One of the things that you said that kind of struck me is you said that if you had known
what you were going to face, the obstacles you were going to face, you might not have
actually gone through with it.
I think that kind of speaks to the whole ignorance is bliss thing.
But at the same time though, it feels like to me that one of the reasons why, you know,
you were able to fund it so quickly is at the time, like you said, you know, just a
couple of different conferences were kind of having tracks on the idea of podcasting.
You know, it was at New Media Expo.
It was mentioned at BlogHer, you know, BlogHer conference and things like that.
But there wasn't truly a space for people who are sitting at home alone talking to their
microphones to come out and get together.
So tell me a little bit about those first conversations, like those first, you know,
let's do a conference.
What was that like?
You and Dan, you're just spit balling with each other.
Like how in the world did you decide it would be an actual conference rather than just
another meetup?
Sure.
We had attended New Media Expo, which you mentioned, and we had met a lot of people
that were interested in podcasting and podcasting was a very redheaded stepchild, small
corner piece of that event.
But the number of attendees that were at that event, largely were interested in
podcasting.
And that struck me was, okay, here's people saying, why isn't there a podcast
conference?
And we hear that multiple times.
Like, okay, I thought that too.
That to me was an undeniable sign that there needed to be one, whether it should have
been Dan and I to start or, you know, is irrelevant.
We neither should be one.
We just kind of blindly jumped in and said, okay, let's go for it.
And that was a learning process to say the least, but we thought through as good as we
could, you know, we decided on Dallas for the first year.
And one of the reasons we picked that is because that is a one way flight for most
US cities in North America.
And so Dallas seemed to be central.
It seemed to be an easy place.
There's kind of two major airports.
There's Dallas, Fort Worth, and there's Love Field.
And so that's what we went with.
And then there was connections that we had from the podcast.
Like we'd interviewed people that had started other conferences and other niches.
And we had conversations with those folks.
We had a rapport with them, a friendship with them where we could say, hey, if you
were to start all over knowing what you know now, what would you do?
What would you avoid?
So we got some really good advice for people that were just very generous and gracious
with their time and charges consulting fees.
They were just friendly to us and which I, which I look back now and I realized, man,
that was a gift and we've certainly tried to pay that forward over the years.
But it is interesting now that there were several years down the road and there's,
there are a number of podcast conferences now.
And it's funny because all, all the people that have gone off and started these podcast
conferences are people that have come to podcast movement.
We just got a laugh at that.
I was like, they're like, Hey, I could do this.
And then they go off and do their own version of it.
So this is creating more podcast conference opportunities, which isn't necessarily a bad
thing, but podcast movement kind of was the first one really to be inserted in that spot.
And so I don't, you know, we don't necessarily look at these other events as bad or
competition or anything like that.
We're pretty established at this point, but it is fun to see how podcast movement has
added impact, not just in podcasting, but also in events for podcasting as well.
So yeah, it's a lot's happened.
So it's truly become a movement.
Is that why you chose?
So some say that some don't.
Yeah.
The name movement, I've always loved that name.
I remember in high school, there was a band, I grew up in Alabama.
I grew up in the South and there was a band called far South movement.
I always thought that was a cool name.
And then when talking to Dan about names for the event, there were so many names that
were just played out and we're like, we don't like that.
That's cheesy.
And we both, this is an interesting fact, not many people know about us, but Dan, I
both grew up wrestling fans.
Dan was actually once a professional wrestler, by the way.
And we loved wrestling.
And at the time there's a wrestler named Daniel Bryant, who was doing this, this yes
chant and he would get in the ring and he would just raise his hands and the crowd would
just go crazy.
They'd say, yes, yes, yes.
And I guess WWE coined that the yes movement.
And we were having a conversation one day and we started talking about that.
And then there was like, Hey, we should go to the event.
And there was like, Hey, we should call it podcast movement.
And we're like, yeah, that's, that's it.
That's the name.
So with that, I wish there was a better story of how we came up with it, but that's
how we came up with it.
So
I actually love that story though.