MSIX: ‘We want them to be rich in life’: Sally McMullen says Two Broke Chicks isn’t a lecture
Sally McMullen and her “best friend” Alexandra Hourigan met while working at comparison website Finder, and launched the Two Broke Chicks podcast under the Finder umbrella.
“We would always just talk constantly at work,” McMullen recalled at MSIX earlier this week. “Our bosses were like, ‘okay, we need to do something. We need to monetise you two.'”
The first season launched in October 2021, and within a year-and-a-half, “it really started to take off”, and had basically became their full-time role at work. The pair then decided to take it solo, and have steered the operation for the past 18 months.
The pair have an audience of over 2 million across all platforms, with at least 20,000 downloads per episode, and over 150,000 downloads each month. In order to grow the show, the pair kept the premise — and conversations — varied and broad.
“When we first launched the podcast, the tagline of the show was ‘life lessons for the gals from the gals’, which is very broad. I think we always aimed to create something that was life lessons that you wish that you knew in your 20s, from moving out of home, deciding what you want to do with your career, relationships, mental health and self-love.
But what we found was the content that resonated the most with our audience was around like life hacks and money-saving tips, which — cozzie livs — I’m not surprised that people resonate with that. So since then, our tagline has evolved to ‘the show that shares life lessons and tips to help make you rich in life.’
“And that’s what we want to help our chicks do, whether that’s saving money on their groceries or hacking how they spend with points to finding their people or learning more about themselves.
“We want them to be rich in life.”
McMullen believes the success of her podcast comes down to how they treat their audiences – they aren’t experts, and this isn’t a lecture.
“When we created this show, we were like, there’s so many podcasts out there, but sometimes when we listen to things, we feel like we’re being lectured to, or it is coming from somebody with that background who has a lot of expertise, but sometimes it’s hard not to be like, ‘oh, well, of course you know all this’, or it feels so easy for you. Or on the other end of the spectrum, you know, it’s people who are professional shit talkers.
“We want to sit somewhere in the middle, where we can learn these lessons along the way and then share them with people.”
McMullen said they don’t pretend to be financial advisors, and any episodes with money tips stress this through disclaimers.
“We’re not coming to this thing like, ‘I knew this all along’. It’s like, ‘I was out on the weekend and was chatting to somebody and they told me this hack’, or ‘I was scrolling on TikTok the other day and I saw this deal’, or ‘there’s this discount code, and then sharing it.'”
The pair noticed that episodes with some form of utility tend to do the best, so they leaned into this, while keeping the feeling “you’re just chatting with your girlfriends over a drink” and the conversational tone of jumping from topic to topic.
“Anything that has really high usability for our audience always performs well.
“Whether that’s a money-saving hack or something with a key actionable that people can take away – anything with high usability and engagement performs well.”
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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This interview and the context of it were a highlight for me.
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