When Craig Constantine asks Lindsay McMahon whether she ever freaks out knowing 200,000 people are listening to her podcast, she doesn’t do what you’d expect. She doesn’t talk about impostor syndrome or performance anxiety or the weight of all those ears. Instead, she zooms in:

I think about that listener who might feel isolated right now because of language. Either they’re living in the US and they’re struggling to get connected in their community, or they’re on a call from Japan to New York and they’re cringing because they think they just said the wrong thing and they’re not building the business relationship.

The question was about scale. Her answer was about specificity.

This inversion reveals something worth examining. When confronted with a number that should feel overwhelming—200,000 human beings, every week—McMahon’s instinct isn’t to zoom out to the crowd. It’s to zoom in on one person, in one moment, experiencing one specific kind of struggle.

Most podcasters think about growth in the opposite direction. We obsess over aggregate numbers: downloads, subscribers, chart positions. The mental image is a stadium filling up, row by row. Success means more people. The question “who is this for?” gets answered with demographics and audience personas—abstractions built from averages.

But McMahon’s response suggests a different orientation entirely. She’s not imagining 200,000 people. She’s imagining that person—the one cringing on a business call, the one isolated in a new country, the one whose confidence falters at exactly the moment they need it most. The crowd dissolves into a single listener who needs what she’s making.

This matters because it changes what you optimize for. If you’re thinking about aggregate audience, you optimize for reach: better SEO, more episodes, broader topics, whatever moves the numbers. If you’re thinking about a specific person in a specific moment, you optimize for usefulness: Will this actually help someone who’s cringing right now? Will this make tomorrow’s call less terrifying?

The difference isn’t just philosophical. It shows up in the work. All Ears English has published over 2,400 episodes with remarkable consistency—same format, same length, same emotional register. That kind of discipline doesn’t come from chasing growth metrics. It comes from having a clear picture of who you’re serving and what they need when they press play.

There’s something freeing about this inversion. The stadium full of 200,000 people is paralyzing to contemplate. But one person, struggling with one thing, right now? That’s someone you can actually help. That’s a problem you can solve in fifteen minutes.

Maybe the question isn’t “how do I grow my audience?” but “who specifically am I imagining when I hit record?” Because if the answer is “everyone” or “my target demographic,” you might be zooming out when you should be zooming in.

This field note references the PodTalk podcast episode “Connection with Lindsay McMahon,” published June 17, 2025.