Running a Community

My hobby for a few years was live streaming Age of Empires IV on Twitch. The real-time strategy game is immensely fun to watch and stream to the point where while at work, I was still thinking about the game. I usually like to listen to podcasts while working on graphic design projects and one day I wondered if there was a podcast that talked about the game and its updates and different strategies. I did a cursory search and came up empty handed. I realized that I had all the abilities to make one myself and so reached out to a few other friends I knew in the game and asked if they would be down to join me in making a podcast. Just like that, The Extra Sheep: The Unofficial Age of Empires IV Podcast was born. The bi-weekly podcast has continued through to today and I still coordinate with my co-hosts to produce 2-hour episodes. The community around it has grown too throughout the online spaces that house Age of Empires IV. We have about 200-300 unique listeners each episode with tens of thousands of listening hours to date. It's niche and relatively small in the podcast world, but it has afforded me many opportunities in the "scene" that wouldn't have been possible otherwise. Outside of the technical experience of editing and hosting a podcast, the greatest skill I've learned is managing a team of people to record and to interact with the community it created.