Growing a podcast aimed at Laravel and PHP developers

Meet Joel Clermont, based near Milwaukee, WI.

Joel is one of the hosts behind the No Compromises podcast, a podcast aimed at Laravel and PHP developers.

The story told by Joel Clermont

Concerns starting out

My co-host, Aaron Saray, and I had two basic concerns when launching (first episode aired August 2020) the podcast:

1. Could we keep up with a publishing routine?

2. Would anyone listen?

The first point is important to us, because we hold ourselves to a commitment when deciding to do something, especially something public like this.

We didn't want to be one of these flaky podcasts that publishes three weeks in a row, then misses a month or two, and then the next episode starts out with the hosts apologizing about how long it's been since the last episode.

To give us confidence we could publish 100% on time and not miss an episode, we decided on a bi-weekly frequency, and we also decided on a purposely-short format: 10 - 15 minutes per episode. We knew we could do this without missing, and at over 103 episodes (and counting), to date we have not missed a single publish date.

This decision on format was also a consideration for the second point: would anyone listen? Getting a person to subscribe to your podcast is a commitment.

Luckily people were interested in our podcast. Today we have around 45,000 downloads.

Low time commitment

There are already so many podcasts, and many of them are an hour or longer, and people already complain about not being able to keep up with their podcasts, so we were very conscious that keeping the time commitment low for new listeners would be a way to attract new subscribers. And I think this strategy has worked. I've heard from multiple people that they prioritize our podcast because of the shorter time commitment.

Publishing and marketing

We publish our podcast using Transistor.fm, which makes it very easy to cross-publish at all of the podcast directories. It also gives us a nice show landing page, as well as a per-episode landing page to promote on social media.

We used our X accounts to announce the launch (example below), and then each new episode I'd promote there once or twice.

I briefly experimented with audiogram clips (example below) of the podcast, and I think this helped with engagement, but ultimately I decided it wasn't worth the time or effort.

Last fall, I launched the Mastering Laravel daily newsletter, which has the same target audience as our podcast, so I began featuring podcast episodes every other week in the newsletter as well, and this has also driven podcast growth.

The newsletter has since grown to over 4,500 subscribers, so it's taken on a life of its own.

Another excellent marketing channel for us is the Laravel News website. They let members from the Laravel community publish links, and I regularly share each episode over there (example below).

Between the traffic they get on their site and the cross-posting they do on their social media channels, this has contributed to podcast growth as well.

Attribution is notoriously hard with podcasts. It's even tricky to really know how many people are listening, since the podcast hosts count downloads, not listens. But we don't stress about the numbers, we just like seeing steady growth, and even better, we appreciate hearing from listeners or seeing others share our podcast. It was a very pleasant surprise when Transistor listed us on their top podcasts for software developers page.

We're now approaching the 4 year anniversary of our podcast launch, and it continues to be something we enjoy doing, and that the audience enjoys listening to. It has also been a surprisingly good source of leads for our Laravel consulting business: nocompromises.io

The time and investment have definitely been worth it

You can find Joel Clermont on X and LinkedIn.