Thought Feeder has run its course. Everyone is getting busier, and it’s time to move on. THANK YOU to our guests for sharing your expertise and time with us, and most of all, THANK YOU to everyone who listened over the last few years. We’re grateful.
Joel Goodman: Welcome to Thought Feeder. My name is Joel Goodman. With me, as always, is the best podcaster I know, Jon-Stephen Stansel. J.S., this is a sad-ish episode. What makes this episode sad J.S.?
Jon-Stephen Stansel: It’s the final episode of Thought Feeder. We are saying so long, Sweet Thought Feeder, but we’re going out on a high note.
It’s not a sad thing. Podcasts run their course. And that’s what happens, you know?
Joel Goodman: And this started off as a slightly pre-pandemic hobby for us. And then the pandemic hit and we were not..
Jon-Stephen Stansel: I wanna set the record, we were not a pandemic podcast. This was planned before the pandemic. Our first very rough episode was recorded before the pandemic, and then I think our first published episode was like, oh crap, there’s a pandemic!
Joel Goodman: We wanted to create this podcast, back, you know, when J.S. still worked in higher ed and needed an outlet to vent some of his frustrations.
Jon-Stephen Stansel: And now I can just vent them all the time everywhere. Cause I’m not there anymore.
Joel Goodman: Exactly. Now you can do it at conferences
Jon-Stephen Stansel: Yeah, I just got finished doing my first keynote ever at CUPRAP and when they invited me, the one stipulation that gave me was, you’re not in higher ed anymore, so don’t hold back, I guess.
Just say whatever you want. And, yeah, it got, it got really, REAL.
Joel Goodman: So, J.S. we’ve had some great shows. We’ve had some incredible guests. I feel fortunate to still have contact with a lot of those people and, in fact, I talked to our pal, Eddie Francis earlier this week.
Jon-Stephen Stansel: I was just on his podcast. I think it’s coming out soon.
Joel Goodman: Eddie’s great and, it would’ve taken me probably a lot longer to meet him if we hadn’t had him on the show. And, it’s incredible the relationships that we’ve built just through, you know, 45 minutes to an hour of talking with people.
Jon-Stephen Stansel: Yeah I feel like most of the goal for this podcast was just like, talk to people that we wanna talk to and have an excuse to be like, hey, I really enjoyed what you have to say on Twitter, can we just talk in person and, and record it?
And, we’ve gotten to do that and I hope people have enjoyed listening to it. We’re not really going anywhere. We’re not doing the podcast, but we’re still gonna be around. Doing things. You’re not getting rid of my Canva hot takes anytime soon.
Joel Goodman: Well, and I mean, speaking of that, J.S., you’ve ramped up your social media spread of your pro tips across, I mean, I see them, and maybe it’s just the algorithms like me now, but they feed me so much of your content on LinkedIn. In a good way. In a good way.
Jon-Stephen Stansel: It’s called diversification, Joel. With Twitter, the future of Twitter still being uncertain, I think, you know, and whether or not, like at some point I just, know you have Joel, it’s just been like, I’m not dealing with this platform anymore, going to other places, it’s a good move.
I think everybody needs to kind of dip their toes into some other waters where they’ve maybe felt more comfortable or just, just kind of experiment a little bit more. And I’ve been doing more on LinkedIn, more on Instagram.
I’m not sure if I’m going back to do stuff on TikTok. Eventually I will. It’s just so much work. It’s so much work to do.
Joel Goodman: Speaking of, I started, so on, on Instagram, I was doing these frozen pizza reviews, with my wife and then my friend Sean Matthew, who lives here in Louisville with me. He and I, well not with me, but in the same city.
He lives like, he lives like 900 feet away from my house. So, he and I decided that we were gonna move that to TikTok. And so we recorded the first couple this weekend and it is so, so much work and their app is awful for editing stuff.
Jon-Stephen Stansel: Oh yeah, like why are the icons are so hard to decipher and like, what, what is this feature?
Like, which is the one, like, maybe I’m showing my age, but like I, it’s so much work, I don’t know why, for me, it feels easier to edit on like Premier or Final Cup Pro or like professional level editing software than it is on TikTok.
Joel Goodman: I want to be able to not have to record my audio in one take or like I know you can like do little clips of audio over your video. It’s like, great, I gotta edit all the video together first, and then I gotta go in and do any voiceover I want to do, and I’ve gotta like chunk that into small bites in case I need to rerecord something. Because otherwise you get rid of all of it.
It’s just a pain. Kudos to all the TikTok content creators that spend hours and hours in that app, because I don’t know if this is true, but there’s some Reddits and stuff out there that, that say TikTok favors the videos that are edited in their app because they want you to be in there.
And so that’s the experiment. Idon’t like it. I was happier just taking pictures and posting them on an Instagram grid, but, oh, well, I’ll probably get bored with that anyway, but if anyone wants to look at some frozen pizza reviews, I’ll plug The Crustodians, that’s like pizza crust and custodians together, on Instagram. TikTok.
But J.S., you’ve had a lot of changes, since we started this podcast, and what’s the outlook for your future? Where, where are you going? What are you, what are you excited about that, that you can talk about?
Jon-Stephen Stansel: You know, I just got back from my first very first keynote at CUPRAP, and hopefully there’s some more speaking engagements in the future. I’d love to keynote and do more of that again, and mainly in whatever industry. But I do want to continue now that I’m no longer in higher ed being an advocate for those who are still there, but also an advocate for social media managers in general.
I’m very fortunate and privileged to be in a position where I have a boss that is okay with me speaking out and, and, and doing some of those things. She actually, reached out to me and was like, hey, J.S., when you talk about your LinkedIn, and I’m like, oh, here it comes. She’s like, can you do that for our company’s LinkedIn?
Like, sure, okay, great. Let’s do that. She’s like, I love what you’re doing. Keep it up. Just let’s, let’s also do it for us too, so follow Chaotic Good Studios on LinkedIn. I haven’t started doing any of that work yet, but we’re still kind of in the foundational research and development phase.
Joel Goodman: That’s nice to even be able to have research and development.
Jon-Stephen Stansel: I know isn’t that wild? And have multiple people to do it for you? So we’re doing that and continuing working in the entertainment industry outside of Chaotic Good Studios, doing some freelance work. And I continue on Invincible for season two, working with Black Market Narrative and their comic books. The comic book, No One, comes out on the 15th, along with it’s accompanying podcast, which features Patton Oswalt and Rachael Leigh Cook. If you like true crime and superheroes, it’s gonna be a lot of fun.
Other stuff, well it was in the Hollywood Reporter, so I guess I can, I can say it, Chaotic Good Studios will be working on, the From Blood and Ash series based on the books by Jennifer L Armentrout. If you’re on BookTok, you might be familiar with that. It’s a super nerdy fantasy and very sexy series.
So excited to get a chance to work on that and, and eventually my wife just keeps telling me like, start writing a book! So hold me accountable, like message me and like how’s that book coming? Cause I just need to just sit down and, and hammer out some chapters.
But, we’ll see. But, follow the adventure along, I’m at jsstansel on all the platforms.
Joel Goodman: I’m doing the same old, same old.
Jon-Stephen Stansel: Bravery is growing by leaps and bounds and doing some really incredible stuff. You’ve got an amazing team. Tell us a little bit about that!
Joel Goodman: We’ve got an amazing team.
Last year we grew by 400%. staffing wise, and we’re still trying to keep up with work, which is, which is a good challenge to have. As a small business owner, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of circumspection that comes with change and growth and everything else. And so, we’re working through a lot of that stuff. We’re about to launch, some new services. And actually, by the time this episode is live, we’ll have some new service packages out.
We’re also launching our new fully-managed higher ed web service called University Insight, and essentially it’s a huge operational shift for some institutions and we’re hoping that it’s something people like. But we are launching with our first institutional partner later this year, and hopefully a couple of others. But we’re basically asking smaller, or anyone that wants to, to outsource their web operations and optimization to us so that they can focus more on the actual marketing side of what they do, because honestly, is web design and development a core competency that universities should have in-house? I’m not sure. There are people, but even like the shifts in the industry with how many technical marketing employees have left higher ed for greener pastures at bigger, you know, bigger companies, startups and things like that, it’s so hard to hire talented technical staff in higher ed right now because we don’t pay enough, in the industry.
And we talked about that a lot on this show. So we’re putting in place some options to let institutions forget about what the CMS is that they’re using. Forget about all the analytics products that they’re buying. Forget about all the subscriptions, get rid of all that stuff and let Bravery worry about it.
And then in return, we will be constantly optimizing your website for speed, conversion rate performance for all of those things. And, giving you data that isn’t just raw data at an analytics platform. It’s actually filtered through our digital strategists, and turned into real insights that say, hey, you should be doing this, and then if you want, we can do it for you.
Jon-Stephen Stansel: Yeah. In other news, long story short, Joel and J.S. have a lot on their plates right now, and podcasting is very time consuming. We’ve loved doing it. I think we’ve said a lot of things that needed to be said and some things that didn’t, maybe shouldn’t have, but I stand by them.
So, glad we’ve done this and glad so many folks have found value and have enjoyed the journey along with us.
Joel Goodman: Definitely. I will say that I am still podcasting, but it’s much shorter. Bravery now has a new 10 minute long short form podcast called Appendix B, which if anyone wants to listen, you can find that at bravery.co/podcast.
It a 10 minute conversation between me and Kristin Van Dorn, our head of client strategy and research, where we just talk about a big topic for 10 minutes and don’t necessarily solve it, but we, you know, put our opinions in place, and for 10 minutes, you know, I can talk for 10 minutes, pretty easily, and it takes a lot less time to edit than an hour long show, which is good.
And, we’re finding that a lot of listeners can also grab a 10-minute podcast and, you know, you can put that on when you’re grabbing coffee, basically.
Jon-Stephen Stansel: Exactly.
Joel Goodman: Anyway, J.S. it was a pleasure. These three-ish years with a small break, I’m glad we did this, and I hope we get to do something, similarly creative again in the future.
Jon-Stephen Stansel: Of course. That’s, well, the best thing about this whole experience is getting to collaborate with you and Carl, and all the people that we brought in, all the guests, so it’s been been a wonderful experience.
Joel Goodman: Thank you so much for listening to Thought Feeder for as long as you have.
We are so grateful.
You can find all of our back episodes still on ThoughtFeederpod.com and we will leave that up, indefinitely.
We’ll figure it out. But also wherever you subscribe to podcasts, the podcast will still be there if you wanna revisit anything that we have talked about in the past.
Once again, J.S. it’s been such a pleasure.
Thanks for being a good friend and a good co-host.
Jon-Stephen Stansel: Oh man, the feeling’s mutual. Thank you.