Savoury Bits: Just in Time & Just Enough Learning

If you've had a conversation with me anytime during the last 1.5 years, then I'm sure I have mentioned SmartStart to you. I may have also mentioned how much fun I'm having building multiple flavours of this product with my team at Adeptic Creative Labs and Clearly Blue Digital.

The ReStart flavour of SmartStart helps women on career breaks return to the workplace. It supports them with soft-skills, helps them rebuild their confidence and realise they're not alone in this journey. We're documenting the success stories of our learners on our SmartStart LinkedIn page. It's extremely satisfying hearing directly from our learners and realising the impact our work has in their lives.

In this episode of the Aedge podcast, we go behind the scenes and speak with the creators of SmartStart. We delve into what went into the creation of SmartStart, what we knew going in, how the program evolved and how some things came as a surprise to us too.

Give it a listen and tell me what you think!

Insights from a Podcast Convention

September 30th is International Podcast Day.  @hubhopperofficial organized a podcast convention in Koramangala, Bengaluru in honor of this.

Interacted with some Bangalore based podcasters and listened to several panel discussions.

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A post shared by Madhavi Nadig (@m_nadig) on Sep 28, 2019 at 9:02am PDT

Topics touched upon included

• podcasting is a nascent industry in India today
• radio stations repackage their shows as podcasts to increase the shelf life of their content
• lack of effective monetization models
• tools commonly used by creators
• new capabilities introduced in new tools
• creators' aspirations, influences and issues
• engaging with audiences using other online formats
• driving offline conversations via meetups‌ and interactive listening sessions
• difficulty of reaching audience, since they are spread across too many platforms
• audiences dominantly from urban areas
• difficulty of engaging folks in T2 cities
• podcasts in regional languages are a miniscule minority
• back catalog contributes up to 40% of consumption share vs new episodes
• fake streams and downloads from bots
• differences in approaches of content creators in different mediums like blogs, podcasts, radio, videos, Twitter, Instagram/Snapchat and other social media.

The number of female content creators on stage and seated in the audience caught my attention. If today's crowd is truly representative of the podcast space, then India is ahead of the US in terms of representation of multiple voices and diversity in podcasts.