It’s funny how a little thing can begin. We’re just two tech writers who, after completing a day job project that ended in sending one of us to a new job and the other caught in the layoffs, said “Wouldn’t it be cool to do a podcast together?”

For so many people, ideas go no further than that: the talking stage. We know people who have talked about podcasting for years…we know people who have talked about wanting to write (or do other things even longer), who never reach the day where they say:

Enough talk — we gonna do this thing or not?!

In our case, we did it…podcasting not even half a year after a job went belly-up and we settled into new jobs long enough to say, “We’re in the swing of the new gigs, so…let’s do this!”

One hundred episodes later, here we are! If you listen to us, you know we’re some of the last people to boast about an accomplishment, but seeing other podcasts start up and die (and start up again and die again) in the time we’ve been doing Men in Gorilla Suits, we hope that what we’ve done — if nothing else — inspires others to do what they want no matter the results.

We know results matter to many. We see podcasts start and relaunch under different names (doing the same thing, over and over), until they get the numbers they crave. Go to the 14:50 – 15:23 mark in this video and listen to what John Green says about numbers. (He also, at some point in the video, points out that most marketers and social media experts he’s addressing would have advised him to, “Quit and start over!” instead of sticking with it — and now having a following most people craving followings will never remotely have.)

What really matters is doing what you love. If you bail on that and start over, did you really love it? Had John and his brother, Hank, stopped because they had low numbers, they’d never have reached a point of becoming iconic — able to raise over a million dollars in a matter of days for charities they believe in…all from the goofy things they do online.

This is not to say we will see a day when we have millions of Men in Gorilla Suits followers, but…it’s to say that when we say “This matters to us,” we’re not giving lip service as we wait for huge numbers to roll in. Our best month saw a little over 500 downloads. Our worst month: 143. To put that in perspective, Christopher’s fiction podcast once saw over 13,000 downloads in a month, and typically sees around 2,500 – 3,000 a month, but…that is a done deal and does nothing for Christopher. Men in Gorilla Suits has rewired the brain of a dyslexic, enabling Christopher to speak much better than any time in his life. While many would bail on the numbers we get (and probably not be as honest as we are about numbers), we do this because we love doing it. And, fortunately, a few big handfuls of people love this, too.

We can’t thank those people enough…

So here we are, 100 episodes into Men in Gorilla Suits. Doing our thing for no other reason than it’s what we like doing. Before barreling into the next 100 episodes, we decided to dedicate an episode to talking about what the first 100 episodes have given us…

We begin the 100th episode of Men in Gorilla Suits talking about if we thought we’d even get to episode 100. After that, we discuss if any episodes changed our minds about beliefs we’ve held dear to us…and what’s surprised us most about the podcast.

There are so many podcasts out there. We dedicate some time to talking about what makes Men in Gorilla Suits unique, and what we’ve hoped would happen with the podcast that has not yet happened.

We create every episode from scratch. In creating a show totally from nothing, we sometimes roll show ideas around for quite some time. Find out what topic we’ve not been able to tackle yet — and then find out our favorite episodes…and why they are our faves.

We’ve joked about the podcast going on until one of us finally dies. Were such a tragic thing to happen, what would the survivor do with the show? Also, find out if there’s anything we’d do differently if we could go back and start over, knowing what we now know.

We’ve created enough content that you’d have to spend almost 5 days straight to listen to what we’ve done. It’s easy to sometimes forget what we’ve talked about until looking back at our list of shows. We talk about episodes we’ve forgotten we’ve done before discussing what we hope for in the next 100 episodes of the show.

We’re coming up on doing this for two years without ever missing a week. We close the 100th episode of Men in Gorilla Suits out by talking about the most interesting developments in our lives since we started doing the podcast.

* * *

Whether you’ve listened to every episode we’ve done, just a handful, or maybe none at all but said, “It’s cool you guys do that regularly,” thanks for your support. We’d do this if we were the only two listeners, but knowing there are at least some people out there listening regularly means a lot to us. So…thanks for that!

 

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