‘Call Your Girlfriend’ co-host Aminatou Sow: I started podcasting because men told me I couldn’t
“We did not set out to make a popular podcast. I think if that had been the case, we would have failed.”
Courtesy Aminatou Sow
If you want to get Aminatou Sow* to do something, just tell her she can’t.
“We were told by a man that women don’t make podcasts,” Sow said on the latest episode of Recode Media with Peter Kafka. “Nothing motivates me faster than telling me that women don’t do a thing. Turns out, it’s not that hard.”
Sow, a digital consultant by day, co-hosts the weekly show “Call Your Girlfriend” with Ann Friedman, a magazine journalist and her “long-distance bestie.” The show, which launched in 2014 before the “Serial” podcast boom, has reached as high as No. 28 on iTunes’ top podcast charts, a climb that took the hosts by surprise.
“We did not set out to make a popular podcast,” Sow said. “I think if that had been the case, we would have failed. We were really just trying to learn how to do this thing and the mechanics of it. And the pleasant surprise is that people came along for the ride with us.”
So, how do you go from not knowing how to make a podcast to being heard by thousands? Sow admits that she and Friedman “kind of cheated” because their network of friends and colleagues happened to include several tastemakers who would spread the show around — including “Girls” star Lena Dunham.
“Ann has been a longtime writer and editor in D.C.,” she said. “I worked in social media and social media marketing for a long time in D.C. It just turned out that when we launched a podcast, we were like, ‘Hey guys, this is this new thing that we’re doing,’ and some of our best friends were media influencers.”
“I know Lena [Dunham] through Brooklyn and just being ladies in New York,” Sow added. “She’s great.”
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* Disclosure: Sow previously consulted for Recode, helping to program the 2016 Code Conference.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
