Omar Zenhom and Nicole set up a cooler of free drinks on the San Diego boardwalk in 2014, offering Coca-Cola and Sprite to strangers in exchange for podcast subscriptions. Over 100 people stopped before police shut them down, giving them real faces and stories of listeners beyond friends and family.
Nicole and I, we wanted to learn more about who are the people that would be listening to our show, who would subscribe, and not friends and family that we're gonna, gonna sugarcoat what they say. We wanted to talk to strangers. So what we did is we filled up our esky or our cooler with ice and we went to the supermarket and filled it up with soft drinks, Coca-Colas and Sprites. And then we went to the boardwalk in San Diego. We're living in San Diego, California at the time. And we just stood there with a whiteboard. We literally just pulled off our wall in the office and wrote on the whiteboard, free cold drinks for iTunes love. And at the time podcasts were on iTunes. And we just held up this whiteboard and people just walk by the boardwalk and there's like hundreds of people walking by and they're like, hey, what's this all about? Like, hey, I asked them, would you like a cold drink? And they would open up the cooler and they would take a can of soda out and they would start drinking the soda. And I say to them, hey, do you listen to podcasts? And like, oh, some people were like, oh, what's a podcast? Remember, this is 2014. And I would explain it to them and I said, hey, search our show. This is what our show is all about. Have you ever thought about starting a business? Do you have any dreams? And we have a small chat and they would subscribe to the show. And I said, hey, if you like the show, leave us a rating and review. And we literally did We did this like over 100 times to random strangers until the cops shooed us away. But it's okay. We had a lot of fun and we, most of all, we got to put a face to the people that we were serving. We understood what the people looked like, what their stories were, what's some of the businesses they're trying to build, and prove to ourselves that we were proud of what we built, that we would actually share with people that we'd never met before.
