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The 300K-Follower Podcast That Launched to 10 Downloads

The Story

When Yong-Soo launched First Class Founders in November 2022, the math looked safe on paper. “EDC has 170,000 followers on Instagram, 100,000 newsletter subscribers. The dog account, Humphrey, has 150k followers across Instagram and TikTok” (Source 1). He told himself, “I thought at least 1% will be a good base minimum” (Source 1).

The reality: “I was probably getting between 10 to 20 downloads an episode” (Source 1). “It was a shocking to me when no one cared. Basically, the audience for Humphrey is following Humphrey for his content is funny and cute stuff. And then EDC is obviously they want to see the gear. So they don’t care about building businesses. So that’s kind of the biggest mistake, honestly, that I made” (Source 1).

The follow-on plan was social-driven. He reactivated a Twitter account that had been dormant 12 years and started from roughly 400 followers (Source 1). “Basically, it felt like I was going into a party. Imagine a room full of people… I walked into this room at a party and I know no one. It’s all filled with strangers. I don’t know anybody. That’s how I felt when I first started posting on Twitter, where I’m sharing all these vulnerable things about me, all the stories, but no one cared. It’s a weird thing, Joe. But I could feel people looking at these posts and almost judging me. Who is this guy? Who invited him to the party?” (Source 1).

The fix wasn’t broadcasting harder — it was one-on-one. “It took me a long time where I had to go up to each person, using this party analogy, introduce myself, build a rapport, build a relationship… It’s like building those individual relationships over time, that compounds” (Source 1). The unit of work was the reply, not the tweet.

He also paid for a kickstart. Roughly a month and a half in, he bought Player FM’s Gold sponsorship package for a two-week period. Downloads spiked from ~400/episode to ~1,000, then “it just kind of dipped back down” to about 400, a new baseline (Source 1). “I think it was worth it because in the beginning, especially you kind of want to have some audience where you can kind of get some feedback. 10, 20 downloads is not much and honestly, they’re probably like my friends and family” (Source 1).

The newsletter-podcast interview piece (Newsletter Circle, October 2023) confirmed which channel actually drove growth: “Right now, Beehiiv Boosts and Sparkloop are my biggest drivers of paid growth. I’ve been getting a lot of traffic from organic content I’ve posted on X / Twitter lately as well, which helps!” (Source 3). His own conclusion on cross-medium funneling: “A podcast is a great medium for building trust but a terrible medium for driving action” (Source 3).

Lesson for Creators

A big follower count on a different topic is not the same as an audience. The 320K followers across Urban EDC and Humphrey didn’t transfer to a founder podcast because the value exchange was different — those audiences had opted in for gear pictures and dog content, not for business lessons. The mistake is intuitive: “I already have an audience” feels like leverage. It isn’t, unless the new product matches what the audience opted in for. Yong-Soo’s recovery move is the more practical lesson — when broadcasting failed, he switched to one-by-one relationship building on a new platform that did match the topic. Cold-starting a niche-aligned audience beat warm-starting a niche-mismatched one.

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