Shea Serrano did the math on podcasting. Betting on himself was the winning equation.
Shea Serrano and Jason Concepcion are back: inside the numbers and lessons from their first week podcasting on Substack
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Substack showcases its podcasting capabilities, highlighting creators like Shea Serrano and Jason Concepcion who have found success on the platform. The company shares lessons and numbers from their first week of podcasting, demonstrating the potential for creators to build audiences and generate revenue. Substack is building a hub for podcast discovery and distribution.
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Shea Serrano did the math on podcasting. Betting on himself was the winning equation.
Shea Serrano and Jason Concepcion are back: inside the numbers and lessons from their first week podcasting on Substack
Arielle Swedback and Shea Serrano
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This interview is presented as part of Double Take, a dual series from The Substack Post and On Substack: part culture, part business, all encompassing. For a closer look at Shea Serrano beyond the numbers, read our companion piece on The Post.
Photos by Larami Serrano
It’s been a very podcast summer on Substack. In the past few months, longtime voice behind the mic W. Kamau Bellpartnered with Pushkin Industries to spin his popular newsletter into a Substack-distributed podcast, while Expense Account, the food and culture podcast from Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me, was signed by the Obamas’ network, Higher Ground. Substack-native pod Diabolical Lies—the brainchild of Katie Gatti Tassinand caro claire burke—had a banner summer, giving nearly $120,000 of its revenue directly back to subscribers, and new shows, like shit you should care about, Nymphet Alumni, Drop Your Buffs, Eric Williams, and The Joy of Baseball, continue to use Substack as the place to launch and grow a podcast. Legacy podcasters like Esther Perel, Sean Fennessey, Astead Herndon, Prof G Media, and Giggly Squadhave also flocked to Substack, building hubs for their audiences and community through chat and live video, recording natively through Substack’s Recording Studio or uploading episodes through RSS to distribute automatically to Apple, Spotify, and other platforms.
Discovery and distribution for longform work are fragmented across the internet. But Substack is building a place where that work can be discovered regardless of format and where creators can turn that discovery into lasting audience relationships. This is now as true for podcast creators as it is for writers: creators publishing podcasts collectively earn over $200 million a year on Substack.
And starting this week, everyone using the iOS or Android apps has access to the new Podcast tab, a dedicated inbox for the shows you already subscribe to and the place where you (or your audience) can easily find the next one. With text-to-speech built in, almost every post published to Substack can now be listened to like a podcast.
Creators have long been at the mercy of network deals and ad markets that shift without warning and platforms that box them out of direct communication with their audiences. Over the coming months, we’ll talk to the people launching and growing podcasts independently to circumvent these realities: the strategies they’re using, the money they’re making, and what they’re learning as they go. First up, we speak with Shea Serranoabout the launch of his new pod, Organizing Things.
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