Srinivas (Srini) Rao is the founder of the Unmistakable Media brand and host of the Unmistakable Creative Podcast. He is a brilliant connector and interviewer. He has created online content for over a decade and has been brutally honest about the journey; writing about both the good and difficult experiences.
He has shared a brilliant overview of his creative journey at:
In the above posts, Srini talks about his experiences before creating BlogcastFM and how self-publishing an essay collection changed his entire creative career.
Building Unmistakable Creative
BlogcastFM
In 2010, Srini started a podcast titled BlogcastFM. It became popular within the blogging community in a short period of time. However, he struggled with both growing and monetizing the podcast. The BlogcastFM brand was limiting the types of people he could interview.
In 2014, Srini rebranded as ‘The Unmistakable Creative podcast. He discussed the behind-the-scenes details at Changing Your Brand Name After 4 Years.
Unmistakable Creative
Srini wrote more about the pivot at The 5 Year Journey of a Podcast That Is Evolving into a Media Company
In 2019, the project got funding from Pod.fund. He wrote about the early experiences at 6 Lessons from my First 6 Months as a CEO of a Venture Funded Podcast.
Srini has shared the behind the scenes details of building and growing the Unmistakable Creative brand.
- Create What’s in Your Heart: A Business Model Work for That Matters
- 10 Lessons from 10 Years of the Unmistakable Creative
- 20 Essential Tools We Use to Run The Unmistakable Creative
Instigator Experience
In 2014, Srini unveiled the first Instigator Experience. It was a 60 person, 9 speaker 2-day TED like event.
He’s shared more the experience at:
- What I’ve Learned from Opening the Doors to My First Conference
- How You Develop The Guts to Launch a Crazy Wild-Eyed Dream
- Why Scaling Conferences Ruins Them
- Lessons from The Instigator Experience – Interview with Srinivas Rao
Books
Small Army Strategy
This book isn’t about how to get more traffic or increase the number of subscribers to your blog. Those things are potential byproducts , but not the goal. The goal is to treasure and nurture the attention you already have.
Lessons Learned from Marketing a Self Published Best-Seller
This post originally appeared on BlogcastFM when Srini published The Small Army Strategy. He used nearly every tactic below for his later book, The Art of Being Unmistakable.
Unmistakable: Why Only Is Better Than Best
In 2013, Srini wrote a series of Facebook updates that covered the less glamorous side of being a creative. It resonated with readers and attracted new followers. These essays turned into a self published book. This book is no longer available, however was a strong influence on the creation of Unmistakable. He shared the story further at How I Wrote a Self Published Book Using Ridiculously Long Facebook Status Updates.
The book ended up becoming a bestseller, partially thanks to Glenn Beck raving about it on his podcast. He later shared the letter Glenn Beck had sent him.
He continued the habit of writing 1000 words a day. In 2015, he got an email from an editor about Penguin Portfolio about possibly working together. He expanded on that story in How Writing 1000 Words a Day Changed my Life.
Thanks to his writing habit, he was able to finish the 45’000 word manuscript in 6 months.
An Audience Of One
The creator of the Unmistakable Creative podcast makes a counterintuitive argument: By focusing your creative work on pleasing yourself, you can increase your productivity, happiness, and (eventually, paradoxically) the size of your audience.
How To Write a Traditionally Published Book – A Behind the Scenes Look
Lessons Learned
Srini is a prolific creator across multiple mediums. This has led to him being able to apply lessons across his projects.
Podcasting
- Why Interviewing “Famous” People Is a Lousy Growth Strategy for Your Podcast
- Lessons Learned from Building a Podcast That Has 450 5-Star Reviews
- 7 Communication Lessons from Over 600 Interviews
- The Art of the Podcast Interview: What I’ve Learned from 700 Episodes
- What I’ve Learned from 1000 Podcast Interviews
Writing
- Things I’ve Learned from Writing Over a Million Words in 5 Years
- 10 Daily Habits and Mindsets That Helped me Write 4 Books
- The 8-Step Daily Routine That’s Enabled me to Write 100’s of Articles and 3 Books
- On Waves and Words: The Lifetime Journey of Surfing and Writing
- 5 Things That Surfing Has Taught Me About Writing
- 6 Things I’ve Learned About Building an Audience on Medium
Book Publishing
- Blog to Book Deal in 2019: What it Takes
- Self-Publishing vs Traditional Publishing: The Pros and Cons
Creativity
Productivity
- How I Get Shit Done Despite Having ADD: Here’s What You Can Learn From my Experiences
- How I Use Notion to Organize Ideas and Manage Creative Projects
Social Media
- Quitting Social Media for 30 Days: What I’ve Learned
- This is the Second Time I Quit Social Media for 30 Days
Failure
- A Resume of my Failures
- The Anniversary of My First Significant Failure
- How One of My Greatest Professional Failures Became a Catalyst For Significant Personal Growth
- 5 of My Most Informative Failures in Life
- 7 Ideas on Recovering from Failure
Life Lessons
- 10 Things I’d Tell My 20 Year Old Self
- The First Time I Got Fired
- In All Honesty: Thoughts on 37 Years
- 38 Life Lessons from 38 Years on the Planet
- 39 Observations of a Life That Hasn’t Gone According to Plan
- 40 Powerful Things I Wish I Knew When I Was Younger
- 41 Things I Almost Know for Sure
- 42 Secrets of Adulthood
Features
Interviews
- Creator Spotlight: Srinivas Rao of Unmistakable Creative on the art of the interview at Podfund
- Building a Popular Podcast and Online Media Biz, with Srini Rao at Chris Ducker
- BlogcastFM’s Srinivas Rao on How He Landed His First Major Sponsor For His Show and Much More at The Rise To The Top
- The Creative Entrepreneur—The Art and Journey of Srinivas Rao of Blogcast FM at Smart Passive Income