Well, thank you so much for being on the show.
I'm so excited to have you here.
I can't wait to talk all about PodFest.
So can you do us a favor and introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Yeah.
Chris Grimizos here.
I am the chief creative officer of PodFest and we are the longest running
in person continuous event since COVID because we've, we were very fortunate
to have a big event right before the lockdowns, but, um, just, we organize
an amazing community of creators.
The majority of them are podcasters and we do have a smaller community of, uh,
video creators and vidfests of YouTubers and Tik Tokers and stuff like that.
Now, and you guys also, didn't you break a Guinness world record during the pandemic?
Yeah, we set a Guinness world record and then we broke a Guinness world record
because the pandemic went longer than we all thought.
So it was like, Hey, we got nothing to do.
Let's, let's keep at it.
And we had over 5,003 people attend, um, virtually over a week's time.
And the second time around, we had over 500 something speakers, 12
languages spoken in, taught in.
It was incredible.
We were uniting the world, um, with, uh, podcasting.
It was pretty awesome.
It is very awesome.
And I've seen some of the free classes that you guys have on your, on
your website occasionally.
So tell me, let's go way back, way back into the, you know, when you first began,
tell me a little bit about your podcasting journey and how you started, how
you got into this medium and how you finally founded podcast.
So, I mean, I used to produce TV shows on terrestrial, um, through public access.
So we used to do live TV shows, um, serialized, uh, you know, business
shows, and then one was a political debate shows, a lot of fun.
And then in August of 2013, we hosted a meetup about podcasting and I got bitten
by the bug.
I went home, told my wife, I'm starting a podcast.
Uh, she said she's starting a podcast and we couldn't both do it because we were
doing so many events at the time that she started her podcast, Biz Women Rock.
And I became her marketing manager and it kind of dovetails perfectly
into how pod vest was born.
I would go all over the state helping people start their podcasts and I would
use my wife as a case study.
So it helped highlight her podcast.
And then after doing that, all these people said, what do we do now?
You helped us start a podcast and that's how pod fest was founded, um, with a
hundred people in 2015.
And since then we've doubled year over year.
When we moved it to Orlando, that really was our, uh, inflection point of
internationalizing the conference.
So, uh, the last big in-person event we had was 2020.
We had over 2000 attendees.
Last year we did a much smaller engagement just to keep things safe.
And we had literally an arena of the Amalie arena where the Tampa Bay lightning
played to host pod fest origins since we brought it back to the source for one
year only, but this year we're excited.
We're, we're going full force in Orlando and we're, uh, I mean, we don't want to
jinx ourselves, but it looks like we'll be over 3000 attendees.
So it's pretty amazing.