Yep… I get a lot of that..
I agree with you that ‘not biting off more than you can chew’ let’s call it, and doing what you can do really well, is better than trying to take on too much and doing it badly.
To some extent, that’s what I was getting at with the Seasiders Pod… insomuch as a live broadcast does come with a certain amount of expectation and ‘responsibility’ and people do get disappointed when you don’t deliver… I think that’s a natural reaction.
When I was as talking in terms of numbers, I’m talking about the relative success of a project. You may choose to think otherwise, but in terms of a podcast or any kind of media output, success is measured in terms of viewership… Think of the “does a falling tree make a noise of no one hears it” analogy…
So to that extent, IF you want it to be a ‘relative’ success as opposed to a flop, then there’s going to need to be a fair bit of ‘people pleasing’ involved… obviously Tom is adopting a well considered approach by doing some audience research before he starts …. However, there’s not much point in doing the research to then just ignore it and do your own thing regardless…So whilst ‘audio only’ might be great (and it may well be all you can do right now)… I’m going to say straight away, that purely on that basis I’m unlikely to be interested…. Of course, the content may be fantastic and my mind might well be changed, but for me personally that’s an immediate barrier to gaining my interest…(of course there will be others with a totally different perspective) and so you have to take a view and balance what people want (or what people will listen to) with what you are able to provide.. The more ‘people you please’ the more success you will have.
So you can’t really get away from ‘people-pleasing’ and the aim (surely) is to please enough people so as to actually have a reasonable audience…. Otherwise ‘what’s the point’ ?