Jacob Wedderburn-Day is the founder of Stasher — a travel tech startup that connects travellers looking to store luggage with shops and hotels providing storage space. Jacob and Anthony, friends from their time studying economics at Oxford together, co-founded the business in 2015. They have grown it from the initial idea back when they were students to being a venture-backed company, valued at over $12 million, present in 250 cities worldwide. They were both recognized this year on Europe’s Forbes 30 under 30 list.
What is The Morality of Everyday Things all about?
The Morality of Everyday Things is, as the title suggests, a show about ethics in our daily lives. We like to tackle questions that can sound controversial (e.g. Are you a bad person if you work at Facebook) and use them as springboards to address topics like “how much should you care about the moral implications of your job?”
Tell us a little bit about your personal background – how, and why you started your podcast?
Anthony and I have been friends for over 8 years. We met studying a mix of philosophy and economics at Oxford University. We’ve debated the kind of questions we feature on the podcast ever since we were students. We’ve gone on to found 2 businesses together – Stasher, a venture-backed startup valued at over $10m – and Treepoints, a social enterprise to fight climate change. We started the podcast when we had some free time during the lockdowns, mostly for our own amusement.
What was the biggest problem you encountered launching your podcast, and how did you overcome it?
As with business, it’s easy to over-fix on the product and under-fix on the distribution. I know way too many would-be entrepreneurs who obsess about crafting their product but have no concept of how to market it. The same is true for podcasts. Making the content is the fun part, but spreading the word is not so easy! We got rather lucky when our first episode trended on Reddit, netting us over 1000 downloads in the first 24 hours and making it easy to go from there.
What are some mistakes you made as a podcaster?
I regret not starting our newsletter sooner. We wanted a way to engage with our subscribers, but we left it until 10 episodes in before we did anything. By this point, we had over 1000 subscribers, but no way of directly contacting them! It’s a slow process building that mailing list up.
Do you have any other projects or businesses you working on?
Yes, the podcast, for all its relative success, is very much a side project to our main business, Stasher, and our social enterprise, Treepoints. Stasher is an Airbnb-style platform for storage all around the world. Use it to book short-term storage or lockers affordably in over 250 cities. Treepoints is a platform that rewards people for carbon offsetting – we want to incentivize people to go beyond carbon neutral.
Do you monetize your Podcast, or plan on monetizing, tell us how or how you plan to do it?
Not currently, we would like to at some point. Our friend, David, from the Acquired podcast (top 0.5%!) said when you hit 10k subscribers, that’s the moment where the monetizing becomes worth your time. We’d consider selling relevant ads or doing sponsored episodes. But for now, we simply use it as a platform to mention our other businesses and promote them.
Most podcast distribution platforms make it quite easy to incorporate ads in your show. I don’t think that’s worthwhile when you’re at a small scale, but once you have meaningful size, then you can either use those systems or negotiate your own deals. I’d say until that point, the negative impact of irrelevant ad content is probably more harmful than beneficial to you.
How do you stay driven and motivated to keep going in your business and podcast?
There is real joy in creating things – I find that to be true in both our business and our podcast. Sometimes the podcast feels more tangible! You get real motivation from the numbers that follow, seeing the downloads rack up or the sales. It’s also important to reflect on what that means. With Stasher and Treepoints, we created products designed to fix a problem and tackle a crisis, so every sale has a real sense of purpose to it. With the podcast, it’s more for fun, but we also do passionately believe it’s important to think critically about ideas and to inject nuance into the debate, which Twitter has done a good job of eradicating. So if people take away good ideas or a desire to think more critically about the kind of problems we raise, then I see that as a good thing.
What is the one thing you wish you knew before starting your podcast?
A decent microphone doesn’t have to cost much more than $100 but will make a massive difference to the audio quality!!
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your audience?
We got very lucky here with Reddit. We shared a few episodes in relevant subreddits, and they got seriously good pick up, getting upvoted over 5K times. Reddit posting is not a scalable strategy, but it was certainly a good launchpad for us. We’re now going down more tried and tested routes – newsletter and cross-posting with other pods.
What is your definition of success?
Hard to say, the goalposts keep moving. However, I like to think of success in 2 ways. Extrinsic success – this is the kind you can measure. Each week, our downloads keep going up, our subscriber numbers rise. Therefore, we set a new milestone and get excited when we hit it. Then intrinsic success – this is the kind that comes from a sense of purpose, creativity, and just enjoying what you do. This is more of a constant, as long as you’re happy with what you’re producing! I like to think even if our numbers never grew from this point onwards. We could look back and be happy with what we’ve achieved and not regret any of it.
If you had to start a brand-new podcast today, what are the steps you would take?
- Step 1 – Pick a theme that has real potential. In our case, it was everyday ethics. Be mindful that if you go too niche, your audience size is limited.
- Step 2 – The technical setup is easy, but here are the steps. For recording, you need Zoom, or Cleanfeed, and a microphone. That’s it. For editing, we use audacity, but there’s plenty of good free or cheap software. Don’t be too ruthless, but it is worth cutting out long pauses, and some ums and ers, because although they sound natural in conversation, they’re annoying to listen to.
- Step 3 – Use something like Anchor to distribute your podcast. Anchor is neat for letting you share across like 9 platforms and it gives you some analytics to see how well you do.
- Step 4 – Figure out a good way of telling people about your podcast. This is not so easy as it sounds! But you should put as much time into this as you do into making the episode since there’s really very little point in making something that just you and your cat listen to.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new podcasters?
Be smart about how you distribute your show and before you go through all the hassle of making it, have some idea of how you’ll promote it too.
What is your favorite quote?
Every journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step.
Reminds you to break down big things into smaller, manageable chunks and to enjoy the process.
How can readers get in touch with you?
You can find me on LinkedIn (Jacob Wedderburn-Day), or you can go to moedt.substack.com and subscribe – we still read and reply to every comment! Check out my business website Stasher and TreePoints.
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