This Couple Left Their Careers To Start A Podcast About Dinosaurs [2M Downloads]
Hello! We are Sabrina and Garret, a husband and wife team who produce the popular weekly dinosaur podcast I Know Dino. We started podcasting almost eight years ago because we wanted to stay up to date on all the latest dinosaur discoveries (there’s one every week)!
We started with a website, then a podcast, and now it’s grown to include merch, books, videos, speaking opportunities, and best of all, an engaged community of awesome people who love dinosaurs as much as us.
Our listeners are mainly adults like us who are curious and passionate. We all enjoy learning about and talking about dinosaurs, and science in general. Dinosaurs are a gateway to science, after all.
Our podcast has nearly 3 million downloads and we have listeners in almost every country.
Through I Know Dino, we’ve also gotten some incredible travel opportunities (we spent our 5th wedding anniversary in a remote dinosaur town in Australia—the people who run the museum there even cooked us a wonderful dinner).
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
We grew up loving dinosaurs. Sabrina nearly wore out her VHS tape of Land Before Time, and Garret did wear out his favorite Stegosaurus hat.
Like many kids, our interests changed as teenagers. But we rediscovered our love of dinosaurs together when we lived near the American Museum of Natural History and we were able to visit often.
A few years later we had a dinosaur-themed wedding.
When you’re interested in something, dive into it. Build up your skills. You can use them later, either to enhance your current project or to apply them to your next big idea.
After the wedding, we didn’t want to stop talking about dinosaurs. We noticed at the time that while there were, and still are, some great paleontology podcasts, there weren’t any that were dedicated to dinosaurs.
So we decided to start our podcast. Garret had been listening to podcasts for a while at that point, which gave us an idea of what format and segments we wanted in our show.
We launched in January 2015, just a few months before the movie Jurassic World came out. We reached out to paleontologists to interview them for our show and did lots of research so we could ask interesting questions.
There was a learning curve, and we made some mistakes in the beginning, but we heard from some listeners it was fun for them to be on the learning journey with us.
We released two episodes a week during the first eight weeks to gain more traction. A couple of months after we launched, Apple Podcasts reached out to us to feature our show.
That was our first “aha” moment. Our download numbers went way up after our first feature. (Apple Podcasts also featured us when Jurassic World: Dominion came out.)
Our next “aha” moment came a few months later when we launched our Patreon. Soon after, we got our first subscriber—and they weren’t even a family member!
It felt like we had good momentum and we were making something people found valuable.
Our backgrounds are not exactly dinosaur-related. Neither of us is a paleontologist, but Garret is a chemical engineer and Sabrina worked for years in various industries, including book publishing, education, and tech. We also picked up a lot of skills through our careers and side projects—building websites, making ebooks, blogging and writing for other publications, and teaching online courses, to name a few.
When we started I Know Dino, we were both working full-time jobs, as a chemical engineer and a content designer. Our podcast was a hobby at first, and a labor of love that we worked on nights and weekends.
We also used our vacation time to take trips to dig sites and museums. Our first one was in the summer of 2016. We drove to Alberta, Canada, and Montana to visit four different museums and dig for fossils.
The trip was a huge success. We interviewed a lot of great people and we got our first sponsorship from one of the museums we visited.
Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.
After listening to other podcasts, we figured out the format we wanted and we just went for it.
A writer and graphic designer we’d worked with on an unrelated blog offered to create our logo and some images for us (which we still use today).
We started with a microphone and a laptop. Our first recordings used a cheap USB condenser microphone (terrible for background noise) and the free software Audacity. For our interviews, we used a free Skype account and a microphone built into our computer to record both sides of the conversation. The audio quality makes us cringe in retrospect, but it let us get started for around $100.
We knew we needed high-quality audio, which starts with not having distracting background noise or sounding echoey. So we did our best by recording under a blanket. Every time a loud car passed by our house, we paused our recording.
Pro Tip: Always make sure to press that “record” button. We forgot once, after finishing an episode. Then we had to get back under our heavy blanket and do it all over. Luckily, we’ve always remembered to hit the record button when interviewing someone.
Over the next few months, Garret did a lot of research and practiced with different tools to improve sound quality. Eventually, we settled on good dynamic microphones (Rode Procasters for in the studio and Shure SM58s while traveling). We also got a portable recorder (a Zoom P4), headphones, mic stands, and other accessories to make it all work. The total cost of the upgrade was about $1200.
We also started paying for better software to improve the sound of the show and make editing and mastering easier. We spent about $500 on software licenses and about $100/per month on software subscriptions.
Over time we’ve also done lots of experimentation with the show style and format. This is based partially on the feedback from our annual listener surveys.
It's free to set up a form in Google. We share a link on our show and ask our audience to fill it out. Shorter URLs work better, so they’re easier to remember.
Eventually, we made our home office more soundproof by upgrading the windows and treating our office with echo-reducing panels that Garret made. We spent about $1000 on new casement windows and $200 on the materials for acoustic treatments. At this point, we had a real studio rather than just the two of us under a blanket. However, we still pause when there’s a loud car.
No matter what people say, it's never as easy to “fix it in post” as to get a good recording in the first place.
In addition to our better equipment, we hired a lawyer and paid for a trademark, and formed an LLC.
Describe the process of launching the business.
Before our podcast, we started with a website. We had experience with WordPress, so we built a blog. This was back in 2013 when we’d both recently rediscovered our love of dinosaurs thanks to the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
We decided we wanted to visit more museums, so we built a page that showcased dinosaur museums around the world. It started with just a few museums we visited. Now we’re up to 300 museums on our map—many of which our listeners have suggested to us (just one of the ways we’ve worked with our amazing community).
In 2013 we also reserved our handles on social media, but we didn’t really focus on it until after our podcast gained momentum. Our podcast is our main product, and making sure we create high-quality content every week is our highest priority.
We financed everything ourselves, though we had our day jobs for a while. After six years, we were both able to work on I Know Dino full-time.
Six months after we launched our podcast, we launched our Patreon. At first, we had tiers at the $1 and $2 levels. After a few years, we got some feedback and insights and changed our tiers to higher levels, where we offered more perks.
Our best perks are things we’d do for our community anyway. We have a Discord server so we can all talk to each other about dinosaurs whenever we want. Patrons can request a “dinosaur of the day” for one of the segments of our show. This makes it easier to decide which dinosaur to cover each week.
The biggest lesson we learned is that podcasting is a long game, so you need to be passionate about your subject.
Podcasting is also an intimate medium. Think about it, you’re literally in someone’s ear, sharing details about your life. Your enthusiasm comes through in your voice. We love talking about and learning about dinosaurs, and our listeners can tell.
You also want to include your audience as much as possible. Make sure they know they’re part of your community. We give shoutouts on our show to our patrons and we incorporate as much listener feedback as possible.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
Putting out the best episode we can each week is our highest priority. We want our listeners to enjoy our show and stick around.
That said, building our community has been incredibly important to our success. Not only are there the intangible benefits, like getting to know so many amazing people around the world, but there are also the benefits of having some consistent income from our Patreon community.
We have two main goals for our podcast: grow and monetize.
Grow
We want to grow our show to reach as many fellow di-know-it-alls (a.k.a. dinosaur enthusiasts) as we can. We do this through a combination of:
- Collaborating
- Creating content on other platforms
- Building our email list
Collaborate
We work with other podcasts that have overlapping audiences.
Content Creation
We create content on our YouTube and social media channels.
This includes videos on Instagram and TikTok, posts on Facebook, threads on Twitter, etc.
@iknowdino Which #dinosaur would you ride? #Dinotopia #PathOfTitans ♬ original sound - I Know Dino
Email List
We’ve been focusing on our email list and we got 400–500 new subscribers in the last few months.
One way we did this was by building out a sequence of emails we could send to people who wanted to know more about the dinosaurs that appeared in Jurassic World. It helped that we’d covered them all as part of our “dinosaur of the day” segment.
We created a landing page where people could subscribe, and paid for ads on Facebook, Google, and Reddit. Facebook and Google had good conversion rates, though Reddit did not. Once people signed up, we sent them a daily email for 30 days with three quick facts about a different dinosaur, along with a link where they could listen to more details in the episode where we’d covered them as the “dinosaur of the day.”
Most people have stuck around since, and a few have even become our patrons! Plus we got some lovely email responses.
Monetize
We monetize in a number of ways, but the main two are: sponsorships and Patreon.
For sponsorships, it’s a matter of figuring out what our audience wants, and then reaching out. We want to provide value to both our listeners and the sponsor. To do that, we always make sure we like the brand or product so we can authentically recommend it.
For Patreon, we regularly ask for feedback from our community and try to keep offering perks and benefits that we know they’d find valuable. The biggest thing is connection. A few things we’ve done that have worked well include:
- Watch parties
- A new topical segment
- In-person meetups
Watch Parties
We set a time to watch a dinosaur movie or documentary. Then we chatted about it together on our Discord.
New Segment
We recently started a new segment on our show. Over the summer, we had our first baby. As an aside, we recorded a lot of episodes in advance so our listeners didn’t miss out on their dino fix while we took some time off. These episodes were more like an introduction to dinosaurs since we weren’t able to cover the news for a few months. However, we got a lot of positive feedback and we’re looking into doing more of these types of episodes in the future.
We noticed that even though we weren’t recording weekly episodes, we still talked a lot about dinosaurs. They came up in many seemingly unrelated conversations. That got us thinking that we could probably link dinosaurs to any topic. So we gave ourselves that challenge and asked our patrons for topic suggestions we could steer back to dinosaurs.
So far we’ve only done this segment a couple of times, and we have already gotten some fun feedback. Our first segment was about sandwiches, and someone tweeted that after they’d listened they were stuck on whether or not a turtle is technically a sandwich. (We have a running inside joke on our show with our listeners about sauropods eating turtles.)
In-Person Meetups
Back in 2019, we went to Australia to cover an annual dinosaur conference. We were able to stay for a month, which is how we ended up in the Outback for our 5th wedding anniversary.
During that month, we took a road trip through the Outback and four states. For each stop, we had a happy hour meetup with our listeners. We had a blast, and we got to meet some really cool people we would not have met if it weren’t for our podcast.
We also earn revenue from our books, merch, and speaking events. We have a book deal with National Geographic Kids because of our platform, and our dinosaur book will be coming out with them in the future.
We’ve published a few of our own books as well. Our two most popular ones are 50 Dinosaur Tales and Keep Your Dinosaurs Here.
50 Dinosaur Tales features short stories of dinosaurs recently discovered that we cover on our show. The book includes information on which episodes people can listen to, so they can learn even more.
Keep Your Dinosaurs Here is a creative journal with dinosaur-related writing and drawing prompts (plus some fun facts about dinosaurs sprinkled in).
Both books help us promote our podcast, and we run ads on Amazon to help potential listeners find us.
For merch, we also look to build a connection with our audience. Our designs are related to our show. Last year, we ran a t-shirt design contest for our listeners. We have a lot of amazing artists who listen to the show, and we wanted a chance to showcase their work.
We got 22 designs and hundreds of votes, and in the end we added five new designs to our store.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
As of early 2021, we are both able to work on I Know Dino full-time. There’s still plenty of room to grow, but we have lots of momentum and we’re excited about the future.
We also created a comprehensive podcasting course, to teach people what we’ve learned (and help them learn from our mistakes so they can find success faster).
I Know Dino has been downloaded nearly 3 million times, and if you search for “dinosaur podcast,” our show is what comes up.
This year we started working with an editor to help streamline our production process, and it’s worth every penny. That frees us up to do more research for the show and more marketing.
Our future plans are to keep creating and growing. We’ve got a new book in the works, and ideas for some different types of episodes that we think our listeners will enjoy, and we’ll be building out more content on our website and our email newsletter. We’re also looking to expand in ways that make sense, whether that’s through new partnerships or creating new products.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
You can’t pursue every opportunity: you need to pick and choose.
A few months ago, we had our first baby. Part of our preparations, in the six to eight months before she was born, was to create enough content so we wouldn’t lose momentum while we took some time off to care for her. We recorded 16 episodes, in addition to creating our usual weekly show.
We conducted lots of interviews. Luckily our interviewees were very understanding as to why their episode wouldn’t get released for a few months. We read dozens of extra books and journal articles and watched multiple documentaries. We planned out episodes based on our most recent listener survey.
We also created videos and social media posts that we scheduled ahead of time. And of course, we let our listeners know exactly what to expect (we got a lot of congratulatory messages and some very thoughtful care packages).
Our baby was due around the time Jurassic World: Dominion came out. That made it really hard to create extra content around the movie and promote it well. (We did go to a drive-in movie theater very soon after having our baby and recorded an episode the week the movie came out—which was both fun and challenging.)
We also hosted a fun livestream with a very talented artist and one of our favorite people who worked on the Jurassic movies just before we went on parental leave.
But there were a lot of things we had to say “no” to. We weren’t able to make it to a press day for Prehistoric Planet. We couldn’t do an interview for Dinosaur Day. We had to postpone interviews with paleontologists who’d published topical articles and books. The list goes on.
And it was OK. We still got everything we needed to get done work-wise for our parental leave. And over the summer, we actually grew our number of listeners.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
- Studio Microphones: Rode Procaster
- Field Microphones: Shure SM-58
- Audio Interface/Recorder: Zoom P4
- Headphones: Sony MDR-7506
- Podcast Host: Art19
- Podcast Recording: Hindenburg Journalist Pro
- Podcast Editing and Audiograms: Descript
- Audio Repair and Mastering: iZotope RX9 Advanced
- Show Notes Creation: Microsoft Excel with VBA macros to automate repetitive steps
- Photo Editing: Photoshop and Canva
- Video Editing: Premiere Pro
- Website: WordPress
- Email Marketing: MailerLite
- Notes for Episodes: Google Sheets
- Organization Tools: ToDoist and Trello
- Membership: Patreon
- Community: Discord
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
The most influential podcast for us was the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. They are an example of good science communication, and they also do a good job with dinosaurs when they cover them.
PodNews is a good source of news in the podcast industry.
The Dinosaur Mailing List is a great place to hear about new dinosaur discoveries.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Don’t be afraid to invest time and energy in learning new skills. Connecting seemingly disparate skills can help you build something great.
Building websites, public speaking, scientific literacy, photography, writing, creating email funnels, connecting with people online, graphic design, audio editing, optimizing for SEO, conducting webinars, creating ads, constructing quizzes, shooting video, coding, 3D printing, event planning, product marketing, fostering community…these things don’t necessarily sound related, but they’re all skills we’ve learned over the past decade that we’ve applied to I Know Dino.
When you’re interested in something, dive into it. Build up your skills. You can use them later, either to enhance your current project or to apply them to your next big idea.
Where can we go to learn more?
- Website
- Patreon
- Apple Podcasts
- Spotify
- YouTube
- Tumblr
- TikTok
- 50 Dinosaur Tales book
- Keep Your Dinosaurs Here book
- Merchandise
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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