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Excerpt
Can you share with us problems you encountered in starting and handling Leadership Stack?
Starting the podcast? I actually started it in a very crude way. If you watch the very first podcast episode recording that I did, it was with my wife, Apple, and my brother, Kevin. And it was just in my office and we had a lot of reverberations, we had a lot of noise. You can hear the cars that are passing by. We started it very crudely like how you would pretty much start a startup. You know, when you start a company it’s never going to be perfect.
I started SEO Hacker from the attic of my parents’ house. It was messy. Oftentimes I don’t get to use the air conditioner, I’ll be all sweaty in that attic. It’s nothing glorious. I didn’t have a carpeted office. I didn’t have any toys in my background. I didn’t have any of these things. I had an eight year old ASUS laptop. That’s what I had. An eight year old ASUS laptop and I had to make do with that. I had to, that’s what I used. And by God’s grace, it has grown and grown and grown all the way to what it is now. When you start it up, there will be struggles – that’s how it is. So I wouldn’t say it’s a problem. I would say it’s starting pains or growing pains, right? It’s part of the process. It’s not really a problem. It’s part of the process and you learn from that.
So I learned how to reduce reverberations, like right now, if you think that the audio output is pretty good, it’s because I use a mixer. I use Focusrite 2i2. I’m not getting anything from this. So just a disclaimer, I’m not a promoter. Buy at your own risk. Yeah. I had the chip from Amazon and all the way here. And then I make sure that the gain is low so that it doesn’t get any feedback or white noise. And then I talk directly in front of my microphone to make sure that my voice is clear. So if you’re happy with the audio output, that’s what I do.
So I’ll only learn these things because of the many mistakes, growing pains, startup pains that I went through. I think those are the only things because by God’s grace, the Leadership Stack team, my editor for the podcast, my editor for the video, you guys do a fantastic job. I don’t have problems doing that. These guys do a fantastic job. All I do is create content. That’s it. I record this. I answer your questions here. I record podcasts with guests. I don’t edit, I don’t do the transcriptions. I don’t animate. They do everything.
And why are we doing it for free? Well, they’re funded by SEO-Hacker. I pay them their salaries through SEO Hacker. But I’m doing it for free. So actually this, I’m not doing this really for free, I pay a lot to produce the Leadership Stack, but it’s my way of paying it forward to you guys. All right. So you guys learn a lot as well from what I went through.