Moe Poplar had a scripted fiction podcast. Actors on microphones, sound design, an engineer, real money changing hands. It was an action adventure thing, and years later he’s still excited about it. But he killed it.
“It occurred to me — I don’t know who this provides a service to, and this is not a free endeavor. I’m spending money. […] If I didn’t know who this was for, this might just be a vanity project.”
So Poplar built something else instead. Bun Amigos, a travel podcast for kids and families — born out of pandemic restlessness and a clear insight: families driving in cars want something to keep their kids engaged. He knew the audience. He knew the service. He knew that as long as there were new kids, there would be parents pressing play.
If these field notes spark your thinking, you'd like the Podtalk Community — a small forum where indie podcasters talk craft, not hype.
https://podcaster.community/
The pivot worked. Bun Amigos has a defined format, a specific audience, a reason to exist that Poplar can articulate in one sentence. The action adventure project had something else — ambition, craft, the kind of creative investment that keeps someone excited years after shelving it. What it didn’t have was an answer to the question.
“Who is this for?” is the most pragmatic question a podcaster can ask, and Poplar’s experience makes a compelling case for asking it early. He was spending money on something he couldn’t justify to anyone but himself. The question saved him from pouring resources into work that might never have found a listener.
Except that applied rigorously, it would have killed a lot of the most interesting podcasts ever made.
Poplar’s filter is probably right more often than not. Most passion projects that can’t name their audience don’t eventually find one. They stay exactly what they look like: someone spending money on something only they care about. The exception — the show that creates its own audience, that builds a need nobody knew they had — is rare enough that citing it starts to feel like a justification rather than a counterargument. But the exception exists. And the filter can’t tell you in advance which side you’re on.
Poplar’s pragmatism is the logic of not wasting money. It’s responsible. It’s what a producer would tell you, and Poplar is a producer — fifteen years in Hollywood taught him that creative work without a clear audience is a gamble most people lose. But it’s also the logic that says: if you can’t name the audience before you start, the work isn’t worth doing. And that assumption is equally efficient at filtering out the self-indulgent vanity project and the work that would have earned an audience given time, because from the outside, before either has had that time, they look exactly the same.
The action adventure podcast Poplar shelved — the one he’s still excited about years later — might have been the vanity project he suspects. Or it might have been the thing that found its people if he’d given it time. He’ll never know, because “who is this for?” gave him a clean answer: nobody you can name. And that was enough to stop.
The uncomfortable question isn’t whether you should ask “who is this for?” Of course you should. The uncomfortable question is what you’re willing to lose by demanding an answer before the work has had a chance to create one.
This field note references the Podtalk episode “Structure with Moe Poplar,” published October 17, 2023.
This work was produced using AI language models directed through an editorial system designed by Craig Constantine. The author selected all source material, designed the creative framework, directed the editorial process, and made all acceptance and revision decisions. The prose was generated by AI under sustained human editorial direction.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://podtalk.show/who-is-this-for/