Q+A: Hot Pod Founder Nick Quah

Nick Quah is the guy you want to read on podcasts. His Hot Pod newsletter comes in both free and paid levels, and covers every angle of the podcast industry, from which new shows are being made to what advertisers want. He’s a journalist on a beat, but also an entrepreneur running his own small media company. We asked him about his career path, creating a newsletter business, and the future of audio. — Kyle Chayka

SH: Growing up, what were your earliest media consumption habits or influences? 

Oh boy. Good question. So, I grew up in Malaysia, which may or may not have any bearing on this question, because my early media consumption habits were pretty generic. I watched a lot of TV (my youth tracked alongside the early cable TV boom in Southeast Asia), watched a lot of movies (cinemas in my part of the world are palatial, still are), and read the local English newspaper. When 56k dial-up modems hit the country, I was online a lot, pretending to be an adult on IRC and going down Lycos rabbit holes. It could easily have been one of those bullshit tech boy origin stories, except my early interests ended up clustering more in places like FanFiction.net than C++ forums or whatever.

I didn’t read books much. I’d like to blame that on the fact I had little influence or opportunity to do so, but that wouldn’t be accurate, because my older sister read a whole bunch growing up. So maybe I was just a little philistine.

SH: When did you start listening to podcasts, and what do they mean to you? 

I started listening to podcasts not long after I came to the States for college, around late 2008 and early 2009. Blame it on public radio. I didn’t have anything like that growing up in Malaysia — or maybe I just didn’t find it, who knows — and I think I first encountered it when I was hanging out in the student center on a random weekend afternoon, and someone was playing it out loud. I don’t remember what exactly I heard, but I liked it enough to go poking around for it online. Soon enough, I was downloading Radiolab onto my iPod Shuffle and going on long runs. And then WTF with Marc Maron came along, and then Comedy Bang! Bang!, and then This American Life, and then some random stuff like Oxford lecture recordings. Suddenly I had this entire universe of stuff on my iPod that I kept piping into my ears.

For a while, podcasts were just a thing I was into. That shifted somewhere in 2012-2013, when I moved to Chicago to spend a lost year in graduate school right out of college. Like many naive undergrads looking for anything to hold onto, I went in thinking I wanted to be a professor or something, but I quickly realized a few weeks into the program that I wanted nothing to do with any of it. There was also a lot of shit happening in my life at that point, and so I spent the year in a very bad place. I wouldn’t sleep for days at a time, I was depressed, etc. etc.

And I would spend a lot of time walking around the city and listening to podcasts for hours at a time. They kept me from feeling too lonely or going off the deep end. At some point, they just became this thing that helped me modulate my emotions. It’s weird. Anyway, that’s when I struck up a really intense relationship with podcasts, and that’s when I started playing with the idea of getting involved somehow, someday.

SH: Hot Pod came at a fortuitous moment for both podcasts and email newsletters. What sparked its creation?

It was late 2014. I’d moved to New York a year earlier, and I was a couple of months into my first media job that I weaseled my way into after working a bunch of random-ass gigs. Man, it was a weird time. I sold stuff on the phone at one point. It was wild.

So, I was working this media job, but I spent a lot of it feeling bored out of my mind and thinking I wasn’t learning very much. (Which in hindsight, wasn’t true at all: I was mostly writing daily newsletters, I was learning how to establish a coverage rhythm, and perhaps most importantly, I was spending a good deal of time trying to figure out about how companies work. So it was plenty helpful — and I was just being a dipshit, frankly.) Anyway, late 2014 was also when Serial happened. I got swept up by it just like everyone else, but I noticed that everybody who wrote about the thing didn’t seem to know what I knew about podcasts, which is the fact that it isn’t this strange little curiosity but something so much more than that. That compelled me to want to start a blog or a Tumblr or something, but I didn’t like WordPress and I wasn’t sure about Tumblr culture, and I had heard about this thing called Tinyletter through a podcast I was listening to, so I started writing what I eventually decided to call Hot Pod on Tinyletter.

SH: Is a subscription newsletter a good business model for a solo reporter or commentator? 

I like to think so. The obvious theory to pull is the classic Kevin Kelly 1000 true fans thing, and then supplementing it with the fact that you could execute on that thesis with little more than your wits and an assemblage of relatively affordable platforms to handle stuff like publishing, payments, and membership management. And all of that is completely scalable if you’re planning to stay solo and, perhaps more importantly, not intending for much radical or progressions changes in overall product. Plus there are all these other people doing it, which makes me feel more confident in the path: Ben Thompson, Luke Timmerman, Ben Falk, that guy who does Sinocism, etc. etc.

However, I don’t think the model can necessarily fit everybody, and that’s the real sadness skirting the excitement around this whole surge in solo subscription newsletter writers. All those people I mention serve audiences that are more than capable of paying for the subscription. They hit niche professional segments, and we can extrapolate from that some skepticism about whether this model can be utilized by solo reporters or commentators who write in genres that may not have that core moneyed base or are somewhat undifferentiated. Can you build a solo subscription newsletter business around a film critic or an essayist about technology? Maybe, I don’t know. But I’m not 100% confident.

SH: What are some of the challenges of running Hot Pod? 

Yikes, there are so, so many. I’ll just give you four:

* Doing everything, from reporting to writing to editing to bookkeeping to customer support to website management to strategy.

* Doing everything by myself — which can get really difficult psychologically, especially when a good deal of your job involves some amount of reporting and trying to figure out what’s actually going on. I get folks constantly trying to psyche me out or pressure me into seeing things their way on certain numbers or actions, and it can get pretty difficult to establish a clear sense on whether something is bullshit or what I actually think about something when I don’t have a second person to pull me out of vertigo.

* The normal writerly stuff of working to be fresh, exciting, and not repetitive every week.

* Staying inspired about the people, companies, and shows I cover. It’s like a marriage — you just have to work at it.

SH: How does the solo entrepreneur model fit into the rest of your life? (Is it kind of a lifestyle business?) 

Hmm. Interesting question. So, my implementation of the solo entrepreneur model was… only partly by choice. It was mostly about necessity. I decided to go full-time with Hot Pod in early 2016, and when I first quit my day job, I was exploring a few options. The solo route was very much already on the table, because I was particularly inspired by Stratechery, but I was also having some very early conversations about maybe raising money and going for something bigger. That poking around went on for a few months before I had a massive family emergency, and all of a sudden, I found myself in a situation where I needed to keep myself flexible so I could be there for my loved ones. All this to say: the business model was deployed to fit my situation at the time.

Is it a lifestyle business? Right now, yeah. But only for now.

SH: What do you see coming next as the podcast industry matures? 

So, we’re increasingly seeing podcasts being adapted for television, and I really do think it’s a 50/50 situation. This could be comic books, or this could be how blogs were the hot thing for book publishers for a couple of years. We’ll see.

I think we’re going to see some shifts in the way podcast networks are structured. There are some benefits to keeping your creatives in-house. There are also some deep disadvantages for all sides. I suspect we’ll see some tinkering with that at some point.

I’m pretty confident that the smart speaker stuff will be massive. Not today, not tomorrow, not next week. But soon.