---
title: "I Am the Media — Sami Miettinen on Myynnillä on asiaa #8"
titleOriginal: "#8 Minä olen media! feat. Sami Miettinen x Neuvottelija | MOA"
description: "Kert Kenner asks the question a salesperson would: what does it actually take to build your own media, and does it make selling easier? Miettinen answers with five years of operating numbers — why most podcasts die at twelve episodes, why he keeps almost no backlog, what the channel earns and why he does not maximise it, why audio-only is a mistake, and why podcast transcripts are becoming the training material that decides what an AI says about your industry."
format: "podcast"
show: "Myynnillä on asiaa"
episode: "#8"
hosts: ["Kert Kenner"]
date: 2025-08-21
duration: "1:07:43"
language: "fi"
original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rf2-VSe3Xgk
relatedEpisode: https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep345-myynnilla-on-asiaa-kert-kenner/
canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/media/moa-8-i-am-the-media/
---

# I Am the Media — Sami Miettinen on Myynnillä on asiaa #8

**Kert Kenner** opens by naming both angles he wants: how the Neuvottelija channel was actually
built, and what any salesperson or company could take from it. This is a twin recording — Kenner
appears on Neuvottelija in return, which both of them recommend as a tactic in its own right:
when two people with real reach combine audiences, the algorithm rewards it.

## The background, briefly

Miettinen introduces himself as, half-jokingly, the unpleasant investment banker. Thirteen years
in London at Credit Suisse and SEB on billion-scale deals, including the formation of Nordea out
of Merita and Nordbanken. Now a partner at **Translink Corporate Finance**, which specialises in
transactions in the tens of millions and has done a good deal of sales tech — Liidu bought by
SalesManago, Profinder sold on. The Neuvottelija channel sits under his own company, which pays
YEL, and Kenner cannot resist the detour: Miettinen calls the YEL reform the Marin government's
worst decision and mentions that an episode of his once titled it a pyramid scheme. His stated
ambition is to get it onto the tripartite table.

## Where the channel came from

The origin is specific rather than visionary. *Uusi neuvotteluvalta* sold well as an audiobook —
some 30,000 copies — and while listening back to his own interviews with **Björn Wahlroos** and
**Martti Ahtisaari**, Miettinen realised those conversations should have been published as they
were. Then the thought: an hour or two of conversation with an interesting person is a podcast.
**Rami Kurimo** of Puheenaihe pushed him into starting his own.

Five years later, in 2020, it is at episode 345, published weekly.

## What keeps it alive

The operating lessons are the most useful part of the episode.

**Consistency is not optional, because the algorithms are merciless.** A summer gap of a couple
of weeks is fine; two months and the algorithm concludes the channel is dead. Miettinen's image
is a shark that has to keep swimming.

**Most podcasts die at twelve episodes** — the number Kenner has seen quoted as the median. The
pattern Miettinen watches repeatedly: a good first season, then the good contacts are used up,
the subject turns out to be too narrow, the same guests get reinvited, and it deflates.

**Keep almost no backlog.** Many plan twelve episodes ahead, record them, and then discover the
conveyor is empty and they do not know how to refill it. Miettinen runs a zero-inventory,
just-in-time approach: a good salesperson cold-calls, so you cold-call a guest for next week, and
if that falls through somebody else comes.

**Name the persona, not the topic.** He nearly called the channel *Neuvotteluvalta* after the
book. Kurimo's advice was to be either Sami Miettinen or to invent himself a title, and the
result — half the social presence as Neuvottelija, half as Sami Miettinen — turned out to be the
better choice, because the two reinforce each other and the algorithm connects them.

The numbers he cites: around 40,000 subscribers in total, 30,000 on YouTube, over 10,000 on the
audio channels, presence on seven social platforms, and LinkedIn running at three to four million
impressions. He notes passing Inderes TV, which has eight people employed on it, and observes
that the top of the field has thinned.

## The multi-channel argument, and Kenner's disagreement

This is the one substantive disagreement in the episode, and both handle it well.

Kenner's position is that blasting the same content into every channel does not work — each
channel has its own audience and needs its own tactics. His evidence: short video does essentially
nothing on LinkedIn no matter how large your network.

Miettinen partly concedes and partly contradicts. **Long-form and short-form are genuinely
different worlds.** YouTube is now heavily algorithmic — the same channel can get 80,000 views on
one episode and 6,000 on the next — whereas Spotify and Apple listeners are loyal and finish
episodes. Short video is the most algorithmic of all, and a lukewarm proclamation will die there.
One of his clips reached nearly 300,000 views on TikTok because the guest was an interesting
personality, while a genuinely good company story from the same series got a thousand.

But once a thirty-second subtitled clip exists — his summer intern made a large stock of them —
there is no reason not to push it everywhere, **because the platforms do not talk to each
other**. Instagram does not care that it is also on TikTok. They function as outposts that pull
people towards the long-form episode. He is even on Bluesky.

## Money

Kenner asks the question directly and gets a direct answer. Miettinen would not live on the
podcast, and does not need to — Translink pays salary, bonus and dividend. But as a side
business it is high five figures, roughly **€50,000–100,000**, and the dedicated operators at the
top of the Finnish market do €300,000 and up.

The theoretical maximum for his own channel is about €5,000 per episode times fifty-two — a
quarter of a million — and he explains why he does not chase it: every episode would be
commercial, the channel would go dry, and it would die. Better to keep it enjoyable and to invite
guests on merit. He and Kenner confirm on air that neither is paying the other for this
appearance; they are trading what he calls exposure currency.

The corollary, which mildly irritates him: **guests should share their own episodes.** Some
well-known guest will ask when the host is going to distribute it, and the answer is that the
guest should too. Not for politeness — because the two audiences overlap only partly, and if only
one side shares, the episode stays inside one bubble. Cross-posting, tagging and commenting on
each other's posts makes the algorithms see activity and lifts both.

## The technical lessons

The advice he would give his earlier self. The first twenty episodes are effectively unlistenable
because the microphones were bad — he went to a consumer electronics shop and asked them to sell
him a podcast. The cameras, oddly, were fine. He would have **outsourced the technical side at
the start**, if only to see how it should be done — though he grants that learning it made him a
competent audio editor and video editor, and he now uses AI tools to handle the camera cuts
automatically.

The awkward finding is that **video is hard to outsource** in a way audio is not. Audio is small
and easy. A typical video episode is around 150 gigabytes, so uploading it alone takes forever.

From which he draws the conclusion Kenner does not expect: **an audio-only podcast is close to
useless**, precisely because video is difficult and expensive. Anybody can make an audio podcast
in a wardrobe at no cost, which is why there is an oversupply. The difficulty is the moat — and
Spotify is investing heavily in video. Kenner agrees, and notes he has always shot video for
guest episodes.

There is a related lesson about fixed costs. Miettinen shared **Ivan Puopolo's** studio for a
couple of years and learned boldness there — Puopolo is unafraid to ask anything, and Miettinen
found that audiences rather like it when you take a risk and that almost nobody punishes you for
it. When Puopolo moved to a cheaper studio, Miettinen faced doubling his fixed costs with a
studio of his own, considered dropping to a home setup, and concluded that fixed costs are simply
a motivator. The shark has to swim.

## Should a business person talk about politics?

Kenner raises the brand-risk objection and Miettinen dismisses it bluntly as timidity. The
consequence of everyone in business avoiding it, he argues, is that only one side talks politics,
and business people end up caricatured. His example of someone doing both without penalty is
**Petri Roininen**, owner of Investors House, who also holds a party economic role and won a
regional election.

His structural claim is the interesting one: **cancellation is dead, because the unified medium
is gone.** X used to be the one place where a coordinated pile-on could actually be run; now
there is nowhere to do it from. On LinkedIn the population is marketing people, and even an
aggressive political statement produces no real consequences. He invites listeners to challenge
this in the comments.

## The part that matters most: AI search

The forward-looking section, and the one Miettinen calls the next Wild West.

Search is shifting from links to **LLM summaries** — Perplexity, Gemini, the AI answers on top of
Google. Which means the retrieval layer that decides what an AI says about your industry is being
trained on something, and a large part of that something is podcast and YouTube **transcripts**,
which Spotify and YouTube generate automatically.

The consequence for a company executive is concrete. Spend an hour talking authentically about
your field, distributed across seven channels that reinforce each other, and the model treats it
as fact — so what the chief executive of a mid-sized firm says about their sector becomes the
answer, while a competitor who appears nowhere does not exist in the model at all. Neither of
them was ever going to get an interview in the traditional press.

Kenner supplies the sales version of the same point, and it is the reason he made the episode.
Buyers now research for a long time before contacting anyone, and the more complex the solution
the more analysis they do — and increasingly the agent does the searching on their behalf. The
winners are the ones with content. His own line, which he repeats: **a salesperson's workplace is
in the customer's mind.** Eighteen of his twenty-four years as a sales trainer passed with nobody
knowing who he was; the content changed that.

Miettinen's caution at the end is the honest counterweight. Being remembered for one enormous
controversy is the other edge of the sword, so the footprint is worth thinking about — although,
he notes, if a large volume of new content arrives every week, a small controversy is over in one.

Original recording (Myynnillä on asiaa): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rf2-VSe3Xgk

From the same session: https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep345-myynnilla-on-asiaa-kert-kenner/

---

Cite as: Sami Miettinen, guest on Myynnillä on asiaa #8 — I Am the Media — Sami Miettinen on Myynnillä on asiaa #8, 2025-08-21, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rf2-VSe3Xgk. Record: https://www.neuvottelija.com/media/moa-8-i-am-the-media/.