TL;DR -
https://soundcloud.com/mindtomatter/inside-the-bubble-the-dailyTranscript:
Hi Everybody,
Adam B. Levine Here from The Daily Bitcoin - Thanks to everyone who listened, tipped or wrote in during our first week worth of shows.
This is not a conventional episode, but a call for help & some explanation of what's going on. If you'd like to join in our quest, please email
adam@mindtomatter.org - We are looking for potential hosts, researchers, writers, and outside the box thinkers to join the team.
When I started looking for help in building the first professional take on a Bitcoin focused audio news source, the plan was to do a weekly show made up of unscripted "live" but recorded host segments, paired with scripted "correspondent segments". The show is basically a platform for independent reporters to reveal and talk about their findings.
In some cases this means investigative journalism, interviewing and asking the obvious questions of the people behind the headlines. To others it provides a megaphone to get new ideas or opportunities into the growing community interested in the possibilities enabled by Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
When I started talking about this plan with those who expressed interest, I found quite a bit of support in the forms of guidance as well as investment. I was advised to think bigger, so I incorporated video into my plans - Live video host segments, and illustration or animation for the contributor segments to make the ideas more accessible.
Even with the funding in-place, that pushed the time to get ready a month or two out... In the meantime I had met my two co-hosts, Eli & Paul - They were both very interested in doing a daily show, and since my weekly project had been pushed back I agreed we'd give it a try for a week to see how it goes.
And it went quite well by any standards. With no promotion, no subscriptions, and a minimal of press attention (Thanks BitcoinMagazine) the episodes produced last week have netted more than 7,000 listens, but internally things were breaking down.
In order to release the show at that pace, I basically was devoting myself to nothing but the show from early in the morning until near midnight each night. not that anything in particular took that long - More that there was so much stuff going on with Bitcoin AND the need to record, edit, and publish the show. At the end of our first week, we still didn't have any ways to subscribe to the show so I spent part of Saturday and almost all of Sunday trying to fix that problem.
At the same time, it became apparent that there were fundamental differences between where I want the show to go, and where our angel investor did. On Sunday I made the decision after speaking with a number of advisers to return his investment and finance the project myself.
On Monday the adrenaline of the week started to wear off and the amount of work we had taken on became apparent - In order to maintain the pace of release, it meant our small team had to be 100% efficient with the content we spent our time developing, so when over an hour of interview was requested removed by the interview subject, the lack of any margin-of-error became really obvious.
Monday night I slept instead of editing, and we started talking internally about what a sustainable schedule would look like. The appeal of a daily show is definitely there, but the amount of work required to produce something high quality is too much for our small team. If we hired the staff required to support the level of production, it would require a large investment and meaningful, immediate cashflow to sustain it.
The whole point here is to bring real journalism and analysis of complicated topics to an interested and basically unserved audience.
So here's where we are now:
The Bitcoin Show will be moving to a twice-weekly format, running about an hour per episode. We'll have a rotating cast of hosts with different perspectives and varied viewpoints. We'll have frequent interviews, and occasional contributor segments. And when we've built up a small backlog of content we'll start releasing timely interviews or segments on non-show days to keep you up to the minute.
If we have success with that format, are able to deliver it consistently, and the demand for a daily show still exists, we will look at doing a Bitcoinstarter.com or Kickstarter.com crowdfunding campaign to raise the necessary funds to make that happen in a sustainable way.
Thanks to everyone who helped build the show to the point we're at now, Especially Eli Sklar, Paul Russo, Stephanie Murphy and Andreas M. Antonopoulos.
Please feel free to send feedback negative or positive to
adam@mindtomatter.orgWe look forward to returning with episode 6 of The Daily Bitcoin, presented twice a week for the foreseeable future.
