It seems today that all we see in the podcast sphere is businessmen in suits talking about their startups and degrees.
Layla Palmer, a senior business of creative enterprises student, launched her podcast “Heart to Hustle” on Jan. 15. The first two episodes featured entrepreneurs with unconventional paths to success, highlighting the bumps along the way.
“I want to shine the light on people who you wouldn’t think would be on a business podcast,” Palmer said. “People just don’t look in their direction, but their insights are just as helpful—if not more—because they’re more personal and more realistic.”
Palmer hopes that this unique approach will appeal to Gen Z college students entering the workforce, many of whom can’t relate to the traditional paths to success featured on typical entrepreneurship podcasts.
However, she acknowledges that podcasts—and long-form content in general—are more and more becoming a relic of the 2010s, as short-form video becomes the most popular means of sharing information.
“We all have really horrible attention spans,” Palmer said. “But I’m leaning into that rather than working against it. In the actual interview I let the guests yap, like a TED Talk, but I do all the magic in the editing to make it more digestible and entertaining.”
Short-form content has not only affected the style of her podcast, but it also influences the content: she uses social media to keep an ear to the ground, as it helps her find otherwise unknown entrepreneurs.
“I do a lot of my homework on TikTok and [Instagram] Reels, because you’ll find people who are really random and super unique,” Palmer said. “I screenshot them in my phone and when I do guest outreach I’ll go back like, ‘oh, that could be a cool person to interview.’”
This personal approach to choosing subjects informs “Heart to Hustle”’s entire ethos. Palmer conducts pre-interviews to make sure her subjects’ stories will resonate with college audiences, and more importantly, that they will get along. For the podcast’s first two guests, Palmer went to mutual connections to make sure her guests would be as open as possible.
The first episode is an interview with Christina Thomas, a close friend of Palmer’s sister. Thomas is an entrepreneur with eclectic work experience—including dancing for Disney and the Philadelphia Eagles, and making a film about rescue dogs—was upended by a cancer diagnosis. She tells the story of bouncing back after her treatment and having to face the unfair but realistic issue of explaining a resume gap.
Nita Akoh, the second episode’s subject, is Palmer’s boyfriend’s roommate’s sister’s friend. Akoh was an international student from Nigeria who studied behavioral neuroscience at Northeastern University. While pursuing her bachelor’s there, she developed an idea for a business, but found no time once she started working. She eventually quit her nine-to-five to pursue her startup, MyAtlas, a mental health app that uses data to provide real-time and personalized support.
“She’s an entrepreneur, so she has the experience of being a student who’s burnt out,” Palmer said. “She talked a lot about self-care in the workplace, like advocating for yourself and your mental health at your company, and her app is making strides to help people like us who are going into the workforce.”
But Palmer has not experienced burnout with her passions just yet; she’s been interested in audio and podcasting since before she was in college.
“I started doing podcast stuff when I was a sophomore in high school, and we just talked about what was happening in our friend group,” Palmer said. “It didn’t really go anywhere until my senior year of high school, when I started a series called ‘Hollywood Hero.’”
From 2020 to 2022, Palmer was committed to “Hollywood Hero,” a podcast series that featured interviews with people in the entertainment industry. Working on the series gave her experience finding sources and conducting interviews, but the episodes lacked a throughline—she wanted to start a show with a strong angle and a specific audience in mind.
“Heart to Hustle” is the culmination of her work and the next step in her own unconventional journey to success. She hopes by highlighting new perspectives, she can show today’s college students that a path to success doesn’t have a single set of stops.
“It’s a passion that I’ve had since I was 15 years old,” Palmer said. “If I can make even one student who’s listening feel like they’ve learned something, or that they want to come back next week, that’s the icing on the cake.”
