1,000,000

We passed a particular milestone recently as we reached 1,000,000 downloads over a 30 day period with Sleep Tight Stories.

Downloads as a metric of success are fraught with inadequacies; I could like others, shorten our episodes and publish every day of the week, and our downloads would certainly go up. Rankings on Apple Podcasts are somewhat the same, though supposedly more qualitative, they are but one measurement.

If you asked me how to create a podcast and get to even greater reach than ours I could tell you. If you asked me how we did it, I couldn’t, because we haven’t really done much of anything, other than to consistently create and improve our audio over a long period of time. My wife and are very “quiet”, so much so that you might think that we have a “we don’t talk about podcasting” rule ala fight club. Other than 2 cheap ads on Overcast we haven’t advertised, haven’t done any cross promotion, collabs, or been featured in any publications whatsoever. I seldom talk to other podcasters, nor do I network. And we live on PEI, which is not what you would call a hotbed of children’s entertainment, or a hotbed of anything really.

This is all a fault, and yet here we are.

We are not particularly ambitious. I like creating audio that kids enjoy, and that helps kids relax and get a good nights rest. And now that much of our current material is written by myself, I can tailor our stories specifically to their needs and interests. We aren’t setting ourselves up for a sale, or to join Amazon or iHeart, or be an “exclusive” Spotify podcast (they don’t advertise to kids anyway, so we wouldn’t be attractive to them), we just hope to continue making something meaningful to ourselves and our audience.

So, here’s to reaching 2,000,000 per month.