Hey everyone, Robert M. Lamb here, creator of seven Lamb, to
give some updates on upcoming projects. We are posting this message to all our
feeds so people can get a better understanding of where we're at as a company
and what's going on behind the scenes. Now, the stuff we talk about
here won't be anything new to people who follow us on Facebook, Instagram,
and Twitter, but we realized that we needed to reach our entire audience.
Although real quick if you aren't already follow us on all those platforms at seven
Lamb Podcasts. If you know seven Lamb, you'll know that we just became
a true business a year ago. But we've been releasing podcasts since twenty seventeen.
It took us that long to finally make enough money that I could quit
my day job and do this full time. Last year was my first year
just working on podcasts. Before that, I worked multiple jobs into the podcasting
on the side. Most of the money I made working those two part time
jobs went to funding the podcasts. I spent thousands upon thousands of dollars to
get this business going because I was serious about doing this full time. So
it took a little over five years of working fifteen hours a day and thousands
of dollars to finally build up enough of a following to make enough money through
advertisers that I could quit. By the way, when I say I worked
fifteen hours every day, that's not an exaggeration. I worked every single day
Monday through Sunday, usually eight am till about midnight, sometimes later. Usually
it was about five hours a day at the day job, sometimes eight,
and then the rest went towards podcasting, the only breaks being traveled time too
and from work, or when I ate breakfast, lunch or dinner, and
sometimes an afternoon power nap. I probably realistically only took about sixty days off
in those five years. It was rough, but I was determined, and
now I'm happy to say that I'm full time. But that being said,
I'm the only one who is. Other people who are part of this business,
like Jack Austen, voice of a ton of characters, has been helping
me along the way, but Jack works a full time job. Soda Zamber
Simpson an editor friend of ours. So does Amy Lay and Brian Messick and
Hope Ennis, other friends who voiced several characters. In fact, tons of
voice actors are close friends of ours, many of which worked for free for
those first four to five years because they were helping me achieve my goal.
They knew all the money I made from my day jobs went to editing,
hosting, other voice actors from Reddit, music, sound effects, computers,
soundproofing and other equipment and so on. It wasn't until just recently that many
of my friends started making money, not much, but I was able to
pay them some. The reason I'm mentioning all of this is because sometimes we
think people don't realize we are a very small operation. The reason why we
produced so much content was because for five years I didn't have a life,
and I have a ton of friends that were willing to help me out.
I understand it can be infuriating waiting for the next episode of your favorites like
Tower four, End of All Hope, Paralyzed, Atlas having to beat and
so on. But even now, I worked ten to twelve hours, six
days a week. I now take off every Sunday since I have a girlfriend
and I want to spend some time with her. But I'm still here working,
and so is everyone else when they can. The problem is, everybody
else has a day job, so we have the schedule around those jobs,
and when you have so many characters and so many podcasts going, it can
get cumbersome. And that's one question we get a lot, Are you guys
still working on X show? The answer, yes, we are still working
on all of our shows and we don't plan on stopping anytime soon. Another
question we get a lot, especially now, why do you do so many
shows if you can't keep up well. The answer is, it took five
years of that many shows to get it to where we made enough an ad
revenue that I could quit. One show by itself just doesn't make enough.
Plus, we never know what show is going to take off. When we
did tell her four, we didn't know that would quickly have a huge following.
If we knew that, we would have started earlier. Also, there's
a creative aspect to it. Right now, I am the only writer.
I love writing, but I cannot for the life of me right episodes of
one show in a row. I need breaks. I hit writer's block one
day. I can wake up and want to write horror, the next day
comedy. I feel the worst episodes I've written are the ones that I forced
myself to write to keep up with demand. I don't want to do that
anymore. Oh. Also, there's an issue with writing multiple seasons of shows.
It gets harder as it goes on, the story expands, the cast
lists get larger, and since we've been adding midroles ads in the middle of
our shows, we're trying to make episodes longer for our fans. The first
season of End of All Hope was way easier to create than season five.
There's other aspects as well that I've slowed production. AD revenue is not always
consistent, and sometimes we have to take on other contract jobs to make up
the money. That takes time away from our shows but helps us fund them.
Also, AD revenue is not so great right now. We've heard that
from multiple podcast producers and we've seen it firsthand. Basically, we have to
be more strategic now more than ever, because this is my full time job.
The moment we don't make enough money, then I'm going to have to
get a part time job and we're stuck releasing even less and that's something we
don't want to do. We don't want to move backwards. Some of you
may say, why not release a ton every month, like just release podcasts?
Well, we would love to but like previously stated, I already worked
ten to twelve hours a day. One episode can take fifty hours, sometimes
up to eighty hours to complete. I know it only takes twenty minutes or
thirty minutes to listen to, but I mean it really is fifty to eighty
hours, and some of our longer episodes, like the Finales, can take
over one hundred hours to produce. So it's just not possible for us to
release more right now. But trust us, nothing would make us happier than
releasing weekly, which hopefully we can get to at some point. So right
now, when people ask when is a specific show coming out, we really
don't know, and that's the honest answer. We're trying to produce as much
as possible, rite, edit, record, but there's a lot of other
stuff that comes along with a business, so it's just been pretty hectic,
and like I said, I'm the only one who's full time. We used
to post schedules, but they're always hard to keep up with, so we've
backed off of that a little bit. Right now, most of the time
we aren't sure, and since we aren't able to pay our friends a ton
of money voicing characters, we don't rush them. Same with the editors.
If an editor for Paralyzed says they need more time, we give it to
them, even if it's a month or two, because if it's not our
friends doing the work, it's someone we outsource. Two and we still aren't
able to pay a ton. Like I said, ad revenue fluctuates, and
right now it's not so good. We do have several editors helping us out
right now, but that's not always the case. And for nearly two years
I was doing majority of the editing. I still do a lot of the
editing. I edited every episode of Tower four. But when I'm editing,
I'm not writing, and that's when we get behind. It's a vicious cycle.
We're trying to work on it, and this is not a message to
scold anyone who's complained about our releases. This is also not a woe is
me post. I'm lucky to be able to do this full time right now,
and I love doing it. We're not looking for pity. That's not
what we're trying to do with this message. The fact that people want more
means we're doing something right. We just wanted to make this message so people
can get a little glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes, and everything
I discussed so far was based in production and ad sales. But there have
been other issues as well. Along with contract jobs. We've had voice actors
get married, take vacations. There's zoom calls and answering emails. Jack just
had a baby, Amber got a promotion at her job where now she works
more. Hope just moved. I just moved in with my girlfriend. We
got hit with a hurricane, you know, six months ago. Studio equipment
has died. We fixed up our studio, which is a two car garage
we work out of. We have business taxes now to keep track of,
and plenty of us have gotten COVID or the flu. It rains a lot
in Florida, and when it rains, we can't record. There's just a
lot of issues that come along with producing this content. Basically, we just
want to say thank you for everyone who listens. We understand the concerns.
We've been getting a lot of emails asking when the next shows are coming.
Most people are cordial about it, which is nice, but we have not
stopped working on any of our shows, even Chair of Swords and Cop Doctors.
We just need some time to get things in order and regroup, but
we think people will be happy with the longer episodes when we finally do get
them out. And remember, everything we release is free. And if Stranger
Things can take three years to make a new season when they have a huge
budget, multiple writers, and Netflix charges sixteen to twenty dollars a month,
we just ask people be a little easy on us. One full timer with
some friends working out of a two car garage. That's how we operate.
While I hate posting schedules, I will say this. Our aim is to
have new Paralyzed in Tower four out before August. Again, that's tentative,
but that's what we're aiming for. We're also working on a couple more side
stories for Patreon. We really want to push our Patreon. By no means
does anyone have to donate, but we do have a patroon where you can
donate as little as a dollar a month and it really does help us out.
In fact, we have such a great following and so many listeners that
if everyone who listened to our shows donated one dollar for the entire year,
just one dollar per person for the year, we would make enough money to
fund the next couple of years of shows easily. Just to put things in
perspective, we have a ton of fans, but AD revenue makes it so
we make just enough right now so I can remain full time and still pay
all of our expenses. Hopefully that doesn't change, but who knows. Again,
no one has to donate. We just care that you listen. I
remember talking to Jack a little while ago about wanting to make sure we are
as transparent as we can be with our business and production, and that's why
I decided to finally post this message. Hopefully it helps people understand our struggles,
and if not, if there's still some people who are really upset with
us and how we release, we're sorry, but we're operating at our full
capacity right now, and until we get more people on the payroll and more
people are able to do this full time, we're just not going to be
able to release faster, but we are trying and hopefully we can. Hopefully
we can release longer episodes, quicker, and get more seasons out of all
your favorites. Thank you to everyone who does listen, everyone who follows,
everyone who's listening to this right now, everyone who has given us a good
review, and everyone who has reached out with something nice to say. It's
really nice to get good emails of people who understand how much work this stuff
takes. We appreciate you all, we appreciate you listening, and hopefully we
will have some new content out real soon