Really Specific Stories: Stephen Hackett Duration: 54:08 SPEAKERS Martin Feld, Stephen Hackett Martin Feld 00:21 Welcome to Really Specific Stories, Stephen; it's wonderful to have you on the podcast. Stephen Hackett 00:25 Thank you for uh, for having me. Martin Feld 00:28 It's an absolute pleasure. Now, I think you know how this starts: every guest gets the same question to kick off, and we'll see where it takes us. Stephen, how did you first get into podcasts? Stephen Hackett 00:38 Uh, I got into podcasts through blogging, actually, and and you know, the route of those technology stacks aren't all that different. But I was writing about tech just on the side, I had an IT career; this is 11 or 12 years ago now, and I was writing about mostly Apple, which is the area I focus on in my coverage. And I kind of bumped to on the Internet, this guy named Myke Hurley. And he had a little tech podcast with a friend of his, and they had me on as a guest. And I had heard some podcasts before then. But really, I started podcasting as a guest, and then sort of on the regular kind of basis, without being a huge podcast listener first, and now listen to a bunch. But in those early days, it was, it was all pretty new to a lot of people. Martin Feld 01:27 Focusing first of all on blogging, which you said was your, I suppose, introduction or transition into podcasting—what was it about blogging that really attracted you, or what did you get out of the activity? Stephen Hackett 01:38 For me, it was, it was being able to publish what I wrote on my own without any gatekeepers. And so I went to journalism school—worked at the college newspaper, as an editor even—and in that process, I learned that well, there's always someone between like, what I write and what goes out. And with blogging, or with the Internet, you could just write something or take a photo or do whatever, and just publish it. And the act of creation and publication, the gap between them was much smaller than anything I'd experienced in school. And I found that really interesting. And so I started blogging, really just to kind of get my ideas about Apple and their products and, and other things kind of out into the world. And I mean, this is a long time ago, before social media was really big. I mean, I'm old enough to remember that like when individual colleges in the United States got Facebook, and you were like jealous that your friend at the other university got it, but you didn't... it was a long time ago. And having a blog, having a domain, with my own name on it, was kind of my own publisher. And I thought that was really empowering. Martin Feld 02:46 And you've noted that Apple was the main topic of interest for your writing. Stephen Hackett 02:52 Mm-hmmm... Martin Feld 02:52 How did that kick off for you? Why was it Apple as the focus? Stephen Hackett 02:57 So for me, it really started in high school: I joined the high school newspaper staff, and they had a bunch of Macs to do the layout and publication of the student newspaper. And it was the first time I'd really ever used the Mac seriously, and definitely the only time I'd ever use the Mac to like get a job done. You know, in elementary school, or middle school was like, 'Oh, we're gonna play these games on this, like janky old Performa', which if anybody remembers, it was a sad, sad line of computers. But it was the first time that I could use a computer to take an idea or a project I worked on or something and make it real, and take it from my mind out into the real world. And ultimately, a bunch of people could read it! You'll notice some similarities between my two answers, probably. Stephen Hackett 03:43 The Mac was the tool, or the set of tools that let me do that. So even though I studied journalism, in school, to be a writer, I always had this sort of dual love, I had this this love of writing and reporting, but also for the computing platform that powered at all. And so when I was, you know, done with school and writing and kind of starting out my life on the Internet, it just made sense to me to continue exploring those interests. And especially in the early days of my blog, there are a lot of posts about like, 'Are bloggers, journalists?'—like, all the, you know, the, the angst we all felt 15 years ago?! But really, that sort of two sides of a coin of, 'OK, I have something, I want to publish it, I want people to read it and enjoy it, hopefully... And this is the tool chest that I have to like, make those things happen'. And so for me it was always really hard to separate those two interests. Martin Feld 04:39 I can really relate to what you're saying in terms of the Mac fandom as this wonderful collection of tools for your creative work or thinking. I really like that. When you spoke about transitioning to being a podcast guest, meeting, Myke, getting that ball rolling that's led to your current creative interests in your career, what do you recall about that shift and how you felt going from being primarily a writer to exploring the sharing of your ideas with the spoken word? Stephen Hackett 05:08 It was definitely strange to go through that process for a couple of reasons. I mean, when you write something, you have the opportunity to pour over it—over and over—and fine-tune it and change it. And if it's on the Web, you can keep changing it (even after you publish it). I'm sure, lots of people have had that experience: they read something they published five years ago and find a typo. It happens to me all the time. It's like, 'Oh! I can just fix it!' Whereas in high school and college, if I made an error in the newspaper, where like, that's printed in the hands of thousands of people; everyone knows, I misspelled the word 'conference' on the front page. That's a very specific example that is true... to my shame, in college. I still, anytime I have to like type the word 'conference', I'm very careful. Got some anxiety over that... Stephen Hackett 05:54 So, having that experience of like, really making sure that everything was perfect, every pixel, every comma, everything was perfect. Going from that landscape to one where you're just having a conversation with somebody, and you're doing it, for the most part, off the top of your head—that was scary and challenging for me, because I didn't feel like I... I didn't like I had the protection of the edit, right? That in print or on the Web, I could tune and fine-tune and keep messing with it (sometimes within an inch of its life), but when I'm just talking to somebody over Skype, or Zoom or whatever we were using, that's kind of it, right? You can go back and you can restate something, or you can script something, but the types of shows that we do and that we like making are very conversational. It's: 'Hey, we're hanging out as friends are talking about these things that we're interested in'. And I had to learn to be comfortable with those conversations being the end product, right? It wasn't like in blogging where maybe I would have a conversation with a friend that would, like, spark an idea for an article and I'd go write it. The conversation is the work, and that was something I just never experienced, and it took a while to get used to. Martin Feld 07:07 And do you recall what some of those earliest guest appearances or show experiences were that you had with Myke? Stephen Hackett 07:14 Yeah, absolutely! I mean, one of the first ones (if not the first one), was talking about the early iPad. You know, that was in 2010; it was just new product category for Apple. Tablets had not been a success before Apple did it. I mean, Microsoft had tried different things and other people have tried things, but nothing had hit. And so Apple comes is like that, like I think literally in the keynote, like it comes out of the sky and a cloud of dust. I was like, 'OK, Apple is serious about this!' And it was, so it was a new thing, and very interesting. And as a kind of Mac-first person, it was like, 'Oh, what does this mean?', right (in those conversations)? So a lot of our early conversations (I ended up being a guest several times), a lot of those early conversations were about those sort of early iPad days. Stephen Hackett 07:58 And it was sort of scary, because we... maybe we had an outline, maybe I knew what questions he was going to ask, I had, like, put some bullet points in. But again, like, we were learning very quickly, that: 'Oh, what we make well together as the conversation itself', you know? The iPad, and those sort of, those sort of still, like, early iPhone days, you know, 2010, 11, 12, a lot was in flux at Apple, as, it was when Apple really started growing away from the iPod and all those things. Towards the end of Steve Jobs’s time there, there was a lot to talk about and a lot to consider. And so, it was never a challenge to find something to talk about. It was just kind of figuring out how to talk about it. Martin Feld 08:37 Now, at this time, you weren't yet running Relay FM. Stephen Hackett 08:41 No. Martin Feld 08:41 You weren't doing podcasting full-time. Stephen Hackett 08:43 Mm-mm. Martin Feld 08:44 How were you balancing this new interest with the rest of your life? Stephen Hackett 08:47 I mean, I stole a lot of time from a lot of people! I mean, when Myke and I were getting serious about doing shows together, I had an IT position at a really large non-profit here in the United States—actually, the non-profit's big everywhere, but here in the US. And I would record sometimes on my lunch break, or I would like book out a conference room. And my boss was cool with it, as long as I made up the time. And in that job, it really was like, as long as things get done, it doesn't have to be between the nine-to-five, sometimes it's better that it's not. And so as long as I got done what I needed to get done for the organisation, he... he gave me a lot of rope in terms of letting me borrow time from, uh, from work to do those things. And I had to do it during the day because Myke is in the UK and I'm in the southern part of the United States. And it's like, we have a six-hour time difference between us. And that meant that if I, you know, went home from work, had dinner, kissed my wife and baby and then went to the bedroom to record, it'd be 2:00 or 3:00 am for him by the time I was ready. And so we had to do it during the day. Stephen Hackett 09:53 We really sort of scratched together this like, little patch of land on the Internet for a couple of our shows with some of our friends; some of those shows, including The Pen Addict, still exist to this day, uh from those early days. And we just kind of forced it because we wanted to do it. I mean, Myke was working a full-time job, I was working full-time job. I had two kids at this point, one was like a newborn. And it was a lot, but it was something I was so interested in, I made the time for it, right? I really believe that if it's something you want to do, you will find the time. And in those early days, it really even wasn't about like, 'Could we make this a job one day?' I had dreams of it, right? It was like, 'Well, maybe one day I can write enough and the site can get big enough, I can do enough shows and like, maybe I can, like pay my mortgage!' But we weren't really working towards that in reality; we were still figuring it out and having fun and, uh, and doing it with, you know, a tiny slice of the audience we have now. But people were starting to show up and that was exciting. Martin Feld 10:53 And when you were in this early stage of experimenting, building a community, working out this content and what it would look like over time, how were you meeting people and getting the word out there for those shows? Stephen Hackett 11:06 I mean, really, it was the same that it is now—10 years later, geez... It's, it really is about that sort of community building, right? So it's, it's talking to listeners on social media, it's answering emails from listeners. I mean, if you email me to this day, I... nine times out of 10, I will email you back because I want to have a conversation. Uh, it was about, you know, those connections. And in some ways, it was easier then just because it was so much smaller, right? As we've gotten bigger, you kind of got to filter through some stuff. But for us, it was about just being authentic and genuine and reachable to our audience, and bringing the audience into the shows with us. I mean, almost every show on Relay, and a lot of shows in our sort of indie tech space, have follow up or feedback sections or Q&A sections, right? And that's a way to bring the audience into the conversation. And we've, we've got newer ways to do that now, but that's always been a through line for us, is: trying where we can to build a relationship with the people who are listening. And it's really, it's important to us. Stephen Hackett 12:11 And I think it's one reason we have found success, is that when someone reaches out to us, they hear from us, right? They don't hear from somebody else they've never heard of. We try our best—not that we're, not that we share everything in our lives, it's not what I mean—but we are honest and open on our shows about what we think and who we are, and our backgrounds and all that stuff. You know, we're not really playing characters, if you will. And that means like, if we meet somebody at an event, or a live show or bump into somebody at the airport, and we have a conversation, like, I want it to be like how I sound on the show. I want to be the same person, wherever I am. And that was really important to us in those early days and it's continued to be really, I think a hallmark of how we work. Martin Feld 12:52 There's that idea of building a network, not just of social relations, but the network formally that you have now. And what do you think was the turning point or the decision in your mind to go: 'We're gonna make a network'? How did that start? Stephen Hackett 13:08 Yeah, I think we really have to back up, back up one step. Um, so Myke and I and some other people had a handful of shows, and kind of loosely operating as a network. You know, it wasn't a business, right? It wasn't a company; it wasn't formalised in any way; we were just kind of hanging out and we shared a website. And then in late 2012, early 2013, we had discussions with a tech podcast out of Texas called 5by5, and some of our previously independent shows, went to 5by5 with Myke Hurley, my partner, kind of being the cornerstone of those shows. And at that point, he and I had had a tech show for a little while, and we brought on a third co-host, uh, Federico Viticci, who's the Editor-in-Chief at macstories.net. Uh, Federico has covered Apple as long as I have, lives in Rome. Um, he's very handsome, and tall and Italians—it's great. And that show became The Prompt. And for us, that show is why we have... or why we were able to start Relay FM, I should say, because that show, it was just three of us talking about Apple and news and rumours, and then also our lives. And that show took off in a way that nothing we had done, ever had. It took off really quickly. It got big for us, it got big. And all of a sudden, we sort of were looking around like, 'Oh, like we have a successful thing on our hands'. Stephen Hackett 14:41 And it took us a while to work out why it was successful. Sometimes I listen to us, and like I'm still not sure how we're successful! Um, but we were again, honest and genuine and funny and like, just three friends hanging out, right? We want you to feel like we're all just kind of talking around a table, and that show was really successful. And as that show was growing, Myke and I—independently of each other, turns out—we're kind of thinking like, what's the next step? Like, are we happy on someone else's network with, you know, someone else making the money and someone else kind of calling the shots? Or at some point, do we want something a bit more than that? And again, Myke and I had kind of been thinking that independently of each other. And you know, the time you know, he's working at a bank, I'm still doing the IT thing. I've got a couple kids. He wasn't married yet. But we sort of had this realisation that, you know, maybe we want to take a swing at this ourselves, like, what would it look like if we did what we do on The Prompt and our other shows, but we did them more our way? Stephen Hackett 15:50 And I'm not saying anything bad about 5by5, or Dan or anything, but there were things that we wanted to do differently, that we felt like, well, if we're calling the shots, we can make those decisions. We started having conversations about it between the two of us. And with some close friends, uh, a lot of whom, uh, ended up with shows on the network over the years, really, in 2014, really, the spring of 2014, the summer of '14 is really when we got really serious about: 'OK, we want to take our shows from 5by5 onto our own network, and we got to build it and brand and figure all that out, but we think we're ready to to make a step out'. And maybe at this point, we were more hopeful that it will lead to full-time jobs. But it was more about, 'OK, like we've had some success now'. And a lot of the success is due to 5by5's popularity back in the day that The Prompt was on a bigger platform to grow, but we felt like we can do what we're doing here, but put our own, our own names on the door, if you will. Martin Feld 16:51 And you said during that description there—which was very comprehensive, thank you—that you're not quite sure still, what made The Prompt successful. You mentioned, though, that you live and work in different places. Stephen Hackett 17:05 Mm-hmmm... Martin Feld 17:05 What role do you think maybe that has in how people relate to you, or how the news and rumours are conveyed—that difference in experience? Stephen Hackett 17:13 Yeah, I think amongst sort of our flavour of show of like, tech commentary, not even just on Apple, but on sort of consumer devices, Connected, which is the show that was The Prompt—we rebranded it on Relay because uh, we needed to change the name. Connected is really the only show with that wide of a background, sort of at our size. And so we've got me, American in the South, worked in IT worked as an Apple Genius a hundred years ago. And so I bring to the table sort of my IT past, sort of the way I think about things. And of course, in my life experience, I'm the only parent on the show, and so they, they're not that much younger than me, but they really like to point out how much older I am. Stephen Hackett 17:56 And, you know, we've got, we've got Myke who is in the UK, who is particularly good about looking at tech differences between the United States and other countries, because so many times you read a press release, like: 'Oh, it's launching in the US and the rest of the world and 2024!' (or whatever). And he notices those things, and he brings them to the table. Myke is also hilarious. Stephen Hackett 18:16 And then we got Federico, who didn't grow up speaking English; he learned English by playing video games, and he brings a totally different point of view to technology, because of some life experience he had where he was basically forced to like continue working, had to figure out how to work on an iPad, like, 10 years ago when it wasn't that easy. And so he has this point of view of like iPad-first, which is very different from me, very different from Myke. And so we do come from these different places. Stephen Hackett 18:44 And generally, if we're, you know, talking about something in the news, or whatever, we usually end up sort of on a spectrum of opinions about it. Usually, like, Federico and I are on the opposite ends and Myke is somewhere in the middle. I think that's, those are sort of the best shows, that's where we end up. And it's because we have those varied backgrounds, but at the same time, we're all extremely close, and are talking all the time and are very involved in each other's lives offline. And so you also get our friendship and partnership and just our love for each other, I think comes through on the show too. And so there's some combination there that just really works. And it's hard, even now, years and years into it to put my finger on exactly what that is, but I think people resonate with hearing people who genuinely like each other, right? There's so much disagreement in the world: it's like, yeah, I can sit down and like these guys may argue or they may disagree, but at the end of the day, like, it's all entertaining and interesting and hopefully funny and it's sort of the mix of the tech and the personal that we've landed on somehow. And uh, it seems to resonate. Martin Feld 19:52 And variety or diversity of backgrounds that you said there is a key point of the next question I want to ask, because while that's within the show, Connected (formerly The Prompt, as you said), you've now got this network of shows. You've got all these other different people... Stephen Hackett 20:04 Mm-hmmm... Martin Feld 20:04 ...doing different programs or podcasts that you're not officially producing or running. They're on your network. So... Stephen Hackett 20:11 Right. Martin Feld 20:12 Can you tell me a bit about what it was like to kick off bringing people on to the network and the shows that were coming in, and how you kind of negotiated having a full spectrum of people being on this new property of yours? Stephen Hackett 20:24 Yeah, absolutely. When we first started in 2014, we had a handful of shows, and Myke was on all of them. I was on one. He basically had hosts that he worked with, and he was on every show, so, and that's how it kind of had always been, it had always been kind of Myke was sort of the the frontman, like we were a band, right? He's the frontman, right? He's out front. He's singing people are throwing roses and underwear at him. Can't travel with the guy, it happens all the time. Just kidding! But very quickly, we were in a position where we were able to add some more people. And so our friend, Jason Snell, who if you're in the, the Apple world, that name means, probably means a lot to you. He was Editor-in-Chief of Macworld Magazine, for like 150 years—really long print history. And he came to us confidentially that he was going out on his own, blogging and podcasting. He wanted to do a tech podcast, and he wanted to do it with us. Stephen Hackett 21:21 At this point, the company had been publishing podcasts for like four weeks, like we were brand new. And now, we had our few years of history that Jason was aware of, but Relay FM itself as an entity was a baby—brand new. And he came to us, saying, 'I want to do a tech show with y'all'. It was an amazing thing. I remember, I remember Myke calling me—which is very rare, we don't normally call each other—and telling me about it. And you know, we met with Jason and worked it out. And very quickly after that, we were able to add more shows. Another early one is a show called Rocket. Uh, it's hosted by Christina Warren and Simone de Rochefort and Brianna Wu. Christina Warren was, like, another giant in, sort of, tech reporting. And we learned very quickly like, 'OK, we have people who are experts', right? Jason, Christina, all of the people we work with, they're all experts in their own fields, and sometimes they overlap with ours, and sometimes they don't. But what we do is: we show up and we have these conversational shows; we cover news, rumours, opinion, all of it; that recipe can work with people who aren't me and Myke. And we learned that really early on with some of our other shows. All of our shows are conversational, all of our shows are relatively casual, right? They're not like this tightly-edited, tightly-scripted public-radio thing. It's more friendly and warm than that. And we learned that that formula, as long as you have an expert, and you have somebody who can drive the conversation (and sometimes those are different people), if you can get the right combination of people, then this formula works. Stephen Hackett 22:58 And so, really, it it wasn't difficult to expand the network beyond our own voices, because we, we were able to work with such talented people, that we knew, like OK, if we just provide them the infrastructure and sell some ads for them, that they're going to be able to do what they do, because they're really good at it already. Uh, especially in those first couple of years, when we really added a lot of shows, to a letter, you know, those folks, those shows, we didn't really worry about because we knew that they were professionals and they were going to be good at what they did. And it means that we can have a pretty loose relationship with those shows. You know, I don't have editorial control over Upgrade, or Rocket or Cortex, you know, anything else. We have some standards and some guiding principles, but really, we just want to empower the people we work with to do really good work. Martin Feld 23:52 Picking up on what you said about ads there for a second, you're making podcasts doing what you love, you know, communicating, as you said, chatting very casually with friends on the shows. Stephen Hackett 24:02 Mm-hmmm? Martin Feld 24:03 Ad sales and other elements of their business are pretty much (I think it's fair to say) the antithesis of that. It's a very formal exercise. So, how have you felt (over time) balancing the fun with the things that you have to do to maintain the business? Stephen Hackett 24:18 Yeah, well, I mean, luckily, we work with a lot of advertisers who are good to work with, and casual and cool. I think that our (Myke and I's) philosophy of, like, trusting good people to do good work, I think that's actually really paid off for us in the advertising space, where we have relationships with a lot of companies and have a lot of, you know, a lot of advertisers across a lot of shows. And they all have the trust in us that we're going to produce something good and that the numbers we report are accurate and truthful, and that they can, they can entrust their brand to us and our hosts, right? And you know, they provide copy to read and links to make sure you read out and some of them want you to read it twice and spell it out—there's all that stuff we have to contend with—but really I think Myke and I's ethos of, like, we want to trust people in their work, I feel like that is, has really done well in advertising for us. Uh, we've really only had a handful of, hmmm... situations with advertisers that kind of went sideways. And over the course of eight-and-a-half years, we've gotten, we've had sponsors that leave, that always happens, but I don't think we've ever had anybody leave angry. And we have sponsors today, ads that I read this week, that I read in 2014 when we started. We have these companies with really long-term investment in our advertising business. And I think that that speaks a lot to the types of shows and type of hosts that that work on Relay. Martin Feld 25:42 Perfect! And I'm also interested—this is reaching back into some of the story you told earlier—you mentioned journalism, as something that you studied. Stephen Hackett 25:51 Mm-hmmm? Martin Feld 25:51 You've mentioned the word 'independent' as well, which is really interesting to me, uh, in the sense of being an independent business or an independent writer, or blogger or podcaster, as you've said, but then you're also part of a network. So... Stephen Hackett 26:03 Mm-hmmm? Martin Feld 26:03 ...how do you think about yourself in this role running Relay FM and the network broadly, in terms of whether your journalistic or what does independence mean? Stephen Hackett 26:13 Mmmm... Martin Feld 26:13 How do you define what you all do? Stephen Hackett 26:16 I like the philosophical questions. That's good. I mean, in the early days, like 2014, and starting the company, 'independent' meant something really specific in the Apple community. Mostly, it was like, a developer who makes one or two apps on their own, they care about every detail in the app or in the service, right? Sort of the adage of like, you paint the back of the cabinet, even though no one's gonna see it. Martin Feld 26:40 Mm-hmmm... Stephen Hackett 26:41 That sort of philosophy really speaks to me and who I am and how I was raised. And my dad and his dad, you know, contractors make things with their hands think that way, right? Like, no one's gonna see this joint in this wall, but I'm gonna do it right, because it's the right thing to do. And so that's really what 'independent' meant to us in the early days, you know? That sort of ethos of like: we're small, we're just a couple of people, there's no outside money or investment, nothing creepy going on; we just want to make the best thing that we know how to make. And that's really how I thought about being independent for a long time. You know, now as a business owner, right, I've got all these people and all this stuff. Now I think about 'independent' more of a: we can do this on our own, right? That we're not part of a bigger company, you know? We're not just a cog in a wheel. Uh, we don't owe anybody anything, there's no investment, right? All the money to start the business came out of Myke and I's life savings. We don't owe anybody anything. And that's really what 'independent' means to me now. It's kind of both things, like: do the best job, we can do; care about details no one's going to notice; and do it in a way where we don't have to answer to anybody else. And that is very attractive to me, as a human being, and I think to a lot of people who are in technology, or a lot of people who are who are nerdy about the stuff that we're nerdy about, they, I think that a lot of those people have the same philosophy in their work and in their passions. And so I think that resonates with people. Martin Feld 28:08 So there's a freedom in decision making and direction for what you want to do? Stephen Hackett 28:12 Right... so I'll give you an example. Early on, we realised that, 'OK, there will be errors made in bookkeeping'. it's inevitable that the wrong ad gets... or old ad copy gets read on the air, or someone messes up an ad, and we have to do it again, give them one—it's called a 'make-good', where we basically give them an, uh a free advertisement for free, as an apology. Uh, there's gonna be things where, 'Oh, I just messed this up!, and like, turns out I, we owe somebody, we didn't pay them or whatever. In a business, those errors are inevitable, especially when you're starting out. And Myke and I made a decision, basically, on day one, that when that happens—because it will because we're humans, and we're going to make mistakes—that we will always make other people whole before ourselves. And so if, for instance, it's our fault, that old copy got read on a show, right, we didn't have it on the website in time for the host to read it, or we missed the email from the sponsor saying, 'Oh, actually don't say this phrase, say this other phrase! (I mean, that happens all the time), that if that results in an error that will take money out of a host's pocket, it's going to come out of my pocket, it's going to come out of Myke's pocket. And we make that very clear with everybody who works with us that, you know, our goal here is, like, let our hosts make as much as they can from their shows and be successful. And a lot of them, it's part of their own independent businesses now, which is incredible to me, I did not think that was gonna happen! We always want to be the good guys there; we always want to make sure that we're taking care of our people. And if it's an error, uh, in any way that we can resolve by taking the hit ourselves, that's what we're gonna do. Martin Feld 29:53 That's really fascinating. Thank you for sharing that because that's a bit of inside baseball. (That's what I hear.) Stephen Hackett 29:58 That's OK! Martin Feld 29:59 And in terms of creative decision making, being an independent business (or set of producers), what are some of the things maybe outside of pure podcast production that you've been able to experiment with or explore doing, because you can make those decisions yourselves? Stephen Hackett 30:14 Hm. The freedom we have to I think changed things is a big one for us, where if something's not working in the business, whether that's something as silly as like, 'Oh, you know, this process of checking invoices stinks, like, we need to rework this', to having our own content management system that does exactly what we want it to do, because we pay a developer to make it do what we want to do. Yes, it's about what we can put on the shows and how they sound, but it's also all the supporting infrastructure that we get to control. An example we're working through right now is the sort of internal Web tool that we use to manage our ad inventory is very old: someone else wrote, it doesn't really meet our needs anymore; we've kind of shoehorned stuff into it in a way that doesn't really work anymore. And so we are in a (turns out) very long process in creating our own ad inventory system. And that means we get to sit down and be like, 'What's good about what we use now? What stinks about what we use now? And how do we get from A to B?' Stephen Hackett 31:13 And it means that our sales manager, or our community manager, or you know, other people on the team who work with us, if they have a feature idea, or they say, 'Look, I only do this one thing in this system and it takes six clicks every time'. It's like, well, it's just software, we can make it one click, right?! Like, software is, is infinitely flexible. And so being able to build the tools that we need, and do them the way that we want to do them. Like there's stuff that my CMS does, that will drive other people crazy; they probably drive people on really crazy, but is that way, because I think it's best for the majority of our shows. And so just having that freedom to build what we need, I find really refreshing because in an IT career, sometimes you have that opportunity, but a lot of times you didn't because you were handcuffed by corporate policy, or the guy above you didn't like Macs, and so he was gonna keep his thumb on you or whatever. Being in control means, like, we can just we can change the tools that we use and build new ones, when necessary. Martin Feld 32:16 And talking about changes, while you were speaking then triggered in my mind as a follower of your work and the podcasts that your network produces: you introduced membership in more recent years. Stephen Hackett 32:26 Yeah. Martin Feld 32:27 What was the thinking behind membership and how much of a challenge was that to introduce given that it wasn't necessarily there at the beginning? Stephen Hackett 32:34 So we launched the initial version of our membership way back in December of 2015. And it didn't really do very much, basically, it was like kind of a karma deal, like, 'Hey, give us five bucks a month, and you get a couple of little things', but nothing, it wasn't ever big. It wasn't ever successful. There were some like hardcore Relay fans in there, which I'm extremely thankful for, but it wasn't, it wasn't really making an impact on the business. And so you fast-forward a few years to early 2020. (Everyone knows what happened in early 2020.) The ad business just fell off a cliff, we had sponsors, pulling out, we had sponsors saying, 'You know, we're freezing our budgets. That Q3-buy we talked about we're not doing it—come back next year'. And in the course of a couple of weeks, were like, 'Oh, gosh, like the wheels are coming off this bus very quickly!' And we spent time thinking about what assets does Relay have, and the membership was just right there. It was not big, it was not very enticing for people, but the seed of it was there. And over the course of really about six to eight weeks, we completely overhauled it into into what it is now, where you could support shows directly at a couple of different price points. You got a lot more extra stuff for that, a lot of incentives, like a Discord server and ad-free episodes, a newsletter. Stephen Hackett 33:58 That honestly, that like six-to-eight-week period where we went from 'Are we're going to be around in a year', like what, you know, if this thing lasts forever, uh, what's going to happen to our advertising business? And really kind of making the decision of like, 'Look, we are going to like push a membership as hard as we can to make something that is successful and will work for people, and hopefully that'll be enough, you know, to kind of keep things moving'. Really thankfully, two things happened. One, the advertising market came back really actually pretty quickly, it was a scary quarter or two, but then it recovered because I think people realised, like, people are at home there's still lots of things to advertise for, especially in our industry of tech. I mean tech had a big boom in '20 and '21. The sponsorships came back really full full steam, but what we had done is we had created this opportunity for listeners and for hosts to interact in new ways through the membership program and having all those those goodies that listeners get and we've been able now to start to scale that up to a point where we're still mostly an advertising business, but the difference between advertising and membership is getting closer and closer every year. And ideally, we'd be at 50/50 in terms of revenue. And that would be, that would make us feel much more easy about changes in the economy and those sorts of things and be able to provide like a new level of content and stuff for our members. Stephen Hackett 35:25 And so it was, it was difficult. And it was weird, because we had never really made paid content before. I mean, there were a couple of membership things in the previous system, but nothing great honestly. And we were suddenly going to go to people, and we started with our biggest, most popular shows. I said, 'Look, if you pay us five a month, or 50, a year or whatever, you can get this show, it'll be longer and it'll be ad-free'. And we had never done anything like that, you know? We didn't know how our advertisers were going to take to ad-free episodes. Turns out, none of them care at all. We've never gotten a single email from any of them complaining about that. Martin Feld 35:59 Mmm?! Stephen Hackett 35:59 And people resonated with it, and they wanted more from the shows and there was demand for ad-free episodes. And so really, thankfully, it worked out because that's still the single biggest crisis our company's ever faced. It was like, what happened to the advertising business, and really, up to that point, we had never had a year that had really taken hit like that. Every year was better and better and better, and I think we'd gotten a little bit comfortable in that. And now in hindsight, I'm glad that we took the opportunity to do what we did, because I think the business and the community is better off, you know, having those options. Martin Feld 36:35 Keyword 'community' there... earlier on, you made the point, I think, really nicely that you always try to be yourself... Stephen Hackett 36:43 Mm-hmmm... Martin Feld 36:43 ...on your podcasts, you're with friends chatting about what you love. As you've made that shift in really balancing advertising with direct relationships with your members—Discord servers, I mean—you've been communicating with fans or listeners for years anyway... Martin Feld 37:00 ...but what has it been like to have more of a obvious or direct relationship or communication with your members? How does that change things? Stephen Hackett 37:00 Mm-hmmm? Stephen Hackett 37:11 First of all, I really enjoy it, like the Discord is the first thing I check in the morning. And it's not because it's like, 'Oh, gosh, what do I have to moderate today?' Uh, it's I want to see what people are talking about. I think we've been really fortunate in the Relay community that our, our Discord server in particular has really been very successful. We've only had a handful of major moderation issues over the course of what, two-and-a-half years now? And we've been really blessed with our great moderation team. You know, it's not just me and Myke deciding what happens, right? We have a community manager, we have a team of volunteers, we have some, uh, hosts in there as well helping. And it's really been great to get to know people better and have conversations and you know, a lot of times in the Discord it's just goofing off, right? It's really been fun. Stephen Hackett 37:54 There are times it's hard, right? There are times where you do have to step in as a moderator; for the, for the better of the community, we have to deal with an individual or two. And that always sucks. And I always think about it for like days beforehand. And after-hand is like, 'Oh, did we make the right decision how we handled that?', all that stuff. But it's really been just a handful of really bad instances of that. And even then, nothing majorly bad has happened, right? It was like, relatively, on the scheme of the Internet, low-level stuff. And so for the most part it's been, it's been really good. There is sort of inherent issues around, you know, relationships between content creators and audience members on the Internet. I mean, that's true for bands and like, I mean, how many people thought like, they knew everything about The Beatles, but The Beatles didn't know who they were, right? I'm not comparing myself to The Beatles, I just want to be really clear about that—not that famous or talented. Stephen Hackett 38:48 But you have those sort of one-sided relationships; Discord and other things can help with that, but ultimately, at the end of the day, our listeners know a lot more about us than we know about them. And so as we've done this longer, as I've gotten older, as my kids have gotten older, and as more of them have come along, I've had to make some decisions around things that we share or don't share and how we do them. Like, I had to have a conversation with my wife, like, 'I really think you should make your your Instagram account private'. Like nothing bad happened, but... Martin Feld 39:19 Mmm... Stephen Hackett 39:19 ...as we get bigger, it's like, you're just exposed to more people. And so we try to be respectful about boundaries that we have. As a sort of a concrete example—on Connected, because Feder..., Federico, Myke and I are really good friends, or on Mac Power Users, a show I host with my friend David—sometimes we have to do a check before we start a show, like, 'Hey, I know we talked about this, but like, can I bring it up on the show? Either to make fun of you or to like, I think it'd be an interesting conversation'. We've just learned to respect that about each other like, hey, just because we had a competition in private doesn't mean that it's fair game for a show. Just because like you texted me a funny link doesn't mean you want me to tell the world that you texted me a funny link. And so, as we've just gotten bigger and more mature and older, we've just kind of learned to keep an eye on those things, because it can be something where you say something or something happens that you didn't mean, and you put somebody in a position they don't want to be in. And I always want to be really respectful of that. Martin Feld 40:17 That's fantastic. And I like that you've spoken as well about how you've had to make some personal shifts, because personal life and business... Stephen Hackett 40:26 Mm-hmmm... Martin Feld 40:26 ...they're not two separate worlds. We can talk about work-life balance, but there's some crossover. When you think about all the stuff that you've mentioned to me in your story here, and some of the changes you've made along the way, a lot of those have been business decisions... Stephen Hackett 40:41 Mm-hmmm... Martin Feld 40:41 ...but over the course of your career, entering podcasting as a space from blogging, launching this business, working with Myke, bringing on people, refining what you do and how you talk to audience members, how do you think that you've changed as a person and how was your life shifted? Stephen Hackett 40:58 Oh, that's a good counselling question! I think I'm definitely more reserved about what I share about and particularly about details about my family. Listeners of Relay FM will know, uh, that my oldest son's a cancer survivor, who's a St. Jude patient, and he's doing great today. He was diagnosed with a brain tumour as an infant, but he's doing really well; he's 14 and he's awesome. Early, he started, I should say, he started... that journey started about the time I started blogging (within the same year). And there were times, a lot of times, that I would share really openly about what was going on with him. I mean, a lot of people were thinking about him, praying for us, like, supportive—again, nothing bad ever happened—but we shared a lot and partially because it's like, that's how our friends and family keep up with us, right? Like, and not not necessarily talking about on podcasts, but sort of more on social media. Stephen Hackett 41:50 But as the podcast got bigger, and as my social media following, or my wife's or Myke's or any, anybody else became, OK, the percentage of people that were your friends and family is now very small and the rest of the pie chart is people who listen to you or read you, I became aware that I'm sharing these things with people who don't know us, and is that somehow invading the privacy of my family, of my son? I don't want him to ever be in a situation where he sees that, OK, I documented all this stuff in public, and now as an adult, he really wishes it wasn't out there. And that's been really hard to balance because Relay FM is actually like a fundraising partner of St. Jude now—out of my relationship with the hospital because of my son. But even in the years we've done that, that's become less about him and our story, and more about the St. Jude through a global story. Stephen Hackett 42:43 And so to me, that's the biggest example of something that, not only have I changed my practice, but I've actually really changed my thought about it, like going to my wife and saying, 'Look, I think it's awesome that you put pictures of our kids on here for our friends and family to see, but like, listeners are finding you, and I think for for all of our best interests, it's best if that's private, or if you stopped doing those things'. And she didn't want to do that, and so she went private. And having those conversations, man, it's tough. And it's like, awkward, because you just sound like a jerk, right? It's like, 'Oh, hey, I'm a big deal, please do this or that'. And it's hard not to sound that way, but for me, it was it was really out of that concern of like a future conversation with family or kids or whatever. But like, well, why was this shared to all these people? And so for me, it's really been as my kids get older, and now I've got they're not, you know, five, three and one anymore—they're all much older than that, our oldest is 14—having kids grow up in this, like, everything-is-online, everything-is-social-media world, uh, I'm glad that I have not put them sort of front and centre in any way. And I mean to the point where like, I don't even use really their names online anymore. But again, nothing bad happened, like not saying any of that, but it just felt like that was the best call for me and my family, and so, that's definitely something that's changed quite a bit. Martin Feld 44:05 And look, thank you for sharing that personal detail. I know you've done it on podcasts before, but... Stephen Hackett 44:10 Yeah. Martin Feld 44:10 ...it's a big deal, and there is that balancing act of what you share and what you don't. Stephen Hackett 44:13 Yeah. Martin Feld 44:14 And look, I've asked you how you define the network, define the business, I've asked you how you think you've changed, and what it means to be independent and a journalist or not. But now we've reached this point where you're a podcaster, you're dealing with the spoken word, you're doing all of these different integrated media things on a platform, you run so many different elements on your own and with others. How do you think about who you are now? Or how do you define yourself or actually tell people what you do? Stephen Hackett 44:48 I've told people all sorts of things over the years. You know, when you started telling somebody you were a podcaster or you owned a podcast network, they'd be like, 'What...? What are those words? Like, that's not a word I've heard before'. Stephen Hackett 45:00 Now in 2022, everyone's heard of a podcast. Even if they don't listen, everyone's heard of them. And especially over the pandemic, the idea that people can make a living just doing stuff on the Internet has become mainstream. For me, it's always felt mainstream, because I've done it for so long. But a lot of people took the opportunity to make content businesses, right? Look at the explosion of TikTok, and Instagram stories and YouTube shorts, like all those people are making content all the time, and a lot of them are making money from it. And as that idea's become more accepted and normalised, it's become easier to tell people, 'Oh, well, I actually own a podcast production company', is normally what I say. And people are like, 'What's that?' And my being in the South, my example is like, 'Well think about, like, ESPN', which is like this big conglomerate of sports networks, and you can watch almost any sport in the United States on ESPN, any meaningful talk show or commentary show or something about sports is an ESPN property. That's kind of how we work, right? Like that, we have a bunch of shows that are kind of loosely related, some closer than others, all under the Relay branding, but they all have their own personalities, and their own talent and all those things. But we're all sort of around the world of you know, consumer technology and creativity. And then people are like, 'Oh OK', and then just, you know, never talk to me again, but um, it has definitely become easier. Martin Feld 45:00 Mmm... Stephen Hackett 46:26 And the way that I view my role at Relay now is really different than it was in the beginning. In the beginning, because we were both working full-time, and then Myke quit his job and eventually I quit mine, it was much more about like the building of the company, right? Like, OK, we need a procedure for this, we need a tool for that. And we need to, like, figure out how to make this, all this, all the mechanics work. And now that all the mechanics work, and they've worked well, for a long time, really, I view myself as kind of two sides of a coin: it's helping our hosts do what they do better. And so sometimes it is a feature in the content management system, or sometimes it's thinking, a show that wants to do more with membership, thinking about what that would look like, 'OK, like, this is what you do every week or every other week, what could you add to that to make a membership offering?", and just trying to make the people we work with, helping them when they do become more successful. Stephen Hackett 47:27 The other side of the coin is with the community: it's being accessible and visible to the community, to help people who have questions, so if a member has a question they email our sort of generic email, it comes to me, I answer them all. Once a week, I get an email from someone like, 'I can't believe you answer!' It's like, 'Well, who else is here?!, like, that's how I think about it like, but really helping the membership become more successful, and making the community of Relay FM, what we want it to be, and I have a lot of help with that. Kathy Campbell, our membership, she's sort of like the membership coordinator on the inside, but she's the community manager on the outside of the company. She is critical in that and does, honestly, way better jobs than I do in these in these arenas. And we have our moderation team and stuff, but I kind of view my position as like trying to make this community what we want it to be, make people feel welcome, and not judged and have different points of view and figuring out how to make all that work together. That's really where my focus is now. We've really, as we've grown, I'm out of the advertising business. It's Myke and our VP of Sales. And they do all of that, and the membership is sort of my half. And so, I want to continue to nurture that as it grows. And so, if you look at my time tracking, when I'm not actually doing a show that I'm on, most of my admin time now is in that membership space, or helping our hosts understand our membership stuff better, so maybe they can jump on board with it and make their show, you know, more successful for them and their families. Martin Feld 49:03 Talking about building on success and nurturing the brand or the community, I'm interested by that word that you said earlier about, you kind of thought that podcasting or at least the online activities you were doing were mainstream, in a sense, or they've become more mainstream. Stephen Hackett 49:17 Mm-hmmm. Martin Feld 49:17 Apple is a brand—that you tend to focus on or that you do focus on— Stephen Hackett 49:21 Yeah. Martin Feld 49:21 ...is a very big brand. But not everyone's really necessarily talking about it or running a business the way that you do. So how do you think about your section of the Internet and where would you like to see it go? Stephen Hackett 49:34 I think it's a great section of the Internet, like the Apple community is a fantastic group of people. I mean, we do our St. Jude fundraiser every year and they donate hundreds of thousands of dollars. Like, it's amazing, I love our community. But as Apple gets bigger, and in a way, like more corporate—that shift's already happened, that shift happened 10 years ago—but Apple's different than it was when we started, their products are really different. Where I tried to route my coverage and the way that I think and way I analyse Apple is through that original idea of they make a bunch of different tools for people to do their best work, right? Whether that's in academia or it’s creativity, or they're a lawyer, whatever it is, if they've chosen a Mac, an iPhone or iPad to do their work, then that's a very interesting, special relationship between a craftsman and their tools, right? Going back to sort of my family's history of woodworking and all that stuff like, 'OK, I have this one tool, it only does one thing, but dang, it's the best tool for that one job, and I may only use it once a year, but it's a lifesaver'. And so that's where I tried to root my sort of philosophy about tech: is at the end of the day, like the gadgets are fun, and the you know, it's it's fun having new tech, but what I tried to come back to is how is this useful to people getting their stuff done? Whatever that is! And so, that's how I got into this mess, you know, 10/15 years ago. And that's where I see it continuing to go is like exploring these tools and trying to make sense of them for people who aren't as knowledgeable or plugged in as we are. Martin Feld 51:08 I think you've come beautifully full-circle with your characterisation of the philosophy there. So that's, that's wonderful. That works beautifully for me as, as the interviewer here, but it's not up to me when this finishes... is there anything that I haven't asked you about... Stephen Hackett 51:23 Hmmm... Martin Feld 51:23 ...regarding your personal story, your experiences, or broadly about podcasting, and what you do that you'd like to mention to people listening? Stephen Hackett 51:31 I mean, I feel the only thing I would add is anyone out there looking to explore this medium, or maybe it's you know, videos on YouTube (or whatever comes next): don't be intimidated by the medium, or people who are doing it professionally and think that you can't enter in. If I thought that 15 years ago, we wouldn't be talking, right? I'd have an IT career fixing Dell laptops somewhere, and that would be sad. But the internet is big enough and the tools have become democratised enough where you can run a very successful business from the iPhone in your pocket—totally can. Tonnes of YouTube stuff from people who (names people would recognise in the space) shoot on iPhones, and it's fantastic. You don't have to worry about the first thing you make being perfect. Just start somewhere. You go back and listen to our early stuff, it's bad. It's real bad, man! We've grown a lot. That's how everybody is. So don't be intimidated, if you're thinking about starting a project, or just putting something out there because someone else who's been doing it a long time does it really well with expensive gear, like we all started at nothing, at zero. We all upload it for the first time. And if that's what you want to do, go do it. I think everyone is better for making something and putting it out into the world. Martin Feld 52:52 I think that's wonderful advice, and uh, certainly something that I would echo I mean, you gotta try sitting down speaking into a microphone and meeting people. Stephen Hackett 53:00 Yeah, yeah, absolutely! And whatever your thing is, you know, I mean, the world of YouTube wasn't what it was when we started, especially 15 years ago. And now we have all these different things on the Internet, different platforms you can create on and who knows what's next? If it's AR or VR or something totally different, whatever, whatever's out there, there will always be people trying to figure out how to make good content on it. And if it if it piques your interest, if it's that idea, you can't get out of your head, go find a way to do it. Martin Feld 53:31 Fantastic. Thank you very much for sharing your story and for that advice. Are you happy to conclude the interview at this point? Stephen Hackett 53:38 Sounds good! Thank you! Martin Feld 53:39 Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for joining Really Specific Stories, Stephen, and thank you everyone for listening to the episode. Of course, you can find many of the topics that were mentioned in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time, Stephen. Stephen Hackett 53:52 Yeah, thank you.