Heidi Snyderburn - Birth Story Podcast
"Education through storytelling." That's the mission of Heidi Snyderburn's company Birth Story Media. Heidi's a birth doula, an entrepreneur, an author, and a podcaster. Her podcast is a free platform for women to gain education and empowerment for their births. 2:25 A birth doula (not spelled dula or doola) means “woman servant.” Throughout most of time, humans would birth with other women, up until the early 20th century. A doula is a birth coach who helps you emotionally and physically through your birth, just as a doctor/midwife helps you medically. 4:23 On her podcast, Heidi interviews women who've given birth (some with doulas, some without). She explores how outcomes would be different with a doula, along with some commentary about what was happening. The more you know, the more likely the positive outcome. 5:54 Heidi learns about her listeners when they write her, and share comments and feedback. Her audience is females, aged 20-45, who are either pregnant, on their fertility journey trying to get pregnant (including IUI, IVF, etc.), or on their next pregnancy. The majority of people who write in are those who have just given birth, and write in to say how the podcast helped them. Heidi also benefits from podcast hosting SEO (people type "birth story" in apple podcasts and find her there). 7:37 She left corporate America 3 years ago, and is now building Birth Story Media. On her website, you can listen to the podcast, buy the book, and download ~20 free workbooks on topics like vaccinations, circumcisions, birth plan, pros and cons of placenta encapsulation, and bengkun belly binding. She’s now using all this knowledge to build online childbirth education courses, along with the Director of Obstetrics at UNC Chapel Hill, Dr. John Thorp. People can listen to her podcast, buy her book for more, and soon, access her courses for a more personal experience. 9:36 She uses her transcripts to write books. Birthstory is your general guidebook. She's now making smaller books on v-backs (vaginal birth after cesarian), and being pregnant with twins. She also uses transcripts to pull out quotes to make audiograms for Instagram and Facebook, and YouTube subtitles. 11:27 Here's how she turns her transcripts into books. Take transcripts. Look up key words. Pull out the paragraphs where the key word is mentioned, and paste into a word doc. Print. Highlight the valuable content that stands out, along with all of the learnings and the teachings. Edit. 13:04 Printing process. Heidi works with custom publishing. Instead of selling her book to Penguin for $100,000, she works with Spark Publications to help edit content, design the cover and graphics, etc. Spark takes an author’s words, polishes them, and then makes a book out of it! Heidi's book is beautiful, and one of the best on the market! It costs ~$20,000 - $30,000, and she owns 100% of the book. 15:20 Heidi first got transcripts to make her podcast more accessible to those with disabilities. She switched over to Podscribe because it saved her 1-2 hours per week, per episode. When she uploads her podcast to libsyn, she soon gets an email with her transcription and embed code! This is because Podscribe taps into your rss feed. Website: birthstory.com Podcast: Birth Story Podcast Instagram: @birthstorypodcast Pinterest/YouTube/Facebook: Birth Story Podcast Have any questions? Reach out to me at eugene [at] podscribe [dot] ai, or visit us at podscribe.ai.