At six years old, a child is supposed to hit certain milestones. They lose their first baby teeth. They grow about two and a half inches. They learn to focus on one thing for fifteen or thirty minutes at a stretch. They start being able to tell the difference between real life and make-believe.
Lemonadio just turned six. So we looked up the milestones.
We are doing okay.
They lose their first baby teeth and get their first adult molars
Lemonadio started with one show a week. Audio only. Streamed from home on lemonadio.com. A microphone, a laptop, and a fairly loose theory that local radio could be something other than what it had become.
It could be local without being small. Fun without being fake. It could create opportunities for people instead of just selling them airtime. And it could actually show up in the community it talked about every day, rather than describing that community from inside a room with the door closed.
Those were the baby teeth. They came out. We had so many great people jump in and do shows, create content, share music! Thank you Ally A, JLynn, Elastic Glam, Dave Death, Ken Allen, Lisa Z, 13 Folds, Chase Lightning, Wamptronica, and WKKL- thank you for showing up.
Today Lemonadio does full video live casts from wherever we decide to be, and the calendar is booked months in advance. Same theory. Better teeth.
They grow about 2.5 inches and gain around 7 pounds
The first event was Music Bingo at Tomatillos on a Wednesday night. Thank you, Mark. That is where all of this starts, and we do not say that as a courtesy. Somebody has to be the first person willing to hand a room over to an idea that has not proven anything yet.
From that one Wednesday, here is where we ended up:
12 hosts have worked with us, on and off, over six years.
45+ events a month. More than 540 a year.
More than 2,000 events since we started. Broadcast, hosted, DJed, played, produced, or simply showed up and helped run.
Restaurants, parking lots, breweries, farmers markets, festivals, fundraisers, fairs, weddings, and community celebrations. Basically anywhere a person could fit a microphone and a speaker, which it turns out is almost anywhere.
They run, skip, hop, and catch a ball with better coordination
Coordination is the right word for what six years buys you.
We started with music bingo. Then trivia. Then karaoke, including the corporate team building kind, which is a genuinely underrated way to find out who your coworkers actually are. Then farmers market vendor gatherings. Christmas installations. Paint parties. Survey slams. Demolition derbies.
And this month, our newest game launches: OPINION-Nation.
None of that was on the whiteboard six years ago. Most of it exists because somebody asked us whether we could do a thing we had never done, and we said yes before fully thinking it through, and then figured it out roughly five minutes before going live. That is still the process. We have just gotten faster at the five minutes.
They can focus on a single task for 15 to 30 minutes
Some of what we do is not a game at all.
We edit, support, and market 20 podcasts from across the United States. Professionals and organizations with something worth saying, and the production help to make sure it actually gets heard.
And we keep a rhythm that regular listeners can set a watch by:
Monday: monthly SCORE segments
Tuesdays with Hank
Thursdays at Mashpee TV
Plus live local shows throughout the week
Our 300th guest host was AJ Hapenny. All told we have welcomed 426 guests behind our microphones, and that number does not include our favorite regulars (RTB, Greg, Lauren, Jenn, and Saraphina), who at this point are less guests and more furniture. Special thanks to my right hand man Hank for consistently being a soundboard and a great morning partner and mentor! Musicians, business owners, nonprofit directors, community leaders, and a healthy number of wonderfully random people who turned out to have the best stories of anyone.
They can count past 10 and do simple addition and subtraction
So can we, and here is the math that matters most:
Our Events on Cape Cod Facebook group has more than 15,000 active members.
Not followers. Members. People who post their own events, find somebody else’s, and go.
That number is the whole thesis in one statistic. We did not build an audience that watches. We built a group that shows up.
They can tell the difference between real life and make-believe
This is the milestone we care about most.
There is a version of local media that is make-believe. It measures impressions. It reports reach. It counts eyeballs that never turned into a single human being walking through a single door.
And then there is Dan Silva of DaSilva Farms.
Five years ago, Dan was ready to quit farming. Not scale back. Quit. We asked him to take a chance on the farmers market instead, which at the time was an ask with very little evidence sitting behind it. He said yes anyway.
What he found was not a sales channel. It was a market family. Encouragement on the slow mornings. Neighbors who learned what he made and asked after it by name. Customers who came back, and then brought somebody. And when fire hit, volunteers who turned up without being asked, because that is simply what a market family does when one of its own gets knocked down.
Five years later, Dan’s best day keeps getting beaten by his next best day. That is not a marketing metric. That is a man who nearly walked away from farming altogether, now watching his product go out the door faster than he can put it on the table.
And this Sunday, you can go taste the end of that story yourself. Dan’s pickles will be at Picklepalooza, 4 Job’s Fishing Road in Mashpee. Go buy some.
That sentence right there is the entire reason this post exists.
Real life is a restaurant with a full dining room on a Tuesday in February. Real life is a musician booked because somebody heard them on a live broadcast. Real life is a nonprofit that walks away from an event that was not even a fundraiser with three new donors.
That is why we do not measure ourselves by how many people are listening. We measure ourselves by how many people are doing something.
Come play trivia. Meet a farmer. Hear a musician. Find a business you did not know existed. Win something ridiculous. Laugh with your neighbors.
More than 2,000 times now, we have watched what happens when people take us up on it.
They can write their own name, tie their own shoes, and use safety scissors
Independence is the last milestone, and it is the one that changed us the most.
We are a nonprofit that supports nonprofits. That is not a tagline we backed into. It is what the work turned out to be.
Today we are working with organizations across the region on food rescue and recovery and on data gathering that helps local groups understand who they are actually serving and where the gaps are. Less glamorous than a demolition derby. Considerably more useful at a budget hearing.
Six years ago we were a radio idea. Now we are infrastructure for other people’s missions, which is a strange and wonderful thing to become.
What we want for year seven
Two things, and both of them are asks.
Come to something. Start with Picklepalooza on Sunday if you need a suggestion. Otherwise join the Events on Cape Cod group, find a night that looks good, and show up. Bring somebody. That is the entire business model, honestly. The events only work because people come to them, and the businesses and nonprofits we serve only benefit because those people walk through the door.
Partner with us. If you are a nonprofit that needs to reach people, a business that wants to tell its story properly, an organization sitting on a podcast you have not started, or a sponsor who wants year seven to be bigger than year six, we should talk. We have 45 nights a month and we would like to spend them on work that matters.
To every business that hired us, every organization that partnered with us, every one of the 426 guests who sat behind a microphone, every host who ran a room for us, every person who played one of our games, and everyone who showed up at one of those 2,000+ events:
Thank you. You turned a once a week show streamed out of a house into something none of us could have drawn up.
Six years. More than 2,000 events. Countless connections.
Lemonadio is six, which means we are just old enough to know what we are doing and still young enough to try something stupid on a Wednesday.
See you at the next one.
Listen happier.
Stephanie