August 4, 2005

The Whole Foods of Spoken Word Audio

I had dinner a couple of nights ago with Asher, a great guy who is going to be doing some marketing stuff for us. We were talking about LearnOutLoud and the word that he kept using to describe our business was “organic.” He was referring to the fact that we’ve made the conscious decision not to sell all audio and video products under the sun but rather to concentrate on educational and self-development material.

The analogy that we drew at dinner was to Whole Foods, the natural and organic foods supermarket chain that is very popular here in California and catching on around the country. Whole Foods is very different from most other grocers. You won’t find Cap’n Crunch or Twizzlers there. And there are many people who won’t shop there precisely for that reason.

But what you will find at Whole Foods is a hand-picked selection of merchandise that’s not only good but (in most cases) good for you too. And that’s why Whole Foods is doing as well as they are. Because they’ve found grocery shoppers who are interested in improving their diets and in turn, improving their quality of life.

That’s what we’re striving for at LearnOutLoud.com. We’re not carrying the Hollywood blockbusters or the latest best-selling audio fiction (even though we probably could have made a lot of money selling Harry Potter…). Instead, we’re stocking stuff that is fun and entertaining but also is educational, inspirational and ultimately fulfilling.

In the past couple of weeks we’ve put up over a hundred educational and self-development podcasts in our catalog. We’ve spent a lot of time listening to these and reviewing them to ensure that we’re giving you the best of the best. There’s so much “noise” out there in the podcasting world that we think you’ll find this helpful. By the end of the month, we’ll be launching podcast.learnoutloud.com which will be a complete directory of high-quality podcasts. We’re very excited about that. (In the meantime, search our site using the word “podcast” to see all the titles we have listed.)

So we’ll continue our work here picking out the best produce…er, audio and video content for you. If that’s what you’re looking for we hope to become the one-stop shop for you. Please send me an e-mail if there’s anything more we can do in this regard. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the site!