A Memoir on Building Hopkins Biotech Podcast

How we built the Hopkins Biotech Podcast — based out of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine — and grew it from a simple idea to a program with >23,000 lifetime downloads, >5,600 pageviews, and >850 aggregate followers in less than 2 years.

Part 1: Conceiving the Idea

“If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.” Steve Jobs, Founder & CEO of Apple Inc.

Why Biotech?

Biotech has been a long held passion of mine, due in part to its rich and profound history. From 1770 to 2019, the global life expectancy more than doubled from 24.8 years to 76.8 years as the human race learned how to tame infectious diseases with antibiotics & vaccines, HIV/AIDS with antiretrovirals, cancers with chemotherapies & targeted agents, cardiovascular disease with cholesterol-lowering statins & antihypertensives, and diabetes with insulin replacement. The nascent pharmaceutical industry expanded rapidly in the early 20th century. It primarily deployed synthetic organic chemistry to either (1) optimize the chemical structures of serendipitously discovered, disease-modifying natural products (ex. penicillins) or (2) to reproduce biochemical compounds that had been isolated directly from the human body (ex. epinephrine).

The next evolutionary leap arrived around the time that the key machinery involved in the central dogma of molecular biology (DNA to RNA to protein) became more well understood and synthetic biology tools like PCR & DNA recombination became more efficient. Genentech kicked off the start of the biotechnology industry in 1985 by developing the first FDA-approved biologic — a recombinant human growth hormone (HGH) marketed under the brand name Protropin. The first FDA-approved monoclonal antibody (mAb) drugs followed less than a decade later in 1994 with Centocor/Janssen’s abciximab. The refinement of synthetic biology manufacturing, unraveling of the Human Genome in 2003, genomic profiling of human diseases, and rise of CRISPR-based gene editing tools added fuel to the fire. The pace of biomedical innovation rapidly accelerated in the 2010s, as evidenced by the explosion of new therapeutic modalities that garnered first-time FDA-approval:

• First antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) in 2011, Adcetris (Seagen)
• First bispecific antibody in 2014, Blincyto (Amgen)
• First antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) in 2016, Eteplirsen (Sarepta)
• First CAR-T in 2017, Kymriah (Novartis)
• First in vivo gene therapy in 2017, Luxturna (Roche/Spark)
• First RNAi therapy in 2018, Onpattro (Alnylam)
• First mRNA therapy in 2021, Comirnaty (Pfizer/BioNTech) or mRNA-1273 (Moderna)

New modality approvals in the U.S., Europe and Japan since 2010. Source: Biocentury.

New modalities continue to spring up and expand our medicinal armamentarium including in vivo base editors, targeted protein degraders (PROTACs, LYTACs), bispecific T-cell engagers, programmable epigenetic writers/erasers, iPSC-derived adoptive cell therapies (here, here), CAR-M, and more. Biotech/pharma is one of the most innovative and impactful applications of science & technology in the modern age. The kicker: it has never been a better time to get involved.

First, Solve a Problem

Where did the idea of a biotech podcast come from? Paradoxically, the motivation to start Hopkins Biotech Podcast did not stem purely from a desire to start a podcast. I was a regular listener of several podcasts, but I had virtually no formal media & entertainment background. Branding? Social media marketing? Website design? These were all foreign to me. Rather, I was motivated by a need to solve three key problems that I had noticed or experienced as a PhD student at Johns Hopkins:

• Omission of the Private Sector from Academic Life: The ‘mere-exposure effect’ is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them. It also produces an unfortunate side effect: an aversion to the unfamiliar. Labs at Hopkins investigate exciting subject matter using cutting edge scientific approaches, all while seeking to push the boundaries of medicine. Why wouldn’t a PhD or postdoc also want to be a professor someday? The academic career path is so compelling and it is always front-and-center. In contrast, the private sector is something we avoid talking about in academia. Even professors who are deeply involved in translational research hurriedly whisk past their disclosure slides at the beginning of seminars, providing only a brief glimpse into a world unknown. As such, it is not entirely surprising that many PhD students & postdocs consider the road to tenure-track professor as the only appealing career option. In reality, industry careers are so abundant and diverse that many such options would likely accommodate the aspirational lifestyles of most PhDs & postdocs — if only they were given more exposure.
• Limited Visibility into the Biotech Industry: Even for young academics who are actively interested in exploring industry careers, there are limited opportunities to learn about them. What do industry scientists do on a daily basis? What types of roles do industry scientists play? What companies are out there and what do they do? What are the pay scales associated with various industries? What are the most pressing medical diseases that the biotech industry is trying to alleviate? What are the hot technologies that the biotech industry is closely involved in developing? The answer to these questions are rarely, if ever, addressed in an academic research setting. In fact, these questions may not even become apparent until the time comes to apply for industry jobs and, by then, the time left until graduation may be too sparse to track down satisfying answers. Tracking the news flow from the biotech press — STAT, Endpoints, FierceBiotech, Biocentury — may provide answers to these questions, but only hardcore enthusiasts peruse these publications on a regular basis. The simple fact is that open source resources for scientists who have a more casual interest in biotech are scarce.
• Limited Access to In-person Industry Seminars: These wonderful seminars were precious opportunities to learn about the biotech/pharma industry directly from the people working there and, perhaps, even do some of that fabled “networking” that I’d always heard about. However, they typically require PhD students & postdocs to leave the lab for 1–1.5 hours, a luxury that presented itself more rarely than I would have liked. I would often find myself enraptured by the synopsis of an upcoming seminar, only to realize that the time conflicted with a critical experiment, meeting, or deep work session. There must be another way — something that would complement the deep value provided by in-person seminars and democratize access to a broader swath of growing scientists.

The fundamental innovation of connected marketplaces is that they introduce liquidity to traditionally illiquid markets — be it railroads for tangible inputs, Square for money, Uber for transport, AirBNB for housing, or AWS/Azure for cloud compute. A podcast stood out in my mind as being an way to introduce liquidity for information about biotech careers; a catalog of long-form conversations in a digital medium that allows for “on the go” listening at one’s leisure. What better way to facilitate career discovery than by hearing the personal experiences of industry scientists? What better way to connect to the biotech community than through guests who represent diverse job functions, companies, and personal backgrounds? What better way to improve the accessibility of these interviews than making it available anytime and anywhere you have a mobile device and an internet connection? Through a podcast, I could transmit my passion for biotech throughout the Johns Hopkins community at large and, perhaps, inspire a few PhDs & postdocs to contribute to the growth & innovation in the industry. This thought process led me to believe that Hopkins Biotech Podcast was a compelling idea. Now, I just had to go out and build it.

Part II: Building an Organization

“[Innovation] is 1% inspiration & 99% perspiration — vision without execution is hallucination.” Thomas Alva Edison, Founder of General Electric (formerly the Edison General Electric Company)

Closing Financing

The Hopkins Biotech Podcast was funded through a large institutional grant that was awarded to me by the Johns Hopkins Office of the Provost. It was part of a nearly $1M initiative aimed at supporting PhD professional development outside of academia. However, I’d like to emphasize that the path to securing financing was not easy, by any stretch of the imagination. At the seed stage — when there is a foundational idea but no minimum viable product (MVP), proof of concept (POC), and product-market fit (PMF) — no project is ‘destined to succeed’. Charisma, credibility, and your ability to communicate the merits of the foundational idea comprise your limited arsenal in procuring investor buy-in.

So, how did the Hopkins Biotech Podcast get off the ground? First, I brought the idea of the program to an on-campus student group called the Hopkins Biotech Network (HBN) and persuaded them to recruit me to their executive board as the Co-Director of Alumni Relations. HBN wasn’t entirely convinced that such a feat might even be possible, since nothing like it had ever been attempted by a JHU student group. They were open to the idea and willing to let me take a swing at it but, unfortunately, they were not able to fund the project with their annual Graduate Student Association (GSA) allocation. Nevertheless, the student group allowed me to plug into an existing talent pool of students who shared my excitement about biotech and could, potentially, be helpful in bringing the idea of Hopkins Biotech Podcast to life. As an added bonus, a position on the executive board of HBN armed me with the social capital and institutional credibility. In an email sent out to the ‘allgrad’ listserv, I discovered the PhD Professional Development Innovation Initiative (PII), which was designed by the Johns Hopkins Office of the Provost to sponsor projects that “help PhD students explore a broad range of career paths”.

It was perfect, but the submission deadline was only 3 days away! The application process was an all-out sprint to the finish line. Within the ensuing days I wrote a proposal, in which I described the ways that podcast would deliver value to the Johns Hopkins student body and why I believed that I was the right person to execute that idea. Additionally, I contacted key collaborators from various institutions within Johns Hopkins (CJ Neely at PDCO, Roshni Rao at PHutures, Kevin Carter at JHTV & FastForwardU) who could serve as advisors and collaborators as I built out the program. Oddly enough, the grant was only made available to faculty so I asked the Director of my graduate department, Dr. Caren Meyers, if I could appoint her as the lead applicant & seek out her advice during the submission process and she graciously acquiesced (on recruitment weekend for my graduate program too, she is amazing!). I submitted the proposal on Saturday, February 8, 2020 and was notified a month later on March 9, 2020 that I had been awarded a substantial allocation from the PII fund to build Hopkins Biotech Podcast.

What are the key takeaways from this? How can you use my journey to fundraise for your own project? Here are a few guiding principles:

• Be resourceful. The world is awash in opportunities to acquire seed financing — be it through grants, fellowships, awards offered by NPOs/foundations, accelerators, venture capital, or bootstrapping. Stay attentive, tune into entrepreneurial networks, and seize opportunities as they circulate.
• Early-stage financing decisions are primarily driven by (1) the quality of the idea and (2) strength of the management team. Your task is to aggregate data points that explain how these two factors, in addition to the proceeds from the raise, will enable the organization to navigate a logical chain of value inflection points and, in doing so, achieve compounding growth. Articulate the roadmap and provide logical justifications for everything. As venerated tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel explains in Zero to One, “Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best”.
• Clearly define the value proposition — how customers/users will benefit from your product or service. What problems do you solve? How much better are you than the next best alternative? One thing I’d like to emphasize: sincerity is key — avoid the “fake it till you make it” school of thought. It produces fundamentally unstable organizations that are doomed to fail (ex. Enron, Theranos, Nikola) and sophisticated investors can spot a grift from a mile away. Instead be honest about what you are trying to achieve and humble enough to admit knowledge gaps, explaining how you will learn the skills or hire complementary talent to ultimately succeed. Identify the pain points in your target market, construct a plan with explicitly stated goals that address those pain points, establish concrete methods of how you are going to achieve those goals, and track key performance indicators (KPIs) that measure progress and keep you honest along the way.
• Clearly define how the proceeds will be spent and how it will deliver value. Money is an agent of change — the ultimate form of potential energy — and it requires discipline to effectively deploy. As a rule of thumb, you should be able to explain to another person the expected return on investment (ROI) for every purchase decision in clear, simple terms and in no less than a few sentences. If the justification fails to meet this criteria, the purchase ought to be discontinued and the money should be reallocated in a more productive fashion.
• Be bold and brave about achieving your mission because the world doesn’t become a better place on its own — it becomes a better place because people make it that way. There are endless excuses that people give to justify their indifference: being “too old”, “too young”, “too early”, “too late”, “too male dominated”, “too feminine”, “someone else is already working on it”, and everything else in between. Instead, consider all of the reasons that you should take action. If you succeeded, how would it improve society or a community that you care about? If you truly believe that your idea will change the world for the better, however big or small, you have a moral obligation to make it happen.

Recruiting a Team & Launching a Product

There are a handful of important pre-requisites for recruiting that any founder must fulfill in order to attract great talent into the organization, but it all boils down to the following statement: don’t expect others to line up at your door, just because you have a ‘good idea’. You have to earn the trust of potential recruits. I recruited the first teammate the day after I had written the original grant proposal. I had them look over the proposal draft, which gave them a view of (1) what the program would look like, (2) how it could be executed in practical terms, (3) and how serious I was about making the program a success. This was instrumental in their decision to join me on this journey. When the project got funded a month later, we had a planning meeting on March 14, 2020, during which I mapped out our short-term & long-term objectives. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic had recently made its way to Johns Hopkins and this would be our last in-person meeting for the year. Later that same day, all of the labs at Johns Hopkins officially shut down.

The podcast could have died at that very moment, but I was determined to execute our plan. Over the next month, I laid down podcast’s critical infrastructure, which included:

• Designing a recognizable logo in Adobe Illustrator, which would define our brand identity.
• Establishing the key podcast distribution platforms on Buzzsprout & SoundCloud, which published episodes to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and anywhere else that podcasts are found.
• Registering social media pages on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and developing a marketing strategy that would (1) facilitate compounding audience growth by leveraging the intrinsic shareablility of social networks and (2) provide marginal value to the existing audience in the form of episode overviews & quotes.
• Designing & building a website on Squarespace, which served as a central hub for all podcast-related information.
• Centralizing internal communications on Slack.
• Contracting out the production of a musical jingle for the intro & outro to a personal contact.
• Scheduling interviews with the first few podcast guests, which we recorded prior to launch and privately iterated upon until the episodes exceeded a certain threshold of quality.
• Organizing a shared filing system on Google Drive, for audio backup & collaborative note-taking.
• Establishing a procedure for preparing questions, coordinating with guests, and conducting interviews on Zoom.
• Editing audio files using Logic Pro X, to trim fat and professionalize each episode.
• Recording the pilot episode called “Academia or Industry?”, which allowed us to test drive the podcast’s basic production & distribution infrastructure (ie. recording, editing, publishing, and marketing) without the pressure of coordinating with a guest.

I had never done any of these things before, but necessity is the mother of rapid skill acquisition. The launch was a resounding success and, within the first two months on air, the podcast had accumulated >1,000 downloads.

Logos used to brand our flagship podcast segment called ‘Careers’ (job-focused) and more recently devised podcast segment called ‘Insights’ (science-focused).

True to the axiom that success begets success, our successful launch made it much easier to recruit than when it was just a ‘good idea’. In July 2020, I connected with a second recruit — a student in my graduate program, who I had briefly worked with on a young startup that ended up fizzling out. He was an out-of-the-box thinker with a burning passion for biotech. During our initial conversation, he volunteered to perform tasks like post-production editing and social media marketing, but I knew that slotting him into these tasks would fail to sufficiently leverage his creative talents. Together, he and I devised what would become a new segment called ‘Insights’, which consisted of thematic episodes that would delve into the details of scientific breakthroughs, told by key people from biotech companies operating at the vanguard. It would nicely complement our job-focused core segment called ‘Careers’, which shared first-hand accounts of various job functions within biotech, consulting, VC/IB, IP law, think tanks, and nonprofits.

A third recruit cold emailed me about joining the team shortly afterwards and, alongside the second teammate, they constructed & launched the ‘Insights’ segment. This experience taught me a valuable lesson: to attract the most ambitious & creative talent, you must give them the opportunity to build something semi-autonomously and in a way that gives them a sense of ownership. This enables them to thrive in a way that not only aligns with the mission of the organization, but takes it to the next level.

Instilling Operational Excellence

As our team grew, I strived to maintain an ambient expectation of operational excellence. How? As a mission-driven organization, I made sure to clearly articulate the mission of the podcast and the tools that we could use to achieve the mission. Through our episodes and dedication to the mission, we could inspire others to reimagine their lives as they consider their post-graduate careers — a powerful responsibility for those of us lucky enough to have such a voice. Additionally, I nudged team members to think of ways to optimize the throughput and quality of our work. We had clear channels of communication to discuss ideas and I strived to instill a culture of openness & inventiveness.

Most importantly, I encouraged the team to pursue ‘excellence’ and not settle for ‘good enough’. Why? The first and most obvious reason is to improve the quality of the product for the audience. If the program had a premium feel, it is more likely that an audience would take to it. The second and more subtle reason is to honor the guests, who had graciously donated their time & perspectives, by delivering quality episodes that they would regard with pride. Thirdly, I wanted to push my teammates to go beyond what was expected of them; to step out of their comfort zone. With this project, we had set out to achieve something much bigger than our individual wants & needs and we wouldn’t get there by resting on our laurels.

However, the process of instilling operational excellence wasn’t always smooth sailing. Over time, I came to recognize that different people have different work philosophies. No single approach is objectively superior to all others but it is very important to intentionally select for the culture that you aim to establish. As such, recruitment decisions play an outsized role in maintaining a culture of excellence. It is far easier to take a targeted approach and carefully select people who already possess the qualities that you are looking for than it is to take a scattershot approach and try to imbibe those qualities in new recruits, as if painting on a blank canvas. It is far better to be understaffed than to retain misalignment within the organization. In other words, ‘cultural fit’ can and should make or break a recruitment decision.

The immense effort that it takes to maintain a standard of excellence was elegantly explained in Jeff Bezos’ final Letter to Shareholders in 2020, months before the tech founder would transition out of Amazon’s CEO role. He highlights a passage from Richard Dawkins’ book The Blind Watchmaker about the requirements for survival in nature:

“Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself, the body reverts to a state of equilibrium with its environment. […] Our bodies, for instance, are usually hotter than our surroundings, and in cold climates they have to work hard to maintain the differential. When we die the work stops, the temperature differential starts to disappear, and we end up the same temperature as our surroundings. […] If living things didn’t work actively to prevent equilibrium, they would eventually merge into their surroundings, and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die.”

Bezos goes on to illustrate the parallel logic in the ways that we ought to run our businesses and lives.

“We all know that distinctiveness — originality — is valuable. What I’m really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness. The fairy tale version of ‘be yourself’ tells us that all the pain stops as soon as you allow your distinctiveness to shine and that the world will accept you for who you are, without resistance. That version is misleading. The world wants you to be typical — in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen.

In what ways does the world pull at you in an attempt to make you normal? How much work does it take to maintain your distinctiveness? To keep alive the thing or things that make you special? Being yourself is worth it, but don’t expect it to be easy or free. You’ll have to put energy into it continuously. The world will always try to make Amazon more typical — to bring us into equilibrium with our environment. It will take continuous effort, but we can and must be better than that.”

If the price of excellence is so high, why even bother? The answer is clear if one inspects the business landscape. In every business sector, value is disproportionately captured by a few outstanding companies. In consumer cyclicals — the sector with the largest disparity between the haves and the have-nots — the 10 largest companies retain 57% of the sector’s $7.2 trillion market capitalization. The remaining 43% of the sector is divided among the 561 other companies in the sector.

The striking degree of value concentration becomes even more clear when visualizing the market caps of the largest individual companies. In every sector, the top 5 companies are not just marginally larger than the rest — they are exponentially larger. Market capitalization rapidly decays as a function of rank, resembling a power series (R²>0.84).

What are the implication of these observations? Business is a game of swinging for the fences. Exceptional organizations are not just marginally better than average — they are exponentially better. Conversely, average organizations are exponentially worse. Therefore, a culture of excellence is not simply an idealistic platitude that rolls off the tongue — it is a matter of existential importance.

Between the myriad responsibilities of lab work and time spent relaxing & recuperating energy for the next day, graduate students have a limited amount of time that they can allocate towards career development. Collectively, there is a fixed amount of ‘mind share’ in our target market. As is the case for every business sector, the most exceptional career development programs on campus could expect to capture an exponentially larger mind share. Hopkins Biotech Podcast had to be one of them.

Part III: Growing & Scaling

“A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don’t. Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. The unscalable things you have to do to get started are not merely a necessary evil, but change the company permanently for the better: If you have to work hard to delight users when you only have a handful of them, you’ll keep doing it when you have a lot.” Paul Graham, Co-founder of Y-Combinator, 2013 blog post

Do Things that Don’t Scale

Paradoxically, the best way to scale is to first do things that don’t scale. This pithy Paul Graham aphorism ought to be shouted from the rooftops of Silicon Valley every day at dusk. Scaling, from an operational standpoint, involves formalizing a method into a standard operating procedure (SOP) that anyone can replicate to achieve similar results. However, it begs one important question: how do you find a method that works? The answer: trying lots of things and seeing what delivers the most desirable outcomes in the most efficient way.

For the first year of Hopkins Biotech Podcast, I was doing virtually everything myself. It was exhausting, but necessary. I had control of all methods from beginning to end. Through experimentation, I discovered which steps were essential for producing the best result, which steps could be stripped away without consequence, and which parts could be automated using tools. Eventually, methods were distilled down to their most essential steps and could be formalized into SOPs. I did this systematically for all of the podcast’s critical functions: coordinating with guests, interview preparation, recording procedure, audio editing, publishing episodes, updating the website, and email/social media marketing.

When I produced a critical mass of SOPs, I began to test them out with the other people on the podcast team. After several iterations, the SOPs were perfected and finalized. This marked a huge shift in the way work was completed behind the scenes, going from results-oriented to process-oriented. Creating a new episode used to take >10 hours (not including the 1 hr of recording). With the finalized SOPs, it took ~20 minutes.

It’s All About the Long Term

In the late 1990’s, most institutional investors on Wall Street were myopically short-term oriented — quick to buy up stock from companies that showed higher-than-expected profits every quarter but even quicker at dumping stock of companies that reinvested their cash flows instead of retaining them on the balance sheet or distributing them directly to shareholders. That sentiment changed in the aftermath of Amazon’s 1997 Letter to Shareholders, penned by the then fledgling tech entrepreneur Jeff Bezos. In a contrarian move for the ages, Bezos laid out his vision to boldly go where no man has gone before. The company would reject the status quo and commit itself to, “making investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions”. The goal: not profit maximization, but market share maximization.

It worked. Investor sentiment for Internet-oriented companies shifted towards growth metrics, disabusing itself of any considerations for balance sheet strength. Capital poured into Amazon as its stock rose to more than 50 times its IPO value in 1999. In response to U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s aggressive spate of interest rate hikes, the dotcom bubble burst on March 10, 2000. Amazon’s stock plunged by more than 90%, but Bezos continued to reinvest (albeit less aggressively than before). Was this the end of the “growth at all costs” philosophy?

It was for the unsophisticated, undisciplined dotcoms that piled into the sector for a quick buck. They got shaken out of the market as capital flows dried up, but Bezos kept on chugging. Amazon’s retail presence and customer base continued to expand and the company launched game-changing products including Amazon Prime, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Kindle. Amazon’s leadership position in online retail, e-readers, and cloud compute sustained the company’s momentum. As of March 2022, Amazon’s stock has risen more than 470-fold since its low in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble. Liberated from the schadenfreude of the dotcom era, Bezos’ 1997 Shareholder Letter is now considered canonical literature in business schools and influences the growthy startup culture of Silicon Valley. Amazon is one of the greatest stories of compounding growth in the history of business — not just for its financial success, but for the long-term oriented framework that powered its success.

Longevity in a Crowded Market

The podcast market is crowded so it’s too hard for new podcasts to succeed, right? Not so fast. There are about 2,000,000 podcasts, but >90% of them quit after 3 episodes and less than 1% publish 21 episodes. The competition for podcasts that have longevity is vanishingly small. If we wanted to succeed, we would not only have to generate high-quality content, but we would have to maintain a consistent output that would outlast those who quit early as a result of short-term thinking. As of March 2022, we have published 57 episodes and will likely publish many more before we close up shop.

What justified our decision to stick with it? Early in the process, I discovered the size of our “core audience” could be estimated by looking at how many downloads each episode accumulated within the first week after publication. This key performance indicator (KPI) bared resemblance to the method by which Hollywood film studios gauge how ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ their movies are: by tracking the box office revenues generated in the opening weekend.

The 7-day downloads (7DD) increased rapidly in the first four episodes as myself and others shared it with the world. After our post-launch marketing push, 7DD remained stable, indicating that the audience that found our podcast during launch had stuck around to listen to subsequent episodes that we had released in 2020. It was the first hint at product-market fit and gave us confidence that the podcast wasn’t just a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon — that it could be successful over the long term.

A second phase of rapid growth emerged after New Years 2021, catalyzed by copious sharing of podcast links by guests on social media. To add fuel to the fire, I formally brokered a partnership with the Johns Hopkins PDCO to co-produce episodes while also promoting a Boston Biotech Community that they were building. Once again the newly expanded audience stuck around to listen to future episodes. Our marketing channels played a critical role in the durability of listeners — something I had hoped would pay dividends for us as we accumulated a following.

In addition to our core audience, we also attracted a “marginal audience”, which is comprised of people who tuned in at least a week after each episode was published. In fact, many listeners were listening to episodes older than two years. I knew that older episodes aged well and that their content was just as valuable as the newer ones, but it was a surprise to see the audience behavior reflect that without a UX/marketing nudge. I had hoped that this phenomenon of a constantly growing, replayable catalog would be one of the many differentiators between us and job talks or career fairs. As of March 2022, the podcast accumulated more than 23,000 downloads averaging 420 downloads per episode. That sounds good on paper, but how did we fare in comparison to other podcasts?

Buzzsprout, our podcast client and one of the largest in the world, publishes data reports on a monthly basis that summarize the performance of all the podcasts that use its service. Podcast episodes in top 1% rake in a high number of downloads within the first 7 days of publication (7DD), but less popular episodes have exponentially fewer 7DD — yet another example of value being concentrated in the upper echelons. This reference data (grey) follows a power series with high confidence (R²=0.9993), which I used to extrapolate the relative performance of our episodes. Predictably, our episodes climbed up the performance curve as the program matured— with episodes from 2022 H1 outperforming those from 2020 Full Year. Our highest performing episode — a collaboration between Hopkins Biotech Podcast and the PHutures Office — roughly fell within the top 11% of all podcasts. Most of the episodes published in 2021 & 2022 were within the top 10–15% of all podcasts worldwide.

Alas, we achieved podcasting nirvana.

Special thanks to the Office of the Provost at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine for making Hopkins Biotech Podcast possible and to our partners & collaborators at the PDCO, HBN, and the PHutures Office.

About Hopkins Biotech Podcast: Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and SoundCloud. For updates about upcoming guests, follow us on social media at Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Browse our full catalogue of episodes at www.hopkinsbiotechpodcast.com/podcasts.