Tony Swish Returns To Podcasting: Market Yo Chain!

This is the pilot episode of "Market Yo Chain" a podcast dedicated to discussion of marketing blockchain projects. The pilot is open-ended and an informal chat about marketing in this space. With myself as the host and Marcello Milteer and Demetrick Ferguson from TheBitcoinPodcast.com as the guests. The show will most likely mutate before the next episode as this was an off-the-cuff, free-flowing conversation that we thought was interesting and fun enough to share with the world.

On December 27th 2015, The Bitcoin Podcast an interview I did with them a few weeks earlier. This podcast was by a wide margin, the most fun interview I've ever done for a variety of reasons. 

The above artwork was custom made for the interview, click on it to listen to what I think is the best podcast I've ever been a part of. Their interview went into my history in music, past projects as well as my current work at Augur. The show was laid back, friendly and pretty much defined everything I love about a podcast, this obviously lead to a great relationship and since then we have all become friends. 

After my interview I made it a point to offer to reach out to some friends and acquaintances in this space to try and get them booked as guests. The relationship didn't stop there as Demetrick, Marcello and Corey have asked me to guest on the roundtable for episode #35 discussing Imogen Heap's interview as I had experience in the music industry. 

My latest appearance was recorded on Saturday, February 13th as I sat in for Corey who couldn't make it due to a prior engagement. In our talk, we discussed marketing in the blockchain space and it resulted in myself, Demetrick Ferguson and Marcello Milteer recording an extra segment to discuss marketing for this blog. Both Demetrick and Marcello have incredible insight into marketing, despite the fact that neither is in the field for employment. Our show went extremely well and thanks to them, I'm back in the podcasting game!

The last show I did had a fairly large listenership base and good momentum, unfortunately as the show continued on I felt myself less and less connected with the topics discussed, something lethal to the podcast. I love everyone I worked on the show with and still do to this day, I just wasn't into some of the political discussions and preferred a more open/free-flowing format.

After my interview on The Bitcoin Podcast, I immediately recognized the vibe and style as something I found to be absolutely perfect. Off topic tirades were encouraged, promotion of your own projects wasn't frowned on, nobody took anything too seriously and there was no format/outline or topics of discussion. Absolutely nothing is wrong with having any of these, they just do not create an podcasting environment where I can do my best work. 

One of my biggest regrets is that every single participant in the previous show thrived under a more stringent environment.....while I put in what I consider to be some of the worst shows in my life. Nothing is worse than feeling like the weak link, and the fact that they were doing their best work while I was doing my worst work made it clear that the problem was me. I hope to have all of my former co-hosts (Eric, James and Chaz) on as guests at some point as they all did an amazing job and are incredible people who are interesting as hell!

I'm about an hour removed from recording the new show. I don't have a show title, a hosting service, a brand, a website or even a clearly framed topic about the show.....and that makes me happy as hell. What I do have is someone I'm hoping will be a guest on episode 2!

In the show posted today we focus on marketing, something that Demetrick & Marcello claim to know nothing about.....a perspective that would clearly change during our conversation. Demetrick is a teacher and Marcello is a graphic designer, yet in many ways they understand the basics of marketing at a much higher level than many within Silicon Valley circles. Their perspective and all around greatness made this episode something special, it truly is the spark that made me fall in love with podcasting again..

The biggest dilemma I'm faced with right now is time management and internal debate of what (or how narrow) the focus of the show should be. I'm fortunate enough to have great conversations with Demetrick & Marcello and I'm hoping some of our discussions and ideas turn into realities!

After Augur's amazing crowdsale run, I looked back on milestones to see what worked, what was a waste of time and what failed, something essential whenever a project has been completed. As Augur was the first crowdsale for an Ethereum dApp, something that gives me a unique perspective on this topic.

This anecdote is what influenced my talk that was prepared for devcon1, but ultimately delivered at Oakland University after being invited to speak on campus by the American Marketing Association (which you can watch in full here). Being one of the only non-developers invited to speak at devcon1 was flattering and helped to confirm that one of the areas that these projects lacked expertise in was marketing. Browsing the awesome State of the Dapps website or watching project presentation videos from devcon1 illustrates the incredible potential of unfunded apps. If I can help to empower these developers with marketing expertise, a podcast seems to be the best platform and I'm hoping this will be helpful to some of these projects.

Much like my involvement with blockchain projects and many other things in this space, the future of podcasting with Tony Swish could go in so many different directions. What I do know for sure is that I fully support The Bitcoin Podcast and encourage everyone to follow them on Twitter @thebtcpodcast, Like them on Facebook , Subscribe on iTunes, Listen on Stitcher and finally at TheBitcoinPodcast.com