How I built a podcast from nothing by making it up as I went along

And why you should be shameless in 2024 and beyond

In the fall of 2017, I decided that I wanted to start a podcast.

Having left my corporate job in sales at a large publishing house to freelance full-time in the fall of 2016, I’d found podcasts to be a surprising source of company and comfort throughout the preceding year. Let me be honest: until that point, I thought the medium was kind of weird and confusing and unnecessary. (Back then, didn’t everyone?)

My husband and I were vacationing in California when I decided that I wanted to try starting up my own show and when I announced this plan to him. True to form, Matt was simultaneously supportive and mellow about the whole endeavor, promising to make himself available to help if I needed it, but never making me feel like I should be feeling tons of pressure about the whole thing simply because I’d put the idea into the universe.

My interest in podcasting was bigger than a copycat endeavor driven by a curiosity in recreating or reinventing what the other podcasters I’d learned about were doing. Mostly, I was craving a project. While I had mostly enjoyed the transition into freelancing—even as I was still kind of struggling to find my footing—it wasn’t long before I discovered that my new professional arrangement often made me feel like I was working for lots of different bosses on “my” time more than it made me feel like I actually worked for myself. I wanted to take charge of something! I also missed books and the special opportunity that working in publishing offered to surround myself with book people. I wondered if I could reclaim a piece of that with a book-centric podcast.

In June of 2018, I released the first episodes of The SSR Podcast.

In the early days, I did a lot of my podcast work from the floor of our tiny home office space.

As you can imagine, there were about a million little steps between declaring myself podcast-curious in the fall of 2017 and actually dropping those shows. There’s no need to bore you with all of those details now, though I’m happy to dive more into the specifics at some later date if you’re interested!

For nearly six years now, I’ve been running SSR as a one-woman show.

It accounts for a huge chunk of my working hours, has grown into a thriving community, and now pays me modestly. There are days when the workload drives me crazy, but I can’t imagine my life without it. It’s easily one of the most meaningful passion projects I’ve ever shepherded into existence, and I’m so glad that I decided to give it a go… and that I went on to decide not to quit on the few dozen occasions when I was tempted.

Recording the last episode of the podcast before maternity leave.

This morning, I released the last episode of the podcast before my (untraditional) maternity leave, which prompted me to think about the show’s roots and the factors that might explain its longevity.

How I'm approaching maternity leave as a freelancer and creative

I won’t pretend to know the exact or “real” statistics because it’s tough to know which metrics to trust, but a quick search suggests that something like 90% of independent podcasters (this is the category into which I fall since I’m not supported by a larger organization) give up on their shows after one or two episodes. I don’t offer up this data to humble brag or to claim some kind of superiority. Like I said, I’ve been tempted to walk away on multiple occasions! I do hope, however, that these stats will give me a little credibility as I share my experience with you.

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Currently Reading: The Book Club Hotel by Sarah Morgan

Cozy, wholesome, and very delightful! It’s a friendship story set in a beautiful Vermont hotel… and exactly what I need to help me begin to wrap up Christmas reading, even post-December 25.

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I’m sure that it’s a weird combination of factors that’s led me to this point, and I’m not sure I could recreate it if I tried. Still, I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and if I had to pick one word to describe the moves I’ve made with respect to the podcast over the last few years, that word would probably be shameless.

According to our pals at Merriam-Webster, the word shameless means “insensible to disgrace.”

The weird thing is that I am incredibly not shameless in pretty much every other area of my life. In fact, it would probably be beneficial for me to loosen up a little and trust that a tiny dose of shame isn’t the end of the world. But for whatever reason, I’ve allowed myself to be shameless in the process of building SSR—and that’s probably been half the battle, if not more.

With the new year upon us, I wonder if some strategic shamelessness might help you reach whatever goals are on your horizon. Whether you want to start a podcast of your own, make a radical move in your personal life, or something else, have you considered being shameless?

Here is an exhaustive list of the many ways in which I’ve been shameless in podcasting. As far as I can tell, they’ve all paid off!