About Tack Sharp
There was plenty of listener demand for more Tack Sharp. The harder part was making the economics work.
It’s a question that comes up at least a few times a month: “What happened to Tack Sharp?” The alternative, which seems to come up more frequently, is a variation of the simple statement: “You and Dan need to reboot your podcast. Seriously.” It’s obvious the demand to listen to Tack Sharp is there. So, why aren’t Dan Benjamin and I making ’em for your pleasure? Why does the Tack Sharp homepage say that no new episodes are being made?
The flip off-the-cuff answer is that Dan and I always had a hard time coordinating time to create each episode. We live in different time zones, Dan’s a morning person and I’m a night owl. I travel incessantly and Dan has a fairly set family schedule. Each time we recorded, it was a minor exercise in schedule negotiation. But, really, that’s not really the issue. That’s just a handy excuse.
The real reason Tack Sharp isn’t on the air is that there isn’t any demand from customers for it.
You might be thinking, “Huh? What do you mean there isn’t any demand? Just look at all the requests you get!” True, there’s listener demand. But, I really hate to be this blunt, but you should already know this, you’re not the customer in this equation. The customer for Tack Sharp in an advertising-supported business like 5by5 Studios is the advertiser.
The growing number of high quality shows that 5by5 produces shows that Dan has cracked the code on building an advertising-supported podcast empire. He knows how to find customers for his product. I’m pretty sure that if anybody could sell Tack Sharp, Dan could. The fact it hasn’t happened says it all. I have no doubt that if somebody approached 5by5 with a deal that could make Tack Sharp financially solvent, Dan would be on the phone with me in 1/125th of a second.
Ok, so if 5by5 isn’t interested in it anymore, how about doing it under some other flag? I’ve looked into that. Dan’s kindly offered to let me take the Tack Sharp name and fire it up the podcast somewhere else. My good friend Patrick Lenz has expressed strong desire to team up with me on it. We’ve gone so far as to trial a few things and I owe him one (or three) for that. But, and it took me a while to realize this, it’s highly unlikely that I could do any better than Dan at finding advertising to support it.
Fine. What about doing it for the love of it? Given an infinite amount of spare time, and a bit more cash in the bank to support the effort, I’d love to do it that way. But, that’s not sustainable in the long or even medium run. All we’d do is get y’all excited and then fade out again.
I miss Tack Sharp too. I hope to collaborate with Dan again sometime, maybe do a guest appearance on one of his other shows sometime. And I hope to collaborate with Patrick as well on something I’ve not yet mentioned to him. But, for now, Tack Sharp is on ice despite the fact that there’s a sizable demand from listeners.
I know. It sucks. I’m not happy about it either.
On the other hand, you know what I am happy about? I’m happy that Dan was able to use the experiences from launching The Talk Show with John Gruber and doing Tack Sharp with me to build out 5by5 Studios. It wasn’t obvious at the time that he’d be able to make the jump from something that was a hobby into a viable enterprise. I’m incredibly happy about that.