How I Built My Dream Career After Starting Over at 30

(Spoiler alert: it definitely wasn't manifesting. I doubted myself every step of the way.)

What follows is a story for anyone who feels maybe a little terrified, like I certainly once did.

In April 2020, I got a call from my boss at the company I worked for.

I imagine this call was similar to the call that many, many people received as they neurotically Clorox-wiped their groceries. It appeared that, alas, my role at the company would not be preserved. I was, indeed, not chosen as one of the special few to carry forward our collective mantle and noble effort of helping consumers express their individuality through splashy socks.

It’s easy to be blazé about it now, but the truth is that job gave purpose to my days, and I absolutely loved so many of the really special people I worked with. It was a fun, “cool” company to work for, and even though I had transferred roles from working as an executive assistant to a more “prestigious”(but much more boring) role managing the company-wide calendar (aka working in excel all day and sending emails), I still had hope that I could parlay my very late start to the corporate game into some sort of respectable life and career.

But then, BOOM. I was unceremoniously kicked to the curb with a bruising combo: a tiny, unimpressive resume and a raging ego that wouldn’t let me forget it.

My late start to corporate America and professional life is perhaps fodder for another article and further opining, but my reality was grim, and I was in a state of internal crisis. Sure, I happily cashed unemployment checks like everyone else for a few months (not even a future black card could slap as hard as the sweet, sweet feeling of swiping that Bank of America prepaid visa courtesy of Jerome Powell and the US Federal Reserve, iykiyk).

But, I digress.

I knew my days on the dole were numbered and I was facing starting over at the tender age of 30.

I was going nowhere fast.

A fun fact, my little sister (you may know her – Chan), had just been offered a fat salary to work remotely for Meta and would be taking a steep pay increase. Did I cry about it and feel like a complete loser in comparison to my baby sis? Oh yeah I did – over the sushi dinner she bought me to cheer me up after I got that fateful call.

What follows is not a short story or an easy road, but I will spare you the unabridged details. Instead, I want to share 6 things that helped me get where I am today.

I wasn’t afraid of being a beginner (aka, of being laughed at).

I think a lot of people are paralyzed to start a business, to change careers, or do anything that puts themselves out there in case it makes anyone think they are the c-word. That’s right, the worst of all things – cringe! It’s absolutely tragic to consider how many people still toil away at jobs they hate with unrealized dreams because of the *imagined derision* of people they probably *barely talk to or see anymore.* The fact is really simple: you have to climb cringe mountain if you want to enjoy the views at the top (and by “views,” I mean the autonomy that occurs when you have created economic freedom for yourself doing something you love).

Find something you love so much that the joy and excitement of doing it drowns out the imagined laughter of ungenerous onlookers. To be completely candid, I have always been someone who really doesn’t need too much of this pep talk. I tried on a lot of different identities and vocations well into my late 20’s, each time so consumed by the love of the thing I was doing, a snide remark from an acquaintance or distant relative fell on distracted ears. I was probably too busy listening to a podcast about whatever my current obsession was to hear them!

It reminds of a quote my sister,

Courtney

, recently sent me:

“The world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own unlived life. They become bitter, critical, or rigid, not because the world is cruel to them, but because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities. The artist who never makes art becomes cynical about those who do. The lover who never risks loving mocks romance. The thinker who never commits to a philosophy sneers at belief itself. And yet, all of them suffer, because deep down they know: the life they mock is the life they were meant to live.”

You have to get over yourself and simply start (and not stop, but more on that later!). Once you actually get going, you’ll realize something really special, which is that you probably have a lot of deeply supportive and wonderful friends who will cheer you on every step of the way – especially if you do something authentic to who you are.

Speaking of…

I leaned heavily into the thing I am naturally good at and love doing.

Talking shit! Juuuuust kidding. ;)

Shortly before starting the podcast, I thought about starting an interior design Instagram account that would post decor inspo with affiliate links. I enthusiastically told my sister about this “business idea” by the pool one day and she looked at me quizzically and said, “Lauren, are you even particularly interested in interior design?”

I rolled my eyes and answered, “No, but that is beside the point,” and continued rattling off reasons why this business scheme was going to be both genius and highly lucrative. She sighed as she sipped a piña colada said, “I really think you should lean into doing something you actually care about. I think you should do the podcast and talk about celebrities.”

For as long as I can remember, I have been obsessed with celebrities. From the requisite childhood crush on Leonardo Dicaprio every millennial girl had to furtively reading Lainey Gossip on my flip phone under my desk during AP classes, I spent much of my adolescence keeping up with the latest interview of Mischa Barton or pap shots of Angelina Jolie with breathless enthusiasm.

Simultaneously, I have had an eye-roll inducing interest in “language” (someone should take away my keyboard now, truly) since the days I beheld Leo in Titanic in the 5th grade and decided he was the man for me. In addition to my very cliché crush, I was just like every other kid voraciously reading Harry Potter books into the night, and perhaps more esteemed tomes as I got a bit older.

This literary interest has manifested itself in various ways throughout my life, including a years-long stint in college hyper-fixating on pursuing a professional literary path. Now, this went nowhere and is nothing to brag about, but I only share to say that although I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, when I re-started the pod, I was putting all of those thousands of hours I spent consuming or noodling with words to use.

Podcasting is, of course, the absolute least rarefied or esteemed mode of using language – I operate a celebrity gossip podcast FFS. I am well aware my Pulitzer Prize dreams have been tossed to the wayside in favor of dishing on what the hidden meaning could be behind Taylor Swift’s latest cocktail order, as revealed via DM to Deuxmoi. But alas, this is the lower path I have chosen for my life, and doing something that is at the center of two of my natural passions has made it a lot easier to not give up.

I didn’t quit.

I can’t overstate the importance of doing something you are naturally adept at and would do for free for a long, long time…because that’s exactly what you will likely end up doing. We released two episodes/week of our show for over four years before we had our lucky break, and it is hard to articulate how hard it was to keep going week after week, month after month, year after literal year, especially when it felt at times like we were spinning our wheels.

When you first start a content creation business, it’s extremely fun and exciting, because you are doing everything for the first time and you have that new-business adrenaline pumping through your veins. You are bright-eyed, excited, and ready to dig in and get to work; the dream feels palpable and you’ve barely just begun. For all you know, you could be an overnight success! The world has been waiting for your voice (or OOTD’s, or jewelry line, etc.)!

But after that first year or so (at least for us), maintaining momentum and excitement around recording roughly every 72 hours (2x/week) became harder and harder. The reality is that we have recorded when we were in a fight, felt embarrassed about where our show was at, were in a stressful moment in our respective relationships, were going through things personally, and through virtually any state of mind you can imagine 500 episodes later (we currently have 268 free episodes published and 292 on premium). I went through a somewhat depressive episode for 3 or so months in 2023, and I remember sitting down to record a deep dive about Angelina Jolie’s love life and just trying not to cry during the recording.

I don’t want to overplay how hard it has been at times or give myself too much credit; I know people do a lot more for a lot less, and we’re not exactly toiling from the coal mines over here when we start yapping into our mics. We record from the comfort of our homes about fun topics we are genuinely interested in. We’re not a pair of Carole Radziwills circa 1985 reporting to ABC News from a war-torn part of the Middle East. My point is simply that even when it felt like there was virtually no payoff, barely anyone was listening, and we were (shudder) embarrassing ourselves, we kept going.

If you are going to start your own content creation job, or any business for that matter, you have to treat your content calendar like the sacred covenant with your community that it is. The second your audience can’t trust that your content will actually come out, they will move on and find more reliable creators to give their attention to.

Four years into podcasting, (roughly one year ago as I write this), I called Chan. Doing the pod full time was both of our dreams, and while we were doing okay, we were not tracking toward where we needed to be. For the amount of time, effort, and vulnerability it took, the pod was not a financially smart time investment unless it was growing at a rate where it could, if necessary, one day support one or both of our families. That morning, I had looked at our analytics, our subscriber and revenue numbers year over year, and the outlook was not good for the amount of effort we were putting into it.

I remember I had just taken a hike with my husband’s family and I felt pretty depressed. We were simply not growing at a pace to provide ourselves full career paths that could match or out-earn careers in corporate America. So, on the phone with Chan, I broke the news. I said, “We really need to have a hard conversation at some point about potentially closing up shop if we are still growing at this pace a year from now.”

She sighed and, after hearing my projections, agreed that we should revisit if the pod was a wise place to invest our energy at the 5-year mark, a year from that call.

Three months later, we went viral covering Kate Middleton’s disappearance, and our show quadrupled in weekly downloads overnight. Eight months after that, we tripled our listener base while covering Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni.

I remember a call with our producer Scott when the Kate Middleton viral moment was in full swing, and he said something that stuck with me. He said this wasn’t an accident, and we weren’t just lucky. Sure, we could have made that TikTok series and gone viral without the podcast, but without the podcast and huge library of content to binge, there would be nothing for people to stick around for. The moment would be a flash in the pan. As we watched our analytics spike for the back catalog of our show, it felt almost surreal, as if we had been building a house for over four years and all of a sudden people were moving in, turning on the lights, and making themselves at home.

I can’t imagine where my life would be if we had quit the podcast four years in and not committed to sticking it out for one more year. Just 90 days after that depressing call, our entire lives changed. Everything we had worked for started coming to fruition exactly 51 months after we started, and not a day sooner. I don’t think I would have lasted even the first 6 months running that interior design account that I thought was so genius. You have to do something you genuinely love doing, because that passion will make your content resonate (or inversely, fall flat). It will also make the mundane act of paddling that much easier when it feels like you’re rowing through cement.

I focused on recurring revenue.

This lesson will be brief, but I would be remiss if I didn’t share it.

Five months into starting the podcast, we were spending about a thousand bucks a month just keeping it going. We decided to launch a Patreon account to help offset these costs, and that single decision was likely the most valuable one we ever made.

If you can put some of your creative output behind a monthly paywall as early as possible, you will help create a powerful disincentive for quitting when the going gets tough. Pretty much immediately, the subscriber revenue was enough to feel meaningful. If we gave up, we’d feel it. In so many ways, we have the early supporters of our show to thank for getting us to where we are today. Their support literally kept us going, and knowing that complete strangers paid monthly to hear our content gave us faith that what we were doing was worthwhile, and there were other people out there who would find value in our show. We would be nothing and have gone absolutely nowhere without our OG’s. 💖

I happened to be sisters with my best friend and favorite interlocutor.

This one is just a matter of luck, but I think being Chan’s sister is one of the best things that ever happened to me. We have been deep in conversation since we were kids sharing a Jack and Jill bathroom, opining on such crucial matters as whether Seth or Sandy Cohen was hotter in the OC (one guess who my vote was for).

We have a profound friendship and connection, and I would absolutely be remiss not to disclaim that none of this would be possible without her by my side, providing not only her quick, dry wit on the show, but also her very wise and intuitive business sense BTS. While I have phrased much of this article around “my” decisions, the success of our show is truly shared, and I can’t wait for when she writes her own article about how she turned her side hustle into her career.

I built something I don’t want an exit from.

I was walking home from the gym recently and my friend asked me what my exit strategy was from the podcast. Now that we had reached escape velocity, how did I want to cash in and, ostensibly, GTFO?

This question made me laugh, because in spite of the trials and tribulations I have waxed on about, I can say with 100% confidence that we never want to stop. We love doing our show, we just couldn’t do it forever if it didn’t turn into a sustainable business. Now that it has, my retirement plan is, and always will be, downshifting our output to only one show per week.

In 2016, I was listening to Juicy Scoop by Heather McDonald, a show I looked forward to so much I *still* remember my elation when she announced she was going to twice a week. While listening to Juicy Scoop, I remember thinking, “Wow, if I could do something that brings people the same joy that this show brings me, that would actually be extremely meaningful because I would be giving this same feeling to other people.”

There is nothing wrong with building a business to sell it, btw. If that is your mindset, go for it. I just think that there is something infinitely rewarding about doing something that isn’t just about making money. I like to think of our podcast as a kind of surrogate sisterhood for our listeners, that can hopefully make them laugh, get through a few mundane chores, and ultimately help them feel comforted and a bit less alone in this world as they hear Chan and I share our guilty pleasures, confess our embarrassing moments, and speak in hushed, awed tones of Brad Falchuk’s latest birthday caption for GP.

Some final tips 🫶🏻

If you’re feeling lost, or directionless, or if you’re just beginning a new chapter, I know all too well how daunting and complicated it can feel. While we’re very much still building this thing that is Pop Apologists, I am finally catching my breath enough to look back and see what worked and what didn’t to lead to where I am now. I want to leave you with a few final tips as takeaways that I wish I learned sooner - maybe it will save you a few years on the come-up.

1. Be strategic in the basic sense. You don’t have to have a business degree to pay attention to the landscape, see what’s working in the algorithm, what’s garnering more engagement, and lean into it. This is what takes a hobby to a business. We could have probably gotten closer to where we are now with steady growth (rather than an act of God aka our viral moments) if we leaned into video content sooner. Thankfully, sudden exponential growth helped us make up for bad decisions early on - but you don’t *need* to go viral if you make a few strategic choices early on and stick to them.

2. Be really clear about the value that you’re providing. What is distinctly you? There are hundreds of creators who do the same things, and you don’t necessarily have to reinvent the wheel to build a successful business. You just have to know your personal identity and deliver your unique point of view, because people crave and respond to authenticity. Your audience has tuned into you for a reason - always keep providing real value for them as your north star.

3. Be extremely ruthless with your resources and direct them towards getting your content to new eyeballs. Right now, the only way to grow on most platforms is through video content. Rather than wasting time doing 10 things that aren’t moving the needle, spend your time, energy, and money on tactics that you will actually see the results from. It may be small at first, but over time, things that are working will act as flywheels towards sustainable growth, and that growth will give you the momentum to keep going. Conversely, if you spend a lot of energy doing things that don’t move the needle, you run the risk of burning out.

4. Utilize your network. As in any profession, it’s completely reasonable (and can be extremely impactful) to simply ask for a favor. If you know other creators with an audience, respectfully, of course, ask them for help. There’s no shame in it as long as you go about it the right way and offer to provide some kind of value to them in return. When we were going viral during the Kate Middleton saga, I reached out to every single influencer that we had a connection with to ask them to share one of our reels. You’ll be surprised how generous and supportive people can be if you just ask.

5. Don’t worry about manifesting. Self-doubt was a huge part of my experience and mental state throughout the past five years – and still is! I didn’t labor under the delusion that I’d be a huge success one day. I did not feel a sense of total confidence or belief in the future. Success *genuinely* surprised me. Don’t beat yourself up if you experience self-doubt - moving through it and keeping going is what matters. For me, whenever I would hear someone talk about the importance manifesting, it just felt like another way I was failing; how could I ever achieve the success I wanted if I didn’t wholeheartedly embody the belief that it was coming from day one? Well, I didn’t – and it did. So you can let yourself off the hook if manifesting isn’t your thing, it’s not mine either! In the same way that I felt like I would never find love before I met my husband, the success of this podcast has also been a huge surprise.

All in all, to use a cliché, it’s been a journey. I genuinely pinch myself that I’m in any kind of position to reflect positively and share this story with an audience who might care. I hope that this will serve as an affirmation for anyone who is feeling lost, directionless, or freaked out about the future. It’s completely possible to build something from the ground up and create your own future. I also know that there will be more ups and downs to come - I by no means have it all figured out - but when you’re doing your dream job you’ve created for yourself, it’s pretty worthwhile to stick it out.