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Case study

We couldn't outspend them, so we outpublished them.

How a student-run podcast in Dhaka grew with no studio, no budget and no polished team, and what it taught me about marketing.

Project
The Evening Brew Podcast
My role
Founder, host, director and editor
Where
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Since
August 2020

The challenge

A few friends and I wanted to build a podcast. We were students, with no professional studio, no production budget and no polished team behind us. Back then, getting 1,000 views across our platforms felt like a huge win.

So we asked a simple question: what can we do with the resources we do have?

The strategy

  1. Turn one episode into many

    Instead of recording an hour-long episode and hoping people found it, we cut each one into 15 to 20 short reels. Some got 200 views, some got 600, then one would suddenly hit 50,000. So we kept publishing.

  2. Make every clip watchable

    Accurate automatic Bangla captions weren't available, so captions had to be typed word by word. I recruited friends from the gym, students from coaching centers and people who wanted to build editing portfolios, taught them the basics of Premiere Pro, set up the text styles and showed them how to caption.

  3. Build the studio from what we had

    We turned an unused space in my house into a set. Everyone brought furniture, decorations and lights from home, and an empty corner slowly became our studio.

  4. Treat every reel as a data point

    If one reel failed, another went out the next day. Every reel showed us what people actually wanted to watch, and over time the quality caught up with the quantity.

The results

People started recognizing us, not because every piece was perfect but because we kept showing up. That consistency opened doors to guests we admired, including artists like Shitom Ahmed and creators like Autanu Jobayer.

People reached on Facebook
771.9K
in 28 days
Facebook followers in our summer 2022 push
3.1×
from 1,219 to 3,781
Video views on TikTok
418K
in 60 days, with 56,425 on the best day
Views on our Season 4 premiere promo
376K
on Facebook, which I directed and edited

What I learned

When you can't win with resources, you can still compete with distribution, experimentation and consistency.

Our quantity-first strategy was never meant to be permanent. It was how we learned. Sometimes starting small forces you to be more creative, and that's the mindset I bring to marketing and analytics work today.

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