Stick the landing 🤸♀️
Building your audience as an indie podcast
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With so many demands on listeners’ time and podcast feeds, it’s no easy feat for a show to grow a loyal following. And it gets even harder when you’re a small indie team working on a passion project.
But that’s exactly what the producers of Blind Landing did. They tapped into a vocal community of fans, garnering a big audience and press attention along the way.
Blind Landing is a documentary show that takes listeners behind the scenes of elite sports. The first season took on gymnastics; the current season is all about figure skating. Episodes include a three-part deep dive into a surprising culture of homophobia in skating and an episode about Mabel Fairbanks, a pioneering Black figure skater (which also appeared on NPR’s Code Switch earlier this month).
I caught up with the show’s creator and editor, Ari Saperstein. He shares his approach to galvanizing a niche community of listeners; how he applied what he learned working at This American Life; and why you can’t only be motivated by the outward markers of ‘success’.
A quick note before we get into the chat with Ari: last week Blind Landing released a special episode featuring Ukrainian gymnast Illia Kovtun. It’s a personal and timely story about the Ukrainian gymnastics team: you can listen to it here.
First of all: what links the first and second seasons of Blind Landing? And why were you drawn to those topics?
So the thing that connects both seasons of Blind Landing is the focus on the Olympics, and these two elite sports that kind of define the summer and winter games, respectively: gymnastics (season one) and figure skating (season two). It’s truly wild that I am running a sports-centric podcast because I am just so very very sports illiterate.
But the thing is, it’s not really a sports podcast. It’s really a documentary show that uses the world and culture of sports as a jumping off point to explore historical and systemic issues. That’s what I was drawn to and what, I think, a lot of our audience is drawn to. Which is a good lesson to remember, and definitely one I’ve been constantly reminded of throughout the making of the series: to look beyond whether or not you’re predisposed to be interested in a specific topic and try to see if the elements of a good story are there regardless.
What’s the team behind Blind Landing like? And did it change from season one to season two?
Season one was, for like a year, just me. And then when production got going, I brought on three early-career producers to come to table reads, help rewrite episodes and prep for the release. We had –– and I cannot stress this enough –– no idea what we were doing. None of us had made a serialized story before. None of us had made an audio story longer than five minutes. I had reported for KPCC but really in a silo; I hadn’t collaborated with people on a story before, in this way, let alone lead a team. The first season took two years to make: six months of me thinking about it, six months of me doing interviews, six months of the actual writing, editing and production, and six months of prepping the release.
Season two has been a totally different beast. Instead of one serialized story, it’s an anthology comprised of four stories; instead of me reporting it all, there are co-hosts or new reporters for each story; instead of having two years to slowly put it together, we’ve made this whole season in about four months; and instead of a team of four, it’s ballooned into about a dozen people working across the stories, with teams of 2-3 on each story.
Was everyone working part-time on the show or are there any folks staffed full-time?
Oh no – everybody, myself included, has other gigs or day jobs. Really, even though it’s very official-looking and has advertisers and has gotten attention and whatnot, at the end of the day this has been a passion project through and through. I’m not sure either time how we pulled it off because we all were working other jobs while making the series… I think the fact that we all believed in the stories and thought they were worth telling was pretty good fuel for us all.
I’m curious to hear how you approached building your audience and bringing attention to the show, despite being an independent production with no marketing support.
Definitely, the first advantage I think we had was a niche community of gymnastics (and later figure skating) fans who want to share our content of their own volition. That has been huge.
One thing we had the foresight to do was we started our Twitter and Instagram accounts months before the show came out, posting gymnastics memes/content, interacting with and following fans of the sport… so by the time we launched season one, we had a couple hundred followers who saw and shared the trailer –– which I think is still, today, our best performing post.
Without realizing it, we did something that in hindsight was really helpful for getting the show off the ground: tapping into topics that had a community of fans, and fans who are really active on social media… which is maybe a good incentive for anyone to think about sports as a topic for an independent podcast. I also think having sports fans pick up our show is a testament to that community wanting in-depth, high-quality stories about their sport. There was a demand that we were satisfying –– without necessarily realizing we were even doing that, at first.
You’ve gotten a lot of press for the show, including write-ups in The New York Times and Rolling Stone, and it was named one of The Atlantic’s Best Podcasts of 2021. How did you get that kind of PR as an independently produced show?
A lot of the season one “success” had to do with timing –– both with having the series completed six months in advance and that we waited to release it with the Olympics. With the latter, we were able to give journalists the entire series so far in advance and I really think that helped convince big publications to write about us because we made it as easy as possible for them to say yes.
Having content that’s both “new” (ie exclusive interviews or telling little-known stories) and “topical” (ie both seasons timed with the Olympics) has proven to be a great combination for getting coverage.
More than even the press, the best PR that we’ve gotten is being featured on the cover of podcast apps. To have both seasons highlighted on the main page of platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify… I can’t overstate how much that’s done to grow our audience. And I think the reason this little, independent show has gotten highlighted on those platforms is because our content is always new and topical.
I know that the show has a “virtual tip jar” via PayPal for listeners that want to donate to Blind Landing –– how did you decide to do that? Did you consider Patreon or any other models?
It’s something that we just started experimenting with recently ––and honestly, because we kept getting asked by listeners if there was a way to support us financially. Patreon doesn’t really make sense for us because we make content so randomly and sporadically and don’t have behind the scenes content to really offer up –– which is why an open-ended PayPal link seemed like the right option for folks with want to support independent journalism by throwing us a few bucks.
While you’ve been making Blind Landing, you’ve also worked for other outlets like KPCC and This American Life, and contributed to a number of other shows and outlets –– how have you balanced all those commitments? And how do you generally manage a good work-life balance?
I have been extremely lucky in the timing of my life over the past few years where all my projects and gigs have mostly fallen back to back versus overlapped… but boy oh boy, that overlap is rough when it happens… and I think I enjoy sleeping too much to want to take on multiple projects simultaneously.
I’m also lucky in that I’m starting to get to the place where I’m being approached about projects and saying “no” is really hard; I can’t help but feel like I’m turning down that last opportunity I’ll ever be offered, or that’s where my brain goes, basically… but then I remember how much I like sleep. And that wins out.
What’s something you’ve learned working with This American Life that you’ve put into practice making Blind Landing?
There’s two things that immediately come to mind… and they both have to do with group edits.
Absolutely, the number one thing is having a wide array of perspectives in a group edit (by which I mean a table read followed by a discussion of the story and possibly line-editing of a script). That might sound really specific, but I really think it’s the secret sauce that makes TAL stories so great –– there’s a big staff and lots of people to call on to help troubleshoot a specific part of a story.
Now, obviously I don’t have a staff of 25 experienced, top-level producers I’m working with on Blind Landing –– but I do have a lot of very talented friends in audio who generously give me their time to come sit in on an edit. Season one, before working at TAL, I think I waffled on bringing in lots of people for edits, unsure if the benefits were worth asking people for their time; now, it just seems so so essential.
I think another simple-yet-important lesson I took away from TAL was always having a clear intention for a group edit. Having a reporter explain what their goal with a story is, and how they want it to make a listener feel, should be the guiding force for every note given in an edit.
To wrap up – what advice do you have for anyone that wants to do independent podcasting, or producers working on a similar passion project?
I’d say: make a story because you want to make the story, not because you want a certain outcome from making it. And it can’t be based on the end result. You can’t care too much about how the promotional stuff shakes out –– it can’t be the only measurement of success. If hoping to achieve external “success” is that only motivator, and… you don’t end up getting that…then… oof. That’s a recipe for disappointment.
I think that’s been the best part of making Blind Landing –– the motivator has been that it’s fun and fulfilling to make. We choose to take on stories we think contribute something to society and we work with people who are nice and driven.
Before I begin any kind of project ––especially an independent project where I’m driving the train–– I ask myself: will my excitement for this idea motivate me in six months, when it’s 4 am, and I’m burnt out? And it’s not often that the answer is yes… but if it is then that’s how I know I’ll feel good about the choices I’ve made. And for whatever reason, that’s also when that external success tends to come, when you’re not really looking for it.
This was a really insightful read Clare! 🎉