A Shelf in the Closet Broke Under Me

Iman Nezhadahad on RawCast, Sixteen Million Downloads, and What It Costs to Build a Media Empire With Two People — Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, Episode PP12

He was recording the third episode when it happened. He was sitting on a shelf inside a built-in closet — because that was his recording studio — with a phone in his hand, whispering so the rest of the family wouldn’t wake up. The shelf gave way. He came down with it.

RawCast started on the fifth of Farvardin 1398, inside that closet, from a quiet place inside someone who had been so introverted that when guests came to the house he wouldn’t leave his room for the first hour. In this episode of Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri — the final episode of the special Persian Podcasting series — Iman Nezhadahad traces the full arc from that shelf to sixteen to seventeen million audio downloads, roughly seven million YouTube views, and a two-person team (Iman and his wife Parastoo) that has produced it all.

The Gap That Pulled Him In

Iman’s entry into podcasting followed the same gateway that appears in several other episodes of this series: Ali Bandari’s early work and Channel B. But the specific gap that moved him wasn’t a gap in format or tone — it was a subject-matter gap. He loved historical events, historical narratives, the why and how of things that happened. He searched for a Persian history podcast and found almost nothing: only Paragraph, which Alireza Banijani was already producing.

That absence was an invitation. He had no guidance, no community of Persian podcasters to learn from, no template for what he was about to try. He began making something anyway — writing what he calls genuinely terrible scripts, recording them with his phone in a closet, and posting them without telling anyone in his household what he was doing.

“Until the fourth or fifth episode,” he says, “nobody knew I was doing this — not even at home. I’d wait until everyone was asleep and go into the closet.”

His Brother, the First Harsh Critic

When Iman finally told someone, it was his brother Amir — a dedicated podcast listener himself. Amir started offering notes. Episode by episode: this part was good, this part wasn’t, this should be changed. He was, Iman says with evident affection, the first qualified critic he had access to.

The relationship between the two brothers in the Persian podcast landscape has a small footnote worth noting: Iman started RawCast on March 25, 2019. Amir started his own podcast roughly a year later, on April 14, 2020. Iman got there first — something that still seems to mildly surprise both of them when recalled.

What He Means When He Says History

The specific way Iman approaches historical storytelling is the engine of everything RawCast has become. He is explicit about what interests him and what doesn’t. The fact that Constantinople fell — that’s not the story. That’s the fact. What he wants to understand is why an empire of that scale fell the way it did: what internal religious competition, what superstitions, what political divisions hollowed it out from the inside before the outside could break it open.

For the most recent episode, on Constantinople, he read two full books from beginning to end and summarized them. He watched three documentaries, pulling out details the books hadn’t covered. He gathered scattered articles and set them beside each other. Then he built a timeline. And then — this is the part he emphasizes — he threw all of that away in the sense that he didn’t use any of it directly. He started from scratch, writing the story in his own voice, in the register his listeners have come to expect from him.

“That moment happened in Constantinople,” he says, “that caused its fall — the internal division, the religious rivalry — how close is that to us right now? That’s what I want to find. Not the lesson in the slogan sense, but the recognition.”

The reconstruction work has also involved going back to early episodes that no longer meet his standards and re-recording them. Some had factual inaccuracies. Some had mispronunciations. Some simply had less energy than he brings now. He re-did them, because he knows listeners who discover the podcast often start from the beginning.

The Closet to Full-Time in One Year of Internal Arguments

For years, Iman ran RawCast alongside a full-time job in the IT team at Agah brokerage. The combination eventually became unsustainable — not financially, but in terms of what the podcast needed from him to reach the standard he was trying to hold. He spent roughly a year in an internal argument with himself about whether to leave.

The decision, when it came, was not primarily about money. He calculated that going full-time would allow him to produce more consistently — moving from roughly one episode per month to one every two weeks — and that the income from the podcast, once he had more time to give it, would likely be comparable to or better than what he was already making. The main thing full-time gave him wasn’t revenue; it was rhythm.

The effect on the show was immediate. Production cadence doubled. Audience growth roughly tripled. Iman attributes this to a simple logic: more consistent content reaches more people organically, and the best marketing for any content is other content.

Two People, Clearly Divided Labor

RawCast runs on two people: Iman writes, researches, and records. Parastoo, his wife, handles editing, post-production, and technical work on both the audio and YouTube channels.

This division was not always the arrangement. Iman tried involving Parastoo in the research and writing phase at one point — handing her books, asking her to extract what mattered. He took the work back, quietly, without even receiving a draft from her. Not because her work was poor, but because he found himself unable to trust the process: he would sit with the anxiety that something she considered unimportant might be something he needed, and the redundancy of reading everything himself anyway defeated the purpose of the collaboration.

“That obsessive quality has developed to the point where I can’t let things go,” he says. “I know that’s the problem. I know that’s what’s stopping me from scaling. I know it.”

Hossein frames this directly as a transition Iman hasn’t yet made: from content creator to media operator, from producing all the original material himself to managing a brand that produces material. Iman agrees with the diagnosis. He lists what stands in the way: the current active projects (RawCast, a second podcast called RapUp, and the YouTube channel), the focus required for each, and his sense that adding anything before the current structure is more stable would cost more than it gains.

RapUp and the Difference Between Platforms

The second podcast, RapUp, works differently from RawCast in a way that reflects a lesson Iman learned the hard way about platform audiences. When he launched a YouTube presence alongside the podcast, he assumed the audiences were interchangeable — that podcast listeners would migrate to YouTube and vice versa. They didn’t.

Podcast listeners and YouTube viewers are two distinct types of audience, shaped by different habits and different modes of attention. Content that works well in one format performs differently in the other, not because the content is worse but because the consumption context is completely different. He built YouTube’s audience from scratch, independently of the podcast’s community, and it grew separately. The two channels don’t significantly overlap.

RapUp applies a similar analytical logic to books: rather than reading a book aloud (which would be an audiobook), or summarizing passively, Iman reads the book, internalizes it, and produces his own version — extracting what he finds essential and presenting it in his own voice and structure. It’s a different kind of secondary creation: not curation, not summarization, but absorption and re-articulation.

The Months When Internet Disappeared and Production Costs Doubled

The economic damage of Iran’s internet disruptions is something Iman quantifies specifically and without diplomatic softening: during the periods of shutdown following 2022, the cost of producing a YouTube episode — internet access for upload, any materials purchased for research — exceeded the revenue the episode generated. He produced and uploaded anyway.

The structural damage is longer-lasting: YouTube’s algorithm treats accounts that go dark for months as strangers when they return. Episodes that used to accumulate a thousand to two thousand views in the first twenty-four hours were now getting four hundred to five hundred in the first week. The algorithm, which had previously been showing his content to new audiences, stopped doing so. He has been rebuilding that relationship since.

“For the content creators in this country,” he says, “there is nothing worse than five months without internet. We have to start from two years ago again.”

Sponsors Who Buy Billion-Toman Billboards and Won’t Pay for Podcasts

One of the episode’s sharpest observations concerns the asymmetry between how Iranian brands approach outdoor advertising and how they approach podcast sponsorship. A brand will sign a contract for a billboard worth hundreds of millions or a billion tomans, Iman says, without asking many questions. Ask the same brand to allocate a fraction of that budget to a podcast that reaches a specific, engaged, loyal audience — and the conversation becomes difficult, the skepticism intensifies, and the deal often collapses.

He has a specific response to this: rather than quoting Castbox numbers, which he considers misleading and which reflect only a fraction of actual listenership, he shows sponsors the genuine host-level analytics — real downloads per episode, real geographic distribution of listeners, real completion rates. His view is that an honest number that sponsors can verify is worth more than an inflated number that sponsors eventually learn to distrust.

“They’ll go and take a billion-toman billboard,” he says, “but they won’t allocate a tenth of that to a podcast whose impact on audience, on sales, on branding is actually greater.”

The Castbox Problem — A Long-Running Source of Frustration

Iman returns multiple times to the Castbox issue, which he treats less as a business strategy error and more as a genuine structural harm to the Persian podcast ecosystem. His argument has a specific mechanism: because a large majority of Persian podcast listeners use Castbox — a Chinese platform with roughly two percent of global podcast market share — Persian podcasting’s listening volume is effectively invisible to the platforms and metrics that matter internationally. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and the directories that feed international podcast rankings simply don’t see it.

This means that Persian podcasting, despite having produced a genuinely large and loyal listening audience over a decade-plus of development, cannot demonstrate that audience to international partners, cannot use it to build leverage with global streaming platforms, and cannot participate in the international conversations about what podcasting looks like in non-English languages. The millions of listens exist — they just exist somewhere that doesn’t count by the metrics that determine whether a language’s podcasting ecosystem is taken seriously.

Iman’s frustration with this is particularly pointed when he looks at his own data: a significant portion of his listeners use Apple devices, meaning Apple Podcasts is already installed on their phones by default. They choose to install Castbox separately and use that instead — because that’s where they were told to go, years ago, when the Persian podcast community made choices whose consequences are still playing out.

What He Actually Wants

When Hossein asks Iman what his real goal is — not in terms of numbers but in terms of what success would feel like — his answer is specific and modest-sounding but actually describes something rare. He wants to be in the group of three podcasts that someone recommends when another person asks where to start with Persian podcasting. Not the biggest, not the most monetized, not the most ambitious in scale. Simply: reliably, undeniably, among the three.

“If someone wants to recommend three podcasts to someone else,” he says, “I want to be one of those three.”

He acknowledges that the podcasts currently in that position have earned it through years of consistent quality and impact — that the stability of those recommendations reflects genuine cultural embeddedness, not arbitrary inertia. He respects that. He’s trying to build toward the same kind of permanence, one episode at a time.

The Cozy Corner — Dim Blue Light and No Lyrics

Asked where his own cozy corner is — where he experiences his most creative self — Iman’s answer is a specific room condition rather than a place or a time. Dim blue light. Instrumental music, nothing with lyrics. His workspace, configured exactly this way. Ideas arrive differently in that environment than in any other, and he’s learned to protect the conditions that allow it.

A Dedication

Iman dedicates the conversation to Parastoo — his wife and the other half of the two-person operation that has produced everything RawCast has become. The technical editing, the post-production work, the YouTube channel maintenance, the consistency of output that a solo creator simply cannot sustain — all of it runs through her. He says this not as a formality but as a precise account of how the work actually gets done.