Hey, y'all, welcome to Second Growth. A Friday check-in where I take the tips we drop in the Refine Labs Weekly newsletter and apply it for our own brand marketing team, stacking them up for our continued evolution and growth. I'm Steph Kignola, and this week is focused on QBRs. Because everyone is caught up in QBR chaos, including me, we kept the newsletter really short this week and linked a video from an episode of Second Growth Live where the team talked through QBR best practices.
It's a really great video, I encourage you to check it out. It's on our YouTube if you want me to send it to you, we'll send it to you directly. But it's a really great, we've got some checklists, we've got some processes, we've got some really good pieces of advice for you. The piece of advice we wanted to highlight this week is to remember that you are presenting this QBR to real people, not to a Google Sheet.
Don't get so lost in the weeds of your expertise that you forget to keep it conversational and focused on practical takeaways. And that's a lot of what I kept in mind for myself this week. We're all about practice what you preach here in this pillar of our content strategy. And so I wanted to give a little transparency on how I looked at my data and made the best presentation of it that I could based on the numbers, but also based on what I know about my content.
So those of you in the content space know how easy it can be to bog yourself down in the minutia of data and lose the big picture. Podcasts data is so limited. It's getting better little by little, but not a ton. It's a struggle to really pull big picture ideas out of that data.
And if you're struggling with that, take a step back. Remember that you know your content better than anyone else. And you know what the trends mean. Be honest with yourself and tell the story beyond the numbers.
I'm going to link a post from Evan Hughes in the show notes. But if you've read it or if you take a look, he talked really candidly about Refine Labs voice and messaging position over the last couple of years. And some of the trust we've lost with our audiences from trying to do too many things, trying to shift and change. We've confused people.
It was really easy in the past couple of years to get excited about growth and come up with new pillars of ways we can help companies. But our core and our heart got lost in the process. So if you look at our podcast data, without the story behind it, you might look at the snapshot of the graph and think, woo, this is failing. This is not working.
We had a huge growth spike in 2022. That peak decreased in 2023. It decreased more in 2024. And it is still lower than past years in 2025.
Just looking at the numbers, it would look like on paper, stacking growth is a failing content pillar. But that's not true. Really taking the story into consideration and knowing the data behind it, the way that we do because we've lived it, it tells a completely different story. That huge peak in 2022 partly came because our team was live three times a week.
We were saturating our own stream and ultimately exhausting our audiences. It was incredible info. They were great workshops, really good Q&A sections. But we weren't patient enough with ourselves to meter it out into a consumable pace.
We weren't too bright too fast, right? So that led to a big drop off, as we, like I said, as we exhausted some of our audiences. 2023 to 24, as you'll read a little bit more about in Evan's post if you go down and like it, we were trying to find our voice again. We released really good episodes, but they weren't focused or sustainable in terms of what we were presenting and how.
In 2025, we're called to action. We are so confident in our direction. We're confident in our pace. We're confident in our sustainability.
Everything has been so positive. Our guests have brought really brilliant expertise. We've been able to tie their tactical advice into our newsletter. We've been able to use that recording to fuel our organic content strategy.
If you break it down to look at just 2025, the podcast is growing at a slow and steady pace. It's a turtle in the hair situation. Where 2022 was kind of a hair and 2025 is the turtle, tortoise, the turtle. So we're really happy to be on this turtle pace and growing and seeing positive signals and success and positive feedback.
All of that, all of that qualitative data is so important when you're looking at content. So this year, we're, you know, we're beginning trust with our audience, we're reaching new ears and we're focused on our singular strategy of brand demand expands. There will be more on that through the year. For an update on my goal from last week, I failed straight up.
I did not make a single post about how to find your brand voice when starting a podcast. I let myself talk myself out of posting. I think the goal was too big to do every single day. I think that was too big for me.
And so I need to own that failure. I need to move forward from it, refine it a little bit. My goal this week is gonna be two. I'm gonna make two topics, two posts about the topic.
And if you're scrolling LinkedIn and you see me follow through on that, give me some hype, hype me up, please. And if you are working on getting started in your content, reach out, I'll hype you up also. I'm here to hype. And I'm here to hear what you're going through, what you're working on, and how this pillar is helping you.
If it is, I hope it is. That's all for me. I'll see you next week.