We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Michael Wall a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Michael, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

Growing up I was heavily influenced by Star Trek. I loved the vision of the future that the show portrayed. It was inclusive and showed everyone working toward the common goal of improving life for everyone. My favorite was the 2nd movie Star Trek The Wrath of Khan. That is the Khan from Meisterkhan. The Meister part comes from my favorite Christmas special, Santa Claus is Coming to Town. The villain in the story was BurgerMeister Meisterburger. I combined the two and Meisterkhan was born.

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?

In the 1990’s I owned a couple of comic book stores called Street Corner Comics. It was how I put myself through College. I absolutely loved it. In 1996 I was married and a new dad. Marvel Comics went bankrupt and I thought it was over. I closed the stores. My son Brett was born a few years later and I always regretted not hanging on to the store so that I could share with him.

In the Spring of 2019, Brett approached me about doing a Podcast. I was thrilled to finally be able to share the things I loved with him. At the same time, an actress that I was a fan of was in Pittsburgh working on the Netflix show Mindhunter. Jennifer Nash who starred in the fan favorite Star Trek The Next Generation episode Inner Light was looking for ways to promote a new science fiction show that she was creating. I reached out offering to promote it on our Meisterkhan Facebook page.

I was not expecting an answer but to my surprise, Jennifer called me and we immediately hit it off. I asked if she would be interested in being our first Podcast guest. Not only did she say yes, but she drove three hours to do the interview and after, she stayed and cooked us dinner. That act of kindness on her part, not only started a friendship and working relationship that continues today, it launched our Podcast. 7 years later, we are getting ready to hit our 1000th episode.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

The seeds for the Too Opinionated Podcast began when I was in college at Marshall University. As the owner of Street Corner Comics, I often worked Comic and Toy conventions, networking with celebrities and comic book writers/artists. When Brett and I decided to start the Podcast, I reached out to contacts I had made during College and those were our first guests,

We ran through that list pretty quickly. I researched how to contact Managers, Agents and Publicists and created a pitch deck for the Podcast. At this point, we did not have much to highlight or incentivize anyone to be a guest. I chose to use our Meisterkhan Facebook page to promote the Podcast. At that time, our reach on Facebook was in the millions. I used that potential listener base along with the fact that we were a small town father/son team to attempt to convince guests to come on the show.

Eventually a few started to give us a chance. As we showed that we could capably handle an interview, more opportunities emerged. During our first year, 90% of our guests came from our requests. Today nearly 100% of our guests are sent to us. We work with dozens of the best Publicists/Agents/Managers in show business. One thing that really helped us out was concentrating on actors from outside the US. Canada, England, Australia, Asia and others were very open to having their stars be on the podcast.

Leveraging those out of country interviews helped establish a fan base for us and got us into the US Entertainment market. The advice I would give someone starting a business especially a Podcast is 1. Don’t give up if you hit a wall on your first few attempts. We had to think outside of the box and reach outside our comfort zone to talk with people outside the US. 2. Be consistent, we average 4 episodes a week. We show up to interviews on time and prepared. We treat our guest’s time as valuable and we always keep our interviews positive. We often get returning guests because they enjoyed their first experiences with us. 3. Never stop working on your craft. I listen or watch every episode we do. Brett does all the editing. We are pretty critical of ourselves and we are always looking for little ways to improve. 4. Be honest about mistakes. When we mess up, we own it and do what we need to, to correct it. 5. Remember where you came from. As we have grown, the star level of our guests has increased. We very rarely turn anyone down for an interview and we love giving unknown actors/authors/musicians a chance to shine. We treat every guest as a star no matter if they are just starting out or not. We often get requests for interviews with people who have never done a Podcast before. It shows the trust we have earned that we are looked at as a safe landing for inexperienced guests.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

We started as a Facebook Meme page called Meisterkhan on June 3rd, 2013. Consistently posting, themes like Meisterkhan Christmas where we post thousands of Christmas memes starting on Dec 1 and running through Christmas day, helped us grow our audience and reach to a high of 60 million.

When we begin to Podcast, we used our Facebook page to grow our audience. Eventually we added all the other social medias and consistently promoted the Podcast. To help with this we built a website, Meisterkhan.com and began to point our listeners/watchers to it as well as our YouTube Page Meisterkhan Pod.

We have never paid any money to advertise. We have never hired someone to get us likes or followers although hundreds have offered. Instead we rely on advertising, word of mouth and a strong reputation to build our business.

Social media is fraught with people who will try to scam you out of money or your business. You have to be vigilant. But even being careful is not always enough. We were recently hacked on Facebook/Meta. Meta was unhelpful until we included our Copywrite Lawyer. You have to fight for your business.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Meisterkhan.com
• Instagram: Meisterkhan_
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/meisterkhan
• Linkedin: [email protected]
• Twitter: @Meisterkhan
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MeisterkhanPod
• Other: BluSky: https://bsky.app/profile/meisterkhan1.bsky.social

Image Credits

These are my owned images. The last one is our first podcast with Jennifer Nash. I moderated for William Shatner’s one man show. Jewel Staite was from a Convention we covered as press.