Radio Lanza v2

It has been a long time since Jimmy and I released the last episode of Radio Lanza. Almost nine months have passed since we published our 2020 — Futurospectiva. Paradoxically, an episode that was about our plans for the upcoming year — both at a personal and professional level, but also for the podcast itself.

Long story short, most of those plans — especially the ones concerning Radio Lanza — have remained as, well… plans, and never came to fruition.

At this point in time, the reasons why don’t matter much. A mixture of our current personal and professional state of affairs; COVID-19 didn’t help, either; but most importantly, we failed to find a niche for our content.

Radio Lanza started out early in 2019 as a “step-by-step” guide on how to launch your own venture. A collection of resources — from product, hiring, growth, you name it — to help entrepreneurs bring their ideas to the market. A process both Jimmy and I had gone through several times and knew a thing or two about.

A show that wants to inspire and encourage you to launch your new project. Also, an excuse for us to geek out on a weekly basis, and share our strong, controversial opinions around the products we love.

The idea stuck and, early on, we received encouraging feedback from our incipient audience. Even some listeners reached out requesting specific themes we could cover.

Pick one, choose your own adventure, or listen through. Radio Lanza’s end game would look like an approachable cookbook to launch your own company.

As it turns out, creating a podcast is not only about hitting the record button, start talking, and wishing for the best. Well, sometimes that might be the case. Yet, we wanted to do something else. Rather than ramble about whatever occupied our minds, we wanted to create a piece of content that endured the test of time and served as a reference for wannabe entrepreneurs. The kind of toolkit our younger selves would have loved to listen to.

However, by the end of 2019, we started testing alternative formats: special episodes around timely topics, interviews featuring experts, commenting on the news… and we lost focus.

We tried to regain control with a new meta-formula: documenting our own journey, as we launched — for real — a project we both had an interest in.

Then COVID-19 happened. The rest is history.

Radio Lanza v2

Fast forward to today, mid-2020: Radio Lanza is back. And we hope it is here to stay.

But again, we didn’t want to start talking without direction. We wanted to create timeless content that would serve future generations.

So, what is it about this time? Radio Lanza v2 will revolve around learning new things and acquiring new skills.

Jimmy and I are known for constantly having on-going side-projects and carrying out new experiments. We have successfully achieved some, we have also dropped plenty of them.

Side-projects are hard. Usually, they are the first thing we retire from our to-do list. Lack of time, interest, motivation, or resources… there are endless excuses reasons why we give up on them.

However, side-projects all have something in common: they are a great source for learning and we have a lot of fun planning and executing on them.

With Radio Lanza v2, we wanted to challenge ourselves through new side-projects that we are curious about and document the process.

The idea is to routinely launch these challenges and document the journey until completion — or failure. Each challenge will represent a season, and each season will last for three months. Consequently, three-month time-capped projects, four of them per year.

The key here is to properly scope and design each project to be:

• Feasible — it has to be achievable in 90 days
• Measurable — it has to be clear what the listener can expect (“learning a new language” wouldn’t be a valid project, but ”running a marathon in less than 3 hours” would)
• Valuable — a meaningful outcome and a positive societal impact (“eating 500 hotdogs in 5 minutes” however measurable, wouldn’t be valuable)
• Reproducible — any listener has to, empirically, get the same result following the proposed steps
• Comprehensible — the “final cut” has to easily guide you through the process without any pre-requisite or previous knowledge (if that’s the case we will make it clear at the beginning)

At a personal level, it’d be like having a long-life commitment with Jimmy (and, of course, the audience). An excuse to start checking off grizzled items that have remained in the backlog and, for one reason or another, were never revisited.

On the other hand, I hope we can share valuable content with our audience. A pool of resources for helping curious minds learn new skills, achieve their goals, and ultimately, create better versions of themselves.

Finally, keep in mind that Radio Lanza is a side-project in itself. Let’s pray for the best and meta-wish a long life and a healthy fate to the side-project of Radio Lanza v2.