Monetizing Fun: Scaling a Creative Passion into a Podcast Empire with Ryan LaPlante

The thing you love is monetizable. Fun is monetizable. If you are passionate about and love doing something, go do it because you can make a living doing it. You may not know when, you may not know how, you may edit a podcast for 4 years while your mom says, do people really wanna listen to you playing games? And then your mom will eat her words. She will eat them. She will love your shows. But like you can do it. Quality and passion sells.

Step into the world of success with Your Brand Amplified, the ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your I'm your host, Anika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies, and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success. One of my nerdy little secrets is that I used to play Magic: The Gathering with a group every week, and I always loved it. I also have a niece who's a YouTuber who does just organically made a name for herself. Playing video games. So this is very much something that's connected not to just me, but to all of our generations. I think as a Gen Xer, I, and she's obviously not as a 19-year-old. So I really am excited about this conversation because we're gonna talk about how a group of friends playing Dungeons and Dragons turned into a business generating millions of downloads, hundreds of thousands in revenue. My guest today is Ryan LaPlante, co-founder and producer of Dumb Dumbs and Dice. Which is Canada's largest tabletop RPG podcast network. You heard that me right, network. But Ryan's background is actually more interesting than just that. He's a multiple award-winning screenwriter whose films have played festivals around the world, a narrative designer for major video games, a voice actor for Emmy-winning TV shows, and a screenwriting instructor who's worked on projects for Netflix, Disney, and Amazon Prime. Ryan, you've really done the work. You've toiled in traditional media, you've chased the Hollywood dream, and you've pivoted to podcasting because it offers something that studios really don't— creative control and direct audience connection. I'm really excited to dive into Multishow Podcast Empires, how you built it from scratch, silliness as a key to profitability, scaling a creative business without losing yourself and what makes the show and you and the hosts special, right? And what it really takes to monetize in this space. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being here.

Well, thank you for inviting me. I'm so excited. Normally I get to talk about, you know, the Dungeons and Dragons and the comedy of it all, but I am also very excited to dive into the business side of things because I do calls with creators and I talk about kind of our process, the ways it can be scalable for other people's creative processes. You gotta have the business brain and the creative brain to be able to make something like this really last.

100%. We cannot. Overestimate that, right? So talk about, you know, you have this resume, awards, projects with NDAs, feature films. Why are we not talking about you as a Hollywood writer? Why are we talking to you about podcasting instead?

I have a knack for leaning into very creative things, or at least I did as a younger person without the business brain, which meant I would go from something I was very good at, but it would be a strange niche that is not monetizable where it was like, okay, I'm great at musical theater. But as you can hear, I am a bass, which means there hasn't been a musical written featuring this kind of voice other than I think Hadestown in the last 2 years since about the 1800s. And then it was like, okay, after that Shakespeare, that's gonna be where the money is. Live Shakespeare. And it was like, no, there's no work in that. It's, it's a very small field. It's really cool. Then I did, you know, improv comedy. I went to Second City in Toronto. I, and that, cuz that's where the real money is, improv. And it was, it didn't work either. And it kind of stepped into these creative roles. And every time I was stepping into something, I would end up learning a business reality that I hadn't anticipated. And what I learned over time as I was stepping through these careers was like, oh, it's from the business side where you actually have the creative control. If you're the producer, you get to make the decisions. You also know where the money is coming from and where the money should be spent. And there's a lot of capitalist realities to art that I don't care for. I prefer just to make art. I think any of us would, but when you're trying to make it work as a business and as a way to make a living, you kind of need to learn how to absorb those skills over time. I also, on my resume, I don't have it. I spent several years working on mobile games as well as working for Wattpad, one of Canada's top 50 tech companies where I ran, you know, I was a senior program manager there for a stretch. So I do have some of the business experiences that I've absorbed as well to help scale these, these companies. So it was like, I've always had a content interest and I've kind of absorbed all these skills. And sometimes you just keep trying different stuff until one thing takes off and then you can scale from there. Podcasting is the thing that took off. So it's just been leaning in with myself and the rest of the team.

And that's truly amazing because that's not the normal story. I know so many people who wanna go into podcasting because they think they're gonna make a lot of money right away. And I always have to say, well, actually you have to go through all these steps and you have to do the work and you have to be willing to invest in yourself and the product. Maybe do some advertising even. You have to take the steps to make the money. But you're also talking about, you have this business acumen that you've developed over the years, seeing what works. You have this creativity, you have so much experience. When did you choose to podcast? What was that decision that said, I'm gonna podcast before you even knew if there was going to be money in it or not?

Oh yeah. To be fully clear, we started in 2017 and we lost money for 4 years. Like this was a loss leader, no question, just a passion project on the side. But I had worked in film and television. I was working in casting. I was production managing Hallmark movies. My resume is really crazy, but I was looking at all that and it was like, I done film. I needed to do something that was low cost, high impact. How could I create something for relatively minimal cost? And in 2017, podcasting is not what it is now. There's not nearly as much competition. So it was like, oh, for a couple hundred bucks, I can get some decent, like, stage band mics and a Focusrite to plug them in through. And create something that is of the upper end of quality at the time. So it was a, a cost v creativity. And I had enough improvisers and other people that I was like, oh, we can do a narrative kind of audio fiction, but combine the improv comedy that I have. One of the things they talk about in independent film, they call it a Rodriguez list. Uh, Robert Rodriguez talked about this in his early films where he made a list of all the stuff he had and he was like, what movie can I make using these 3 locations? I have this camera, I have these actors I have, and the movie was the last part. Part of it. Podcasting for me was that, and it was something I could do on the side while I was hustling for all these other things. Kind of like one day a week I would edit an episode and then I would organize the recordings for the occasional kind of weekend once every 3 months. We, we were all in our late 20s, so we would play for 18 hours a day for 2 days and then disappear for a stretch.

Yeah. Well, and who would've thought that listening to people play, right, along with your comedy and your improv and all of that, would become such a hit. You said it took you 4 years to monetize. Talk about that journey. Talk about when you knew, oh, we have something special here and this is something that I should do more of.

What we'd started doing, uh, some like rough podcasting stuff that's all disappeared. 'Cause for me, I'm like, keep, keep the good stuff out there and, and keep your mistakes for yourself. But D&D, playing Dungeons and Dragons, our biggest flagship show is Dumb Dumbs and Dragons. It's improvisers and comedians who've never played Dungeons and Dragons before, playing for the first time with a professional dungeon master who knows all the games stuff. So we have a ton of fun. It's very silly. It also became very heartfelt over time. There are episodes where we know like, okay, we're getting new listeners will message us on this episode to be like, I cried all day. And we're like, yeah, sorry, it's a comedy, but there's also, you know, the impact of it. It was landing in terms of monthly downloads at 5 times any other project we had tried where we were like, oh, we've done movie reviews. Oh, we've done other things. It was like, okay, that's, that's the 5x for the same amount of effort. So let's lean in on that. And then we expanded into trying more shows where we're like, okay, what is the part of this that works? Is it the Dungeons Dragons? So we tried, okay, we'll do a, we'll do a Star Wars comedy role-playing show. Okay. We'll try these other fandoms, these other games, trying to match, you know, as much as we can. We wanted to kind of play adjacent, but inside the wedge of kind of nerd improvised space. And then over time, we now have done 11 shows. We have 4 that are active. We have a couple that have kind of wrapped out. We have some where we may drop a mini series occasionally, but that also was part of scaling where we're like, okay, if we can only run 4 or 5 shows at a time, this show's underperforming compared to the other 4. We've got to scale that one back. Oh, we have a new opportunity, or we've had somewhere where we were going to wind a show down and then a video game dropped that hit the same niche and all of a sudden listenership spiked and we're like, bring it back from the dead. It's not canceled anymore. We got to do this. Uh, and we've kind of had all of those pressures, but for me, it was looking at success. Leaning into success, experimenting around it, and figuring out what our capacity is when everybody was really part-time. And you have those adjustments of trade-offs where it was, oh, the first couple of seasons I was doing all the editing. It was very in-depth. It'd be kind of one day a week I was doing that. And then we started launching more shows. You start to dial in and go, okay, how much editing works? And we did, because I had, again, I worked in the tech space. We did the data-driven testing that was like, oh, if I spend 8 hours editing an episode, versus we do a 4-hour edit versus we do almost no editing. It was like, okay, the improvement's 15% in conversion from the episode to the next. Like, great. That's worth 8 hours is worth 15%. How many hours do we have? And treating that part of the production process in a much more business-like sense than I think a lot of our, I would say competitors, but podcasts, we don't really compete. We all just kind of cross-promote. People listen to a bunch, but that is something in the space where we were really like, okay, we're going to focus on. Narrative. And one of my big focuses coming into it was I'd listen to other competitors in the space. I'd listen to the big dogs and what they were doing. And in D&D, a lot of kind of the competition functions, it's very parasocial experience. People listen because they don't have their own D&D group at home. They don't have friends who are into the nerd stuff. So they'll listen and they will be kind of the imaginary extra person at the table. They imagine like, what would I do if I was there? Oh, I would get along with these people and my character would do this and all that kind of stuff. And these other shows were very lightly edited because they were leaning into that. Also, they had celebrities. A lot of the big D&D shows have celebrities. We're like as big as it gets with no fame. Everybody above us has like Jack Quaid, the lead from The Boys, or like major voiceover actors. And then there's just a bunch of Canadian idiots all trying our best. I'll write on their tail. But I was like, oh, our strength can be that we don't do the table talk. We're going to focus on the story. We have the improvisers. We're going to stay in character. If you want to engage with us as individuals, we've got a Patreon and that's where all the behind the scenes is. But if you're listening, our episodes are 45 minutes. They're not 4 hours.

Yeah.

They're edited down. So any jokes or outside conversation is about the show. We're, we, we're not talking about what we did that week. We're not talking about anything else. It's a pure experience of narrative and it's been a differentiator. And I think it's important to know what your differentiators are when you're comparing yourself to the biggest people in the field and what you get, what they are doing that they can do because they are famous.

Right.

And what you need to do because no one knows you to make it more engaging.

Yeah. Well, and one of the things we're really talking about here is having a niche that people are interested in and engaged in that you can also monetize. Mm-hmm. Even if you're not famous.

100%.

Yeah. Because I mean, you and I are both in that space where I haven't done all the things that you're doing or have done, right? But neither one of us are huge names that people know. We just, we love this medium. We love what we do, whether it's the games or the business or the marketing or whatever it might be. And we've been able to parlay that into an income stream.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think that's been one of the important things in why podcasting is such an interesting space. So we, again, we're losing money. We had no ad partners. I think we were launching off of a SoundCloud for years. I was paying the monthly subscription so we wouldn't go over it. Yeah. Because we had too many episodes. And for years we were just doing that cuz I was like, this is about Putting out content that I believe in, it's like kind of output, not outcome. But if I'm putting out something I'm passionate in, and then we kind of got a new partner, the partner gave us some advice. I followed it instantly and our downloads 20x'd in a month. Like we went from, or no, 5x, something like that. It was, you know, 10,000 to 20,000 downloads a month to 100,000 to 200,000 overnight. It was like, oh, we need new art.. And I knew from my time working in the Wattpad and online publishing, I was like, okay, it needs to have a face on it. Cause people connect with faces. They like to make eye contact. It's important. Oh, we need to change our niche. So it's like, oh, we'll be comedy fiction. Okay. We'll do this so that it'll click through and we need to change our show description so that we can make sure that it is clear that it's like, it's a Dungeons and Dragons show. If you're looking for this, it's people who don't know how to play, learning how to play. Here's our tagline. And when we changed our description, our category, and our, our cover.

It's incredible.

I had both a month. It was like the biggest return on investment we ever had.

That's truly incredible. And what then led to monetization? Did somebody come to you and just say, we see that you're doing quite well, maybe you should partner with us so you can make some money at this?

I, yeah, I had reached out to other shows. I'd done the networking that, that people kind of talk about where I knew people at our level. And there was like, someone reached out, his name's Russ Moore. He is a lovely human being. He runs some fantastic podcasts of his own. Uh, and he reached out that was like, hey, do you want to collaborate? And we did like a Christmas special crossover between his show and our show. I'd listened to his stuff and was like, oh, he's doing high quality audio. His, like, there's a lot of care about content. There's a good, a good vibe here. And then he reached out and was like, hey, I've got this partner. Like, your numbers I know are a little small for them, but they might be interested. And then we signed on with the partner who took care of ad sales. They gave us that advice and we like leapt up massively. And all of a sudden we were a big part of that partner's catalog, but that was the key to monetization. And I continue to tell people, podcast monetization, if you've got a good ad sales partner, or even just, I, I mean, span, but like programmatic where you don't have to do anything with it, if you have access to programmatic ads, they pay better than any other online media. Because I've experimented with YouTube and Facebook video, but if you're looking at like dollars per view, dollar per download, podcasts pay so much more. If you're looking at like Facebook or YouTube downloads, like we just had a short that got, I think, 500,000 downloads on something like 100,000 on another. I think we're going to make like $20 if you're looking at actual video play. Whereas podcast monetization is, as you know, as anybody who's got experience in the space, we're talking per 1,000 downloads. It's CPM. I mean, what a classic term to really confuse people, but cost per M equals 1,000 in the Roman alphabet. So ta-da!

And there we are. So, you know, I think this is just so interesting that you're able to parlay not just one show, but tell us about the other shows and, you know, how you've used the same formula or if you've used the same formula for the, the growth of those.

Yeah, we absolutely have used the same formula and built the network around the concept. So one of the things that they discuss in terms of content creation when you're looking at a publishing level is you're creating a funnel. At the top are kind of your most accessible things. They're, they're the thing that leads you in. If you've never read science fiction before, The Hunger Games may be your intro to science fiction. It's not necessarily the deepest cut. It's not the most like adult. It's not the most hardcore sci-fi, but it's tremendously accessible. It's an easy way in. And then as you work your way down the funnel, then you can find like there's Dune. Okay. That's a lot more deep cut. There's a lot more interesting language. It's more challenging to engage with, but as you kind of enter and work your way down the funnel, You become a specialist and you get interested in these more intense, dark, or focused elements. So for us, the top of the funnel was, we've never played this before and we're comedians. Comedy is our easy in because it transcends whatever your show is about. Also, it's pretty big on my Rodriguez list of like talent and other people I have who I had available for the company. And then we were looking at, okay, we've got Dungeons and Dragons. Well, if we've got that and we expand, A, we can use our existing audience to send them to new shows they may also enjoy. 'Cause people who enjoy improvised role-playing games are interested in learning new games and they may have other IP they like. And it was, how do we get more people into the funnel to engage with us? Because once you like us, if you have a parasocial relationship with our team, you know, you, you like the hosts, you like the comedy, you're more likely to go, okay, how do I get more of this? The complaint we get all the time is how do I get longer episodes? How do I get more episodes a week? And we're like, well, here is our tail end catalog. Here are the other shows that are coming out weekly. Of them, these 3 are the closest to this. This one's the same game system. So the whole goal is to create as many top of funnel or even mid-funnel niches to draw in new groups, to get them engaged with our content, and then they can spread throughout the rest of the catalog. One of the strengths of fiction in kind of a, a serialized podcast version as opposed to the standard chat podcast is our tail end stays really valuable because we're not talking about weekly events. It's very evergreen and it's consciously evergreen. So our number one, our very first episodes, are almost always in our top 3 most listened to episodes on any given month. And when people tag in, all of a sudden, one, one listen, we have people still messaging every day being like, I caught up from 2 months ago because I saw a Facebook video that I liked. And I'm like, this show has 450 one-hour episodes and you've burned them down in a month. So that was the interest. And over time, because of the bingeability of the series, that's what's given us a bunch of other opportunities. I think people just think of podcasts as a, a bulk download play. They're like, how many downloads do I get in a month? That's what's going to draw success. But we ended up joining Spotify's managed partner program, which doesn't give them any ownership, but they just help us promote and we talk more about data. They're lovely. They reached out because they had an annual priority of shows that have the most bingeability because Spotify was like, how do we get more shows people want to engage with? So it wasn't total downloads. It's how many people started episode 1 and listened to 30, 50, 100+ episodes because there's also value in that.

Yeah.

And we've diversified around that. So we have our podcasts, we have direct ad sales, we do programmatic ads. We also have Patreon so people can contribute to the shows, learn more about what's going on behind them, but it gives us a separate revenue stream that kind of helps bulletproof us a little bit more. We've got the socials, the Facebook, the YouTube. It's another revenue stream that supports. And as we were looking at other things we could do, we now have a show that streams and records live on Twitch every week. And puts the show out. So the show sends people to the livestream, and the livestream means we're actually monetizing our recording of the show. So production is monetized on that. It's complicated compared to other shows because if you take a week off, we don't have episodes and we're, we're looking to solve that this year.

Yeah.

But the whole thing was like diversification, play within the niche, find as many on-ramps as possible and make it as easy and pleasant for people to stay once they have on-ramped. Because we've always got something new for you. You're never gonna run outta content if you're with us. Even if you're fully caught up on everything, you will get 5 new episodes a week.

Wow. That's a lot. And it's, um, it's also really cool. So are you doing everything in person? Is that one of the barriers or are you doing recording via, you know, where everybody's in a different space?

This has developed and changed for us over time. So we actually do both. We originally were doing fully in-person recordings up until the pandemic. The pandemic forced us to go fully online. It also just meant people had moved. We've been running for almost 10 years. It'll be 10 years next year where we've been doing this. People have gotten married, people have had kids, people have gotten divorced and still work on the podcast and are really good friends. But, uh, it means everybody's kind of moved around. So we shifted to digital, then we were back in person, but we had more talent and how do we get a studio? And then we ended up now we, we have a house that we've built a permanent studio recording location in. So we have full camera setups, full lights. If you check out any of our socials or our new episodes on YouTube, they're all fully produced video podcasts as well as the traditional podcast. We shifted as time has gone on to more of a bulk recording schedule. We used to try to do more weekly or monthly. It just started to really become a toll as you get behind and you're— for us also trying to track 4 or 5 shows continuity with the same cast improvising all of them. It's a lot. So we now do bulk recordings in studio. So we generally get together, we do a 4-day recording, we get 6 episodes a day. So we get 24 episodes. We take 2 weeks off and we come back and do another one so we can still all remember, but we have the break in between. So if someone has to record while they're ill, we can then all get sick and recover in between and do that. And we do that for 3 of our shows. So right now we have one show that's fully digital, online streamed on Twitch, and the others are all in-studio productions.

Mm. And if you want to bring in new players, new people, how do you manage that?

Uh, at the, at the beginning, very slapdash. This is again part of our kind of evolving process cuz it was like, who knows somebody? And then it just became welcome, we'll see how it goes. And it was really good for us as a business because our core team got very used to helping guests through the process. We could make them look good and it was a skill we didn't realize we had until a couple years in where I was like, oh, we can kind of put anybody in the studio and make them a star plus the editing. Like they're always going to look great. And then we kind of tested some people out and started to go like, okay, this person's a good fit here. We started to be more conscientious about our casting. We've done casting calls where we brought people in and done test 1 or 2 hour games that we've never released to the public, but we're like, come in and play with us. Like, this is like, we'll, we'll do like a, you know, easy chat audition with Absentia materials. And then we've done auditions or it's been, oh, I think this person could be good. We're doing a holiday special. It's not as big a commitment as an ongoing show, but we did a Halloween special one year that's just 4 episodes, like 4 45-minute episodes, or we did a Christmas episode, like Christmas special last year called Hallmark Never Stopped Blowing Up, where it starts off as a Hallmark movie and then terrorists attack and they have to become action heroes. And like, that was 11 episodes. So it's a perfect chance to kind of test out some new talent. And then those people, I mean, everybody's been great so far. So our batting average has been really good, but a number of those people are now appearing on our regular series. As we've lost talent, as stories have developed, as people's availability shifts, we've had to deal with a lot of those challenges.

Yeah. And I, I love that you have multiple income streams and multiple shows and you have different things that you're testing out. So not everything is a Spotify partner or—

no, no. Yeah. Like our partnerships generally probably our top 4 shows right now that are, are weekly plus the 5th. We have one. Called the Valentine Heresy that we did. That was like a Warhammer 40K show. It's like a grimdark sci-fi adventure. And it's— we technically wrapped up the central Valentine Heresy plotline. Like, we just kind of ran out of story and it was done. So we created a spinoff series. And this is where my business brain is always like, well, how do we keep the SEO alive on the core show? And we've got new content that can stand alone. It's a spinoff enough that you can kind of keep going or join wherever you want. So it was an experiment and we're, we've found it to be successful, which is we, we cross-release. So the episodes of Agents of the Inquisition, which is technically like 10 years later and one of the main characters continues, it's released as its own podcast and people are listening or engaging with the video podcast in full form as its own show. We're also dropping it weekly as just audio podcast because Valentine is just an audio podcast. It's been dropped in that feed as well. And it means that feed, we haven't had any of the drop-off. We had from our traditional series because there's something still in it. So people who are listening forwards are listening forwards and we can see the discovery on the new show. And it means even the new series, when we start looking at kind of the, the trail off, that doubled our download growth on the spinoff, even though it's still keeping all the value from the original. I, I had to go and talk to our partners and be like, is this against terms of service? Like, what are the rules? Am I allowed to put this podcast out functionally kind of at the end of another podcast in two feeds? And they're like, there's no rules about it. And I was I was like, great. And that's turned out to be tremendously profitable for us in terms of just keeping the downloads, keeping the engagement, and still new audio sourcing. And we can look at direct comparisons a little bit between a video podcast and an audio podcast because that medium has expanded now. It's not, it's only started to really be monetized effectively in the last little bit. They still haven't synced up the codecs for video. So Megaphone will be a video podcast. For Spotify, but it will not for Apple. But I think Apple's starting. It's one of the things I wanted to get ahead of with my film and television background where I was like, oh, if, if this is going to be the push, we need to actually have a studio and be prepared for it. And with my tech background, I'm also a bit of a cynic. And I was like, if it's the big push, even if it doesn't work for 2 to 3 years, these tech companies are going to be doing nothing but promoting video podcasts. We should be one. Like we should get in on the ground floor with our ability to do it because so many of them are just going to be Zoom. And if we've got the studio, it lets us push better social videos. It lets us do better on YouTube and it should let us take advantage of any programs that pop up along the way.

Yeah, I think what you're saying is really important for people. And I, I recently saw that YouTube is a huge place that younger generations are starting to find their podcasts. They may not fully watch them, but they like having something on in the background. They like listening to it, even if they're not avidly watching. What's happening on screen. And that's a great place for discoverability because then they may transfer over. I mean, I have an 18-year-old daughter and she does listen to podcasts when she's in the car from her phone. And the podcasts she chooses are very different sometimes, although I do like some of the ones that she listens to. You know, she's finding different things than what I would expect.

And introducing you to podcasts that you would never, you would never experience.

Because I'm, I'll listen to business ones, right? Or ones about podcasting and she's listening to fiction and fun ones that, you know, I, I like, I can get out of this side of my brain and get into this again. You also mentioned, so just flagging on video, love that. My partner is a doc, an indie filmmaker, and he's the one who started editing this podcast for about the first 100 episodes. But now I've said, okay, I now I want to really play the video game because it was really Yes, we shoot video. We've always shot it, but it's really not been about, that hasn't been the focus.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, podcasting was not in any way video focused. They were very different productions. And I mean, the, the amount of time we've seen video speed up in the industry, the fact that video podcasts are now, I mean, what is the difference between a video podcast and a talk show? We can get into that. And I'm sure the unions can't wait to have that argument now that they're on Netflix, but it is kind of the next big evolution. And it's also, I think, for what you're saying is discoverability. There are people who are going to connect with watching it. There are people who are going to connect with listening. There are people who bounce back and forth and people, I think, underestimate the impact of good audio-only podcasts, even in terms of YouTube. So we had a show where we, we had some like rights issues. So we had to pull some episodes from YouTube. So it started when we kind of hit full video studio recordings and we were missing probably 120-something episodes where it was like, okay, they can start as a podcast and shift over. It wasn't our biggest priority because YouTube is not our priority space to be like, okay, let's export new video versions. But our in-house graphic designer, Del Borvik, she's amazing. @del_tastic, delborvik.com. You can hire her to make stuff. She made the COVID that made us a viable business. She was like, I think there's quality here in the show that we're missing. Let me go through and create kind of an interactive art interface video with some of the kind of audiophile waves underneath. So it's, it's interesting to look at. And just on the side, she exported all of those episodes and we put those up. We had people binging all the way from the beginning. We had nearly 5,000 downloads on an audio-only first episode of a show within 2 weeks, which it does not sound like huge numbers, but considering the level of engagement for an audio-only video feed out of nowhere, that's from something that was originally like started launching in 2021, like there is discoverability there and people who binge on one platform, they may switch, they may not. We've also seen a lot of people commenting on the podcast versions that they went to YouTube to watch our reactions to things they had heard because they want to know, oh, this bit was really, really funny. What did they look like when they said this? Who was laughing the hardest? Like, what are they? So we've got people bouncing back and forth between mediums as well. For one of my big pushes is to like remove any friction point. Where I'm like, what is the pain point for anybody listening to our podcast and how do we get rid of that? Okay. Anytime there's social, all our social handles are the same. We change, like we fought that fight until it's an easy sync. Oh, also just future-proofing is a big thing where I'm like, if you want to join and support us, we don't have a Patreon link because who knows if we're going to be on Patreon in 5 years. We have a support link and it takes you directly to our Patreon, but it means I don't have to go back and re-edit episodes to take something out. The social media push really made it clear we all need to just like remove platform names from stuff because they keep exploding or changing their identity. But investing in those, I think, is, is really important to just make it friendly, easy, painless. Podcasts really are structured very comparably to the free-to-play mobile game market. And the more I, I saw the crossover there, having worked in both, the more I realized like, oh, all the strategies apply because it costs people nothing to download a free-to-play mobile game the same way it does for a podcast. They engage. If you're too heavily monetized, they'll bail out. Also, if you give them any reason to bail out, they will just try a different show. Like the audio, I don't like this. Boom. I don't like, ah, made me feel bad. Uh, I got the ick. Uh, like any reason you're competing with everything in people's lives and they have no emotional attachment to you if they don't know your show. So your conversion, the idea of like an 80% conversion rate from episode 1 to episode 2, in a narrative function, which is like serialized, that is the gold standard because that does not happen. And as you increase discoverability, it's really easy to be like, well, our conversion's going down. It's like, of course, the more people who look at anything free, the more people are going to opt out. So you have to benchmark it all, but it means get people in, get them hooked. Cliffhangers at the end of every episode. We do a cliffhanger before every commercial break. Where we're like, oh, we've got, you know, in a 45-minute episode, there's also the debates in the podcast space. I'm like, monetize as heavily as you can. That's the right answer. Like, people understand what it's for. Most people subscribe to their premium podcast app, whatever it is, so they're not dealing with the ads from Spotify terribly much. They tend to be dealing with the ads on your show. Be careful about your categories because people do get very picky about feeling like brand safe identity to the creator and themselves. But we do pre-roll, we have two mid-roll points, and we have a post-roll on all of our shows. Three spots, four spots, three spots, five spots. So we have a ton. Post-roll tends not to sell, which is why I'm happy to put a big number there. If you want to, have a nice time. Uh, people tend to bail out, but having the others really lets us move forward. So we get a lot of messages and you get this from fans who can't do the Patreon support or other things where they're like, is it cool that I'm skipping through ads? Because I know I can't contribute in other ways. If I listen to ads, does it matter? And my answer to them is always like, skip anything. If you're listening, we love you. Like, again, no pain points on this, but have those monetization posts because it's not an active monetization. It's super passive. So if they're engaged with the show, if they have a reason to keep listening, if you could structure it in a way that brings people back and rewards them every time they need to keep listening, that's a reward in and of itself. We all want to be addicted to a thing. If it's an entertainment property, I'm not saying we all want to like dive into the, the negative parts, but we all want that story that we're like, I need to know what happens next. Like, I, I gotta know. I want, I, that time we're reading a book until we hit, you know, bedtime and then it's a half hour post-bedtime and another half hour and you're like, but just one more chapter. I gotta know. Like, that's what we want and that's what we're actively trying to create both narratively because it's satisfying and business-wise because it is a free marketplace, not in the sense of like stocks, but we're, we're free to play. Which means we can lose somebody to anything at any time.

You've put so much thought and intentionality into it. I would say much more than most people are starting out in podcasting or even a couple years in, 3 years in, 4 years in because of your background and, and the care you're putting in. I love that you were very explicit with how many ads you'll include. You talk about Patreon. What will somebody find on your Patreon? Because there's, I know, a lot of debate with podcasters on? Well, well, people really subscribe to my Patreon. How much should I price it at? Will it be a lot of extra work?

Well, it's one of those things that I think you have to structure. It's kind of like the idea of, for me, I've done Kickstarters and Indiegogos in the past where people like, they're a ton of work and like, well, what reward are you offering for what is there? So our theory behind Patreon when we first structured it was, this is going to be where you can get behind the scenes information. This is going to be where you can find out about us as people in our personal lives. And this is where you can influence the on, like the on-screen, for lack of a better term, part of the shows. So we have a number of tiers that range from, we have a $1 tier that gets you some behind the scenes stuff for Dumb Dumbs and Dragons. It also just gets you access to our Discord forever. We did that as an easy way to have a not toxic Discord because anybody who's going to pop into troll or pick fights won't give you a dollar. And if you do it one time, you get the Discord forever. I, that That is the best thing we ever did because it's just no villains. But, uh, we offer— most recently we expanded to offer a tier where we do ad-free versions of the shows where you get one of our shows, uh, one of our current shows that's in release. So we have $3 tiers in the US for all of those. We have a $7 tier that gets you ad-free feeds for all of our shows and all the behind-the-scenes information. So that, that's probably our most popular tier. A lot of people start at $3 and jump to $7. It can even happen in the first month where they're just like, I want, I want it all. We have a $17 tier that allows people to vote on things that occur in the shows. It allows them to submit names because one of the challenges of trying to improvise a world and whoever is running one of our shows plays everyone. It's an analog video game. The players play their character that they've invented and the dungeon master plays everyone else they ever meet ever. And as somebody who created a town, forgot to name it, and then called it Corn Town, so I was stuck with that on air for months. I was like, I gotta get names in advance. So they get to submit names, which then becomes part of characters and other things. We also do a tips, tricks, and traps video quarterly where people can submit questions about their home games and get them answered. If they wanna know about the history of the company, if they wanna know, how do you do this kind of voice? How would you suggest I do combat? If they've got those other things, it's there. Uh, that, those were, we did a $27 tier monthly, uh, gives a name in the special thanks at the end of the show and they can add a character to a show. Take your home character, take whatever you want, choose whatever you want. They will exist in one of our worlds. We can't guarantee the level of attention that can be received because our, it's improvised. Our players kill people or they befriend them forever for the rest of the show. You never know, but people do get to contribute kind of more directly. And then as time went on, we'd started with those tiers. I think everything was $2 less, so it was like $1.05, and then inflation, isn't that fun? But we were like, oh, this feels like a good way. And then we had people wanting more. So we ended up adding tiers now where you could do a one-on-one Zoom call each month. We have a tier above that where we run a small game for people who want to play with our dungeon master and other fans. And then we have kind of like a big, uh, like our, our whale tier, which I also learned from Free to Play where I was like, if you want to produce a miniseries with us, if you're like, I want to produce 4-episode miniseries, it'll go out in one of your, like we do a one-shots podcast. I'll bring some guests and play with some of your performers and edits and go to the podcast. And we started offering that and we had engagement there as well. What I would say about Patreon is it is valuable. It's especially valuable over time. If you're starting one because you think it's going to blow up this month, it's not going to happen. But it's not like if you're consistently doing what you're doing and you're putting your show out there and you've got an audience, even if it's 1,000 downloads a month on your podcast, 1,000 downloads a month is 1,000 people. If you can get the smallest percentage to convert to give you anything, it can start covering your costs relatively quickly.

Yeah.

And over time, over years, it really starts to add up. For Patreon, we weren't making a ton of money, but when we were doing a couple of podcasts, we're like, well, we can make $200 a month, we're like, okay, now it doesn't cost us anything. Like they're paying to feed performers to come in. This mic broke, it's paid to get replaced. And then as that scaled up, it started to be kind of more focused on the content, the expansion. At this point over years, we've made more than 6 figures from Patreon. And it's not like we're making it, we're not one of those creators who are making like $80,000 a month. It just really adds up. And the amount of support that that gives over time is huge. The two things I would say from research I've done at other companies, from research we've done about Patreon, that I think people should kind of keep in mind is generally it's been found people who are putting out Patreon, people who will subscribe, you can't advertise to people who will subscribe too much. If you're trying to get people on your Patreon, you can talk about your Patreon two times an episode forever, and people who will subscribe do not care. People who will not subscribe can get grumpy. So it's like, if they're like, I'm, I'm never going to join your Patreon, they could be bothered by Patreon ads. But for people who are people who join Patreons or do that kind of support, you're golden. So don't worry about alienating the Patreon people. You want to remind them so they can join. The other thing we, we found and outside study demonstrates is people want to know that the money they are giving you for the Patreon goes back to the shows. They don't want to be paying for your groceries. They don't want to be paying for your rent. They want to feel like they are contributing to the content that they care about. So it's, it's not dishonest. It's just couching the language so they can see the direct impact on the shows and those things. Because it's the difference between a Patreon and like a GoFundMe spiritually is like, am I helping you live your life or am I helping you make this content that I love? And if your Patreon is yourself as an artist, you do a bunch of things, then it should absolutely be about your life. But if it's a Patreon for a show, focus it on the show. Let people know what's possible. And stick to non-digital deliveries. That's the big thing for us was like, we don't offer stickers. We don't offer mailing stuff out. We, we, we stuck to here's videos we would make anyways, our behind the scenes content. When we sit down to record a day of 6 episodes, we record a 15-minute conversation at the top of the day, just kind of off the dome, whatever is there. And then at the end of a story arc or 6 episodes or whatever, we'll sit and record. A conversation with the showrunner. So we get that for 15 minutes to a half hour to be like, what happened that you expected? What didn't? What inspired this? You can have that chat. And then we do, uh, you know, 15 to 30 talking about our favorite moments from everybody else. We kind of pass it around. And it meant our behind the scenes stuff is built into our recording days. It's when we have everybody, it's edited in the exact same workflow. They generally are 15 minutes-ish. They're spaced out. It gives us enough that we've got something approximately every 2 weeks as we space out releases. And it's not a pain for us because it's not custom. It's not us every week trying to organize a call to record it. We spent a lot of time going, how do we make this painless to produce? And my experience having done, you know, Indiegogos and Kickstarters is like, where do you lose a lot of money in rewards? And what are the right kind of rewards that are easy? You want a PDF of the script of a movie? I'll send it to everyone ever. Have it for nothing. Because it's so easy to create. And I think when people are looking at these pipelines, they tend to look in terms of like maybe the first quarter they're running it, maybe even the first month. And I'm like, how can you make it as painless as possible so you have room to make changes?

Yeah.

Better to start offering too little and have like not a strong response and go like, okay, I need to index and invest a little more. You really don't wanna be in a situation of taking things away from your subscribers. That just poisons the water, poisons the well really upfront. Yeah.

You know, the idea of mailing items with our logos is really, really great. But with the mail service, and I know for a fact right now because I've tried to order some things from Canada and they don't want to ship to the United States, so there can be some difficulties there.

Absolutely.

I wanted to ask about audience. Is the audience primarily coming from North America? Is it coming from all over? Because that is also something that's important when we're thinking about advertisers, because a lot of times, of course, in the US and in Canada or North America, they want to see that be the base, the bulk of our audience, and they're not going to pay if the ad's being served to people overseas. But for we as creatives, I do feel like we want to reach people everywhere.

Absolutely. Yes. And I think it's, it's important to keep a, a sense of scale in that because yes, so our, our audience, we're primarily, I mean, as English language podcast, the US is like one of the biggest markets ever for English language content. So it's an easy 60 to 70%. Of the podcast existing space, I think, for English language podcasts. But we do have presence that's like, oh, we're, we're very well indexed in the charts on Canada. We do well in the UK. I think we were played in 100+ countries last year, uh, just with our podcast being picked up. The big thing I think is, yeah, scale matters. So it's just like, as you get bigger, your audience gets bigger everywhere, but it's going to be scaled relative to the size of those countries. And our predominance is North America, but specifically US. Partners ask us right up front. I make sure to keep all of our historical data because it's really important for people to be able to know that. And as the deeper cut conversations happen, it's like, well, what percentage of your audience is US-based on this podcast? Okay. What's the age range? How, what's the gender split? Where are we? We've done some internal surveys. We're, we're really fortunate in like the, the narrative fiction, like comedy space. Our audience, we're in a pretty good sweet spot. We're probably, you know, 20 to 45. 45 to 55. And the, the income for us, the average household income that of people we had access to to actually survey, because Spotify doesn't give that information, but we average to nearly $100K a month across listeners. And it's one of the things that I'll say to anybody who's looking at running their own show. If you have your Patreon, if you have these other things, feel free to put out just a generic— don't keep anybody's info. It's a nightmare to try to protect. It's a legal disaster. But if you're doing a generic thing where people can fill it out to give you that information, it's really meaningful to advertisers. Even if you're like, I got 700 people, on my Patreon. It's a very small sample size, but you could pull numbers from that and say, here's the average household income. Here's how many people have bought something from, you know, a podcast ad, and you can extrapolate. It's, it's kind of creating the tools as well as you can. It really helps because most people have nothing when they go to have those conversations other than stuff they can pull from, from platforms. And the, the data access has been getting better.

Yeah. What's interesting to me as I continue using different tools to look at my own data, how much episode content can shift your audience. Because my audience is pretty even male, female usually, but there were a couple of weeks when it was skewed 93% female and I was like, this is so fascinating. And I can only pinpoint it to the content people that I was putting out caused a shift that, you know, one or two of the guests caused a big shift. For those weeks. But that was an incredible, I mean, that I was, I mean, like, it's either an anomaly and I'm not getting the right data from this tool, or it really did make that much of an impact.

Yeah. And the answer almost always is somewhere in between, which is it probably had a, a notable significant impact. Maybe not as big. Technology is weird and it does break data all the time. But like that, that kind of thing. And I, it makes sense for me. Again, it's the free-to-play marketplace. If the idea is they can listen to anything, and I do this with most interview podcasts after a period of time of engaging with them where I'm like, I know the interviewer, I like the interviewer. If I'm not interested in the guest, I'll see you next week. Like, I don't have to engage with it the same way. And it's not because I don't like the show, but I'm like, I've listened to a bunch of this, so great. And it's— we started doing the reverse, and I am the guy who will ask awkward business questions that I think horrify the rest of the team occasionally, where in one of our surveys it was like, who's your favorite performer. And we pulled the numbers and it was really interesting because it was spread across. It was like, there's nobody who didn't— everybody was somebody's favorite in, in a statistically relevant way. But there were some standouts and it became a thing for us in terms of casting where we're like, oh, if we're trying to create a new show, we want to cross-pollinate with an existing show. Who are the, the performers that we're like, is, is there anybody who's a definite where we're like, oh, if we cross this person over, it's going to impact 40% of the audience, 50% of the audience versus somebody who's like 5% of the audience. It doesn't matter for new people. It just matters for us in terms of which shows do we promote on? Oh, this person only listens to this show. And on this show, 60% of people, this is their favorite performer. Okay. We can promote this performer on this other show. We should do that here. Like it starts to get really more granular, but we are serialized. So we don't have the same variance per episode. Other than I look for big dips because if I see anything in the serialized stuff where I generally track episode conversion, cuz individual downloads are tricky and you have to do it over time. But if I see somewhere where I'm like, oh, they're all converting at about, you know, 80% in this season. And then I have one that's 60. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna go listen to that episode. Is the edit slow? Are the cliffhangers weak? How do we tweak that one so we can carry it through? Because conversion is the big game over time in serialized fiction. Whereas individual podcast episodes, you can have a lot more, as you said, episode to episode variance and promotion can even be really big. How did you run your ads slightly differently? It drives me nuts. I love to move fast and break things, but data does not work that way. You have to change one thing, wait a month. How did it work? And we've done even those tests with covers now. We've started testing, put this, this cover on the show for a month, switch the COVID to something else for 30 days. What was our discoverability? How many people clicked through? Spotify's starting to give more information. It's a, a big percentage and be like, okay, this This cover performs 10% better. That's our cover. Like we just A/B testing those things. But the challenge is you can't change content. You can't run ads, or if you're running ads, you have to run them the exact same on both. It just takes a lot more care. Otherwise you're starting to guess based on stuff you may not know.

Absolutely. I have so many other questions and I have so many thoughts and I have so much follow-up even after we get off this interview that I have for you.

And if people are interested, I'll come back. I'm happy to talk about this.

Amazing. I love that. I love having return guests.

See how the episode does and with who, you know, run that data.

Well, I, I wanted to ask, how do you not get burned out? How do you take time for vacations? How do you take time for those important occasions? Because you have to run a pretty rigid schedule. And you said, you know, you, you joked you've built in a couple weeks off for if one person has to come record sick, and then everybody can get sick over that 2 weeks and then come back fresh. What about the other things in life?

Yeah, I mean, the, the comedian answer is like, how do I not burn out? Neuroses and mental illness. I just have to work more. But I— the, the realistic answer is, over time, we have started to be able to balance the cost of things in terms of people's capacity versus what we can pay to make it worth that versus what capacity is. And it's a lot of math. And I think people don't think about this from a producerial lens in the same way that they probably should, because having the time in your schedule to go look at things and go, what isn't working? And wander around your house or apartment or the streets and go like, how do I fix this? Like, I, I think about those things all the time and it's been, oh, we had to shift to batch recordings because monthly stuff was too hard for people with kids. And oh, we had to get a studio. And, and we ran, I ran the numbers where it was like, okay, here's our hotel costs to get talent to somebody's place. Here's the amount of time it takes to set up. Here's the amount of time it takes to, to tear down. Okay. If we're looking at all of those costs, what is that worth compared to taking that dollar amount and attaching it to the monthly rent that's being paid on a house right now? Oh, we can actually get enough guest rooms and we can build the permanent studio. Okay. There's value in like the clean A to B, it's like, is it slightly more expensive? Yes. But we don't have to build and tear down the studio, which helps capacity for team and all the other stuff. And we can house people and they don't have to worry about like their kids. Or we had one recording weekend where we went and set up the studio at somebody's house and then their neighbors started building an illegal addition on their garage and it just killed the whole weekend cuz it was just hammering brutal. That was our deciding factor of like, we need a studio. But it's, it's talking to everybody. And one of the important things also is making sure people are being honest about what their capacity is. They're hard conversations to have to be like, how many days can I get from you this year? If it's somebody who's like a shareholder at that kind of like, you're not getting paid, but your time is an investment in something that you partially own and being able to have this conversation, somebody be like, I got 8 days. You can have any 8 days this year you want, but I have 8 days total. Okay. I'm the scheduling guy. Like it's my job to figure out how do I get those 8 days to translate into what's needed? Or people having to step away from series and go like, okay, that's— I've got ideas, but you start planning ahead proactively. We've got experience now with losing performers on shows and what do we do? It's the same thing as the TV model. It's the same thing as any other business. It just involves those personalities, but it's being realistic. It's scaling back. And we have learned through trial and error, don't make public promises on ambitious plans. Keep an ambitious plan close to your heart and don't tell anybody. Only talk about stuff you're 100% sure you can guarantee in the next couple of weeks. And that's been the big thing. And just accepting those limitations and going like, yeah, we would love— if we had the money to get everybody full-time, we could create X much more content.

Yeah.

This is what we could do here. And we're pretty upfront about that, but not, not in a hostile way. But we have listeners ask that, why isn't it more than one episode a week? Why isn't it this? Why isn't this? Comments, I mean, get as hostile as you want. I love the engagement. Please fight each other. It's great. Comments fuel everything. But for people on our Patreon or for people who come to our live events who want to have those conversations, it's really easy. It's the challenge is our, to make a show, we don't just need one host. We have 3 to 4 players and someone running it. It's 5 people plus the behind the scenes team. Everybody's in their late 30s. A lot of us are professionals who have worked in the tech industry or elsewhere. The amount it costs to get our whole team full-time, plus health insurance, plus all of these things, it is insane. So if we have that, yeah, we'd all love to do this forever, but there's also questions of stability. And it's been a real journey for the team to also figure out what those things are and figure out what the healthy limitations are for them. Tom, who is the showrunner of Dumb Dumbs and Dragons, I worked with him at Wattpad. He's like one of the coolest human beings. He's great at tech and he's super smart and he's creative. I love Tom so much. Tom, if you're listening, I love you. But Tom, he was gonna have a kid and was like, I gotta step back from some of these shows. So we traded showrunner duties, we balanced it out, and we've been able to— I know he dealt with a lot of FOMO, and the nice thing was we were able to have conversations about it. Or he's like, I feel like we're running 4 shows and I'm only on one of them. It feels like I'm not involved. And it was like, hey dude, You have a 1-year-old. The fact you're on one show is a miracle. I'm glad we could pull this off. But also, that show is the center of the whole network. That's the flagship show. If everything else goes away, we're keeping your show, buddy. Like, that's, that's the drive. And he's, he's able to be more involved now as time goes on. And we have people coming in and out. And the other thing that I think really helped upfront, and I would say this to anybody who's looking at a a long-term partnership. And I mean, honestly, as a company that's also had like a divorce amongst the central group, even if you're married, have the conversation about what, what is the ownership structure, who owns how much, what's going on. Because we had a handshake agreement, but I'm the guy who's like, let's agree on the percentages. Let's send it out. So it's an email. It's from my email. Because technically it was, you know, under me for tax purposes when it was non-corporate. But the moment we went corporate, it was like everybody knew the exact percentage they got. We all have the agreement. It's the, the business is super clean in a sense. And I'm like, it's better to be overly clear about business upfront. Don't leave stuff to just find out later because it'll never be a problem if stuff goes poorly in terms of like income. But if you start making a lot of money, oh man, you really want to have it in writing how that's going to function. Cause it prevents any of those battles. It keeps everything really civil.

Ryan, what's next? Do you have some other shows that you're considering? We were talking a little bit about that before we jumped on and start push record. Do you have other product lines? Just what, what else? I know your creative juices are always running.

Oh, always. So we're looking at a new merch partnership that might let us put out more kind of drops through our merch store, which I'm excited about. I am hoping that'll come to fruition, which is really neat. We had to do some restructuring this year based around, you know, ad income. One of the things is, you know, about podcasts, any advertising-based business is like, how's the economy? Because if it's bad, You're doing bad. But we, we've kind of got some new processes I'm excited about. I'm hoping we can get back to doing some more specials this year. I think it's nice to do some high-value, high-investment storytelling. And one of the things that we've wanted to experiment with that I really want to get into is full scripted audio fiction. We have some exciting ideas that we think could be, again, I'm always looking at like, okay, here's our funnel. Here's what we do. What's adjacent? What straddles new and what we're currently doing? It's like, oh, fully scripted. Fully kind of dramatic works. There's something very interesting about that. I've got a passion. I've written, as we discussed, for like film and television and video games. And I'm like, what is the right step there? Also, maybe more live events. That's something we've been looking at. We might be doing— we, we've been talking about the idea of doing DumbCon, as people have called it, because we're dumb dumbs and dice, of trying to do a convention somewhere in North America for fans. That's probably a year or more out, but I'm just looking at like what works, what can we try, what do we have capacity for, and what are the fun experiments? And it's like, yeah, merch, scripted, uh, possible more live events are kind of the short-term goals. And then who knows? I have other stuff I can't even talk about, but there are exciting announcements to come.

Yeah. And we didn't even touch really on the live event part. We talked about the streaming, but we'll have to, of course, have another conversation when you have new things you wanna share. As we continue going down this road. So this has been really fun.

And thank you for having me. This has been a blast.

Yeah. When you get to some of the other stuff and you're looking for somebody new to audition, sign me up.

Oh yeah. Oh, we're doing it. This is going to be fun. Do you know what your character would be? I got to ask. I know you've got Magic: The Gathering experience.

Yeah, I'd have to— I'd have to think about it. Elf?

Dark elf? You feeling dwarf? You got the whole world. If it existed in Lord of the Rings, it exists in D&D.

Absolutely. And the funny thing is, you know, I used to watch the Dungeons Dragons cartoon as a kid. I'm aging myself a little bit. And then I got— I ordered a Dungeons Dragons pack and it was the dice. And I was like, I don't know who to talk to. I mean, I was young, right? Elementary school. And I'm like, I don't know what to do with these. I don't know who to talk to about this. This isn't what I thought I was going to be getting. I was very confused. Well, this is fantastic.

Now we have two things to talk about. You know, we've got— we've got podcast stuff and we got to find you a D&D group.

Amazing. I love it. Actually, there is a group of women here who, on the other side of Los Angeles, who do play Dungeons Dragons, and they're all pretty interesting women. So I may have to go check them out.

Do it.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much. This has been truly like just insightful and fun. Your energy is amazing. The everything that you share is fantastic. I love that you found this way to get out some of your creativity. And be able to monetize it and not have to depend on somebody else giving you a yes or no.

Yeah. And I think the, the final thought I would give to anybody who's listening to this podcast in terms of business is, this is gonna sound really cynical, and I mean this to be very joyous. The thing you love is monetizable. Fun is monetizable. If you are passionate about and love doing something, go do it because you can make a living doing it. You may not know when, you may not know how. You may edit a podcast for 4 years while your mom says, do people really wanna listen to you playing games? And then your mom will eat her words. She will eat them. She will love your shows, but like you can do it. Quality and passion sells.

Hmm. Well, I usually ask people for a final quote. I don't know if you have one beyond that because I think that was pretty good advice right there.

I, yeah, I don't, I mean, if we're looking for a quote, this probably isn't true, but I love it anyways. Oscar Wilde's reported last words are, Either the wallpaper goes or I do. And I think that is a pretty classy joke to exit this plane of existence on.

100%. Thank you to everybody who's listened to this episode or watched it on your favorite platform. I hope that you've had as much fun listening to Ryan talk about all of these things as I throw out random questions and, you know, some not so random, hopefully. Think about how you can monetize your fun. Yeah. Yeah, that's a really good one. I think that's the best thing we can do in life is what brings us joy, what brings us fun, and how do we make a living out of it? So we'll leave you with that, and I'll be back again with another amazing guest to share their story, their journey, and some things that you should think about very soon. Thanks for listening or watching to this episode of Your Brand Amplified. Don't forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast listening platform. And if you want to learn more, check us out at yourbrandamplified.com.