at some point. And I think that there’s a
23:04 – 23:20
Alastair McDermott: real, this juxtaposition of thought leader, thought leadership and AI, I think is, is a nice conflict that maybe will be provocative. And in fact, I had some people say that it was provocative when I asked them for feedback, they said, oh, that seems a bit provocative, which is exactly what I’m going for.
23:20 – 23:55
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. Especially like if you’ve grown up in big firm consulting like I did, you know, thought leadership is this like lofty territory of only the geniuses. And then you say AI. What? It’s, It’s a really interesting juxtaposition. So it’ll be fun to see where you take it. But I know anybody listening to this that has a podcast or is thinking about it, I know they wanna know How do you get the work done whether this is 5 podcasts or 7 podcasts or 4 podcasts? I’m going to going to assume you have a killer production Process, you
23:55 – 24:03
Rochelle Moulton: know, we listen to that but I mean, how do you do it? Is it just that you have this agency you send everything to in addition to your assistant?
24:03 – 24:04
Alastair McDermott: Oh, no, not at all.
24:04 – 24:07
Rochelle Moulton: But it still feels like it’s a lot of work for you.
24:08 – 24:38
Alastair McDermott: No, I don’t have any. There’s no external agency or anything. I think that I have just very good workflows. I think I’m a bit like Jonathan in this way. If there’s something that I’m procrastinating on, I just remove it completely. So I was procrastinating on editing. So I just decided to get rid of editing by just recording the episodes live. So now I do like I do the like I did an interview today, for example, with Debbie Jenkins. So that interview was from 2pm to 3pm today, and the episode was live on the podcast feed in
24:38 – 25:09
Alastair McDermott: audio format by about 5.15. And that was just because of just simple workflow and production line. I use AI. For example, I will, when I take the audio, they process it, I use a tool called Ophonic. And what it does is it helps to balance and level the audio. It takes out noise if it detects noise. But it also, if you hook it up right, you can get it to do the transcription automatically Sometimes I use a tool called otter for transcription blade I like yeah I like doing it all in 1 go and then I
25:09 – 25:35
Alastair McDermott: was able to take the transcript of that and I feed that into Claude which is an AI tool a bit like chat GPT except it has a larger limit of input. And I say, hey, Claude, here is my podcast transcript. Can you take this and can you give me 5 title suggestions for this? And can you write the show notes according to this format for me, please? And then Claude gives me that back and I can just copy paste that in. So if you’ve got your workflow nailed down for that stuff, it’s actually fairly easy to
25:35 – 26:02
Alastair McDermott: do that quickly. You need to have the philosophy, I think, of moving fast. This is where I think people coming from corporate, they move at a little bit of a slower pace than people who are more independent and have been independent for a long time. So I think that, you know, it’s just about getting in the mindset, okay, let’s, we can get this done and out the door and live if we’re okay with doing it quickly and using these tools and making our workflow so we don’t have any edit step whatsoever.
26:03 – 26:19
Rochelle Moulton: Yes, speed, speed, speed. And I think part of that is that I think we think if we go too fast, we’re going to make mistakes and guess what? We will. Even if we go slow, we’re going to make mistakes. If we go faster, we can make them faster and get to the other side faster.
26:19 – 26:40
Alastair McDermott: Making the mistakes faster means that you get feedback on those mistakes faster, which means that you can adjust. And I think that that is something that is important, because when you do things slowly, you adjust slowly to, you know, you don’t have as much data. You don’t have as much feedback because you’re moving slowly on it. Yeah, I think that makes a difference.
26:40 – 26:54
Rochelle Moulton: So Alistair, I want to go someplace. I usually start with this question when I’m talking to soloists, but, you know, once I realized you had all these podcasts, I had to go there first. But how did you start your business? I mean, what made you take the leap initially?
26:54 – 26:55
Alastair McDermott: Oh, I
26:55 – 26:56
Rochelle Moulton: think I know this story.
26:56 – 27:31
Alastair McDermott: Well, it’s pretty simple. So I was a software engineer for many, many years. And so I worked on some really low level stuff. So Some stuff like I did machine code for IBM mainframes. Really nerdy, like literally ones and zeros at some points. Then I was working in a company called Sun Microsystems, now part of Oracle. I worked there for 6 or 7 years. And I was working on the operating system Solaris and a few different things in different places in that group. What I realized was that I make for a terrible corporate employee, Just not
27:31 – 28:01
Alastair McDermott: a good fit here. And so I had a, and this is a very stereotypical Irish story. I was having a whiskey late 1 night with my mom, standing beside the fire, having a chat. And I said, I’m thinking about quitting, but I don’t know what I’ll do. And she said, well, what’s the worst thing? If you quit and you try your own thing, what’s the worst thing that can happen? I said, well, I’ll probably have to go and find a job. And she said, yeah, if that’s the worst thing that can happen, you know, just take
28:01 – 28:31
Alastair McDermott: the leap. So I gave my notice the next day. And yeah, that was, I decided to start my own business. And I had very little transferable skill set because it’s very hard to go from being a low level software engineer into providing services for businesses at a kind of a higher level. The 1 thing I was good at was I had been a software engineer. I was good at making things like websites and coding and things like that. So I got into search engine optimization and I became a search engine optimization specialist. And then a lot
28:31 – 28:47
Alastair McDermott: of people kept asking me to build them websites. And so I started building websites again, that became Website Doctor, which was the agency that kind of the full services generalist web agency, which had the specialization problem. So that was kind of full circle on that.
28:48 – 28:53
Rochelle Moulton: So how long did it take you to hit your first hundred thousand dollar a year?
28:53 – 28:58
Alastair McDermott: Oh, well, this is funny. I actually got very, very lucky in that very first year.
28:58 – 28:58
Rochelle Moulton: Awesome.
28:58 – 29:27
Alastair McDermott: And I got it in my first year. I built a built an e-learning platform for the International Federation of the Red Cross based out of Geneva. And I was just lucky because it was a chance conversation, you know, how these things happen. And it took me a long time actually afterwards to get back up to that level. But I was very lucky that that contract I think was, you know, it was well in the 6 figures. So but it was it was a very complex system. And the software engineering background really helped with that. But it
29:27 – 29:42
Alastair McDermott: was kind of cool because back at the time that the e-learning platforms were not as developed as they are now, so we had to create everything from scratch. So I basically built a remote team to do that. So that gave me a lot of experience working with subcontractors and all of that as well.
29:42 – 30:10
Rochelle Moulton: You know it’s funny I can’t tell you how many people have told me. It’s like they’ll hit a hundred thousand in that first year and then the second year is like, and then they figure it out. You know, it just takes a while of having a great client in year 1 and then figuring out how to start building for the rest so they come more naturally. So I’m curious now, I mean, knowing what you do now about podcasting, would you have done it sooner or differently?
30:11 – 30:42
Alastair McDermott: Yeah, I mean, I definitely would have started sooner if I had a niche down earlier. And so I went broad because I think that was what the market, the market, when I started my business, it was 2007. I thought, wow, this is a great time to start a business. The economy is great. The sun is shining. And then boom, those next few years, particularly in Ireland, we had a really like our economy was very tied into the property boom here. And we went through this process of it was darker in Ireland, economically speaking, than other places
30:42 – 30:56
Alastair McDermott: for a lot longer. So we only kind of climbed out of that in 2014 or 2015. There was a few years very lean years there. And so I think that’s where I went more into that generalist kind of scramble mode where you do anything and everything, you know, just to keep afloat.
30:57 – 31:05
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. You keep the lights on. I hear you, but I hope you bought your mom a really lovely bouquet of flowers and maybe a house.
31:06 – 31:07
Alastair McDermott: Working on the second 1.
31:09 – 31:20
Rochelle Moulton: So Alastair, I do love to ask everybody this question. So if you could go back to who you were when you started your business in 2007, what’s the 1 thing you’d advise him to do?
31:20 – 31:21
Alastair McDermott: Buy lots of Bitcoin.
31:24 – 31:25
Rochelle Moulton: Anything else?
31:25 – 31:53
Alastair McDermott: To give you a real answer is probably to look at niching down. This thing of niching down and specializing is a lot more important than you realize. I can’t emphasize that enough. So yeah, that’s probably it. Now I had very little business acumen on me. I was coming from a software engineering background. I was very lucky. I joined a mastermind very early on and that helped me a huge amount. But not understanding the value of the niche that was something that I Wish I understood earlier
31:53 – 32:05
Rochelle Moulton: Awesome. Awesome. So we’ll be putting all sorts of links to you and your your content including your podcast in the show notes, but where’s the best place for people to learn more about you?
32:05 – 32:12
Alastair McDermott: Go to LinkedIn, search me on LinkedIn, and follow me on there, send me a message, say hello.
32:12 – 32:34
Rochelle Moulton: And it’s 2T’s, McDermott with 2T’s. McDermott with 2T’s, yeah. Yes. So Alistair, thank you. I just so appreciate your sharing your podcasting journey and how you made the business work. And just some of these, this advice is just going to be pure gold for people trying to decide what to do with their podcast. So thank you.
32:34 – 32:54
Alastair McDermott: Awesome. And my biggest advice is, don’t screw it up by not starting. You’ve got to start at some point. So, and if it’s not podcasting, you know, it could be writing, could be blogging, it could be a YouTube channel, whatever, but do something and start building a personal brand. I think that’s crucial for all of us who are experts and want to put ourselves out there, you know?
32:54 – 33:00
Rochelle Moulton: Perfect. So that’s it for this episode. I hope you’ll join us next time for the soloist life. Bye-bye.
