Why Not to Start a Podcast
When I tell people that I've launched a podcast, I get reactions ranging from interest to eye rolls. On two or three occasions I've been in someone's presence while they rant about how dumb it is that everyone seems to have a podcast these days and then realize what they've said in front of me and attempt to say something like "present company excluded" or "but yours is great…"
I started ShowUp—with my co-host Leigh—because I think storytelling in a format where people can actually hear your voice (especially when it comes to long form narrative), is immensely powerful.
Oh what a shocker, the marketer believes in the power of storytelling…but, hear me out. It’s like a magazine feature, except one where you can feel the emotion in the characters’ voices. You know what I mean. Comparatively, a lot of storytelling nowadays feels like getting a text from someone you met in passing at last week's event. You don’t feel connected, you may not even recognize the sender, and there’s no contextual history to clue you in to their tone of voice (we might as well throw inflection out the window).
Getting to the point, podcasting sauntered onto the scene as a compelling form of creative, and I just couldn’t stop myself from giving it a go (besides, why not?) I wanted to learn the intricacies of it, and attempt to master it. But, in doing so, I learned even more reasons as to why not to start a podcast:
Audio Production is Hard
In some ways, it’s never been a better time to attempt DIY audio production. Equipment is cheaper, software is free or comes with your Mac, and it’s easy to get started. Despite all the resources at hand, the reality is that anyone can start a podcast, but few can do it well. In case you missed that, it’s HARD to do it well.
There’s a bit of a learning curve with the MIDI setup of multiple microphones on a Mac and GarageBand. Even more than that, the room where you record matters, and it’s hard to find a good space. We thought renting a studio would do the trick, but even that came with poor insulation and shiny surfaces.
Key lessons learned are: use a professional but moderately priced microphone—we like the Blue Yeti Nano for portability. Read up on using the Audio MIDI Setup tool built into the Mac to connect multiple lines into GarageBand. And most importantly, record in a small, quiet room with lots of soft surfaces. We chose my co-host’s walk-in closet (we even take care to cover the desk that the microphones sit on with cushions or blankets to prevent reflections from the table). By using two microphones and GarageBand in her walk-in closet, we achieved what we think are pretty darn close to NPR-quality results.
Journalism is Hard
ShowUp has a highly produced style, meaning that it plays more like an audio documentary than a talk show, or one of those podcasts where the hosts just kind of gab about “the events” in “that space” “that week.” That means talking to numerous experts and/or the players involved with the story, digging through countless sources, and recording three or more high quality interviews with interesting people (AKA a job in journalism that you didn’t mean to apply for).
We find that interview targets respond at very low rates, so we reach out to many times more people than we actually end up using in the episodes. In case you missed that math:
Many People x More People = Maybe 1 Interesting Interview (if you’re lucky).
In general, even if an interviewee responds it can take a couple of weeks, which creates real timing challenges for producing an episode. My co-host and I now work on multiple episodes simultaneously.
The key lesson is: be persistent, use the network, follow up, and hopefully you’ll get to talk to meaningful and interesting people. Have a strong production calendar and be prepared for delays and challenges getting hold of great guests for the show.
Storytelling is Hard
ShowUp has a long-form, magazine-style feel, meaning each episode is 30 minutes to an hour long. This means that—if we do our job right—we’ll have several hours of interviews plus many more hours of my co-host and I unpacking the material, filling in the gaps, and reflecting on how it all comes together. We also want to be sensitive to the medium and leverage music, news clips etc to help tell the story. This can heighten the emotion of a section or make it more engaging—something you just can’t do in a text-only story (e.g. haven’t you ever wished your life had a soundtrack playing in the background? It really would make it easier to read the room…)
The best way I’ve found to turn five to ten hours of this audio into a compelling 45-minute story is to study all of the material, read the transcriptions for all of the tape, highlight it, and then manually piece it together into a story. Podcasts are where shortcuts go to die, so I’m hoping AI has the potential to alleviate this challenge in the future. I don’t think it can do the actual editing, but there could be a workflow that solves the mechanical difficulties of having all of the transcripts and file references open, copying and pasting, and trying to keep track of the audio files for each one.
In the meantime, the key takeaways are to start with a strong narrative structure: think about the beginning, middle, and end. Reflect on the lessons you hope that listeners will draw, and then cut aggressively through the tape, looking for only the best bits. Remember that you don’t have to include everything—sometimes what you omit can be even more meaningful.
Promotion is Hard
Podcasting is now a post-bubble marketplace. It has gone through the rise and the pop, and has now settled down but is still extremely saturated. So many people think they can make a podcast. Generally, we hope the better content will win, but to even get your work out into the world in the first place, you need to stand out. This means marketing your podcast: get subscribers, get downloads, build momentum. Podcast marketing is still valuable, it just has a high barrier to entry because, in the aftermath of the popped bubble, the market is crowded, and expectations are higher.
The marketing process starts with small mechanical challenges: where do you host your podcast when there are hundreds of tools and syndication services? What about digital marketing—which content and advertisements do you make to promote it? How do you navigate the algorithms? Like with many platforms, there’s a little bit of a secret sauce in getting a certain amount of engagement within the first seven to thirty days of a particular podcast episode being released.
Our key lessons learned here have been: keep it simple, use the fundamentals. We like a hosting service called Buzzsprout. We promote ShowUp using all of our existing channels, including paid and organic social on Instagram, LinkedIn and newsletter. To get the first episode off the ground, we did all kinds of hustling, texting our friends directly, getting them to subscribe and download to get those initial numbers up. We also experimented and had good results with Spotify ads, specifically for getting podcast downloads. We found that a 29-second trailer for each episode, with a few hundred dollars behind it on Spotify, had very meaningful results.
We Did it Anyway
The first three episodes are out. Here’s what you can expect: In one, our journalistic investigation results in me, the author of this blog post and host of that podcast, receiving actual death threats. Another features a conversation with Nike’s advertising agency and creative director about a political campaign gone wrong (and just a couple controversial side quests). And lastly, a secret Russian source cultivated by my co-host, Leigh. We have a fourth episode dropping soon, and we’ll have more coming out on approximately a monthly basis as we continue to do the long-form journalism thing that takes time and effort.
While launching your own podcast isn’t quite as easy as buying any old microphone and winging it (like it may have been five or ten years ago), with a thoughtful approach, strategic planning and an emphasis on nailing all the elements—the production, the journalism, the storytelling, and the promotion—it’s still possible.
I would love to take what we’ve learned and help you make yours a success. At Sangfroid! we support our clients’ podcast projects in a number of ways, from creating promotional content to offering the exact workflow described in this blog post as a service and managing the production of the podcasts completely. And if you’re not ready to take the leap just yet, we’re also experienced in placing clients on other people’s podcasts to build their personal and professional profile.
Ball's in your court, either way, we support you and we’d love to connect! Follow us on socials and reach out via contact form below (we do appreciate a long lunch like everybody else).
