We're getting really meta for this episode--Elizabeth usually asks other people what it's like to be in their shoes; now she's chatting with her special guest (who has been her secret weapon behind the scenes of the podcast since Day 1) about what it's like to work on this podcast! There have been a lot of tweaks and changes recently, so we're doing our own State of the Podcast. Find out about the name, the logo, the colors, what's in store for the website and the marketing... and have more than a few laughs with us along the way.
In this episode:
Want to know more about the podcast What It's Like To... ?
We're getting really meta for this episode--Elizabeth usually asks other people what it's like to be in their shoes; now she's chatting with her special guest (who has been her secret weapon behind the scenes of the podcast since Day 1) about what it's like to work on this podcast! There have been a lot of tweaks and changes recently, so we're doing our own State of the Podcast. Find out about the name, the logo, the colors, what's in store for the website and the marketing... and have more than a few laughs with us along the way.
In this episode:
Want to know more about the podcast What It's Like To... ?
Elizabeth 0:07
I carry all my stuff around through the house, the laptop, the microphone and the headphones, try to get into a quieter space, the dog follows me around and crawls onto a bed near me. And so it's kind of a little bit comical. Yep, that's me, Elizabeth Pearson Garr, the host of this podcast. In each episode, we usually find out “what it's like to” walk in someone else's shoes. This one is a little different. We decided to give you the listeners some inside scoop on what's been going on around here. And I invited someone special to join me. He's had a huge impact on this podcast since day one. But up until now, it's been all behind the scenes. In fact, as you'll hear, this is the first time he's ever been on a podcast. So I thought the way that the country has a “State of the Union”, maybe we should do a bit of a “State of the podcast” kind of check in midway through the season, on how things are going.
Dave 1:14
You want me to respond to that? Is that a question or a comment? Or? I mean, I don't know what I'm doing here.
Elizabeth 1:24
You're here for comic entertainment.
Dave 1:25
Great. Okay, good.
Elizabeth 1:29
No, it's just that we've made a lot of changes recently, you know, lots of little tweaks. And so I thought maybe we could fill the listeners in on why we've made some of those decisions and what's going on and how, what, where, and why. And you've been a part of those things. So let me introduce you. First, your, your Dave. You're my husband. You're my right hand, man, my left hand, man, because you're a lefty. And you're the person I turned to for everything that's going wrong with this podcast.
Dave 2:05
(Laughs) Help! But the problem is, it never gets better after you've given it to me. So thank you for you keep trying.
Elizabeth 2:14
Now you're my technical support. And then all the rest of it, though, to the emotional support and marketing expertise and everything else. So you're the good person to help explain all of these decisions with. Okay, so let's start with the name change. So we started out with the Experience podcast, which really wasn't bad. It was a good name, I thought because it is a podcast about people's experiences. It is an experience podcast. But here was the problem, I learned that two of the worst words to have in a podcast title are “the” and “podcast”. So we had 2 of the 3 worst words. And then the third word I had, in their experience, took a lot of people to “The Joe Rogan experience”, which is one of the most popular podcasts out there. So we thought we should really change the name. So we decided to go with the first phrase of what we were titling all of the episodes: “What it's like to”.
Dave 3:19
Yep. I mean, every once in a while, I guess I'm supposed to say something.
Elizabeth 3:24
Okay, so we changed the name. And, then we decided to change the logo as well. The old logo, some people might recall, was a little blue circle with a headphone with microphones on, again not bad.
Dave 3:41
Do you mean a microphone with headphones on it?
Elizabeth 3:45
Oh, yeah. Did I say the opposite? Yeah, that's okay. See, that's why you're here. Anyway, whatever it was, it was adequate, but quite generic, because it could have spoken to kind of any podcast has microphones and a set of headphones. And I did get some feedback that it felt very newsy. If someone just saw that they felt like maybe it was a news program. So again, we thought we should get a little more particular to this podcast, and what it really is about, so we changed it to my face and the thought Bubble from the website with the title in it. And the thought bubble, by the way, was your idea. Give credit where credit's due. But we're not done making changes, because right now we're also going to change the color scheme. The original blue and yellow is feeling a little bit kind of college football team rah rah rah to me, so I've wanted it to be a little more sophisticated, understated, so we're changing the colors a little bit right now. So something to look out for. And a new photo of me. You know, that shirt that I was wearing in the first one, anyone else has noticed I just sort of randomly put that on. It was like this coral color t-shirt didn't fit in with anything. But we're just trying to be a little more thoughtful as we get a year into this podcast. So, logo change - check.
Dave 5:16
People are gonna love that new photo.
Elizabeth 5:20
Oh, yeah, a little background on the new photo. So the glam squad on the photo was my daughter, our daughter, our younger daughter, and one of her friends. So two 13 year-olds on the hair and makeup for the photoshoot. And, I have to say major props to them. I couldn't have asked for a better glam squad. Yeah, I got more than what I paid for. With those two. It was really fun. We listened to Taylor Swift the whole time as they did me up in the bathroom. So next, oh, this is your big category. So Dave has nicely all this time been in charge of the website because I basically asked him/made him do it. And he has experience in that area and I have none. And he nicely because he's a good guy and he's my husband. He said, Okay, I'll take over the website. So from the start, he created the whole website, and it's been working great.
Dave 6:22
I do have one thing to say about the website, how painful it's been to get a good designer, I decided to go to a marketplace of designers called Upwork, where you can put out a bid and then people come back with their proposals, you get a ton of them. And then you have to sort through them. And some look really good. And then I would talk with them, they'd seem okay. And then I say, Okay, I'm gonna use you and like the first guy I really liked. And then I didn't hear back from him for a few days. And then like a week later, I'm like, What's happening with the site? And he's like, you know, I had dental work. And so I've been out of commission for this last week. But I'll get right on it. And then like a few days later, I'm like, Okay, what's happening? The dental situation is getting worse. So I can't work on it this week. And then another week later, he's like, listen, things are so bad. I just need to drop you. And I’m like, I don't know, how bad could this dental situation be? So that was my first guy. And then I just had a few like that after that. So I will just say that, that that has been the hardest thing about this whole project for me.
Elizabeth 7:41
I think that dental story could be a little bit fishy. I wonder how many times he's used that dental emergency with work he's been trying to get out of.
Dave 7:50
Yeah, you could be right.
Elizabeth 7:52
Okay, so the website is getting refreshed and a little bit updated. And it's going to have the new colors and the new name and a few new features over the next couple of months.
Dave 8:05
That is correct. I don't know if there's any… Oh (almost falls out of chair & laughing nervously)
Elizabeth 8:14
So you know how your mother always tells you never to lean back in a chair? Well, that's why.
Dave 8:21
I'm nervous. I've never been on a podcast before. And I thought I'd try to cool by leaning back in the chair. Oh man.
Elizabeth 8:32
He’s trying to impress the host. Little does he know he's already married or, okay, well, so we were talking about some new colors. And that's also going to be reflected in our social media. So shortly, when you look at our Instagram page, or our Facebook page, you'll see the new logo and the new color scheme in there. I have ideas for the Instagram page to kind of have as a 13 year old would say, an “aesthetic to”. She's very into aesthetics. So that is forthcoming on the Instagram page. Moving on… marketing. I love doing this podcast, it is really a passion and really fun. And it's also a lot of work. But it's very satisfying. And it's a really wonderful thing for me to do. The hard part of it is getting the word out and trying to get more listeners, and that falls into marketing. And I've had Dave and several other people try to help me with that. And it's just a really interesting challenge to try to market a podcast I have found. There's a lot of articles, different suggestions about best practices to do it. I think one of my challenges is that it seems like one of them always is: use your social media, and the fact is, I wasn't even on Social media before I had a podcast, I mean, you had signed me up to go on Facebook like 15 years ago. I mean, I had an account, but I never posted on there. In fact, I missed a high school reunion, because they only posted on Facebook, and I was never on Facebook, so I didn't know about it. So I didn't have a social media presence at all until this, so it's not like I had this base to build from. So I've had to try to build that up. And then just in general, I think, podcasting to grow in different ways. I mean, definitely people who are celebrities, they have that base of influence already. Anyway, that's kind of an ongoing challenge for us, when you agree, is just trying to market this thing.
Dave 10:44
Yeah, I agree. Totally. You know, it's so frustrating for me, I just love the product. I love your podcast, and everyone I talked to who listened to it loves it. And I know a lot of people would love to hear it. It's just how do we let them know about it? You know, it's frustrating, we have no ad budget. And I'm used to working in marketing at big companies. And we had a huge ad budget for products a lot of times that I didn't necessarily love that much. So it's frustrating that I haven't been able to figure out how to get the word out about your podcast.
Elizabeth 11:18
Anyway, if you like this podcast, and you feel like sharing it with some people, we would be really grateful because we love doing it. We love creating it for you. And we want it to grow. And it kind of takes all of us to just spread the word.
Dave 11:34
Yes. And if you want to hear guests that are higher caliber than myself, please spread the word and you'll be able to get higher quality personnel.
Elizabeth 11:44
All right, what else can we share with them? Oh, how about that potential new office space.
Dave 11:51
Elizabeth complains about her podcast desk.
Elizabeth 11:56
Well, I mean, complains is an interesting word to use, I would say “mentions” occasionally. And let's say “desk” is an interesting word to us. Because it's a dining room table. It's not really even a desk. So I have a desk, but it's in the family room. And that's a high traffic area with two teenagers and a dog. So that had to go, that's just too noisy. So then I migrated into the dining room, bigger surface area a little quieter. But that's the dining room. And I don't really like having all my stuff on the dining room table all the time. I mean, Mr. Bigshot, over here has his own office. So I figured it was about time that I got an office too.
Dave 12:46
All kidding aside, it's true, you really do need an office.
Elizabeth 12:50
Thank you. Because then the other thing is, so that's just working like on the computer and everything. But when I need to record, I need to go into a quieter room, which means one of the bedrooms, so I'm like a little migrant, like I carry all my stuff around through the house, the laptop, the microphone, the headphones try to get into a quieter space, the dog follows me around and crawls onto a bed near me. And so it's kind of a little bit comical. This podcast takes up our whole house. So, I've been making waves about building something in the backyard. But we'd have to take out the trampoline. And then our younger daughter complains.
Dave 13:31
And we say you haven't used it for a year. That doesn't work.
Elizabeth 13:36
And then the next day she goes out and jumps on it. So anyway, we're not making a lot of headway on the building of the outdoors office, but it would be nice. The house can get a little bit noisy sometimes when I'm trying to record an interview or the intros and the outros. Our dog is pretty quiet. He tends to stay with me whatever I'm doing, but occasionally, he will start barking at something. He often lets the mailman go but sometimes he barks at the mailman. But he has some new targets on our street. Do you want to mention them?
Dave 14:14
Yes. So we'll hear it here first. Mark Zuckerberg lives in our city. And he has a significant security personnel that is in front of his house, I think a couple of different cars at all times. And I understand that, but it just so happens that he has chosen a house, a few houses down the street from us where those security personnel are being housed.
Elizabeth 14:46
We think it's like a break room. We don't think they sleep there. But they come and go constantly. So there's these huge SUVs that come and park on our street all the time and these big burly guys are walking down the street and in and out all the time. And the dog is not happy. A lot of the neighbors are not happy even though the guys are as nice as could be.
Dave 15:11
Yeah, we want to say that since they are big and burly, I do want to say in case they hear this, I love these guys, and would not want any harm to come to myself because of this podcast. And you too Elizabeth.
Elizabeth 15:28
Or the dog or the children.
Dave 15:30
Yeah. Oh, yeah, them.
Elizabeth 15:32
But it's been an interesting development on the street and for the dog and the noise in the house.
Dave 15:38
Again, this is Dave Garr talking to those burly guys, please don't harm me and the family.
Elizabeth 15:47
I'm glad we were added. We’re a nice addendum. Anything else you'd like to share with our esteemed listeners?
Dave 15:57
No, I'd rather actually withdraw some of the things I said. If that's possible.
Elizabeth 16:03
So that's Dave, everyone. He's backstage behind every podcast. Getting it done, you know? Thank you, Dave.
Dave 16:15
Yeah, it was. I mean, yeah.
Elizabeth 16:21
Don't you think he has a great voice? When we were dating, do you remember this? One of our first dates I said: Have you ever worked in radio? Because I think you have a great voiceover voice. Great radio voice. Do you remember me saying that?
Dave 16:35
No, I don't remember that. I just remember after our first date, you emailing me and saying, sorry, I talk so much.
Elizabeth 16:45
Oh, that I talk so much. Oh, yeah. Sorry.
Dave 16:49
Yeah. So I thought that was sweet that you were that sensitive.
Elizabeth 16:52
Did you think I had talked a lot?
Dave 16:55
No, I didn't. I mean, you shared some significant things, though. And I appreciated that.
Elizabeth 17:01
Just spilled my guts, I guess.
Dave 17:03
Yeah. Well, not all of them, I've learned more since being married.
Elizabeth 17:10
A lot more. All right. Well, thanks for listening to our fun and games here. And thanks, Dave, for, for all of it.
Dave 17:20
I love this podcast. I'm so happy I'm able to help.
Elizabeth 17:25
As you can tell, Dave not only solves all my IT and website problems, but he also keeps me laughing, which actually may be the most valuable part of keeping this podcast going. I don't have a list of takeaways like I usually do, since this obviously wasn't officially an interview. But I'll just leave you with this: take risks; try new things; lean on others for help when you need it; don't give up, and keep laughing.
If you're interested in checking out our website, go to https://whatitsliketo.net/ you can link to all of our social media from there too. Keep checking back in the coming weeks and you'll see all the changes Dave and I talked about. I'm Elizabeth Pearson Garr, thanks for being curious about “what it's like”.