We recently connected with Rick & Adri and have shared our conversation below.

Rick & Adri, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

In the summer of 2019, my brother Rick and I had just finished having a heart-to-heart about the abandonment issues him and I face after our father left our family in 2008. In that conversation we went from crying together about certain memories we share, to getting angry with each other about the different ways in which we now communicate with our father, to eventually laughing it all off by making jokes about our situation. The conversation was so seamless and so honest that it was then that i realized that we could make our story into a podcast where we talk about abandonment and the issues that come from not feeling worthy enough, and tying up the loose ends with comedy.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

The Chismes and Menudo Podcast is a comedy podcast that was started out as a way to have 2 siblings talk about how abandonment shaped us into the people we are today. At the beginning of our podcast, my brother and I wanted to talk about how different our memories are from one another, even though we both experienced the same traumatic event, at the exact same time, but somehow both remember events differently and, somehow both handled our emotions in completely different ways. We soon discovered that in these hour long sessions of venting, we also made light of our situation and ended each episode with laughing at our pain. We realized after about 60 episodes in that we had discussed our trauma so much that we had, in some ways, healed ourselves through comedy.

We became so close that we also started to trust each other with our dreams and aspirations and it was then that my brother Rick was able to confide in me that he wanted to pursue a career in comedy. So the podcast became a way to document his experience in the stand-up comedy scene in Dallas, Texas. He started to create genuine relationships with the comedians in Dallas and we started to have them come on the pod and have them share their experience in comedy as well.

As creatives, we also wanted to speak to other creatives and have them share their stories, so we decided that we would have on guests from all types of creative spaces come on the podcast to share their highs and lows of being creatives so we are very proud that we have grown The Chismes and Menudo podcast into a platform that people can come on to talk about the very early stages of their creative journeys.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

There was a point where we realized that we no longer needed to talk about our abandonment issues because we both felt that we had exhausted the topic. At this point, we realized that we had already gained some traction in viewership and we didn’t want to disappoint our very small audience by shutting down our podcast. There were a lot of fights about how we were going to keep the podcast alive. We both knew that whatever we transitioned to, we wanted it to feel as genuine as possible. The only way we knew how to be genuine was to just be honest with our audience and say “hey, we don’t wanna end it, but we don’t know what y’all want from us.” We used instagram as a way to have our audience interact with us, so we posted a question asking them what they wanted to hear from us next and the response was pop culture. Our audience had connected with us and our comedy that they now wanted to hear our comedic responses to what was going on in the world. We started to talk about music, movies, celebrity gossip, and world news with comedic relief. We were also documenting my brother’s stand-up comedy journey, so we had that be a topic of conversation as well. The pivot then became seamless.

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

What had us gain a positive reputation was just being as supportive as possible to the comedy scene, and the creative scene as a whole, in Dallas, Texas. We try to share as many posts of creatives and what they’re putting out into the world in the hopes that our audience goes out and supports them by steaming one of our guests’ music, or attending a comedy show. It has worked out well for us, and we feel it has shown our genuine interest in seeing all of our guests grow.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @chismesandmenudopodcast
• Facebook: Chismes and Menudo Podcast
• Youtube: @chismesandmenudopodcast