Priya Nandan came to Signal frustrated with a familiar problem: her podcast had healthy download numbers, but nobody on her growth team could explain what those numbers actually meant for the business. Every review meeting ended with the same unanswered question — is this working?

We started by changing what "working" meant. Instead of reporting downloads, we built Priya a simple framework tracking three things per episode: guest relationship depth, follow-up conversations generated, and any downstream introductions. Devon Okoro, a growth marketing lead at a fast-scaling SaaS company, became the test case for this new approach.

The episode with Devon covered a specific, narrow topic — retention modeling for usage-based pricing — deliberately avoiding the broad "growth tips" territory most guests default to. That specificity made the conversation memorable enough that Devon referenced it in three separate LinkedIn posts afterward, each one driving direct traffic back to Priya's team.

Priya's team no longer asks "is this working" in review meetings. They ask how many warm conversations came out of each episode, because that's now the number that actually gets reported upward.