Episode 13 | Simon Freeman

the morning shakeout podcast

Coaching, Marathons, Sports, Olympics, Running, Ultrarunning

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 May 2018

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

"I think a degree of paranoia is a good thing—again, whether it's running or business, it keeps you on your toes. Julie and I literally couldn't work out why this magazine that we were imagining didn't exist. Because we didn't think that we could possibly have come up with something that no one else had thought of, so we just assumed that the reason it didn't exist is that people had sort of tried it and figured out that it would never work, and we were going to find out ourselves that it wasn't going to work. The reality is that there's been quite a few moments when we thought 'this is utter madness'...but the last 4 to 5 issues we've hit a sort of form and it feels like it's gaining momentum so the hard work is starting to pay off."Thrilled to welcome Simon Freeman to the podcast this week. He is the co-founder and editor of Like the Wind, a quarterly UK-based running magazine that ships to 32 countries worldwide. LTW, which just published its 15th issue, explores why we run—not how we run—through modern design, stunning photography and illustrations, and diverse storytelling that celebrates the spirit of running: road, trail, track, or wherever interesting things are happening in the sport.Freeman, who launched Like the Wind in 2014 along with his wife Julie, also runs the Freestak, a digital marketing and communications agency that helps brands in running, cycling, triathlon and outdoors connect with their target audiences.In this episode we dive into the origins of the magazine and why he and Julie decided to launch a print publication in the digital age. We also discuss how it gets decided what stories and artwork end up in the magazine, how LTW continues to sustain itself for the foreseeable future, and the current state of the running media landscape in general. Finally, we talk about how the marketing skills he uses at Freestak have influenced the magazine's growth, what's exciting him in running right now, and much, much more.This episode of the morning shakeout podcast was edited by John Isaac at BaresRecords.com.Complete show notes here: https://www.themorningshakeout.com/podcast-episode-13-simon-freeman/Sign up here to get the morning shakeout email newsletter delivered to your inbox every Tuesday morning: www.themorningshakeout.com/subscribe/Support the morning shakeout on Patreon: www.patreon.com/themorningshakeout

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Simon Freeman, welcome to the Morning Shakeout Podcast.
0:03.0	Thank you for having me, Mariah.
0:05.0	I'm very excited to talk to you because we're going to touch on some topics that I haven't really covered with many of my other guests to this point, but you are the
0:16.2	co-founder along with your wife Julie of Like the Wind magazine, which is based in the UK.
0:22.1	You also run a digital marketing agency called Free Stack.
0:26.4	But I want to touch on the magazine side of things.
0:29.3	You launched it in 2014, so we're going on four years now and you decided to launch with a print
0:36.0	magazine and I'm curious what was the impetus behind that decision?
0:40.7	I mean the thing thing was the idea for the magazine or the question really that we wanted to answer came up while we were running,
0:50.0	my wife and I were running around the Mont Blanc, around the UTMB, the Mont Blanc route.
0:55.2	We were staying in some mountain huts, mountain refuges on the way and we were talking about the fact that
1:15.0	there were these beautiful magazines that I was kind of obsessively buying cycling and surfing and skating and climbing magazines despite not doing really any of those things. I was just a out and outrunner. But I just loved the idea of this sort of whole story telling on paper, almost like slow journalism and we thought we were just
1:26.1	wondering whether there would be an appetite for a magazine like that in the
1:28.7	running sector so we came back and Julie downloaded the free trial of
1:35.4	in design and learned how to use it, which gave us 30 days
1:39.9	to put an addition together before we had to commit to buying in design.
1:45.0	And yeah, it was just a sort of a curiosity really.
1:50.0	I wonder whether other people would be interested in the kind of magazine that we would like to read about running.
1:56.3	So that was, yeah, that was it.
1:59.8	And I've always wondered what's behind the name like the wind?
2:02.8	Well, so Judy's the creative person behind the magazine.
2:09.1	And we wanted something that was evocative.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from the morning shakeout podcast, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of the morning shakeout podcast and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.