How Gary Arndt built Everything Everywhere, a podcast with 1.5 million monthly downloads
He's already published 1,400 episodes since 2020.
What does a professional travel photographer do when all international flights are shut down due to a global pandemic? That’s a question Gary Arndt found himself asking in the early months of 2020. By that point, he had built up millions of social media followers and an entire career from snapping photos in exotic locales, and within a matter of weeks his income streams had completely dried up.
Luckily, he had already been batting around the idea for a podcast that didn’t require any travel. In July 2020, he started producing seven episodes a week of Everything Everywhere, an educational show about a diverse range of topics, and it immediately took off. Today, it generates 1.5 million monthly downloads and pulls in much more advertising income than Gary ever made as a travel photographer.
In our interview, Gary walked through how he found his audience, where he gets his ideas for new episodes, and why he weaned himself off the social media platforms that once delivered him huge reach.
Check out the interview below:
Transcript
Hey, Gary, thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
So these days you host an incredibly popular education podcast, and I definitely want to spend most of this episode talking about that. But before we talk about that, you've actually been an Internet entrepreneur spanning all the way back to the mid 1990s, right?
Yeah, so like the really early days of the internet. I got involved because my college roommate – you've probably heard of a product called ColdFusion. It's actually owned by Adobe right now. And so, yeah, JJ Allaire was my college roommate and I lived with him after college. And while I was living with him, he built this tool that allowed very easy, intuitive ways to hook up a database to a website, which at the time, going way back, this is like 1995, it was hard to do. People were buying servers. They had to buy copies of Oracle to do things that would just be trivial today, cost enormous amounts of money.
Give me an example of something that you would want to try to do by hooking up a database to a website.
Like what you can do with WordPress, like simply having an article you could publish where you put it in a database and then have it output as text. Just doing that was very, very difficult. There was no MySQL, there was no PHP. So he built a tool that could be used on this new operating system called Windows NT. You could use Microsoft Access, which was a very cheap relational database. And it did really, really well. He focused on the tool and people were coming to him saying, well, could you build my company's website? And he didn't want to actually build websites. So he said, well, do you want to do this? So I said, sure. So I started doing this and then I hired a friend who had a friend, and, you know, four years later, I'm 28 years old, I got 50 people working for me and I sold the business to a larger multinational corporation that wanted to get involved with the Internet. And this is all before the dotcom bubble burst.
So he created an easier way to do certain things with websites. And then he had a bunch of people coming to him saying, hey, you've built this tool. I actually want to build a website. And so you were kind of like a spinoff business from that, like basically a website building agency.