Streamlined Podcaster: Save Time Podcasting with Systems and Automation

The 2016 stack, as best I remember it: Skype for the call with video on so I could read body language, Ecamm Call Recorder capturing the Skype audio, and QuickTime recording my side locally — with a guest notes page asking every guest to do the same. I edited in Audacity, later GarageBand, and my first mic was the Blue Yeti, which sounds bad mostly because people talk into the top of it instead of the front. I was going to host the files on my own site until my friend Jackie Delia talked me out of it, which is how I ended up on Libsyn. Were they the best tools? No. Were they the ones I had? Absolutely.

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Eric Nuzum wrote a piece arguing that podcasting's pivot to video is going to end in a charred mess of garbage fire wreckage, and I think he's mostly right — though not for the reason most people assume. This is a reaction to that article and a follow-up to last week's "is video worth it" question: video isn't a magic wand, and adding it to solve your download problem instead of your audience's problem is exactly the rushed, mistargeted move he's warning about. I get into video's three jobs, why 90% of podcast consumption is still audio, and why serving your audience has to come first.

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How I Built It was a short interview show — 30 minutes at most — built on the same five questions every time, ending with "do you have any trade secrets for us?" The predictability is what made it work for the first hundred-plus episodes, the way a procedural show gives you a format you can settle into. The question that mattered most was the one about failure, because in 2016 everyone was talking about their wins and almost nobody was talking about what went wrong. I'll admit past me used "I like to be surprised along with my guests" as an excuse to skip research, and I don't agree with him anymore.

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I bought the domain howibuilt.it on my honeymoon in Italy, purely because every site I saw there had a .it address and I wanted one. The idea arrived a few weeks later: I was relaunching my online courses, having great conversations with people about how they'd built their businesses, and realized I should be recording them. How I Built It launched in July 2016 — less sloppy, better researched, and aimed squarely at independent developers who wanted to start a business, which is to say, at me. People say good ideas come back to you. I don't believe that. Write them down and revisit them.

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Going on ShopTalk Show with Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert around 2013 changed how I made podcasts. They had a guest notes page explaining how to get the best possible recording, and they had guests record their side locally so the finished episode sounded like everyone was in the same room — years before Riverside, Zencastr, or SquadCast existed. That one appearance is a large part of why my next show sounded good enough to take off. Spend time in the space, take the good lessons, and apply them.

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The TIL Podcast failed because I wasn't serving anybody. The technical barriers are gone — you can record from your phone, and RSS.com has a free hosting tier (disclosure: I'm their evangelist, and the link below is an affiliate link) — which means serving a specific audience is now the whole job. Write a mission statement, pick someone real and specific, and talk to them. You don't need millions of downloads; you need people you serve well enough that they come back and bring others.

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After ending the TIL Podcast, I rebooted it as an interview show — I'd talk to friends about their professional lives, starting with Dr. Dan Ostermeier and my brother, who worked at Disney World. It lasted two episodes, because I had no mission for it beyond wanting to make podcasting work. This was before Serial and Lore pulled podcasting into the mainstream, and I still had no reason for the show to exist. Two failed experiments with the same show taught me more than a cautious success would have.

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We made it about six episodes before the TIL Podcast fell to podfade. There were too many of us, we all had full-time jobs, the moderation was loose, and we never carved out a niche that would have made the show worth continuing. When our schedules shifted, we called it — and I asked everyone whether I could keep the name, which nobody minded. Know when to stop, and don't let sunk cost make the decision for you.

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After three days of talking about the TIL Podcast, I dug through the archive to find the very first thing we covered on that show: Coin, a connected card that was supposed to replace every card in your wallet. Apple Wallet and Google Wallet killed the product, but the domain is still live — now pointed at beginner crypto guides. Whoever is running it started sloppy, did their research, and iterated, which was not the tie-in I planned when I started digging.

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My podcast app of choice, Pocket Casts, supports video — and after some Reddit spelunking, it turns out it has for a long time. That sent me back to a question I keep circling: is video actually worth it for your show?

I pull up the YouTube analytics for both of my podcasts, explain why a 74% jump in views hasn't moved the metric I actually care about, and lay out the two-question test I use to decide whether video earns its place in your process.

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• Enjoy Pocket Casts on the big screen
• RSS.com — where I host this show, and where the video support comes from
• Got thoughts? Write in at streamlinedfeedback.com
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