They say revenge is a dish best served cold.
But former Mamamia podcast host and senior producer Claire Murphy has put her own spin on the old adage, showing that revenge may, in fact, be a dish best heard.
Murphy was made redundant from her role at Mamamia last month, just a day before April’s Australian Podcast Ranker results showed Mamamia Out Loud in second place with 722,478 monthly listeners.
Within weeks, she had built, named, and launched The Solo Bureau – a solo daily news briefing – entirely on her own terms.
It debuted on 31 May, climbed to second position on Apple Podcasts’ top news chart within its first week, and is available across Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocketcasts, and YouTube.
All it took was a gut feeling.
‘Mess with your head’
Murphy told Mediaweek the experience of redundancy hit harder than she expected – and that she wasn’t alone in that.
“It takes with it this fear that it’s going to happen again – the blow to the ego also makes you second-guess yourself and your skills and your talent – and also you feel like when you’re rejected it’s like well who’s gonna want me,” she said.
“It’s a real mess with your head moment.”
The response she received after going public about her redundancy helped shift that.
“There are people who are like I just want to listen in my car on the way to work about what’s going on in the world right now – and that’s who I’ve identified as my audience,” Murphy said of the clarity that followed.
The Sunday decision
The idea for The Solo Bureau grew from a joke with former colleagues, then quietly took shape over weeks – until one Sunday afternoon, it became something she could no longer put off.
“My gut kicked in and said if you don’t do this right now, you’re never going to do it, you might regret that,” Murphy said. “And I was like, you know what, f**k it.”
With no media company behind her and no promotional infrastructure to speak of, Murphy took a direct approach to building an audience.
“I literally sat down and just DMed every single one of them the link to that trailer, thinking, ‘ I don’t have enough database, I don’t have a big media company behind me to push this, I’m not cross-promoting anywhere – these people might listen,” she said.
Soul cup
The response since launch has surprised even Murphy. In a LinkedIn post marking the chart result, she said she was “beyond floored” by the community’s support.
Murphy said the debut had done more than validate the idea.
“I’ve always worked for somebody and I’ve always been able to adjust to whatever it is that company requires of me – and so this has given me a little bit of just freedom to be me for a minute, which is really exciting, terrifying, very not profitable, but just really interesting and has filled my soul cup quite to the brim this week,” she said.
Main image: Claire Murphy