Creator Interview: Heather Li
Plus: Sleepless in Helsinki ✈️🇫🇮🥱💤
Hyvää päivää!
Greetings from Helsinki, Finland, where I’m spending time with family I haven’t seen since #TheBeforeTimes, playing peekaboo with three outrageously cute baby cousins, and sleeping when I’m usually awake (or trying to, anyway!). In order to make room for this momentous trip, I put my reporting projects on pause in favor of bringing you an interview with Heather Li, whose first audio effort won a freaking Third Coast award.
A few quick notes before we get started:
Since last week, I’ve learned that at least one accusation of misconduct against Billy Jensen came from “a higher up within the Exactly Right world.” If you have any information about this, please reach out.
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Alright, let’s hit it!
Interview: Heather Li
When I first heard about It’s Nice to Hear You, I dismissed the idea of listening to it outright. While the premise was unique in audio — a blind matchmaking experiment in which participants would explore relationships solely via voice recordings— I had just finished the second season of Love is Blind (lol) and thought it sounded too similar. But during an episode of the podcast discovery show Feed the Queue, I learned that the show’s creator had made her own dating missteps an integral part of the show’s narrative. That changed the game for me entirely and within a few days I had gobbled down the whole thing. (I guess it really doesn’t take much?)
During our interview, I was surprised to learn that It’s Nice to Hear You was Li’s first audio effort. But contrary to some who launch a podcast without any previous experience, Li was aware from the start that making something great would require hard work. And while she had a number of advantages — extra time, money saved up — I found her insights to be invigorating and astute on a number of levels. I hope you find them useful in some way as well.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Skye: What drew you to the idea of making a podcast?
Heather: I was laid off at the beginning of COVID. I have a background in strategy and finance and was working on new retail concepts at the time. Our whole team was eliminated. I was kind of burnt out and lucky to be in a position where I didn't have to work immediately.
I wanted to do something creative. My plan was to try and combine two things I was interested in: the social science behind dating and podcasting. I’d been listening to podcasts, mostly retail stuff and interview shows, but I was also fascinated by the tremendous growth I was seeing in the podcast space. I had the idea that I could create a blind matchmaking experiment based just on voice memos and use the audio content from the experiment to create the podcast.
Skye: Did you have any connections to the world of podcasting?
Heather: Not at all. I educated myself by listening to all different kinds of shows — fiction, narrative, etc. I tried to find podcasts that had been recognized for being innovative. I always listened to the credits because they helped me make sense of how everything worked — like, what does a producer do? What does an editor do?
The credits also helped me figure out who I wanted to reach out to for guidance. I went to business school, which is basically two years of professionally trying to get a job and networking, so I got very good at finding emails and contacting people. I started identifying people’s names in the credits and then I would find their email, or even guess at their email, and reach out. I was doing the same thing on the dating science side; I was reaching out to academics and matchmakers.
At the end of the day, it's a numbers game. If you reach out to enough people, some of them will get back to you and say sure, I'll talk to you for half an hour. I tried to talk to as many people as I could. And from there I was always asking, who else should I talk to? What other shows do you think I should listen to?
Skye: Who were some of the people you reached out to?
Heather: I was impressed by Mermaid Palace. They have a strong visual identity and I wanted that for my show as well. I figured out that their designer was Jen Ng from listening to the credits. I reached out to her and pitched her on working with me. She didn’t even know me but she was so open and generous. I had a tight turnaround time and didn’t have that much money, but we worked out a deal. She ended up being helpful in so many ways.
Another person I reached out to was Eric Nuzum. I read his book [Make Noise: A Creator’s Guide to Podcasting and Great Audio Storytelling]. He was kind enough to speak with me. He recommended a bunch of resources including AIR and Third Coast. I reached out to so many people and was honestly surprised by how many were open to talking to me.
I wanted to have as many editors as I could afford because I'm someone who appreciates a lot of feedback and this medium was so new to me. I wanted guidance.
Skye: What were some of the issues your editors helped you work out?
Heather: Midway through the experiment I had the participants speak to a dating coach. I had a ton of tape from those meetings and initially my instinct was to incorporate as much of the coach’s voice as possible. For one thing, I wanted to show that this advice was coming from a legitimate, professional person, but I also wanted to avoid saying something if I could use original tape instead.
So that was my plan, but then one of the editors pointed out that there might be a minor ethical question with including all of that tape. Even though the participants knew that they were being recorded — they had all signed waivers, they knew they were being recorded, etc. — the coach didn’t really know the participants. They only spoke for maybe an hour. The editor suggested that we approach that element of the show with more nuance and consideration. I never would have thought about that on my own.
Another issue was that I only had space to feature three pairs — six people — but I wanted to acknowledge every person who had participated in the experiment. I wanted to give voice to all of them somehow. I started out by incorporating little segments from everyone’s different stories into the main narrative when it was contextually relevant. But the editors kept saying, make it shorter. [Editor] Camila Kerwin came up with the idea of doing a brief montage of all the voices at the beginning of the episode and that worked well.
Skye: Why did you go with only three pairs?
Heather: On a lot of dating shows, like Love is Blind or The Bachelor, there are so many people participating that each person becomes kind of one-dimensional. Everyone is sharing the screen with so many others. I wanted to paint a three-dimensional portrait of each of the participants as actual people. In the end, it was really more of a character study.
Skye: Was weaving your own dating story into the show’s narrative your idea?
Heather: [Laughs] No — In the beginning I thought, I have all this voice memo tape, I’ll just montage it all together and it’ll be great! And it was horrible. I tried so many versions, so many ways — for months. It wasn’t working.
Skye: What was the fundamental problem?
Heather: I had been listening to these peoples’ stories — over one hundred hours of these voices memos — and I genuinely thought every one of their stories was fascinating. But when I listened to these montages that I made, they were just awful. It was just like random strangers’ voices. There was no story, there was no reason for the audience to care. I sent it to friends and they were like, this is so boring.
[Story editors] Jesse Carrey and Katya Stepanov were the ones who came up with that idea. They were aware that I had had a lot of experiences with dating that were unsuccessful and that I genuinely wanted to get better at it. I guess they had a feeling that my personal story as well as my thoughts and reactions to what I was hearing from the participants and the coaches would be connective enough to tie it all together.
Skye: How did you feel when they suggested it?
Heather: I wasn’t trying to put myself in the spotlight by any means, but it was definitely something I was willing to do to make the podcast work. I wasn't going to invest all this time and energy into something that was bad! I was like, if this is what is going to make this good, I will definitely do it.
Skye: What else did Jesse and Katya help you with?
Heather: One thing we did was develop metaphors that became key themes within the show. We envisioned the podcast as a house and each room inside the house was a metaphor for one of the matched pairs. We talked about what it felt like to walk into this strange house, what the hallway felt like, what each room felt like. We talked about the objects in each room and how they would unfold into each pair’s story. Unfolding became a huge theme within the series.
This work informed the writing, but also the show’s visual identity. For example, juxtaposition was another major theme and that’s why the logo features the serif and sans serif fonts kind of colliding together.
At the end of working with Jesse and Katya on all of this, I had a brief I could hand over to Jen Ng and say ‘here are all of the show’s themes and everything I want to convey visually.’
Skye: You had two personas in the show — Yves D. Ropper, the matchmaker who interacted with the participants, and Heather Li, your true self, who is struggling to learn how to get better at dating. Why?
Heather: First of all, I wanted to make sure that the participants couldn’t find out who I was, because if they did, they might feel like they were being judged. They could have gone on the Internet and been like, okay this is a mid-thirties, single woman living in New York. What is she going to think about me? I was concerned that knowing who I was could make them more hesitant to open up so I just removed that filter for them.
I also wanted my name to be intentional. Yves D. Ropper means eavesdropper, right? That’s not something I ever explained in the show, but it’s part of the theme of unfolding that runs through the show.
Skye: How did you market the show?
Heather: I started an Instagram account for the show way before it launched. I started following lots of accounts and building an Instagram follower base.
I also compiled a list of about one hundred people to reach out to — dating influencers and other dating shows, journalists who cover modern love and dating stories, people who write ‘conscious dating’ newsletters. I reached out to all of them. I put a press release on my website, which didn’t do much on its own but it did help with SEO.
Skye: Will there be a second season of It’s Nice to Hear You?
Heather: Yes, but it’s important to me that it’s different from the first season. I’m thinking that through right now.
Skye: You’ve gone back to working in retail strategy full-time. How do you feel about the juxtaposition between your corporate identity and your work as an audio creative?
Heather: My view on creativity is that it doesn't matter what role or industry you're in — your creativity is how you approach doing things in a new or different way. I identify as someone who is creative, even though I don’t work in a creative field for my dayjob. Sometimes it’s helpful to come from a different mindset, you know? It can be good to be an outsider.
The End
That’s all for me this week! See you next Thursday, by which time I hope to be sleeping when I should sleep and writing when I should write!
Hyvää yötä —
Skye
I'm pivoting my podcast and this interview was super helpful. Thanks Skye & Heather!
Great issue Skye. Enjoyed the interview.