Temujin is a limited-series audio drama about the life of Genghis Khan. It has a fan base in the audio drama world and was a finalist at this year's Webby Awards in the Podcasts - Scripted Fiction category, where it competed against The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and entries from HBO, the BBC, and Wondery.

Spoiler alert: Temujin lost to Trevor Noah. But it was comfortably in second place with 34% of the 2 million votes cast. (The Daily Show with Trevor Noah got 40% of the votes. Third place got 10%.)

It has opened doors for the show’s producers. Writer and director Roshan Singh was brought on as a writer on the animated adaptation of the beloved graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan. He and fellow Temujin producer Isabel Perucho have set up Andas Productions to create narrative stories for audio and video games. 

But back in university (they graduated from Yale-NUS three years ago, although it feels like a lifetime in the past), Temujin was a capstone project Roshan worked on with his classmates.

Most thesis projects simply get printed and sent to the archives. He wanted to put it out into the world, despite little encouragement from mentors. 

“One thing a mentor of mine said was that Temujin was just a silly little side project I was doing with my friends and that I would have to grow up soon and figure out what my actual career is going to look like.”

He first pursued it as a play, but there was no interest. So Roshan considered audio. “The beauty of audio is if you have the resources, nobody can tell you not to do it.” With Isabel running marketing, they raised $10,000 on Kickstarter to fund the production. “We decided to push ahead because we had this faith that if it meant something to us, then it'll mean something to someone else.”

In this interview, Roshan and Isabel reflect on the experience of finding a listener base for Temujin and how they're navigating the industry as young producers. 

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