745: Bedtime Stories for Grownups: How a Boring Podcast Turned into a Booming Business

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Thanks for having me, Nick. I'm really glad to be here.

I am excited. Stick around. In this one, we're talking idea generation, we're talking growing your audience, carving out time to make your thing, make your product, and of course, monetizing an online business. So Kathryn, my understanding is you're running a yoga studio, and the initial side project idea is you wanna write a book. You've got some stories in your mind, and they, they need to get out to the world.

Yeah. You know, I've always told myself bedtime stories since I was a little kid. It's one of my earliest memories. Because I've always done that my whole life, I am able to sleep. [laughs] I can sleep when I choose to. I can return to sleep if I wake up in the middle of the night. And being a full-time yoga studio owner and full-time teacher, I talk to people every single day about what's going on with their health, and at the bottom of most people's issues, there's gonna be a sleep component there. So I just kept thinking, "So many people are struggling with this. I seem to have sorted this out organically. How can I m- move this bit of understanding from my brain to theirs?" And at first I thought it was gonna be a book. I really wanted it to be a book, but that is such a far reach to make if you are not connected to the publishing industry at all, which I definitely wasn't.

Yeah, and you didn't wanna go self-published. I mean, that, there's a low barrier.

I didn't wanna go self-published, yeah. I, I knew that I needed a bigger partner to make it happen, so I kinda literally put it on a shelf. And then when I realized sort of in the middle of the night I had an epiphany that it was gonna be a podcast, I bought a mic sitting on the floor from Amazon at 2:00 in the morning, and we launched about a month and a half later. And that was 400 episodes six years ago.

Yeah, and the rest is, uh, is history. It's taken off since then. But in the early