Podcast Milestones: Why Showing Up Is 90% of Success

TL;DR

90% of podcasts quit before 20 episodes. By crossing the 21-episode mark, Venture Step proves that consistency, not just skill, is the key to breaking through the noise. #VentureStep #Podcasting #Consistency

INTRODUCTION

In the fast-paced world of content creation, countless ventures are launched with enthusiasm only to fade away when faced with the long, quiet grind of building an audience. This is especially true in podcasting, where the initial excitement often gives way to the challenge of consistent production. So, what separates the creators who endure from those who disappear?

In this special solo episode of Venture Step, host Dalton Anderson pulls back the curtain on the podcast's journey, celebrating key milestones and sharing candid reflections on what it takes to succeed. 1Hitting over 250 downloads and, more importantly, publishing 21 episodes, Dalton discusses the surprising statistic that this level of persistence places the show in the top 1% of all podcasts worldwide. 22

This episode is a raw look at the mindset required for any long-term project. Dalton explores why a good attitude and the simple act of showing up day after day are more critical than raw talent, the unexpected challenges of conducting interviews, and why setting a long-term vision is essential for navigating the inevitable ups and downs of the entrepreneurial journey.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Reaching 21 published episodes places a podcast in the top 1% globally for production volume, as an estimated 90% of creators quit after 20 episodes. ³
• Success in long-term projects is driven more by attitude and consistency than initial skill; the majority of your competition eventually stops showing up. ⁴⁴⁴
• Interviewing guests effectively is a learned skill that involves making them feel comfortable on a recording, guiding the conversation, and scheduling well in advance to avoid conflicts. ⁵⁵⁵⁵⁵
• Short-form video content, such as YouTube Shorts, can serve as a powerful tool to create awareness and drive traffic to a long-form podcast. ⁶

FULL CONVERSATION

A Quick Update and a Change of Plans

Dalton: Welcome to Venture Step Podcast where we discuss entrepreneurship, industry trends, and the occasional book review. Today, this episode might be the same length as the intro, as we're going to be going over podcast milestones and just keeping everyone updated with how the podcast is growing. ⁷As you are part of the podcast and you're a listener, you're an early listener and you're one of the few. ⁸And so I feel that I should one, keep making your podcast episodes every week, and two, keep you updated on how the podcast progresses. ⁹

Originally this podcast was supposed to be about the history of autonomous vehicles and how they have progressed to where they are today. ¹⁰But I didn't get to it because I overslept my alarm this morning as I've been exhausted doing some work around the house, like remodeling, trying to get ready for the next big push to finish my Nana's home. ¹¹So that's why this episode is just about the podcast milestones and not about the autonomous vehicle history, which is quite interesting. ¹² So I wanted to share it. But before we dive in, I'm Dalton Anderson, your host. My background is a bit of mixing programming, data science, and insurance. Offline, you can find me running, building my side business, or lost in a good book. ¹³You can listen to the podcast in video or audio format on YouTube. ¹⁴If audio is more your thing, you can find the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and of course anywhere else you get your podcasts. ¹⁵

The agenda today is podcast wins, a reflection of my first interview, and just how the show is doing in general and how I think it affects my personal life. ¹⁶

Milestone Unlocked: Joining the Top 1% of Podcasts

Dalton: I'm super excited to say that we finally crossed, a couple of weeks ago, the 250 download mark and we crossed 21 episodes. ¹⁷21 episodes, I'm pretty sure, is the 1% of podcasts. ¹⁸According to Forbes, 26% of podcasts have more than 10 episodes and 32% have published more than 10 episodes. ¹⁹And this one says 90% of podcasts don't publish more than three episodes. ²⁰So apparently that's 1.8 million people, and this is data as of two years ago. ²¹Of the 200,000 people left, 90% of them will quit after 20 episodes. ²² So it's another 180,000 gone.

To be a top 1% podcast in the world for episodes, at least on production, you need to publish 21 episodes of your podcast. ²³

The Mindset of Consistency: Why Showing Up Matters Most

Dalton: I think the gist of it is in a lot of things in life, a lot of things that you are passionate about or that you are willing to do. ²⁴

It's not about skill. It's more about attitude and having the right thought process and approach, and knowing when things aren't going to be a short-term turnaround and have this long-term mindset towards growth and improving and getting bett²⁵er. ²⁶

Because the majority of your competition just isn't showing up day to day. ²⁷And so all you have to do is show up and have a good attitude, a good approach, and be willing to learn. ²⁸I'm not your dad or your mom, but maybe you need to hear that. ²⁹You might have been a little down on things not going right and that might cheer you up. ³⁰

But that's big. So basically two million people quit before they get to 21 episodes. 31Of the hosts after 21 episodes, that's 20,000 podcasters. 32That's really not that many people. 33And I think a lot of them, I follow these podcast forums, and a lot of them are so concerned with the numbers. 34I know it's funny because I'm talking about the numbers and how it's cool, but I never expected people to listen to the episode. 35It's more of me putting out this stuff, creating content instead of just consuming. 36I just wanted to provide something and be able to improve my speaking skills and my presentations and enforce good habits upon myself, learning constantly every week and having that pressure to perform and create an episode. 37This week I failed unfortunately, but I'm still making the episode and hopefully this is still valuable. 38

Where I was getting with that is, you just have to show up and have a good attitude. ³⁹ That's it.

I never had the expectation of people listening. Like the only person I really expected to listen was my mom and my Nana. And that's it. So anything over two listeners is huge for me. 40

I'm like, wow, these are people I don't know. And when I look at the country list, it's like 30 different countries, people all across the world. 41It's insane to think that people are finding what I'm saying interesting. 42So I appreciate you and I appreciate you listening to the episodes, and more to come there. 43

Measuring Growth Across Platforms

Dalton: That was the downloads. On YouTube, and this is kind of wishy-washy, but on YouTube I have just over 10,000 views. ⁴⁴The majority of those views are coming from YouTube shorts and I'm using YouTube shorts to kind of poke at people, kind of an ad of awareness. ⁴⁵I'm not running ads, but think of it as an ad. ⁴⁶ It's just like a slight nudge. Like, hey, watch this. Hey, I'm here. This is what I'm talking about. ⁴⁷So on YouTube, just over 10,000, I think it's at 10,556 or something. ⁴⁸I don't recall the exact number, but over 10,000. ⁴⁹And on Facebook, I have a reach of just over 7,500 combined with Facebook and Instagram. ⁵⁰ So it's pretty cool. I'm honestly flabbergasted that people listen to Venture Step Podcast and myself. ⁵¹ I'm super excited. If you can see the video of me, I'm just smiling. I think it's insane that people are listening to the episodes. ⁵²

A Two-Year Horizon: Setting Long-Term Expectations

Dalton: But that's the mindset you have to have when you're first starting something out and it's a long-term thing. ⁵³

If you do a business or you do something and you're going against the grain of what's considered the norm in society, there's gonna be a lot of judgment and there's gonna be a lot of, let's say non-combatant support maybe. They're not telling you you can't do it, but they're not supporting you and not being encouraging and wishing for your downfall. ⁵⁴

You just have to grind through and just appreciate those times and the challenges and the learnings that come with it. Because I originally started the podcast when I was in college and I fell off from doing it because the first thing I did was I did an interview as my first episode, which is wild because it was difficult. 55And the second interview was difficult with Risa. 56 I didn't have the right setup. I thought that I needed a nice mic and I thought that, you know, why would people listen to me? 57And all these other things when really you just got to get started and get after it and publish episodes. 58It'd be crazy how big the podcast would be if I was publishing episodes for four years straight or something like that. 59 Who knows? We'll never know. But we can know from four years from now. I keep publishing episodes and we'll see from there. 60

For this kind of thing, I'm giving it two years. In two years time from when I originally started publishing episodes a couple months ago, I'm going to re-evaluate if I want to keep doing the podcast. 61I'm pretty sure the answer is going to be yes. 62 But having that gauge, okay, within two years from now, we'll see where we're at and whether I still enjoy it. Does it feel like a chore? 63 Do I feel like I'm providing value to society with these episodes? Do people find it entertaining? 64 All those things. It's not a numbers thing. It's not like, well, if I don't have 10,000 downloads in two years, then I'm not doing it anymore. 65There are other metrics that you can measure this to, and so that's what I plan on doing in two years. 66

The Art and Challenge of the Interview

Dalton: My first interview on the revival of the show was quite interesting. ⁶⁷ It's so difficult to interview. You have to prepare the episode properly. You need to get your guests to be comfortable. ⁶⁸ It's a bit odd. I don't think people have issues with Zoom meetings or Teams meetings because they do it all the time. ⁶⁹But as soon as you say, "Okay, we're going to do a recording," people start thinking about what if I make a mistake? ^70707070 What if I say words or jumble my sentences? They start to kind of freak out a little bit. ⁷¹And so you have to try to calm them down and get them settled and then start the episode, and ensure them, "Hey, if you make any mistakes we can just edit it out." ⁷²It's no big deal, but it is quite interesting to try to guide the guests in the right direction. ⁷³I think that's a skill that takes a while to learn, and the only way to really learn that is to do it. ⁷⁴So I need more episodes and more guests on the show. ⁷⁵

One thing that I need to get better at is scheduling the episode weeks in advance. ⁷⁶I should have probably three entrepreneurs scheduled already, months in advance. ⁷⁷So each one would be two months in advance, and if things come up, I could switch something out. ⁷⁸But right now I'm kind of just doing it week by week and that's not the way to do it. ⁷⁹ Because things come up. I was trying to do that episode with Risa a couple of times, but she had events that came up, I had events that came up. ⁸⁰And so if you couldn't make that one day for that section, then it might delay you a week because everyone has things going on. ⁸¹That was causing issues. ⁸²So I need to get a better schedule for planning for guests on the show. ⁸³

What’s Next for Guests? A Quest for a CRISPR Scientist

Dalton: And it doesn't have to be entrepreneurs only. I would like to get maybe leaders, researchers. ⁸⁴One thing I would love to get for the podcast, I would like to get an episode with someone who is a scientist that uses CRISPR because I felt like I didn't properly explain the CRISPR episode. ⁸⁵⁸⁵⁸⁵And I told you I couldn't because I'm not a geneticist. ⁸⁶I really wanted to have an episode that goes more in-depth, like how you use this service and why it's so revolutionary for their work and how much time it saves and some of the stuff that you can do. ⁸⁷

I don't have any thoughts because I don't know how to use it and I don't know how to explain it. ⁸⁸ And it would take me too much time to research it. I started reading papers about it and I was like, what? ⁸⁹ This is so far out of my wheelhouse. I can't do 30 hours of research to do a podcast episode. ⁹⁰I can, but I figured people love to nerd out about things they're passionate about. ⁹¹And so it'd be great to get a scientist on the show to talk about CRISPR. ⁹² That's been on my mind since the episode. So I'm going to try to get that done. ⁹³ I'm going to go to some internet forums and see. If you have a suggestion of someone to reach out to, by all means, I'll get that done. ⁹⁴

A Personal Update: What's Been Keeping Me Busy

Dalton: Right now I am making a big push to finish my Nana's house. ⁹⁵ We're going to do some new lights. We're going to do hi-hats in my room, the closets, the bathrooms, my Nana's room, the living room, the dining room, and the laundry room. ⁹⁶And we're going to do some insulation and we're going to redo the bathroom valves so I can put in a new shower set. ⁹⁷Basically the home was so old that the valves that you tie your shower knob to are normally by a company. ⁹⁸So if you had a Moen valve or a Delta valve from way back, they'll make trims for it, but you can really only use the trims that are assigned to that valve. ⁹⁹And if your valve is super old, you won't have any trim options. ¹⁰⁰That's basically what I ran into because I tried to update it and I had two options and both of them were straight out of the sixties. ¹⁰¹So I'm like, well, let's just update the valve. ¹⁰²And I purchased closets for my closet, my Nana's closet, the hallway closet and the laundry room. ¹⁰³And I painted my Nana's bathroom and also my bathroom. ¹⁰⁴

So I'm doing those things. Some of that I'm paying for or I'm doing. I'm doing the closets, I'm paying to do the installation and the lights. 105But once those things are completed, then I can sit on top of my throne, my castle, and just watch life go by and I could just relax in my kingdom. 106Actually I have to do the backsplash myself, but other than that, I'll be able to relax. 107

Until Next Time

Dalton: That's what I've been up to. And I've been trying to really push hard to get the bathroom done. ¹⁰⁸And so I've been staying up late, getting up early. ¹⁰⁹And I set an alarm today to do the episode about the autonomous vehicle history, and I just ran out of time where I couldn't wake up. ¹¹⁰I set two alarms, I slept through them. ¹¹¹I normally don't sleep through alarms and I woke up and I had to work. ¹¹²Then after work, I had to go to Home Depot, get all the supplies because the guy starts tomorrow. ¹¹³ So I was really tight on time. I wanted to get an episode to everyone for tomorrow. ¹¹⁴

Maybe you love hearing me ramble on, maybe not so much, but I appreciate you as a listener and I just wanted to give you a quick update. ¹¹⁵I promise that the next episode will be a little bit meatier, but until then, take care, talk to you next week and of course have a great day, a good afternoon or good evening, wherever you are in this world. ¹¹⁶ I hope to hear you next week. Bye. ¹¹⁷

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Forbes
• YouTube
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts
• CRISPR

INDEX OF CONCEPTS

Dalton Anderson, VentureStep Podcast, Forbes, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Facebook, Instagram, Risa, CRISPR, Moen, Delta, Home Depot