Party of One 2024 Year in Review
A recap of the download numbers and metrics for the year that was, and goals for the year that's coming.
Hello my friends. Happy New Year.
It’s the new year, and that means I’m starting work on building out my project plan for the year. I figured why not start with the project I spend the most time thinking about. Let’s get into the 2024 Party of One, and what 2025 might look like.
I’m also trying to write monthly on this newsletter, so if you’re not currently subscribed, now’s a great time to do that.
2024 Year in Review
Let’s start with the numbers, to give us something concrete to support our navel-gazing.
Episode Downloads
As you can see, approximately 53,000 downloads over the year, with a slight and steady increase over the back half of the year. This is encouraging to see! It lines up directly to when we started expanding the pitch of the show, reaching out to guests outside of TTRPGs, and marketing the show a little differently. That feels like it’s working.
Now, when we expand outward to the past three years, that’s where the issue emerges.
2023 was a rough year for the podcast. A large part of that was the changes in Apple Podcasts analytics, which led to a craterous back half of 2023 that dropped our downloads by close to 30%. We haven’t really come back from that, just now starting to claw back towards where we ended 2022.
So that growth? It’s promising. I hope we can keep it up. But at the same time, it’s promising growth at the end of a difficult, discouraging two years that has required us to truly reimagine what the show is and can be.
Guest Metrics
In 2024, we released 42 episodes. That’s 2 more than we released in 2023, and 2 fewer than we released in 2022.
Our most popular episode, unsurprisingly and by a colossal margin, was Episode 395 - All the King’s Goblins with Brennan Lee Mulligan with 1,787 downloads. Our next highest, for reference, was Episode 402 - Ironsworn Starforged with Joshua Meehan with 872 downloads.
Notably, in terms of 30-day downloads (not quality, every episode is great), only two games played with their own designer cracked the top 10 episodes of the year, with only one more in the top 20. This seems to affirm a general feeling I’ve been having that those episodes have been plateauing in terms of audience response.
23% of episodes featured a game being played by their own designer, down from 40% last year. Most of our guests (38%) were involved in some form of AP outside of Party of One; an intentionally large bucket but helpful for understanding audience awareness of the artform.
Curiously, two of the most downloaded episodes of the year featured the same game, Ironsworn Starforged. It’s worth considering whether a particularly buzzy game can have an impact.
A big change this year is that only one episode (A Fool’s Errand) was tied to a crowdfunding campaign, with a few extras living on the Patreon. That was not intentional, but, given the show growth in the back half of the year, very interesting.
Takeaways From the Year That Was
So, looking at these numbers, what do we learn?
Positioning the podcast as “an interview show wrapped in an AP” seems to be working. We saw steady growth in the back half of 2024, exactly when we retooled a little. We should lean into this.
Game designers playing their own game isn’t working the way it used to. Previously those episodes ranked among our most popular; I suspect the scene has shifted and that’s not the case anymore.
Guests with audiences draw more audience… That sounds self-explanatory, but it’s worth emphasizing. Our most popular episodes across the board were people with recognizable names and established audiences. While I never want the show to feel like clout-chasing, and I always want to make space for newer voices, less established artists, and people I want on the show, regardless of audience, capturing eyes with prominent guests seems to be the surest fire strategy.
… But a game with buzz can capture eyes just as easily. Ironsworn Starforged is hot right now, and people sought out that episode. We saw large spikes on our Triangle Agency and The Zone episodes from previous years this year as well, alongside our Wanderhome episode. Games that have a lot of buzz upon release (as opposed to upon crowdfunding) are useful to keep in my back pocket.
Party of One Objectives & Key Results, 2025
I hate so much that OKRs are a useful framework for me, gamers I hate how much I have taken from my corporate jobs
Objective: Grow total downloads by 25%, to a total of 67K downloads, by 2/1/2026.
That number tracks to the growth that we’ve seen in monthly downloads, and would put us slightly over where we were in 2022. Mind you, that is a stretch goal, but it is I believe achievable.
2025 Party of One Key Results
Release 44 Party of One episodes in the 2025 season (Jan-Dec). This gives us eight weeks off from the podcast, which feels like a good solid number.
Book 12 guests with established audiences outside of the Indie TTRPG Design bubble. This will involve shooting some out-there shots (and figuring out how to work with managers and agents), but the last year has left me feeling like this might be possible.
Feature 6 highly anticipated TTRPG releases during the 2025 season. I want to experiment to see if capturing game buzz upon release, as opposed to upon crowdfunding, can have an impact on the show. This will be tough, because the currently announced highly anticipated games for 2025… don’t sound like the kinds of games that mesh with Po1. But we may have to stay in frequent contact with publishers and build that pipeline.
Book 6 promo swaps and feed drops with nonfiction podcasts. If Po1 is an interview podcast, I want to experiment with spotlighting other interview shows and nonfiction podcasts to see if that audience can be converted.
Questions?
As always, I am an open book. Feel free to shoot me an email, or drop a comment on the Po1 Discord, or shoot me a message on Bluesky, and I’ll do my best to answer honestly.