Nobody Asked For This: Sara and Erin Foster Did It Anyways

Sara and Erin Foster have a message for anyone who thinks they’re too late to the game: start anyway. The sisters, who launched their hit podcast during COVID (“Who wants to hear from us?” they initially wondered), have turned their late entry into an advantage. Now partnering with Dear Media, they’ve built their success by ignoring advice and finding voices before they blow up. And yes, they’ve noticed when bigger podcasts poach their discoveries (“we’re coming for you,” they warn with a laugh).

A Q&A with Erin and Sara Foster

Q: Did you have a plan when you started the show? Anything you want to tell your haters now?

SARA: The truth is, we questioned if we had anything interesting to say. It’s why we waited so long to start a podcast. People were telling us for years before we started one, ‘Why don’t you guys have a podcast?’

ERIN: We were actually our biggest haters.

SARA: Yeah, and I think we were like, who wants to hear from us? There’s so many great podcasts out there, so we really dragged our heels in starting one. We were late to the party.

Q: You do this on your show where you read negative comments. If somebody said something mean to me, I immediately want to go home and cry.

ERIN: There are things that people have said that are mean and cut to the core, and I can’t laugh about it. And then there’s a lot that I can laugh at, and so we kind of try to focus on the ones we can laugh at.

SARA: When you stop and you look at it through another lens of this person is taking time out of their day to not only listen to your podcast, but go online, find a place to leave a comment… they clearly care. You’re doing something right.

ERIN: We take a lot of risks in our work life and in the conversations that we have, and part of that is saying things that people aren’t going to agree with.

SARA: We’re not for everyone, and we’re okay with that.

Q: Your podcast often tackles things you wish you’d known earlier. What’s something you’ve learned with age?

SARA: You realize as you get older that the value that you bring is how you make someone feel. It’s not what you have to offer them.

ERIN: I think kindness is overrated. I think honesty is more important than kindness. My father-in-law likes to say nice is not a job, or nice is not a profession. So to me, I am way more interested in someone who is honest, who has integrity, who lives the life that they say they care about.

Q: Why did you choose Dear Media?

SARA: I think we when we met Lauren and Michael [from The Skinny Confidential Him & Her Podcast], when we did their show, we were like, we just vibed with them right away, and I think we really had a much better understanding of the magnitude of what they built.

ERIN: I think we’ve just been bootstrapping our podcast since the beginning, and it’s been great because when you keep it small, you can be in charge of everything and you can take it at your own pace.

Q: What’s your approach to finding guests?

SARA: Erin and I have made a conscious effort and we’ll continue to make a conscious effort to seek out seekers and healers and experts that you don’t see on every podcast. We’ve really worked hard to find those needle in a haystack…

ERIN: …we don’t want the person that’s on the PR tour that’s on every podcast you’re listening to. There’s no point. We want to find someone that might have 2000 followers, but we like what they have to say. It’s not about following a trend, it’s about…

SARA: …creating it! I mean, a lot of these people that we’ve sort of found, and we were their first podcast, you now see them on ones I will not name. There are certain podcasts much bigger than ours that just love to steal our guests.

ERIN: Yeah, they do. But we’re coming for you.

SARA: Look, Erin and I made a lot of mistakes in our twenties and thirties, and all of our conversations are kind of like trying to hold our listeners’ hand into not making the same mistakes that…

ERIN: Or feel better about mistakes you’re making!

SARA: Or feel better about them. Yeah, sure.

Q: What’s your advice for people trying to find their voice?

ERIN: Don’t look at what anybody else is doing. Do what feels right to you. Everything that Sara and I have ever done in our work life, we didn’t mimic anybody… People would say, ‘oh, you can’t say that’ or ‘You can’t do that’… And we just always did what felt right to us, and it didn’t work every time. People only know about the times that it worked.

SARA: Fall in love with the process, commit to the process, not the end result. We never sat there and we’re like, ‘okay, we got to have this hit clothing company [Favorite Daughter].’ It was never something that we created in a lab. We just always operated from the core of who we are.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.