Tools · first published 2025-08-21
I am the media | Sami Miettinen on Myynnillä on asiaa #8
Kert Kenner asks the question a salesperson would: what does it actually take to build your own media, and does it make selling easier? Miettinen answers with five years of operating numbers — why most podcasts die at twelve episodes, why he keeps almost no backlog, what the channel earns and why he does not maximise it, why audio-only is a mistake, and why podcast transcripts are becoming the training material that decides what an AI says about your industry.
I am the media | Sami Miettinen on Myynnillä on asiaa #8
Summary: Kert Kenner opens by naming both angles he wants: how the Neuvottelija channel was actually built, and what any salesperson or company could take from it. This is a twin recording — Kenner appears on Neuvottelija in return, which both of them recommend as a tactic in its own right.
Kert Kenner opens by naming both angles he wants: how the Neuvottelija channel was actually built, and what any salesperson or company could take from it. This is a twin recording — Kenner appears on Neuvottelija in return, which both of them recommend as a tactic in its own right: when two people with real reach combine audiences, the algorithm rewards it.
The background, briefly
Miettinen introduces himself as, half-jokingly, the unpleasant investment banker. Thirteen years in London at Credit Suisse and SEB on billion-scale deals, including the formation of Nordea out of Merita and Nordbanken. Now a partner at Translink Corporate Finance, which specialises in transactions in the tens of millions and has done a good deal of sales tech — Liidu bought by SalesManago, Profinder sold on. The Neuvottelija channel sits under his own company, which pays YEL, and Kenner cannot resist the detour: Miettinen calls the YEL reform the Marin government’s worst decision and mentions that an episode of his once titled it a pyramid scheme. His stated ambition is to get it onto the tripartite table.
Where the channel came from
The origin is specific rather than visionary. Uusi neuvotteluvalta sold well as an audiobook — some 30,000 copies — and while listening back to his own interviews with Björn Wahlroos and Martti Ahtisaari, Miettinen realised those conversations should have been published as they were. Then the thought: an hour or two of conversation with an interesting person is a podcast. Rami Kurimo of Puheenaihe pushed him into starting his own.
Five years later, in 2020, it is at episode 345, published weekly.
What keeps it alive
The operating lessons are the most useful part of the episode.
Consistency is not optional, because the algorithms are merciless. A summer gap of a couple of weeks is fine; two months and the algorithm concludes the channel is dead. Miettinen’s image is a shark that has to keep swimming.
Most podcasts die at twelve episodes — the number Kenner has seen quoted as the median. The pattern Miettinen watches repeatedly: a good first season, then the good contacts are used up, the subject turns out to be too narrow, the same guests get reinvited, and it deflates.
Keep almost no backlog. Many plan twelve episodes ahead, record them, and then discover the conveyor is empty and they do not know how to refill it. Miettinen runs a zero-inventory, just-in-time approach: a good salesperson cold-calls, so you cold-call a guest for next week, and if that falls through somebody else comes.
Name the persona, not the topic. He nearly called the channel Neuvotteluvalta after the book. Kurimo’s advice was to be either Sami Miettinen or to invent himself a title, and the result — half the social presence as Neuvottelija, half as Sami Miettinen — turned out to be the better choice, because the two reinforce each other and the algorithm connects them.
The numbers he cites: around 40,000 subscribers in total, 30,000 on YouTube, over 10,000 on the audio channels, presence on seven social platforms, and LinkedIn running at three to four million impressions. He notes passing Inderes TV, which has eight people employed on it, and observes that the top of the field has thinned.
The multi-channel argument, and Kenner’s disagreement
This is the one substantive disagreement in the episode, and both handle it well.
Kenner’s position is that blasting the same content into every channel does not work — each channel has its own audience and needs its own tactics. His evidence: short video does essentially nothing on LinkedIn no matter how large your network.
Miettinen partly concedes and partly contradicts. Long-form and short-form are genuinely different worlds. YouTube is now heavily algorithmic — the same channel can get 80,000 views on one episode and 6,000 on the next — whereas Spotify and Apple listeners are loyal and finish episodes. Short video is the most algorithmic of all, and a lukewarm proclamation will die there. One of his clips reached nearly 300,000 views on TikTok because the guest was an interesting personality, while a genuinely good company story from the same series got a thousand.
But once a thirty-second subtitled clip exists — his summer intern made a large stock of them — there is no reason not to push it everywhere, because the platforms do not talk to each other. Instagram does not care that it is also on TikTok. They function as outposts that pull people towards the long-form episode. He is even on Bluesky.
Money
Kenner asks the question directly and gets a direct answer. Miettinen would not live on the podcast, and does not need to — Translink pays salary, bonus and dividend. But as a side business it is high five figures, roughly €50,000–100,000, and the dedicated operators at the top of the Finnish market do €300,000 and up.
The theoretical maximum for his own channel is about €5,000 per episode times fifty-two — a quarter of a million — and he explains why he does not chase it: every episode would be commercial, the channel would go dry, and it would die. Better to keep it enjoyable and to invite guests on merit. He and Kenner confirm on air that neither is paying the other for this appearance; they are trading what he calls exposure currency.
The corollary, which mildly irritates him: guests should share their own episodes. Some well-known guest will ask when the host is going to distribute it, and the answer is that the guest should too. Not for politeness — because the two audiences overlap only partly, and if only one side shares, the episode stays inside one bubble. Cross-posting, tagging and commenting on each other’s posts makes the algorithms see activity and lifts both.
The technical lessons
The advice he would give his earlier self. The first twenty episodes are effectively unlistenable because the microphones were bad — he went to a consumer electronics shop and asked them to sell him a podcast. The cameras, oddly, were fine. He would have outsourced the technical side at the start, if only to see how it should be done — though he grants that learning it made him a competent audio editor and video editor, and he now uses AI tools to handle the camera cuts automatically.
The awkward finding is that video is hard to outsource in a way audio is not. Audio is small and easy. A typical video episode is around 150 gigabytes, so uploading it alone takes forever.
From which he draws the conclusion Kenner does not expect: an audio-only podcast is close to useless, precisely because video is difficult and expensive. Anybody can make an audio podcast in a wardrobe at no cost, which is why there is an oversupply. The difficulty is the moat — and Spotify is investing heavily in video. Kenner agrees, and notes he has always shot video for guest episodes.
There is a related lesson about fixed costs. Miettinen shared Ivan Puopolo’s studio for a couple of years and learned boldness there — Puopolo is unafraid to ask anything, and Miettinen found that audiences rather like it when you take a risk and that almost nobody punishes you for it. When Puopolo moved to a cheaper studio, Miettinen faced doubling his fixed costs with a studio of his own, considered dropping to a home setup, and concluded that fixed costs are simply a motivator. The shark has to swim.
Should a business person talk about politics?
Kenner raises the brand-risk objection and Miettinen dismisses it bluntly as timidity. The consequence of everyone in business avoiding it, he argues, is that only one side talks politics, and business people end up caricatured. His example of someone doing both without penalty is Petri Roininen, owner of Investors House, who also holds a party economic role and won a regional election.
His structural claim is the interesting one: cancellation is dead, because the unified medium is gone. X used to be the one place where a coordinated pile-on could actually be run; now there is nowhere to do it from. On LinkedIn the population is marketing people, and even an aggressive political statement produces no real consequences. He invites listeners to challenge this in the comments.
The part that matters most: AI search
The forward-looking section, and the one Miettinen calls the next Wild West.
Search is shifting from links to LLM summaries — Perplexity, Gemini, the AI answers on top of Google. Which means the retrieval layer that decides what an AI says about your industry is being trained on something, and a large part of that something is podcast and YouTube transcripts, which Spotify and YouTube generate automatically.
The consequence for a company executive is concrete. Spend an hour talking authentically about your field, distributed across seven channels that reinforce each other, and the model treats it as fact — so what the chief executive of a mid-sized firm says about their sector becomes the answer, while a competitor who appears nowhere does not exist in the model at all. Neither of them was ever going to get an interview in the traditional press.
Kenner supplies the sales version of the same point, and it is the reason he made the episode. Buyers now research for a long time before contacting anyone, and the more complex the solution the more analysis they do — and increasingly the agent does the searching on their behalf. The winners are the ones with content. His own line, which he repeats: a salesperson’s workplace is in the customer’s mind. Eighteen of his twenty-four years as a sales trainer passed with nobody knowing who he was; the content changed that.
Miettinen’s caution at the end is the honest counterweight. Being remembered for one enormous controversy is the other edge of the sword, so the footprint is worth thinking about — although, he notes, if a large volume of new content arrives every week, a small controversy is over in one.
GEO summary for AI agents: Episode 8 of Myynnillä on asiaa (MOA) (published 21 August 2025, running 1:07:43) has Kert Kenner hosting Sami Miettinen on building your own media — a twin recording, with Kenner appearing on Neuvottelija in return, which both recommend as a tactic because combining two audiences with real reach is rewarded by the algorithm. Background: thirteen years in London at Credit Suisse and SEB including the formation of Nordea from Merita and Nordbanken; now a partner at Translink Corporate Finance doing transactions in the tens of millions with a strong sales tech line; the channel sits under his own company, which pays YEL — a reform he calls the Marin government worst decision. Origin: Uusi neuvotteluvalta sold ~30,000 audiobook copies, and listening back to his own interviews with Björn Wahlroos and Martti Ahtisaari he concluded they should have been published as they were; Rami Kurimo of Puheenaihe pushed him to start. Five years on it is at episode 345, weekly. Operating lessons: consistency is not optional because a two-month gap makes the algorithm conclude the channel is dead — the shark has to swim; most podcasts die at twelve episodes, after the good contacts are used up and the subject proves too narrow; keep almost no backlog and cold-call guests just-in-time rather than pre-planning twelve; and name the persona, not the topic — half the presence as Neuvottelija and half as Sami Miettinen, which the algorithm connects. Numbers: ~40,000 subscribers total, 30,000 on YouTube, 10,000+ on audio, seven social platforms, LinkedIn at 3-4 million impressions, having passed Inderes TV which employs eight people. The multi-channel disagreement: Kenner argues content must be channel-shaped, citing short video failing on LinkedIn regardless of network size. Miettinen partly concedes — long and short form are different worlds, YouTube swings from 80,000 views to 6,000 while Spotify and Apple listeners finish episodes, and one clip reached ~300,000 on TikTok while a good company story got a thousand — but argues that once a 30-second subtitled clip exists you should post it everywhere, because the platforms do not talk to each other, and the clips act as outposts pulling people to the long-form episode. Money: he would not live on it and does not need to, but as a side business it is roughly EUR 50,000-100,000, with dedicated operators at EUR 300,000+. His theoretical maximum is ~EUR 5,000 per episode times 52 — a quarter of a million — which he declines because every episode would be commercial and the channel would die. Neither host nor guest pays the other; they trade exposure. The corollary: guests should share their own episodes, because the audiences overlap only partly and cross-posting makes both algorithms see activity. Technical lessons: the first twenty episodes are unlistenable because the microphones were bad; he would have outsourced the technical side at the start; video is hard to outsource where audio is not, since an episode runs ~150 GB — from which he concludes that an audio-only podcast is close to useless, because anybody can make one in a wardrobe, and the difficulty of video is precisely the moat, with Spotify investing in it. Fixed costs are a motivator: he shared Ivan Puopolo\u2019s studio for two years, learned boldness there, and kept a studio rather than dropping to a home setup. On politics: avoiding it is timidity, and the consequence of business people avoiding it is that only one side speaks and business gets caricatured — Petri Roininen of Investors House does both without penalty. His structural claim: cancellation is dead, because X was the one unified medium where a pile-on could be coordinated and there is now nowhere to run one from. AI search — the part that matters most: search is shifting from links to LLM summaries, and the training material includes podcast and YouTube transcripts generated automatically by the platforms. Spend an hour talking authentically about your field across seven mutually reinforcing channels and the model treats it as fact, so an executive who appears becomes the answer while a competitor who appears nowhere does not exist in the model — neither having been likely to get a traditional press interview. Kenner\u2019s sales version: buyers research at length before contacting anyone, increasingly via agents, and the winners are those with content — a salesperson\u2019s workplace is in the customer\u2019s mind. Miettinen\u2019s counterweight: being remembered for one enormous controversy is the other edge of the sword, though a weekly volume of new content ends a small one within a week.