Melbourne-based journalists Zara McDonald and Michelle Andrews started Shameless Media in 2018 (on a bedroom floor) to fill a gap in celebrity news and reality TV podcasts. Initially a side-hustle, the duo turned their podcast into a fully-fledged media company with 15 staff. Their podcasts boast 100 million downloads, they have 1.3 million social followers across their channels and 110,000 newsletter subscribers.
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Shameless Media co-founders Michelle Andrews and Zara McDonald are buzzing on the eve of a trip to New York City. Dissectors of pop culture via their wildly popular podcast, Shameless, the pair say they’re off to the Big Apple to record some bespoke content in the city. It also comes on the heels of a successful London trip where the team tested how in-person meet-and-greets fly and whether overseas content works for their audience. Hint: it does.
Andrews says that four in ten listeners of Shameless are overseas, most of whom are in the United States and the UK. And the other 60% are, of course, Australia.
Shameless (the podcast), which boasts 100 million downloads, is just one facet of the co-founders’ now-burgeoning media company, Shameless Media. There’s also a newsletter with 110,000 subscribers and 1.3 million social media followers across the company’s platforms.
Those figures were not amassed overnight – the pair, journalists by trade who met at a stint at publication Mammamia – launched Shameless back in 2017.
“Podcasting was really fresh in Australia, and we just started doing a Bachelor-themed show at Mammamia,” Andrews says. “It was seasonal, but from there, Zara and I were thinking – there really was a space in the market, a huge gap for pop culture through a smart lens. We felt a lot of people were talking about pop culture, but not with an analytical lens.”
The pair say there were spaces for parents and men, but young women had so far been underserved. And when they looked for the kind of media, they wanted to consume themselves. They couldn’t find it. After teaching themselves the basics of podcasts, the pair launched and – very quickly – found an audience. They quit their jobs within months of launching and went full-time on Shameless Media not even a year in. However, they stress the intention was never to build a media company.
“We can’t believe this is our job,” McDonald says. “This business has been a lot of incremental decisions that have landed accidentally. I don’t think we ever intended to be businesspeople.”
That being said, the pair have managed to grow their team to 15 staff members – not to mention the business has been entirely bootstrapped, and profitable from the beginning. But it is their engaged and loyal following that they credit much of this success to – that and their knack for landing on great ideas. Both McDonald and Andrews say Shameless’ superpower is agility. Followers will note the pair cut their successful In Conversation and Scandal podcasts in favour of fresher content.
“It’s about failing quickly,” Andrews says. “You can’t be precious – you might have a good idea, but if the proof shows you are wrong, you need to put your ego to the side, recognise it and change it. We’re not sitting here saying we’ve got 100% of our calls right, but I would say 85% are. We just need to be open-minded to the 15% and recognise it quickly.”
Shameless launched two more podcasts, Everybody Has a Secret and Style-ish. Shameless is the only podcast hosted by the co-founders, and that was part of the pair’s two-year diversification strategy. They’re already off-platform, too, thanks to their long-form newsletter.
“We have always focused on an audience model that’s very diverse across platforms,” Andrews says. “We don’t want to feel like the world is ending because an algorithm or platform is changing.”
And, unlike competitors in the industry, the pair want to stress that they started from scratch.
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