Who? Weekly's Lindsey Weber and Bobby Finger on how to start a podcast with a friend
Hi y'all!
I can’t lie, I’m especially excited about this month’s interview. It’s with the podcast that I’ve listened to more than any other. As in: when I refresh my podcast feed and see a new episode of Who? Weekly I hit play right away.
Here’s a little introduction for the uninitiated: Who? Weekly covers those low level celebrities who, when you mention their names, people ask, “Wait, who?”
Think Corbin Bleu or Fletcher. You might know them, but if you brought them up at Thanksgiving dinner your family would probably be lost. They’re not exactly A-list. Who’s (as they’re called in the Who? Weekly lexicon) are delightful because they’re so obscure that they’ll do ridiculous things to get in the public eye, like writing songs for Cracker Jack’s (as in, the snack) or playing a concert at your local Sam’s Club.
Hosts Lindsey Weber and Bobby Finger follow these kinds of exploits, while giving sharp (but never mean spirited) commentary on celebrity culture. On Monday they take us through the week in Who? news and on Fridays they release a call-in show, where they answer ridiculous questions from listeners (“Does Pluto’s demotion to dwarf planet make it a Who?”).
The show has a dedicated following, we call ourselves Wholigans. I’ve speculated with friends in the industry about how this show gets made — it’s clear that a lot of work goes on behind the scenes to make a final product that sounds so effortlessly entertaining. It comes out twice a week (three times if you subscribe to their Patreon) and has been on for seven years. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.
When planning this season of the newsletter I decided to go straight to the source: Bobby and Lindsey, to find out how they make the show feel fresh, and what it’s like to make a show with a friend. I think you’re going to love it.
Also in the newsletter this month: how to manage your money while freelancing, featuring star freelancer (and my friend) Alex Sujong Laughlin. She has excellent advice on practical skills like following up on late invoices and saving money for taxes.
Lindsey and Bobby backstage at The Bell House in Brooklyn, NY
Alice: Who Weekly started as a newsletter — how did you decide to make it a podcast?
Bobby: Our friends who had a podcast said, “This should be a podcast.” And we were like, “Whoa, why and how? We don't do that!” And they said, “Oh, just try it,” and they kind of gave us the tips on how to start it and do it and gave us the motivation to just make a pilot episode and see if we liked it.
But what's crucial is that Lindsay and I have gone into everything that we've ever done together with the assumption that it won't last, that it's just for fun. We did Tumblrs, we made the Who Weekly newsletter. We never thought that it would last that long and it didn't. And then we were like, “Oh, we'll just try a podcast, we'll see how long we can have fun doing this.” And it just sort of stuck.
Lindsey: I think the key to it was at this point in time, podcasting wasn't seen as anyone's career, unless you were like Ira Glass. There was no expectation that we’d make a career from it.
Everything that we've ever done separately and together revolves around a piece of media and how to make it funny or how to make it at all. Podcasting really just was another excuse to learn how to play with software and learn how to audio edit.
I do think that we probably wouldn't have started a podcast now, because now there's so much information about it being hard. It's a full-time job. It needs to be perfect. It needs to be engineered.
We would've seen that as too big of a barrier to entry. But back then, it almost felt bare bones, that you could get away with putting something out that was kind of DIY.
Bobby: It was a gag, it was very unserious. So it was unserious until it was suddenly serious when we realized: “Oh, there’s a little audience here.”
Resources
I’ll admit that I don’t have the best system for managing freelance payments. It’s usually a sticky note on my computer monitor that says “XYZ owes me money.” I’ll be lying in bed trying to fall asleep and remember that I should probably follow up on that invoice. When I told my friend (and fellow podcast producer) Alex Sujong Laughlin about this, she gasped in horror.
Alex does an excellent job of treating her freelance work like a business. So I called her up to have her explain her system to me. Here’s a selection from that conversation:
Alice: Talk me through your system for managing invoices.
Alex: I have a couple of systems, but it all comes back to the spreadsheet. As soon as I sign a contract I add a line to the spreadsheet immediately.
The main columns on that spreadsheet are:
Invoice number. Let me give you an example: for Poynter, I had an agreed upon amount for 22 issues. And so I knew that I was going to need to send 22 invoices. Every time I sent an invoice, it was “Poynter Cohort #13, Poynter Cohort #14.” I’m counting up.
Quarter, so Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4.
Doing business as. This is a way for me to make sure I know if they are invoicing to my business or to me as an individual. I have an LLC and I try to have all of my professional work going straight into the LLC, but if I'm teaching, for example, they're not gonna be paying my LLC to teach. That's a situation where I'm being paid as an individual.
Job. That's where I'm writing, like what is the actual thing I'm invoicing for?
Amount, so that is the total amount that's invoiced. Then I have a bunch of other columns that have to do with how I sort my money once I get it.
Date that I sent the invoice and the date it's due according to the contract.
Work type. Is it producing, is it writing, is it teaching? I just have that for my personal filing, because I wanna know how much of my income comes from what.
Have you sorted your money? It's just like a check box – I'll check it once I've done it. [We’ll come back to this later!]
Status. That’s either “paid” or “sent.”
That's the spreadsheet. And the way I use it is that whenever I sign a contract, I immediately add a line item to the spreadsheet. That doesn't mean I'm invoicing immediately, but it is a record of what money I should expect to be coming at some point.
And then on my calendar every other Thursday is Invoice Day. On Invoice Day I go through a spreadsheet and look at what needs to be sent and send invoices.
Alice: What do you do when your invoices are overdue? How do you track down that money?
Alex: I try to have my payment terms clearly written on my invoices and in my contracts, and it's important to pay attention to that because sometimes they'll sneak in net 60 or net 90, which is silly. [Editor’s note: that means that the client doesn’t have to pay you until 60 or 90 days after the work is done.]
I will wait until the day the invoice is due (usually 30 days after I sent the invoice to them) and if I haven't been paid, then I'll check in politely and be like, “Hey, I wanted to check in on the status of invoice number whatever, it's due today. Let me know if you need any more information from me.” I usually give like about one or two weeks of messing around before I start to get really tough.
I think the toughest I've ever had to be was with this one publication; they were really wiggly and wishy-washy about getting me payment, and this was probably three weeks after it was due. I ended up having to escalate. So almost two months after I had invoiced, that's when I was like, I will be escalating this. Like you are in violation of this law. And they got me payment the next day.
Alice: When do you get to the point of thinking, “Okay I’m going to tweet about this.”
Alex: I usually am not eager to do that. I tweeted about NYU because it was three months after the class had ended and I still hadn't been paid for teaching a full class. And the person that I was communicating with was starting to get very dismissive of me and was not giving me any answers. I contacted the union and that helped a lot.
Alice: What’s your advice to people who are thinking about going freelance and want to start preparing financially?
Alex: I am very fired up and passionate about this. The minute I knew I was going freelance, I started a business bank account. And I immediately put $5,000 into it just to get it started.
I was thinking of going freelance for probably two years before I finally did it, and for those two years I saved a very big percentage of my paycheck.
A big caveat here: I am married, I live in an affordable town that's not New York, I don't have kids and I don't have student debt. And so I had a very cushy jumping off point. If a person has the good fortune of being in a full-time job and choosing to go freelance, save as much as you can and really use that time where you're getting a steady paycheck to experiment on how much you actually need to live, because it's unlikely that you're gonna get the same salary freelancing that you did while working at a staff job.
I forced myself to live on a low salary, a very low salary, as low as I could get. In part because I wanted to save the money, but also because I wanted to see how low of a salary I could live on so I could pay myself that.
Alice: I wanted to go back to an item on your spreadsheet, “Did you sort your money?” What is money sorting?
Alex: Once I went freelance and started my business bank account, I [set up] a checking account and a savings account inside my business bank account. And once I get paid, I sort my money. Everything goes straight into my business account, so it's a matter of taking out 40 percent for my business savings and taxes, and then 10 percent for my personal savings.
Alice: And then what about paying rent and buying other things, like for life. At what point in that process do things get transferred to your personal bank account?
Alex: I gave myself a salary and I pay myself every two weeks. And that's what I use to live my life.
Alice: Did you give yourself vacation days and sick leave?
Alex: Yes! All of these things, sick days, days off, and also how many hours you hope to work in a work week should be built into what you are deciding your rate is. Have you heard of the Writer's Co-op?
Alice: Oh yes, they have a great podcast.
Alex: I listened to their entire podcast before I went freelance, and it taught me a lot about how to manage my money and think about what I'm doing as a business. They have a very cool calculator thing, like they have an equation. They have some math that they include to account for the unpaid work that goes into being a freelancer, like generating leads, sending invoices, all of that stuff. So if you say you wanna work 40 hours a week, that's actually gonna look more like 55 if you're a freelancer. And you need to account for that. Part of that is how many vacation days you want to take. You decide what the policy is for the small company that is you. And they help you account for all of that and then do this amazing math: this is my day rate, this is my hourly rate, this is the absolute minimum I can work for and still have the lifestyle that I want.
Classifieds
Spring Intern (Part-time), 99% Invisible, Sirius XM (No pay information shared)
Spring Intern (Part-time), Earwolf, Sirius XM (No pay information shared)
Radio Newscast Intern (Part-time), KQED ($16.99/hr)
Newsroom Intern (Part-time), KQED ($16.99/hr)
Intern, KPCC, American Public Media Group ($18.66/hr)
Intern, Make Me Smart, APMG ($18.00/hr)
Intern, Performance Today, APMG ($18.00/hr)
Intern, Marketplace Tech, ($18.00/hr)
Digital Intern, Marketplace, APMG ($18.00/hr)
Intern, Marketplace NY Bureau, APMG ($18.00/hr)
Intern, Media Production & Operations, APMG ($18.00/hr)
Intern, Audacy (No pay information included)
Programming Intern, The Block, Audacy ($15.00/hr)
Creative Intern, California based, Sony Music Entertainment (No pay information shared)
Creative Intern, New York based, Sony Music Entertainment ($15.00/hr)
Fellow
Last Mile Fellow, Sirius XM
Kroc Fellow, NPR ($50,000/yr plus benefits)
Fellow, Education Research & Production Assistant, APMG ($18.00-$23.00/hr)
Associate/Assistant Producer
Associate Producer, Earwolf, Sirius XM (No pay information shared)
Associate Producer, Volume/Faction, Sirius XM ($40,000-$55,000/yr)
Associate Producer (Part-Time), The California Report, KQED (No pay information shared)
Associate Producer (Part-Time), Southern California Public Radio, APMG ($26.76/hr)
Associate Producer, Minnesota Now, APMG ($22.74 - $32.36/hr)
Associate Producer, Weekend All Things Considered, NPR (No pay information included)
Associate Producer, Branded Podcasts, Audacy (No pay information included)
Associate Producer, Audacy (No pay information included)
Assistant Producer, WBBM Newsradio 780, Audacy (No pay information included)
Associate Producer, Entertainment Podcasts, Sony Music Entertainment ($60,000-$70,000/yr)
Associate Producer, Narrative Non-Fiction Podcasts, Sony Music Entertainment ($60,000-$70,000/yr)
Other
Contract Production Coordinator, Wondery
Producer, On the Record, WYPR
If you are hiring interns, fellows or other entry level positions, send your job postings and rates to startingout [at] transom [dot] org and I’ll list them in the next issue. Please note that Starting Out features only paid opportunities.