What it costs to make Hyperfixed.

Stuff I'm learning as I go along.

Thank you for reading this. If you read it and decide you’d like to support the show, the best way you can do that is by subscribing to Hyperfixed at https://hyperfixedpod.com/join

On December 6, 2024, at exactly 9:13 AM, Eastern Standard Time, my new Podcast Hyperfixed officially hit its 1,000th premium supporter, which is incredibly exciting for us. In honor of hitting this incredibly benchmark, I wanted to just talk a bit about the financial aspects of the show, because you all make up the bulk of that part of it, so I want you to know what your money is going toward.

The only way I was able to get this show off the ground was with a loan from Supporting Cast. If you don't know what I'm talking about, Supporting Cast is a company that handles payment processing and this website for me. They're a lot like Patreon in that they keep a small percentage of the money I get from listeners and the way the loan is structured, they give me a fixed amount every month (@ $13,000) for a year.

In addition to money we have gotten from you, we are selling ads. Or at least trying to. The wonderful folks at Radiotopia do that for me. They keep 30% of the ad revenue and I keep 70% and in return, I get help from them with the distribution of the show (the RSS feed and so on, help with promotion, general good advice and cameraderie from other shows on Radiotopia, and a little bit of money allocated to me yearly.

Now that you now how the revenue is set up, here are the expenses:

Since money is tight, everyone at the show - myself, Emma, and Amor - are taking the same salary. It's a day rate that was calculated based on an entry level producer salary in radio. I wake up every day and thank the powers that be that Amor and Emma believe in the show and its capacity to grow and are willing to, at least for now, be paid at salaries way below what they're worth.

In order to get the episodes sounding nice, I have a fact checker and an engineer, but of whom cost between $250 and $500 an episode. I'm paying my incredible friend Joe Calderone and my incredible foe Breakmaster Cylinder about $1,000 a month each for social media promotion and a library of music respectively. I also have little expenses here and there like paying for Slack, paying for Discord, the Hyperfixed domain, little things like gear and batteries.

In total, my expenses run @ 20k a month. It takes a while for advertisers to get a show, so the ad process is ramping up kind of slowly. In short, the amount of money I get from the loan and from the ads is not covering my expenses, which is kind of stressful! Right now, the show has approximately $4500 in the bank until the latter half of the month, which is when I receive my monthly allotment from Supporting Cast. I am making up the difference by being a couple months behind on paying myself.

I'm not gonna pretend that's not terrifying. But the thing is, even though it's still early days, I'm incredibly heartened by the trajectory of all available metrics. Last week's episode got 9,000 listens on its first day. This week's episode already has 23,000. We are only on our fifth episode, if you count last week's bonus, and yet, we're already at 1,000 supporters.

My dream for the show is 200-250k listeners and 10,000 subscribers. That will put us in the black enough for me to pay everyone what they deserve, to make my co-workers actual W-2 employees with health care and whatnot. And If you look at where we are today, we're already @ 1/10 of the way there for subscribers and if you account for the first week of listens, we're like 1/5 of the way there on listeners. That's way out in front of what I had expected and hoped for.

Part of the reason it took me so long to actually get this show started is that I obstinately didn't want to ask listeners to support the show, because it's hard! I had the luxury during the podcast bubble of the mid 2010's to not have to be a brand or a salesman. But now that this thing is all mine, I'm realizing that your support of the show is so much more than a financial investment, and I see that every day in the discord and the messages I get from people, and I'm honestly so glad I have this channel to all of you now. So thank you. You all are literally keeping us afloat and that means the world to me.

As the show continues to grow, I plan to keep doing these. If you have any questions, feel free to sound off in the comments or to tweet at me or whatever. Thanks so much for reading.

-Alex