Episode 122 · 2022-02-23 · 41:35 · Original in Finnish
Puheenaihe and 200 Episodes | Rami Kurimo and Leevi Leivo | Negotiator 122
Originally published as “Puheenaihe 200 jaksoa | Rami Kurimo Leevi Leivo | Neuvottelija 122”
The Puheenaihe hosts Rami Kurimo and Leevi Leivo describe how a podcast with two guests grew into one of Finland's most followed channels for public debate. It started as an ambitious website with three writers for every topic, and six months after launch they had sixteen subscribers. The pair walk through three eras: the nomad phase, recording in the back rooms of pubs and in a glass box out on the water; Rami's home studio, which carried the channel through the pandemic lockdowns; and the present studio in Pasila. Along the way they discuss why two guests at a time is an underrated format, how the Jussi Halla-aho and Elina Lepomäki episode turned growth around, and why they deliberately make episodes they know will draw downvotes. It closes on the sister channels, the dilemma of commercialisation, a target of four episodes a day, and why growing a podcast takes years of unpaid work.
Core theses
- Sixteen subscribers after six months is the number that makes the rest of the story legible: the growth came from years of unpaid repetition, not from a format insight.
- Two guests at a time is the underrated choice, because the conversation has somewhere to go that neither host controls.
- Making episodes you know will be downvoted is a deliberate editorial policy, and it is the opposite of what the metrics reward.
- Commercialisation is framed as a dilemma rather than a milestone: the thing being sold is the independence that built the audience.
Watch and listen
Summary
The Puheenaihe hosts Rami Kurimo and Leevi Leivo describe how a podcast with two guests grew into one of Finland’s most followed channels for public debate. It started as an ambitious website with three writers for every topic, and six months after launch they had sixteen subscribers. The pair walk through three eras: the nomad phase, recording in the back rooms of pubs and in a glass box out on the water; Rami’s home studio, which carried the channel through the pandemic lockdowns; and the present studio in Pasila. Along the way they discuss why two guests at a time is an underrated format, how the Jussi Halla-aho and Elina Lepomäki episode turned growth around, and why they deliberately make episodes they know will draw downvotes. It closes on the sister channels, the dilemma of commercialisation, a target of four episodes a day, and why growing a podcast takes years of unpaid work.
Sixteen subscribers
Six months in, that was the audience. Everything afterwards — the studio, the sister channels, the four-episodes-a-day ambition — is downstream of continuing anyway, and the honest inclusion of that number is what makes the rest of the account usable rather than inspirational.
Two guests, not one
With a single guest the host has to supply the disagreement. With two, the conversation can go somewhere neither host chose, which is both the format’s value and the reason it is harder to schedule and to edit.
Publishing against the metrics
They deliberately make episodes they expect to be downvoted. Stated as policy it is a claim about what the channel is for, and it is the most checkable thing in the episode — an archive either contains those episodes or it does not.
Watch
The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: Puheenaihe 200 jaksoa | Rami Kurimo Leevi Leivo | Neuvottelija 122. A Finnish edition of this episode is published at www.neuvottelija.fi.
In depth
The Neuvottelija AI editions carry a long-form write-up of this episode: English · suomeksi.
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People and topics
Guests: Rami Kurimo, Leevi Leivo