We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Elijah Grayson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Elijah below.
Elijah, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. The first dollar you earn is always exciting – it’s like the start of a new chapter and so we’d love to hear about the first time you sold or generated revenue from your creative work?
From what I remember, it was January of 2022 when my co-host and I earned our first bit of money from doing the podcast, and we were both super surprised at how soon after we had began we were starting to earn. It wasn’t anything crazy, but that day I remember we celebrated. We had earned something by doing an activity we both loved, and together, too! It really wasn’t much, but we knew we had something going for us. Eventually it snowballed due to our community wanting to give directly, and now we have a Patreon where people donate straight to us. It was weird to have audience members ask about how to support the podcast, but a welcome one.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Well, my best friend (Matt) and I were just playing video games together until we both kind of remembered this online community around something called the SCP Foundation. We both dove headfirst into the SCP website trying to find specific SCPs, when we both realized we loved reading them out loud to each other. It was casually mentioned in that conversation that “it would be funny if this was a Podcast!” Weeks later, I pitched to him a full idea with scripts, procedures, a way to upload. And within a month we were recording and editing a trailer. In the podcast, we try to read all of the SCP documents from beginning to end, and our process changed over the years, but we very much kept the “we’re just friends who made a podcast” vibe. What we soon found out is that plenty of people in the community were craving something like the content we put out, which is essentially two good friends reading the SCP documents and putting our own commentary between the lines. We had several people directly tell us that they felt like they were just listening to a conversation between someone who knew SCP well and someone who didn’t, and it created a fun dynamic for the audience.
What we noticed as we got further into the project, was that almost all the other “casual” SCP podcasts no longer uploaded, and we were one of the few left. So we got this weird influx of people that were looking for this very specific niche of SCP content, and we welcomed them with open arms.
Matt and I have held to our standard of reading all the SCPs in order, and we’re not even 5% of the way through all of the SCP documents, with plans to speed up our process that are actually being implemented now. It’s our dream to do this for a living, and we have plans to expand and make more content every week.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
We used to script our intros heavily, and now we kind of realized that it isn’t necessary. Especially for a casual podcast. We got to the point where we both started going through the routine of the intro and not enjoying it, so we just did away with it on an early episode and we haven’t looked back!
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
Ask how you can support your favorite shows directly, especially if they aren’t super popular and don’t have that ball rolling yet. It can mean the absolute world to a creator if they have even a single member of their fandom reach out and ask how they can help. I know it helped for us!
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