We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jason Stewart and Frank Raney. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jason/Frank below.
Jason/Frank, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
I learned the art of podcasting the hard way. I spent a lot of time researching podcasts and podcasters online, as well as reading anything I could find on podcasting and the industry. I also took a brief class from a successful podcaster that I follow on social media before we got started. I would definitely say seeking out a mentor or business coach would have been something that could’ve sped up my learning process. For me, my technical skills proved to be essential because I do all of our audio/video editing and produce the podcast myself. My co-host is a born entertainer, so his on-camera personality has been essential. I’d say having a limited budget has been an obstacle to learning more. I’d like to take more courses and attend some podcasting conferences this next year but couldn’t do any of that in our first year.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
My name is Jason Stewart, I live in Houston, TX and I am a single father of one girl. I am originally from Kansas City, MO, where I grew up with my co-host and best friend, Frank Raney. Frank still lives in Kansas City, and he is a single father of two boys and one girl. We’ve been best friends for over thirty years, and have been through thick and thin together. Based on our experiences, we decided to start a podcast together to help our young men and women. The podcast is titled Kings Can Move On, and it is available on YouTube, Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google, and several other podcast platforms. Our core mission is to cover topics that we feel will benefit and help young men and women. We cover various topics from dating and marriage, single parenting, co-parenting, mental, physical, and spiritual health, career and entrepreneurship, financial literacy, etc. The podcast space is flooded with shows covering a vast array of interests and topics these days, but we don’t think there are many coming from black men’s perspectives with the desire to reach our youth. We feel that we are fulfilling a need, and we’re committed to making a difference. We have very candid conversations about real issues facing our community with the intention of talking through and finding solutions to issues. I’m very proud of the work we’ve produced so far, the people we have met along the way, and the impact we are making. We are often asked where we came up with the name for the podcast, so let me break that down here. Kings Can Move On is about getting unstuck out of whatever is hindering you from growing and moving forward. As black men, we refer to ourselves as kings, so we’re telling people that we can move forward, we can move upward, and we can move on. Being that we are from Kansas City, MO, it’s also a play on and reference to our hometown. We’re from Kansas City, MO, which is KCMO for short, and we used those same letters of KCMO for Kings Can Move On.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
Our major goal or mission behind doing our podcast is to impact our youth and eventually start a mentorship program for young men and women. There are so many young people out here being forced to figure life out on their own, and we feel we’ve had experiences that we can share that can help young people. There are a lot of negative influences in our communities, and we’d like to be that positive force that makes a difference in someone’s life. Ultimately, our hope is that we use our platform to not only entertain, but bring awareness to issues and provide education and information to those listening.
How did you build your audience on social media?
Social media is an interesting game that can really benefit you if played right. We are still in the process of growing our audience across several platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. We don’t have it all figured out yet, but we are constantly looking at data from all platforms trying to understand the algorithms. We’ve spent a lot of time talking to other people that thrive on social media, as well as reading and listening to other podcasts and creatives around the topic of social media growth. The two biggest things I’ve learned are you must show up consistently and authentically on social media and you need to engage and interact with your followers. The other important thing is to establish a community where people feel they are taking part in your journey.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.kingscanmoveon.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kingscanmoveon/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Kingscanmoveon
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@kingscanmoveonpodcast3910