Cali Lewis:                                     

Yeah.  How I got started.  June of 2005 I found out about podcasting, and we heard Adam Curry being interviewed on NPR.  Do you know who Adam Curry is?

Aaron Strout:                             

I do from MTV days.  I saw that on your blog the other day.  That was pretty cool.

Cali Lewis:                                     

He is what we call the "Pod Father."  He's a total geek.  Anyway, he was being interviewed on NPR, and we heard about it, and he was talking about a couple called Don and Drew who podcast from their firm in Wisconsin, and we started listening to Daily Source Code, Adam's show, and Don and Drew and got hooked on the idea.  Anybody has the power to create a show and have a worldwide audience, and you don’t have to know anything.  You don’t have anybody telling you what to do, what to say, what not to say, and any – just anybody can do it.  This is an amazing new media. 

So, we decided that we wanted to start a podcast and came up with the idea for Geek Brief, launched it December 23^rd of 2005 and were able to announce that we were quitting our day jobs five months to the date that we started.

Aaron Strout:                             

So, that's wonderful, and I think not everyone's going to be able to do that.  I feel blessed myself because I work at a company called Mzinga where I'm able to be the head of social media, and I get to live and breathe and do things like podcasting and blogging.  But for those that are sort of thinking about going in that route what was your success step that you took that allowed you to do that?  Obviously, this stuff is all fun, and as you mentioned, everyone can do it, but there needs to be some sort of sponsorship or business model behind it if you do want to do it full time.  Can you talk a little bit about that?

Cali Lewis:                                     

Yeah.  One thing, we started the show with the full intention of quitting our day jobs and doing this as a full-time business.  So, that was our intention from the very beginning, and it was pretty amazing.  We had never been so focused on anything in our lives.  We call it a laser focus.  It was like we had blinders on.  And we didn’t care about anything.  We didn’t care about getting sleep.  We didn’t do anything but focus on starting the show, figuring out how to do it and doing it to the best of our ability and with our goal being to quit our day jobs. 

Adam Curry started PodShow, who's now known Mevio, and they – at that time in 2005 they always talked – they had a strategy cast, and we would listen to that for hours.  It was like a few hour strategy cast about what they wanted and what they wanted PodShow, now Mevio, to be.  They wanted to help people make it their full-time job.  They wanted to make it possible for people to do their passion for a living.  So, we knew immediately that we wanted to be connected to PodShow. 

When we got shut down from our hosting company for exceeding our bandwidth limit we contacted PodShow, and they weren't launched yet.  They were still kind of behind the scenes getting everything started up, and they were able to take us on and get us onto their servers, and they came to the rescue.  Then we continued our relationship with them as we wanted to do, so they'd go after advertising for us.  Because that's a totally different business.  What we do is on the creative side, and we decided we wanted to focus on that aspect of it and let somebody else handle the business part of it because we didn’t go to school for this.  We don’t have the contacts. 

So, when we started we just knew that's how we wanted to approach the business side of it was team up with somebody who knows what they're doing.  So, that's what we did, and there are a lot of people that are out there doing it themselves, and I see how hard it is for them.  So, there are those basic two choices I think.

Aaron Strout:                             

Shifting gears a little bit, one of the things that we try to talk about here on this show is helping companies or individuals as they go through this social media community journey and so, I would say you've become an expert at creating this content through videos, podcasts, blogging.  Any tips for success?  What is it that you think about?  How do you do it?  I know one of the things you do, which I think I applaud and I don’t do enough of it myself is you keep it really quick, and you're known for the Geek brief and saying, "We've got to do it in" – whatever it is – "two minutes because that's all the time people give us that attention span for."

Cali Lewis:                                     

Right.  The attention span on the web is very small still at this point, and I don't know that that'll ever change.  Audio shows I think are ideal at 20 minutes, video shows no more than 10 minutes.  If you do – there are some successful shows like Diggnation that are video, 40 minutes to an hour, and they're successful in their own right, but I don't think that many people can pull that off.  I mean, it's Kevin Rose.  (Laughter)  He's a geek rock star. 

So, I think if you're going to create a video show it's gotta be short because people don’t tend to want to sit and devote all of their attention to one thing when they're at their computers and there are 15,000 different things that we do on our computers.  They're kind of going to start migrating.  Also, if you're talking video, visually appealing.  There's a study that says every seven seconds people start to lose interest if something on the video doesn’t change.  So, that was one of our original desires to create something that was constantly changing.  So, that's why we have the different clips.  So, each story we have four or five different stories in a show – in a three to five-minute show.  So, it's constantly changing with different zooms of the camera.

I find myself – and maybe it's just because I do the show like we do, but I find myself getting pretty bored pretty quickly if something is at the same camera zoom the whole show.

Aaron Strout:                             

Yeah.  I totally agree with that, so those are good recommendations.  So, building on that theme, one of the things you've also done a great job– and I know as a data point, Twitter you've got 16,000+ people following you.  I'm sure you have hundreds of thousands of people that subscribe to it or watch your videos, read your blogs.  How have you built that community over time?  What are some of the two or three success metrics that you've looked at?  I know the founders of Flickr personally welcomed people when they joined their community, and that's sort of a success story.  What's your secret sauce?

Cali Lewis:                                     

Yeah.  We have about 350,000 on average downloads per show currently, and one of the things I always say is you've got to care about your community.  We're huge community people.  I love talking to our viewers, and I don’t like to call them fans because they're not that to me.  They're friends of the show because I'm as much a part of their – they – obviously I'm a part of their daily life, but they are a part of my daily life as well.

Besides being active in the community that you already have, you – in order to build your community you've got to get out there and participate in the communities that you want to be your community, if that makes any sense.  So, you've got to get out there on the forums and the places that people are hanging out that are your audience.  Not – you don’t go out there and say, "Hey, look at me.  I'm here.  This is my show.  This is my site, my blog, whatever."  You are being a part of a community, and you are answering questions whenever you can.  You are providing valuable resources to other people.

And you can't go in there with, "Ha, ha.  This is my trick."  It has to come from the heart, and so you have to really want to provide that valuable information for people and be a valuable resource in the community.

Aaron Strout:                             

Well, I love that message.  Interestingly enough, I just did a blog post on that.  So, big believer in that if you want to be known and get people on board it is participating.  Like you said, it's not going out and saying, "hey, come see my company, it's great."  It's going and having conversations with them and being a real person and talking about what they're interested in with the hope that maybe they'll take an off interest and come back and visit you in your community at some point in time.

Cali Lewis:                                     

Yeah.  All you need is a signature, and people certainly are savvy enough to know somebody who's just coming there to –

Aaron Strout:                             

Do the infomercial.

Cali Lewis:                                     

Exactly.  They'll see it coming from a mile away.

Aaron Strout:                             

So, one of the things from a personal note I saw that – I didn't actually get a chance to watch it, but you have some bloopers on your site.  With all the videos that you've done – with podcasts it's pretty easy to sort of edit out the bad parts and no one ever gets to see, but video you have to be a little more careful.  What's the most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to you during an interview or during one of your shows?

Cali Lewis:                                     

During an interview I don't think I've ever really had embarrassing moments.  The one most embarrassing thing throughout this whole experience has been when I was invited to speak at the Texas Library Association, and I love – I have a very special place in my heart for libraries.  I spent most of my childhood there.  (Laughter)  So, I love libraries, and I was so honored to be asked and I got the time wrong. 

So, I showed up 15 minutes after, and the funny thing is – well, not funny but horrible thing is I was there in enough time to have done it, but I looked in the room, I got checked in, and I saw a room full of people and just figured they were there for the person that was supposed to be there right now.  So, we went away.  We went to get some coffee and then came back, and when it was time for me to go on – or what I thought was time for me to go on.  If anybody knows me, I'm fanatic about being on time.  I have to be early for everything.  Neil has to stop me from leaving the door in order to be there early.  So, I'm not good – I'm learning how to show up late for parties and stuff.

But –

Aaron Strout:                             

You could teach my wife a few things.  She's the exact same way.

Cali Lewis:                                     

(Laughter)  It's – I can't be late for anything.  It's just not in me, so to do that.  There were I think 70 people or something like that there waiting for me the whole hour, and then by the time I got there there were five people.

They just up and left.  We had a casual conversation to the five people that were there, but it just broke my heart, and it was certainly the most embarrassing moment of my entire life, let alone just the experience with podcasting.

Aaron Strout:                             

Well, that is a good one.

Cali Lewis:                                     

Not a fun one.

Aaron Strout:                             

Looking toward more fun things.  So, what's next for you guys?  You're a successful entity right now.  You do your shows.  You're spreading across a number of different social media channels.  Do you see yourself going the Robert Scoble FastCompany TV route where you sort of potentially bolt on to a big, traditional media brand?  Do you become your own TechCrunch or Mashable where you start to do events and things like that?  Maybe you're already doing these things.  Where do you grow from here?  Or are you content staying where you are and doing the same thing on and on?

Cali Lewis:                                     

I'm certainly not content.  I – we are constantly in the process of building our brand, and one of the things that we're constantly doing and we have from the beginning is pushing the limits of technology, figuring out what we can do and can't do and what is out there that will allow us to do it.  One of the things that has been happening lately in the past couple months, we wanted to do live streaming because it's just now available for people to really get out there and do live streaming successfully and have good quality.  So, we're on YouStream.tv, and we do a weekly show there. 

We wanted to be able to switch cameras live.  And there was nothing – we searched and searched and searched for months, actually, trying to find something that costs not $10,000.00 'cause there's TriCaster out there.  It costs $10,000.00.  We wanted to be able to find out what we could accomplish with maybe software.  So, we worked together with the developer of VidBlaster, which was an application that was already out there, but it wasn't doing what we wanted it to do.  So, he – just working with him, he developed it to the point that we wanted it, and he's constantly pushing out new features. 

So, we're constantly pushing those limits, and we want to always find out how to do something in as little – a small amount of budget because a school, community organizations, churches, they want to do this stuff too, and we want them to be able to, and they don’t have a big budget.  So, that's kind of where we are right now.  We're trying to figure all that out.  We go through certain times in the show where we're doing that too in one aspect or another.

But that kind of ties into our growing our network, and I certainly don’t ever want to work for somebody else.  I'm a good boss.  (Laughter)

Aaron Strout:                             

That's a fair statement.

Cali Lewis:                                     

So, it's all about expanding our network of sites and our brand.

Aaron Strout:                             

Great.  So, my final question, which is I like to ask everyone because I think it sort of gives some insight into who influences the influencers.  So, I know this would be impossible since you probably have millions of inputs, but if you have one blog that you could read and one blog only for the rest of your life whose would it be?  And I know that's a tough one.  I'd love it if you didn’t answer like – I think it was Tim O'Reilly who said, "Slashdot" or something like that that's sort of an aggregate Techmeme.

Cali Lewis:                                     

Well, that's what I was going to say.

Aaron Strout:                             

So, I'm not going to let you go that direction.

Cali Lewis:                                     

That's the first thing I turn to everyday, so that's what I was going to say: Techmeme.

Aaron Strout:                             

Who's the person that inspires you?  It's probably at least one or two people that you say, "You know what?  That person is – they play at a whole different level, and I want to know everything they have to say because they're just so amazing"?

Cali Lewis:                                     

So, I'm going to say Leo Laporte.  I look – he has years and years and years of experience, and he's doing certain things that I want to learn how to do better.  He's been doing this for longer than I've been alive I guess, so I have some room to grow.  (Laughter)  When I look at him, he's doing stuff that I want to figure out how to do well like be interesting on an hour or 12 hours of live video constantly and consistently.  So, stuff like that.  That's kind of where I'm drawing my inspiration right now.

Aaron Strout:                             

That's great, and that's the type of answer I'm looking for.  Obviously, it's an impossible question to answer, but –

Cali Lewis:                                     

It is.

Aaron Strout:                             

I like to get an array of people, so it's interesting the different types of people that some of the folks I've interviewed will pick and why they pick them.  So, we won't hold you to that.  You can read whatever blogs you want.

Cali Lewis:                                     

Thank you.  (Laughter)

Aaron Strout:                             

We've come to the end of our show, so, Cali, I really appreciate you spending the time with us.  I look forward to watching more of your shows.  They're, definitely, as you talked about earlier, engaging.  They're quick, which is nice, and I always find something of value that I get out of it, particularly as an iPhone lover.  You do a lot of great functionality.  Like I learned how to take screen captures of my iPhone screen the other day, so thank you for spending the time with us.

Cali Lewis:             

Thank you so much.