LinkedIn Post: Sponsored by Ourselves

Source: NSFW Podcast S1E129 — "Back, Sponsored by Ourselves" (Kennedy + Brandyn return episode)

Timestamps: ~1:38–4:25 (cost/infrastructure discussion), ~3:31–4:25 (the self-sponsorship frame)

Topic: Building a business to fund the work you actually want to do

For a lot of months, Not Safe for Wonks cost more to run than it made.

Not by a lot. But the production quality was high, the guests were real, the music was right — and that stuff adds up. If you're doing a podcast with any standards at all, you know what I'm talking about. You're also probably doing it on top of a day job or a freelance grind or some other thing paying the actual bills.

Kennedy and I eventually stopped doing the show. Not forever, just for a while. We were both going through stuff. And also the math didn't work.

When we came back, the structure was different. We'd spent the break building Ghost Coast Radio and the video production work under Ghost Coast Video. And by the time we were ready to do the show again, we weren't asking "who's going to sponsor this" — we were asking "do we have the infrastructure for this."

The ad read in the return episode is literally Ghost Coast Video. That's the sponsor. That's the thing that makes the show possible now.

I keep thinking about how many people try to figure out the creative thing first and then attach a business to it later. But we kind of did it the other way — we built the business that bought us back our own time. And once we had that, the show stopped being a question of sustainability.

If you're running a creative project that keeps costing more than it makes, the question isn't always "how do we find a sponsor." Sometimes it's "what else are we building that could make this possible on our own terms."

draft from corpus — based on NSFW Podcast S1E129, pub. January 29, 2024