William Bissett started Charlotte Angel Connection to help empower the city's founders and draw in new investors. Now, nearly five years in, the local podcast is making waves outside the Queen City.
Bissett's long-running podcast was named last month to Feedspot's Top 40 Angel Investor Podcasts You Must Follow in 2021.
"It's crazy ... I got an email that said, 'Hey, we're going to put you on our list. We think it's a really good podcast, and we're dropping you in at No. 7,'" Bissett said. "I go back to the time when we were only getting 25 listeners a month ... and it's really cool to see us up there with some of our peers that we've listened to over time."
The list's podcasts were chosen based on five main credentials: content quality, episode consistency, podcast age, average number of social-media shares per episode and overall podcast traffic.
Charlotte Angel Connection was born in 2016 out of Bissett's desire to draw more attention to founders and investors in the city — the people, he said, who are building, shaping and influencing entrepreneurship in the region.
"I came to the conclusion that one reason we didn't have a broader set of investors here is because very few people in Charlotte were actually founders at that time," he said. "The podcast idea was discussing what it's like to be an investor and what it's like to be a founder ... to help expand and grow that Charlotte-area investor base because our community needs its own area investors."
Episodes are released biweekly, and Bissett said the podcast now pulls in 500 to 700 listeners per episode within the first month of each release. After six months, each episode typically has an average of 1,000 listens.
Some of the most recent episodes include interviews with Chris Langford, partner at IDEA Fund; Trent Hawthorne, founder of Standup Pro and COO of Rabbu; and John Dillard, founder of ThreatSwitch.
