Bonus #47

Ellen Yin17min

Ellen Yin

00:06

Hey friends, it's your host Ellen Yin. Welcome back to another bonus episode of cubicle to CEO, the podcast where we ask successful founders, the business questions you can't google. We are now on bonus episode 47, which means for 47 Wednesdays we have come together for an extra episode on the pod. In case you are a newer listener, you may not realize that prior to 2023, we were a once a week show. So on Mondays when we air our case study guest interviews, that's what we've had for all of the years of our podcast until 2023, when I decided to run this big experiment and challenge myself to publishing two episodes a week for you all on this show. And I am proud to say we have not missed a week yet. And trust me, there have been some weeks when it's been hard to put out this much content at this frequency with everything else we have going on in the business. But I am really, really proud of myself, of our Podcast Producer Sabrina for sticking it out. And as we near the end of this year, I kind of wanted to bring you behind the scenes of what our plan is for 2024 with our bonus episodes.

Ellen Yin

01:19

So like I said, I started this twice a week cadence as a test as an experiment to see how it would impact our listenership? Would it grow our show? Are people interested in a more frequent episode release all of these unanswered questions, right. And I think I can say sitting here at 47 weeks now of doing this, that unequivocally, it's definitely grown our show. I think this is actually true across most podcasts who have chosen to up their frequency of content that if you publish more content, naturally, there are more opportunities for people to find your show and to listen in and to binge listen to your catalogue. So we've definitely seen an increase in listeners and an increase in listened time over the past year, with our more frequent cadence, we knew kind of going in that this type of content output doing twice a week would likely not be sustainable long term, in terms of keeping this bonus content free, just because it's a it's a huge resource strain on our small staff. So that's why we kind of set out just to do it for a year to see you know what the feedback would be.

Ellen Yin

02:37

And actually, we recently conducted a survey and found out that 30% of you actually love the bonus episodes, the most like that's your favorite type of episode that we release, I think the options we gave you were our Monday, guest interviews, or Wednesday bonus episodes, and then our quarterly income reports and 30% of you selected the bonus episodes as your favorite episode type. So that was really great data. But the kind of the long term vision for when I started this experiment is if we found that these bonus episodes were providing value to you all that you all, were increasing your listenership of our show because of this content. And we kind of created this habit of you tuning in twice a week that we could potentially monetize this extra content, this bonus content in the future. So that's kind of the point that we've arrived to now, let me share a little bit of the thought process behind this.

Ellen Yin

03:37

As you know, the bonus episodes are really an opportunity for me to come on behind the mic usually solo, and kind of take you into my founders journey. I've always been a believer of building and public and taking you all along with the decisions that we make the strategies that we test, the ones that work, the ones that don't, a lot of things happening in real time behind the scenes, I really, really love this opportunity to go behind the business with you all. And what we have decided to do with the bonus episodes leading into next year, is that we are going to continue publishing bonus episodes. I don't know if it's going to be on a once a week cadence like we've been doing for all of 2023. But what we are doing is we are removing bonus episodes from our public podcast feed. So what you're listening to right now, and we're actually adding it as an exclusive content perk for our C Suite members.

Ellen Yin

04:37

Now if this is your first time hearing about the C Suite, that's totally normal. We hadn't really talked about it publicly, outside of our very small and private soft launch back in the spring of 2023. So we had a soft launch where we opened up 100 founding member spots all of them sold out within the week. So we haven't opened the doors since then. But essentially the C Suite is going to be our flagship product moving forward in 2024 and beyond. It's what we're really doubling down on creating the best membership for CEOs of small businesses who want access to exclusive deals and discounts with our favorite brands that support your business growth and support you as an entrepreneur holistically. And also giving you access to an incredible community of other CEOs and all different industries and niches and stages of business, as well as access to exclusive content. And under that umbrella of exclusive content is our Behind the Business bonus episodes. So I'm not saying that there will never ever be another bonus episode and 2024 on our public podcast feed, it just won't be a regular and it may not be behind the business content.

Ellen Yin

05:53

I think I really want to keep that intimacy of the Behind the Business Content and really giving people a front row seat to what we're doing in our own business for our C Suite members. So that's kind of the thought process, we're going to place our bonus episodes just kind of shift it into our private membership. And part of doing this for an entire year for free was a again, testing the grounds for this type of content, how it was received, if we felt we could produce quality content like this on a regular basis. And it's also kind of a play off of what a lot of big tech brands do.

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