For the first time in my career, I made a decision that didn’t make sense on paper.

Last year, I started a podcast to practice speaking and share software engineering career stories that inspired me. Everything felt new and I was learning a lot. After work, I kept thinking about ways to make the podcast better.

I dreamed of working on it full time but it never made sense because I’d only ever lost money on it. Then late last year, there was a reorg that felt like a good opportunity to leave Meta early and try it out. So I decided to use six months of my savings to see if I could make it work.

At first, it was glorious. I interviewed people like Bjarne Stroustrup (Creator of C++) who I’d looked up to ever since I started learning C++ as my first programming language. It was a lot of fun studying for each interview and getting into video production. But doing everything myself had an obvious downside. If I stopped, everything stopped.

I put so much time into each episode that even though I was working more than ever, I could barely keep up with my goal of one episode per week. That’s because I personally reviewed every second of footage and did deep research on each guest before interviews.

Four months into my six-month runway, I still hadn’t made a dollar. I’d been reluctant to monetize since finding sponsors felt like time taken away from the fun parts of creating content. But as my bank account got closer to zero, I knew I couldn’t put it off much longer.

Then I got sick. I caught what felt like a strong flu that had me bedridden for a few days. Lying there, drifting in and out of consciousness, I kept wondering if I’d even be able to publish an episode that Monday. Because I couldn’t work suddenly everything felt fragile for the first time.

Thankfully, I had one episode already mostly finished so that got me through that week of sickness. And because of that week I finally started taking sponsors seriously despite my reluctance. I also found ways to make my recording process more efficient so I could do two episodes a week to get ahead although it was an insane grind.

With some luck and hard work, great sponsors like Cursor and then WorkOS signed on, which brought money in. I also cut my burn a lot by recording every episode myself. Aside from saving money the scrappiness has been a fun way to capture the essence of some of my guests. For instance, the interview with Bjarne was shot in his study against a wall of his own C++ books with two iPhones.

I earmarked 6 months of money and it’s been 9 months now. The podcast sustains itself and my other passion project (an ergonomic keyboard I wish existed) raised the funds we needed within a day of launching on Kickstarter. Since then, we hit our first milestone of real production hardware off the assembly line. If you want one, you can still sign up on Kickstarter.

My career decision didn’t make sense on paper then and it still doesn’t. For instance, I actually expect the keyboard project to lose me money in aggregate. But the goal with my podcast and keyboard wasn’t to make money. Otherwise I would’ve stayed at Meta.

I often think about how lucky I am to get to work on my passion projects. I just want to say thank you to everyone who has supported my work along the way. Without your support, the podcast would have died and the keyboard would have never seen the light of day.

What’s next?

I’m going to keep working on my passion projects as long as I continue to earn my keep:

1. The Peterman Pod - The podcast has grown so I hope I can leverage that to bring on better guests for you all. If you want to see how it’s going you can look at the Spotify podcast charts in tech. I usually struggle to stay in the top 50 but I’m going to keep pushing here! If you want to help out, I’d greatly appreciate if you dropped a rating for the podcast on Spotify.

2. Compose (my ergonomic keyboard) - I’ve been using the first sample off the assembly line as my main keyboard for the last two weeks. It’s a surreal feeling seeing the abstract become physical. It’s exactly what I wanted and my next goal is to bring it to production at the highest possible quality bar I can. We’re on track to ship early next year (follow along here if interested).

As long as the podcast covers itself and my living costs, I plan to keep pushing on these goals. I hope what I produce is good enough that you’ll continue to supporting it. And if you want to follow along you can also subscribe here.

Thanks for reading,
Ryan Peterman

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