Welcome to Season 2
Ts&Zzz launched on April 1st, 2020 with the goal of bringing better sleep to those that needed it most. The idea for the podcast stemmed from my own personal experience of falling asleep while reading textbooks in school and listening to audiobooks at night.
At first, I was unsure how the show would be received but after the launch I was immediately overwhelmed by the positive response and feedback to the show. It was working! We were helping people get better sleep at night and managed to find a practical use case for Terms of Service agreements. Over the next five months Ts&Zzz would be covered in Fast Company, featured on Apple Podcast, participate in Podapolooza, hit the most viral page on Imgur and secure its first advertiser. It took a lot of work to get to where Ts&Zzz is today but this is just the start...
I am excited to announce that Season 2 of Ts&Zzz is here! We are kicking off Season 2 with a two part episode on the biggest food delivery company in the world right now; DoorDash! These episodes deliver sleep right to your door. 10,000 words of pure boredom. Take a listen now and treat yourself to better sleep this evening.
What’s new for Season Two?
Intro Music: Season 2 arrives with a brand new intro for the podcast courtesy of Audio UX. This new soundscape creates a consistent aesthetic and sense of place through sound design and ambient music, using elements of ASMR and dreamy modular synthesis to immerse the listener in a consistently comfortable world. “ASMR TYPE” (a reference to the world of hip hop “Type” beats), is the audio story—the typing, a parallel to the dry monochrome of the terms and conditions themselves, ASMR and soft synthesis, a concoction of dream-logic that relaxes us and beckons an oncoming sleep. Big shout out to both Sean and Dexter from Audio UX for going on this creative journey with me and for somehow making a Xerox machine sound so, so sleepy.
Merch: Thanks to a collaboration with Le Hatch Designs the merch you’ve been dreaming of is here and you can get it at the Sleep Store. Also go check out Connors work. It's fantastic.
Seasons: Starting with season 2 each season will have 10 episodes released weekly on Sunday nights. In between seasons we will take a 4 week break to develop new content, improve the show and recover from reading and editing 10 terms of service.
Episode Length: Each episode will be between 30 minutes and an hour. We have heard and listened that this is the ideal length of time to drift off to sleep.
Episode Speed: We have sped up the pace at which we will be reading each agreement. The goal of the show is to keep a normal tempo of conversations. For example, the pace of conversion on the Exponent podcast.
Social: Ts&Zzz’s instagram is focusing on becoming the best meme account dedicated to sleep and terms of service memes. These have been so fun to make. I am still figuring out our voice on Twitter but for now Twitter will be the best place for updates on the show, new episodes, and to send us feedback (or memes!). Give us a follow on IG and Twitter!
What I have learned?
In the five months since the show launched I have learned a lot:
I learned that it is possible to read a Terms of Service too slowly, throwing listeners into the uncanny valley of spoken audio.
I learned that an arbitration clause is an overly complex way of saying a user can’t take a dispute to court.
I learned that listening to Alesso is the key to not falling asleep while editing a sleep podcast.
I learned that the length of a Terms of Service varys heavily between 3K-10K+ words.
I learned that Disney licenses digital content to users. Users don’t own anything.
I learned that putting an episode together takes about 10-12 hours.
I learned that UGC is a very complex topic for companies to protect against.
I learned that users of the Quibi service are not allowed to use a password for their Quibi account that is already used on another service (ex. Netflix).
I learned that I still don’t know the difference between the JAMS and AAA arbitration companies.
I learned that a person may lose access to their downloaded Netflix content depending on where they start and end their travel.
I learned that I read the TOS too slowly at first. Message received, everyone. Thank you again for the feedback.
What’s Next?
Growth! It’s time to take Ts&Zzz to the moon and help even more folks get better sleep. We have a goal of hitting 10K total downloads per episode by the end of the year. To kick things off if you are a fan of the show and find it helpful spread it around. If you don’t let us know how we can improve the show.
Thank you
Thank you to everyone that has helped out in the past five months. Whether it was creative feedback, t-shirt designs, sound design, reading a TOS, feedback on twitter, featuring the pod, or just being a fan of the show I really appreciate it. It means the world and I am excited to continue to make a great podcast.
Here’s to better sleep 😴.
Scott