One Question Friday: How Do You Make Your Podcast Standout?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. It talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said, you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's podcast network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.

**Ben** (1:09)
Okay, hi, it's producer Ben.
This is One Question Friday. This is where we take one question from a listener and we answer it on air. Today, I'm answering it because Sam and Shaan took a long weekend. They left a little early on Friday. And a few of you asked questions to me because I was on the show a little more than usual this week.
So I figured I would answer one of those questions. So let's play it. And before we go into the question, as always, if you wanna leave a question for Sam and Shaan to answer, usually Sam and Shaan, go to mfmpod.com and click on the microphone in the lower right-hand corner and you can leave a question. And if we select your question, your voice will be on air, be on My First Million. Okay, let's get to the question.

**Jeremy** (1:52)
Hi, this is Jeremy. My question is for producer Ben.
What did you do to get your podcast found by famous people like Sam and Mr. Beast? And do you have any advice for how to develop a good idea for a podcast?

**Ben** (2:07)
Okay, so to answer the first question, what did I do to get my podcast found by Sam and Mr. Beast? So the first answer that I have to give honestly is nothing. I'm extremely lucky. That's how I feel. And, but I, yeah, I don't know. Like the first time that I heard Sam mention how to take over the world on My First Million, you may have heard me use this analogy before, but I felt like I was watching TV and then all of a sudden the news came out and the TV caster like looks out of the screen and is like, you, I'm talking to you. It was very bizarre, very weird. I had no expectations, no knowledge that he was gonna mention it. And it just totally caught me by surprise because I was already a fan of My First Million.
So I don't have like a deliberate strategy or anything like that for getting famous people to find and like my podcast. I feel like all the strategy is essentially just the content, which leads into the second question. Do I have any advice for how to develop good ideas for podcasts? And yes, I do because I get pitched a lot of podcast ideas. A lot of people come to me and most of them are good, but bad. What do I mean by that? Good, but bad. The worst thing that your idea can be as a podcast is fine. And that's my reaction to most people's ideas for podcasts. I go, yeah, that sounds fine.
And there's a problem with fine.
And this is the problem.
So before I worked in media, before I did podcasting, I did management consulting. And I was on this one project where we worked for a security sales company. The guys go to door to door and sell security systems.
And they had a problem, which was they had all these fraudulent sales. And all these fraudulent sales, as we looked into it, would happen at the same time of the year. It happened at the end of the summer. And so as we dug into it, what we found out was that the salesmen for the security system were incentivized such a way where they had these really steep steps, where it was like, if you sell nine security systems, you will make $5,000, but on your 10th security system, it jumps up to $20,000, which is totally crazy, right? So what you would get is you have all these summer salesmen who are just selling for the summer and they have to hit these certain steps. They have to hit a certain number of sales. And if they do, they're gonna get this huge lump sum. So towards the end of the summer, they're really trying to hit these numbers and they get panicked and they start just selling accounts like crazy, even if that means fudging the numbers a little bit, selling systems fraudulently, stuff like that. So it's a big problem. So we go tell them, hey, this is a big problem.