Podcasting with Purpose: Multitude’s Amanda McLoughlin

Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription software errors.

Jeff Umbro: This week on Podcast Perspectives.If you had to sum up the key to long-term success in podcasting in one sentence, what would it be?

Amanda McLoughlin: Make something you really care about and something you are really proud of that you are excited to do with others on a recurring basis.

Jeff Umbro: Today we are joined by Amanda McLoughlin, CEO of Multitude, a powerhouse independent podcast collective that's redefining what success looks like in the podcasting world. Amanda is not only a creator herself with hit shows like Spirits and Join the Party, but she's also built a thriving business helping podcasters grow, monetize, and sustain their work. She's been featured in Forbes and Rolling Stone, spoken on some of the biggest industry stages and is a fierce advocate for indie creators. And to top it all off, she was a teen YouTuber herself and can speak a lot about the complexities of video today. If you wanna make a sustainable podcast and have fun doing it, this is the conversation you need to hear. 

Welcome to the show, Amanda. Great to have you.

Amanda McLoughlin: Thank you so much, Jeff.

Jeff Umbro: I wanted to start by asking you about your career, because unlike most of podcasting, you spent more than a decade actually creating for YouTube.

Amanda McLoughlin: I was a teenage YouTuber, which I am going to soft copyright as a potential memoir title one day. I think I'm too, I'm too young to write a memoir so far, but I had YouTube. It launched the year that I started high school, 2006, and it was such a fortuitous and exciting place to meet other people who were interested in books and theater queer people, which I was not finding a lot of in my very cookie cutter suburban town.

And so I video blogged through my teenage years, my college years, and my first few years as a working professional. I met some of my best friends there, people who were in my wedding, whose weddings I have been to, people whose kids now call me auntie. It's incredibly powerful. And that was really my first taste of making stuff online, of choosing how I represent myself and really finding my people.

And that same spirit of just interesting people who wanted to experiment in digital medium, meet each other and build community from that. It's not just one way, it wasn't just posting a video and then later you hope that the numbers go up. It's waiting anxiously for comments to come into the comment section and having video replies to one another, having a full conversation, making those friends, making those community connections.

It was incredible. YouTube started changing when money really started pouring into the space in 2010, 11, 12, wasn't paying the bills, and so I ended up taking a day job in finance. But during those years and during that time, I felt that desire stick around and just get stronger, and I found my second iteration of that community in podcasting, which I thought I was very late to when I got into it in 2015.

Jeff Umbro: What did that look like when you transitioned to podcasting? And, and I want to come back to the YouTube stuff because obviously it's such a prevalent conversation today.

Amanda McLoughlin: For sure. I desperately wanted to make a podcast with my best friend. We met in kindergarten. She moved back to New York City after finishing college, and she studied mythology and folklore in her history degree. And so we wanted to make a podcast where, number one, we could make it without wanting to die.

And number two, it could come out every other week. No matter what. And so while our first ideas were in the sort of scripted space, wanting to make something that was maybe audio fiction, very inspired by The Bright Sessions, Welcome to Nightvale, all of these incredible shows that were popping off or popping up around the same time we ended up landing on something we knew we could do, which is have a drink, talk about a different story from mythology and folklore every single episode, and make it educational and hopefully funny.

And so Julia Schifini and I launched Spirits in 2016. Here we are, almost 500 episodes later, making the now weekly podcast in year nine.

Jeff Umbro: How does it feel making that show that you've been making for nearly a decade? I'm sure that you've lived several lifetimes throughout that process.

Amanda McLoughlin: It's incredible. It is the object lesson of everything we now do at Multitude, the podcast company that I founded and now run as my full-time day job. I've actually been describing myself recently as a part-time podcaster, full-time person who runs a podcast business. 

And so it is such a gift to me that Spirits has reliably paid several of my bills since 2018, but it's not my full thing. I am not an influencer. I am not a full-time person whose only job is doing this one podcast. I get to be a little bit more relaxed. I get to experiment with it. In that time, we've had different editors and songs and episode structures and miniseries. We've interviewed hundreds of authors who I really admire, and we get to make it fun for ourselves and keep challenging ourselves to say the episodes that we want to make now are not the same as we did nine years ago.

The people that we are now are not the same as we were back then, and the joy of it and humility of it is that there are people out there who have been listening the whole time and to keep earning their trust and keep, I, I would say, deserving a space in their weekly rotation of the content that keeps them company really means something to me.

It's like a constant opportunity to keep iterating on it and keep ourselves interested, which keeps the audience interested.

Jeff Umbro: Something that is always understated when you're talking about you, a podcast professional who also is a podcaster, is that you get to use it as your playground to experiment, touch all of the things that you're talking to clients about all the time, which I find to be incredibly important because then you can actually talk the talk and walk the walk.

Amanda McLoughlin: Everything I tell clients to do everything I do for money in my job, every six and seven figure budget that I allocate for a corporation out there, I have full confidence in what I'm saying and doing because I've done it for myself. I have made the decision of putting a Blue Yeti mic on my credit card and hoping and trusting that I'll make enough money from Patreon one day to pay myself back. You know what I mean? 

Like I have made that decision between I am burning out, keeping up with Facebook, Tumblr, Google Plus, and Instagram. What do I do now? Like how do I decide? I trust the people who make the stuff to tell me about the strategy of it, and that very much is something that we focus on Attach Your Resume, the show that I co-host with Eric Silver, where, similar to what you said earlier, Jeff, it's really like the show I I wish existed when I was getting into this. The conversations that I wish the industry was mature enough to have when it comes to work in labor of being a digital media creator or digital media professional.

I just fundamentally trust the people who make the stuff to decide what happens next in our industry or what happens with someone else's hard earned money and time.

Jeff Umbro: Five years ago, we had this moment where a bunch of TV executives came into podcasting to try and make the IP play happen. I feel like today we have all of these creators from every other industry coming in to see what they can do In the podcast space specifically, YouTube is a part of this gonna be a good thing where these people from these other industries who have already solved some of the problems that we're dealing with. Are able to bring those solutions to us, or is it just gonna be like yet another situation where everything gets messy and consolidated and then we have to come back and reclaim what is ours?

Amanda McLoughlin: Can you name me an industry that venture capital has actually solved, benefited a problem that they have fixed?

Jeff Umbro: I don't think venture capitalists would tell you that they're there to fix problems. They would say that they're there in order to equip the people who can solve the problems with the resources that they need. And I think if you frame it that way, then you probably can point to a lot of success stories when it comes to like healthcare or technology or something. But I view that differently than media and entertainment because often the stakes are very different. In media and entertainment, the financial side of it is basically how do you build an audience, then monetize that audience? 

You have the creators who are coming in to actually make this beautiful thing, and then you have people who come in and try and turn it into a business. Do you see it differently?

Amanda McLoughlin: I think that it's the people doing the stuff. It's the creators who are making rent from audiences of a thousand people or more. Like, really starting in that micro influencer way, a term that. Is being thrown around that I a little bit disagree with, but when you make things that are compelling enough for other people to make space for it in their lives, that is the real situation of what all of these VC guys, tech guys, platforms would just term as content.

Platforms need creators, but creators fundamentally don't need platforms like we will find a way around it. When you know a certain social media service goes down, we find another one that we like. When the pavement processor you were using has an arbitrary new law that like de platforms your work because it's gay or whatever, we find another one to go to.

That is not the felt and emotional lived reality of being a creator online where it feels like, Oh man, if just like Spotify would notice me and if they would just tap me on the head and if they put my podcast on their platform, then like I would make it, baby. 

But that's not how any of this works.

And so I am so grateful that all of the dumb money has left podcasting. It feels people aren't looking at podcasting as the next get rich quick scheme of digital media. And I think folks are asking themselves, should I, is this good? Should I have a podcast? Is this a good addition to my platform, a community, whatever?

I love that. I would rather have that conversation with individual creators, with small businesses all day long, then I would take another stupid meeting with another like television studio or bank, or like a consulting firm that just says, well, we need a podcast because we're seeing that it's popular. And I read that Alex Bloomberg is a millionaire, so I also now wanna be a millionaire again by doing this.

I think that creators need to own our power, and we need to withhold our labor and our content and our audiences from platforms that don't prioritize us.

Jeff Umbro: There is a reality behind that statement where sometimes people just need to get paid, but you. Are building something as a vehicle for your vision, and this is multitude and I'd love to hear more about what you guys are doing and how it's going.

Amanda McLoughlin: Multitude is a podcast collective. Production services company and ad sales provider. So we are basically in the business of making our ocs, our original shows, the stuff that are, that's in the collective, including spirits and join the party shows. I started in 2016 and 17, respectively as one half, and then one fourth of the show.

We learned, as I said earlier, everything we know about growing those shows from the people who followed me to Instagram and Twitter from my YouTube audience, for the most part, people I went to college and high school with. Into the thriving communities that they are today. We are in the business of, I hope, equipping and encouraging creators to understand what it takes to make a sustainable living in this field.

I am not here to sell you a platform or a solution. I am here to exchange goods and services. I'm here to help you with things you need help with, and let you do what you wanna do otherwise. So when a creator comes to us functionally and says, I have everything on lock, except I need you to help me with ad sales because I'm scared of it and I don't wanna sell out, but I also need to make money, we've got you handled. 

We sell ads. We sell ads to ethical good companies. We help you figure out the best solution for podcast hosting programmatic ads. Et cetera. We help you work through those problems. Not to say, give me the keys, I'll take care of it, but to say, let me educate you on what this situation is, what this industry is doing.

You should not have to be in the weeds about DAI pixels and, and like vast tags and the cascading logic of dynamic ads, like all of this, you know, stuff that I have had to get brain pills about, but I'll explain it to you so that you get it, and you can make an informed choice as a creator about what happens on your show with your listeners. 

Same with production services. We employ several incredibly talented human editors, a, a new word I'm saying. More and more people try to say like, I can just AI generate a podcast for you. And I say, do you realize you're explaining to me how you wanna put me out of work? And they're like, yeah, it's really efficient.

And then I say, go fuck yourself. So, absolutely not. But what we can do is say to a creator, what do you wanna accomplish? What do you want the show to do? Let us help you with our 35 years plus combined experience and podcasting to structure a show to make it work for you, to make it not unbearable, to make this podcast and advance your goals, whatever that is, which doesn't have to include, by the way, making money.

There are lots of great reasons to have a podcast and make one and call one successful that has nothing to do with profit and all of those services together. Our goal is to be a toolbox for creators, to be colleagues you can come to, you can ask for advice, you can work with, you can do this not alone, and still do it all on your own terms.

When networks were out there trying to sign hundreds of creators a year, take a part of their IP, promise them baseless marketing and monetization, and one person we know got a book deal, so maybe you'll get a movie deal. We were saying instead, how can we help you do what you wanna do on your own terms right now?

And that has ended up being year eight, a sustainable business that employs now nine people.

Jeff Umbro: You guys are clearly doing something right? You have a full office and studio in the middle of Brooklyn. You have nine people you just said, W2, 1099?

Amanda McLoughlin: W2 baby.

Jeff Umbro: That's amazing. Congratulations. 

Why is it so difficult for so many creators to figure out the business side of their creations?

Amanda McLoughlin: Because capitalism treats us like artist dummies who can't understand this stuff. There is this false divide in at least US culture between the like math kid and the reading kid, right? Between like stem and art. And I fell into it too. Exactly. We're gonna bash all the binaries by the time the 21st century is done, and this is one of them.

And we as artists are told and coddled and had it on the head to say, Oh, the thing you wanna do doesn't make money. Good luck with that. 

And why would you push yourself to understand these things? A system that is designed to deter your understanding? This is my, having worked in finance, I've gotten pilled in this knowledge that the financial system is set up to make it difficult to understand.

Stock market investments, 401ks. If these sorts of words make you start sweating, that's by design. And we exist as creators in that larger context where we are just supposed to put our stuff up on the internet and then magically money or connection will come. And that's what I get really upset about when I see platforms.

I think Substack is a really prime example to me of they wanna be all in one. They wanna be everything. They want your consumers to never leave Substack. They want you to publish there, to make podcasts there, to send emails there, to take payments there. Chat and live and social components. They wanna have an ecosystem where it is truly a walled garden, and if you're one of the people that they pat on the head and give a preferable split or give a grant, that's amazing for that individual. And I will never begrudge any artist to be clear for taking money when offered to them. God, what a dream. 

But for almost all other creators, we are forced to choose between convenience and autonomy. And that sucks, and that is an artificial construct created under capitalism, but it is what exists for many of us.

So when you do go to start a podcast and you Google how to start a podcast, Spotify really wants you to do it with them and to make it look really easy and to have everything all in one platform. But then when Spotify decides to war with Apple, or when Spotify decides to pivot itself to video and to start disincentivizing audio only podcasts, which they are doing effectively financially right now with their new Spotify partner program, you really don't have a choice.

So I think that it is more work and that is undeniable, which is why we at Multitude work so hard to try to demystify and talk about and provide resources and explainers for this stuff. Because the only people who like understand public 10 K filings and have worked on the inside of big agencies and who know what it's like when a platform makes a choice that kind of screws you. It's the least we can do to explain that to others so that creators can learn hard things. It is so much more difficult to teach someone who is so quantitatively minded to be creative, to have an idea, to make something interesting. Companies are trying and they can't stop putting out slop about good marketing campaigns, right?

Think about good companies on social media. I think about like the Denny's Twitter. I think about various very good social media plays. There are a few examples, but it's not a lot. And yet every single year companies try harder and harder to have a voice and make you love them, and consumers are smarter than that.

And so the art, the creators and artists who make something compelling enough that strangers make you a part of their life, their routine, care about you, care about your stuff, care about each other, and maybe even give you money. That is the thing that no VC backed digital creator platform can possibly touch.

Jeff Umbro: It's funny, I just got off a call this morning with a brand that you would recognize and they'd reached out 'cause they want a podcast. And my first question is always, what are your goals here? They had no idea. They hadn't thought about format, structure, cost, goals, KPIs, none of it. It's exactly what you're trying to illustrate here, where it's like. They're often having those conversations 'cause they read somewhere that they should be making a podcast and not because they have a real vision behind it.

Amanda McLoughlin: And I think that is ultimately really dangerous for us. Pay your bills, take the work you gotta take. But if a company decides to like pour money into a podcast, it's Ill conceived from the start. There are no goals. There's no way this could go well. Then what do they conclude? Podcasts are dumb. Podcasts don't work.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, we tried that. Nothing happened.

Amanda McLoughlin: Instead of having someone say to you, just from a business perspective, I feel like the most powerful word in my vocabulary is no. The, the most powerful thing I can say on a client call is, I can't help you, or I'm not the best person for this, or the thing that I know I could do for you well, it doesn't seem like your priority.

It, I think, builds confidence, but also for me, the difference in 2025 to 2015, when we were first getting started, is I feel like I've seen some shit. I've seen two different pivots to video rise and fall, right? We're midday new mall on the second one, like it has a Wikipedia article. Look it up. It's never a good idea when a company just thinks that your profession is a fad, and the more we talk about and lift up podcasting as an industry, ask these critical questions, give critical feedback, make shows like this where we can have in-depth conversations with professionals about what they think and what they do and why it matters. Going beyond the headline is just so important.

And so when we talk and think about the pivot to video in of 2024 and onward, no it's not. It's Spotify trying to become a YouTube competitor, which they're never going to do because YouTube is the largest search engine in the world. Spotify isn't pivoting the video because they think that video is great for podcasters, they're doing it because they have hit their earning ceiling on what they can make you pay for Spotify Premium. So they need to keep adding more stuff to make you pay for more Spotify premium or annoy you sufficiently with ads that you end up flipping that switch. And the only way they can do that is adding a whole new medium 'cause they have done all they can in audio at this point. So when podcasters see those headlines and get nervous and say, Oh my God, do I have to pivot to video? Do I have to be a YouTuber? Again at 16, I liked to be on camera at 33, I don't wanna have to be camera ready every single day that I come into work.

I did not get into this business to stay a YouTuber. I got into it to be a podcaster. And so if video works for you, I am so happy for you. I think that's amazing. If it adds something to the experience, it makes you stoked. If you share clips on social media, I do too. I love that. But don't do it because you think you must.

It's literally only because Spotify needs to make more money.

Jeff Umbro: What are the mechanics of posting video for your podcast? And I want to look at both high level, what extra steps need to go into actually creating the video and like where you can publish it and that kind of thing. Let's pretend everything goes well. 

How much money can you earn doing this? What does that look like?

Amanda McLoughlin: Video is a different medium. That may sound like a truism, but I say it really intentionally because when I co-designed and launched the shows that I'm on with my collaborators. It was for audio. Audio is not just video with the camera turned off. It is a different medium. It requires imagination. It's super intimate.

All of us got into podcasting because we believe and love the power of audio. That's great. There are also documentary shorts I watch on YouTube and video essays and all kinds of fun streamers and let's plays. Video is great, but it's different. And so the point of the article that Eric Silver, our head of development at Multitude shared a few weeks back in 2025, is we basically filmed ourselves doing an introduction to our show, Attach Your Resume.

And in that introduction, the just uncut footage of us sitting in this studio doing it side by side was basically that it makes you perform differently. You're aware of it. I think when all of us had to spend a lot of time on video chats during lockdown, we got very familiar with how distracting and disorienting it can be to see yourself right in front of you.

It's a whole new skillset and also requires a new kind of editing. So when I talk and think about video podcasts now, I think they can be a great fit for some people, but they're definitely a different show. And so to make a show that began as audio only become a video podcast would necessitate changing the format if you're doing your job properly.

And so for us, we capture video while recording podcasts. We cut clips for social media using a very skilled audio video editor who is great at this stuff, who adds effects, who adds humor. It's making a different product. And that product is a short form video clip that somebody can share with a friend, they can watch, they can have a laugh. We can start hopefully building our audience. 

The answer, Jeff, is that pouring money into video production because it costs money. Part of why I stopped being a YouTuber is 'cause I was a work study college student and couldn't afford the $2,000 camera that everybody else was pivoting to with that nice soft background, the DSLRs and it made you look unprofessional, 'cause it does require more money and more different kinds of skill sets starting up. So all of that is to say that video costs money to produce, and it doesn't necessarily make money. Have you talked to a YouTuber recently about what their CPMs are like? Have you ever talked to somebody who is totally dependent on a platform like Twitch or YouTube to decide the split of the ad revenue they run on those creators?

The platforms dominate it all. Monopoly is bad even for capitalists. And so when you have one platform deciding just overall to change their split, change their rate, and effectively reduce the. Annual income of so many streamers on Twitch and video bloggers on YouTube, that's a really dangerous place to be.

And so in practical terms, I have several clients who do make video podcasts and looking side by side at all their streams of revenue. Spotify's video program pays almost nothing. YouTube's video program pays a little bit more because YouTube shares with creators a split of the public ad revenue on public videos that are not YouTube Premium.

Spotify does not do that. And then the biggest chunk by far is ad sales on the podcast itself. Finally, even bigger than that, like we're comparing Venus to the sun is direct support from listeners. So whether that's via Patreon member full, any other service you like, having that direct relationship to the audience who actually pay you for your work in a way that is not beginning with, let's literally sell to the, in this case, highest bidder on a dynamic ad and then split that 50 50 with Google, if you're lucky, and then with whoever else you have to split it with.

It's just diminishing returns at that point.

Jeff Umbro: What about simulcast, selling an ad to a DR brand on audio and then multiplying that with whatever you're gonna get on the video side? Is that something that you guys have seen?

Amanda McLoughlin: Yeah, we do that. We address a podcast's total audience. For example, we represent a great weekly Pokemon show. They began as a live streaming show. They released the audio as a podcast, the video as, uh, a YouTube stream and AVOD on Twitch. They're amazing. And so we sum the audience across those platforms and when they read an ad, it goes out in all three places.

It's not magic fairy dust, it's just increasing the size of the audience. And frankly, podcast downloads are way more reliable, way more engaged, and the CPMs are way higher than they would be if I was just selling on YouTube or Twitch alone.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, I'm, I'm seeing a few people who are starting to do the simulcast, baked in spots across all of these different platforms. And, and it's funny 'cause sometimes they're charging a much lower CPM for the YouTube stuff. Sometimes they're able to just keep the same CPM across the board. In theory, you can get a much bigger audience on YouTube, or at least there are ways to do that. And then you're multiplying a similar content by multiples per platform.

Amanda McLoughlin: Views are worth less though.

Jeff Umbro: They are, and we all know that even if you just look at consumption per platform, you can tell that they're worth less.

Amanda McLoughlin: I'm like working on a timeline or a, a multiplication table of what views and engagement are worth what, and the, the fact is podcast audiences are more engaged. They listen harder, they do things you ask them to do, they're loyal. Podcasting is a weird, somewhat jurassic technology where we have to use this artifact called the RSS feed, almost older than me, in order to serve these things to our audiences. But the jankis of our technology, the somewhat dated way that we can just distribute stuff online and then any kind of app or IFTTT integration out there can capture it, is a strength. We don't have to log on to our single platform like Twitch or YouTube in the morning and say to ourselves like, oh my God, what are they prioritizing next?

And then change your entire content model to suit what it is that YouTube is doing to make more users stay on YouTube and make money for YouTube, not for the creator. So podcasting is always going to be my heart and soul and the backbone of my business. It gives you so much more autonomy, and when listeners complete that grueling cycle of four or five clicks in several different apps to finally subscribe to your podcast. They're not really going anywhere, and that's an, an incredible honor. And something that I, I base the business around. 

The same podcast on YouTube is like shouting into the void. And sometimes the void shouts back and sometimes it just goes off into nowhere.

Jeff Umbro: We had Joe Cilio from Forever Dog on the show recently, and he basically said that for all of the shows that they're doing, video and audio for, the video is a completely separate product. It might be an hour long audio property and it's a 15 minute video that goes up that is produced entirely differently and recorded as its own thing. So all creators should be doing whatever is suitable to what their needs are and what they're hoping to achieve. And I don't disagree with any of what you said in terms of it is way more work. It is very rarely more money, and it is something that causes a lot of headaches and it's something that we are gonna continue to hear from clients that they want more of.

Amanda McLoughlin: They read the same headlines that Spotify PR is putting out there saying, oh, we sent this many millions of dollars last month to these video creators who they've already paid billions of dollars to make a video component of their podcast. So the thing that I would entreat people to do is just like you said, ask themself, does this work for me?

Why? Like, why should I be doing this? Why does this company want me to do it? And then decide for yourself if you want to or not, which again, is not instinctual because most of us see what others are doing and think, Oh my God, I guess I have to do that. And I don't blame again, anybody at all for having that reaction.

But it's taking those extra beats to to ask who is incentivized, who profits when I do this? And two, is it the right call for me really is why it's so important to have collaborators, to have this trusting relationship with your audience and to ultimately do what works for you and f the rest.

Jeff Umbro: It's funny, we started this show on video, knowing that I, I knew I was gonna hate doing it on video, but I just had to try it because everyone was asking me for it. I hadn't done any video properties before. I don't know, a lot of trial and error later, I think our video product is fine, but it's nothing that you can't just hit play on on Spotify or Apple or whatever and get the exact same product.

Amanda McLoughlin: Listen, I watch a ton of video podcasts. I love reality competition tv, and I watch a bunch of podcasters basically do post-game analysis of shows like Survivor, Big Brother, Love Island, and they are very skilled streamers. They come on for an hour and a half, have an uninterrupted commentary, they, it's not edited.

And then both the audio goes out on a podcast feed. And I watch it on video because I pay for YouTube Premium and it is less annoying than it is to have 18 ads inserted into an hour long podcast when I can watch it ad free on YouTube Premium. So I'm not a video hater overall, I'm a video, let's pick and choose when it works for us.

Jeff Umbro: What are some of the most important hard skills that independent creators need to learn in order to build sustainable careers?

Amanda McLoughlin: You gotta know where the money's coming from. You have to know what money you need in order to live, and you need to know how you're gonna make that money, and also how platforms are making money from you. For most of us, making the stuff that we care about a lot won't become our full-time gigs. That might not even be desirable, but all of us have a set amount of money that we need to make every month or year in order to live, and a different number to maybe live like comfortably or without as much financial stress as you can possibly eliminate from your life.

And so that can look like a lot of things for online creators. You can start a project and end up making money via teaching or speaking or consulting. You can have a part-time job that makes a lot of sense for you and frees up your schedule to do more of the stuff you wanna do online. I podcasted for about two years while working a day job in finance, sleeping less than I should have.

I was also 25. It was a little bit easier back then. Saving money and getting to the point where I could cover my mini, my base expenses, my emergency, gotta pay rent, gotta pay my bills this month with the Patreon from our podcast, until I was able to quit my day job and have more time to actually launch Multitude, build a business, and start making other kinds of revenue, it is just so important to educate yourself to ask the silly questions. If you don't know who to ask, literally ask me. You can DM me on socials. I'm @ShesSoMickey on Instagram, @amandamc on Bluesky. But learning about these tools is a lot less hard than you think. It is made to seem impossible to understand, impossible to navigate without an expert who, by the way, you have to pay, believing that you can do it, and believing in the necessity and finding someone who will explain it to you without judgment.

It's hard, but I know you are capable of it. If you've ever made anything artistic in your life, I promise you, you can learn about spreadsheets. Look up, again, basics on like personal finance and budgeting. Look up basics on contracts. I spent my first check for Multitude on a lawyer to have a contract for freelancer services. So important to have your bases covered there. 

And then lastly, to ask basically questions that build up to a business plan to say to yourself, what do I wanna do? How can I get paid? What are the skills that people would want to pay me for or compensate me for or trade me for? And why would people care?

What am I doing that is different? What am I doing that adds value to someone's life and how can I free up more of my time or money to do more of that thing?

Jeff Umbro: Are there common mistakes that you see different creative entrepreneurs making time and again?

Amanda McLoughlin: I think that trading autonomy for convenience is the biggest one. Folks choosing an all-in-one platform, an all-in-one provider, one that says that they can do every single thing, a Swiss Army knife of platforms is almost always gonna be a mistake. And then secondly, I am so frustrated when people start with a limited series or they start with three or four guest episode, like test episodes of a podcast, or they say, I'm not really into always on chat shows. I'm gonna do something different. 

Great. God bless you. I loved cereal too. But the way to build audience and stay a prioritized part of someone's life is to show up for them over and over again. And so whether your show is once a month, every other week, weekly, multiple times a week, there's pros and cons to all of them.

And ultimately, I always want you to make a podcast that you know you could hit your deadlines and make it sustainably. But putting 500 hours of work into a single episode of a podcast is only going to be a single episode of a podcast. And again, as much as I love and admire lots of reported stories, how often do you think about the five episode limited series that you listen to in 2015?

There are a few that come to mind, but I've listened to way more than that. The creators and properties that I have a relationship with are the ones that show up for me consistently again and again, and especially if you're going to ask listeners to do that, if you're gonna ask them to give you money to recommend your show, to write in or to care about something or to fight for change, you need to show up for them as well. 

And so if someone comes out to try to make a podcast, I want them to commit to a year of releasing that podcast consistently, which again, can be whatever schedule works for them. Maybe it's, like, Kate Helen Downey made this excellent podcast called Cramped about the science of period pain and Multitude was one of the companies that helped her distribute the show.

She built a relationship with her audience via a newsletter for the better part of seven months before the show launched and is keeping that going. The conversation is not limited to the six weeks when the show comes out or the 10 weeks in Kate's case, and that is just realistic and important and something that you gotta commit to doing.

Jeff Umbro: I couldn't agree more. The limited series stuff is fun and is some of the most rewarding creative endeavors that that I've worked on personally. When it comes to turning that into a business, it is often the worst thing you could possibly do in podcasting.

Amanda McLoughlin: And maybe your goal is not to grow your audience, but to serve an existing one. Perfectly great. Paris Marx of the excellent show tech Won't Save Us did a super impactful mini series on Elon Musk last November in 2023 and has continued to make a podcast with weekly releases, even as he worked on that series for months and months and months.

So whether it's, again, releasing it on a feed, keeping up with an audience in another way, or maybe even choosing another form, like it's okay if you want to take a break from your show and then make something totally weird and cool and new that you're stoked about, and then go back to what you did before.

But thinking that you can just release three to eight like perfect gems of an episode and people are going to care is unfortunately not the reality of the industry. And that's sad and uh, challenging and hard, but it's when those podcasters then say, and, and fuck you for making your light lift weekly chat show.

Is where I get frustrated because if you think that there is no production value and time and thought and planning put into conversational podcasts, copyright Eric Silver, which we call them here at Multitude, I dunno what to tell you buddy, because that is the backbone of audio and why people care about talk radio, about podcasting, about streaming.

We wanna make a relationship from Dear Abby's of the world onward. We wanna make a relationship with someone who we get to have consistent contact with and that is the backbone of our industry.

Jeff Umbro: So final question for you. I have been a fan of Attach Your Resume, which is a new show that you're hosting and producing. Ian, you mentioned earlier, it is the show that you wish existed when you had started Multitude. So on that note, whether it's from Attach Your Resume or just something you've learned over time, what is one thing that you wish that you knew when you started the company?

Amanda McLoughlin: People way dumber and more evil than me are pretty rich and have made a lot of money in this industry, in digital media overall. And so if these idiots can cash huge checks and get people to trust them and make keynote presentations, why can't I? The thing that qualifies me to run a digital media business is making digital media and to anyone else who is listening and thinks, God, if only my boss would freaking listen to me.

Like anybody who has ever had a boss or has had an hourly job or has worked anywhere in customer service knows that doing it qualifies you to make decisions about it. Holding the job makes you qualified to make strategic business development decisions, and so I wouldn't have any leg to stand on and any expertise to give at all if I hadn't spent hundreds and hundreds of hours making hundreds and hundreds of podcast episodes.

Doing it is what makes me okay at this, and what gives me a reason to tell other people what they should do with their own time. And so I would say if you're talking to somebody who's never done the job that you're doing, be a little wary. And if someone who has a fancier title accent salary than you tells you that you're stupid for wanting to make something or believing in yourself or relying on your community, fuck them because you know what it is that you're doing.

That is what I wish I had the confidence to say and own when I was first getting into the industry.

Jeff Umbro: Just as an add-on to that. If you are the person who wants to do the thing, we have a lot of people who come to us because they wanna make a show, but then they haven't tried to make the show yet. And that's always a, a little pet peeve of mine.

Amanda McLoughlin: Find collaborators. This shit is hard. Being a podcaster makes you wear 10 different hats. It is almost impossible to do on your own and true ups to anyone who does. So find collaborators, find friends, team up with people. This stuff is difficult, but having friends at your back and a community at your side is the only way to survive.

Jeff Umbro: Thank you, Amanda, for joining us on the show.

Amanda McLoughlin: Thank you, Jeff. Folks can find me and my shows at multitude.productions.

Jeff Umbro: Thank you so much to Amanda for joining the show. You can find more from Amanda on LinkedIn or at multitude.productions.

For more podcast related news, info, and takes, you can follow me on LinkedIn at Jeff Umbro. Podcast Perspectives is a production of The Podglomerate.

If you're looking for help producing, marketing, or monetizing your podcast, you can find us at Podglomerate.com. Shoot us an email at listen@thepodglomerate.com, or follow us on all socials at @podglomeratepods. 

This episode was produced by Chris Boniello, and myself, Jeff Umbro. This episode was edited and mixed by José Roman. And thank you to our marketing team, Joni Deutsch, Madison Richards, Morgan Swift, Annabella Pena, and Perri Gross. And a special thank you to Dan Christo. 

Thank you for listening and I'll catch you all in a few weeks.