The Six Colors Podcast turns 10

Listener Jason M. wrote:

I just listened to your recent appearance on John Gruber’s The Talk Show. I was glad to hear more about the subscriber program you’ve begun at Six Colors, and I have a suggestion for a subscriber-only feature: a weekly podcast recapping the recent posts on the site.

He wrote that ten years ago this week. My initial response to Jason was that it was an “interesting idea” but that I was “hesitant to do more podcasts at this point.” And yet I immediately forwarded his email to Dan Moren and wrote, “I wonder if we just hopped on Skype once a week for 10 minutes as a part of a Six Colors meeting and recorded a recap podcast.”

Dan’s response: “I think doing a quick, informal podcast, might be interesting…. Plus if we could do it with minimal effort/editing, then it probably wouldn’t be too much overhead. At the very least, it’s probably worth trying! And podcasts are in our wheelhouse.”

A week later we posted the first episode of the “Six Colors Secret Subscriber Podcast.” (The RSS feed and episode URLs were entirely security-through-obscurity, hence the need for secrecy.)

A decade and 474 episodes later, thank you to listener Jason M. for the prod, and to all the Six Colors members who let us keep doing this thing. (We use Zoom now, and it’s more like half an hour, minimum, but it’s still quick, informal, and interesting!)

If you haven’t heard the podcast, there’s an unlocked sample episode as well as a delayed episode feed. Members at the higher More Colors and Backstage level get an extra post-show segment that’s sometimes as long as the actual show, and access to listen live when we record on our Discord.

When we launched the Six Colors membership plan, we had no idea how it would go. I think literally nothing from that initial membership benefits plan survives other than the general idea that by giving us money, you are manifesting more of our work into the world on this site. Our old “magazine” is now a regular newsletter of site content, we’ve added a member-exclusive weekly post from John Moltz, and most notably, we added a podcast we had never, ever intended to do—and based on all my surveys, most members consider it the biggest attraction in the membership!

Dan and I both do a lot of podcasts. This one is different, right down to the complete lack of notes and the occasional sound of my laundry running. Thanks again to Jason M. for suggesting it and to everyone else for making it worth doing almost every week for 10 years.

That said, we’re taking this week off! Our next new episode will be December 5.