Hi!
I’m unsure exactly where to start this as I’ve been so hot and cold about sending newsletters out. I have about fifteen unfinished drafts, each on widely different topics, that I could have sent sometime over the last three months but chose not to. In that time, I’ve accomplished a few personal goals, one of which is now worth sharing - I started a podcast!
Before I jump into what I’ve learned, here’s a link to the podcast: https://linktr.ee/WCYTMAS.
At first glance(or hearing), it may seem that your favorite podcast hosts are doing what is really a very simple job in an elegant manner. They ask questions, the guest answers. Repeat. Podcasting is much more than it seems. It’s only after my co-host, Faraz, and I started recording our own podcast that we realized the many layers involved in making a great show. Below, I try to describe some of them in detail.
Topic/Market: I’ve started many creative endeavors(like this newsletter!) and the imperative question I’ve had to ask myself is whether I’m building something for myself or for others. Acknowledging this difference and choosing one is the most important action in making a project successful. In part, because the criteria for what I consider successful is different in either case. We firmly wanted to build a podcast others would want to listen to. The topic we wanted to cover, software, is widely covered by other podcasts but mostly with a focus on operations and how money flows in and out of the system. While the equity side of the software business is complex and interesting, we wanted to focus on technical topics with guests that could speak confidently about their domain. The current market dynamics are also in our favor as the software industry is experiencing a boom cycle. More people than ever are entering the industry and looking for outside resources to complement their existing knowledge. 20 years ago they would have looked to professional journals or textbooks, now they can listen to our podcast at 1.5x speed. With this in mind, we wanted to design our show to dive deep into a topic without compromising the bigger picture.
We also didn’t want to fall into the trap where we touch on serious topics lightly and magnify the more dramatic or sensational aspects. A good example would be the subject of artificial intelligence - I captured a screenshot from the NYT of the types of articles that the current discourse focuses on. The angles are typically consumer-focused, political, a little sensational, and can be characterized as answering this question: What can we write about regarding AI that will pique enough curiosity from our readers for them to click on the link? (This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, obviously it’s what the average NYT reader is curious about.)
What mainstream discourse often fails to answer is how these technologies are being built. What methodologies are being used? What’s the cutting-edge research suggesting? How can somebody break into this industry? What isn’t being said about these topics? Are these technologies as influential as we’ve been led to believe?
The audience for a podcast like this may seem small in comparison to the widespread appeal of a comedy podcast or more light-hearted fare, like “The Joe Rogan Experience”. But, I’ll counter that total addressable markets are always much larger than they seem.
Guests: Finding guests can be hard for a new podcast. But, Faraz and I are privileged in that we grew up in Silicon Valley and had a number of childhood friends either studying or working in deeply technical areas. However, in order to diversify our guest base, I’ve spent significant time cold emailing and DM'ing people on Twitter asking them to come on as a guest. One strategy that’s worked for me is to hop into Clubhouse rooms where people are discussing AI or Data Science and direct message the most authoritative speaker in the room. Another strategy - I would specifically target professionals at public relations agencies located in the Bay Area. When companies are launching a new product or service, you’ll find that PR agencies are involved in placing executives at multiple media channels to get the word out.
Guests play an important role other than providing great content. By sharing our episode they open us to a whole new audience that would minimally overlap with the audience of previous guests. Anecdotally, I’ve discovered most of my favorite podcasts from recommendations of guests that had appeared on said podcasts. Finding a guest that would help make great content + open us up to new networks will be the powerful combination that increases our growth. At the time of writing this piece, I’m excited to say we have 4 guests lined up, 2 of whom are executives at Intel and Cisco, an entrepreneur running a “big data” startup, and a chairman of a hardware manufacturer in China.
Questions/Framework: In college, I went to a few open mic nights in Los Angeles. I only performed twice but I quickly realized there are jokes that make me laugh and jokes that make other people laugh. The trick is to say the latter. People new to the stage often say the former. In a similar trend, after soft-launching our podcast, Faraz and I received due criticism that the questions we thought were well-framed and cohesive were scattered and lacking a certain “secret sauce”. This is because we were asking questions that were a combination of what we wanted to know and what our instinct suggested that our potential audience would be interested in listening to. The rule here is to not underestimate the audience. We made some dramatic changes; we cut out biographies because nobody wants to hear the guest’s resume(that’s what linkedin’s for), we started revising our questions to be more direct, we focused on a few major topics. In editing episodes ourselves, we began seeing trends in the language and phrases we were recycling often. For example, I uniformly reacted to thoughtful answers from guests with, “that’s really interesting”. We also learnt to cut out content that wasn’t relevant to the theme of the show or the episode even if it made for decent listening. This tweet by Paul Graham encapsulates this:
Every guest is different and approaches how they answer questions differently. One guest may hedge on questions and provide only definitional answers. Another guest may be more verbose and cover multiple topics in one monologue. The best hosts, at least my favorite, know when to follow up and when to cut guests off to reorient the conversation. Another interesting phenomenon is how people change once the mic is hot. Something about being recorded and having their voice disseminated into the ether makes people less like themselves and more like who they think they should be. The best hosts know how to break through this dissonance and bring out the real person. You want to disappear the mic. Faraz made the following point at the end of a prep session, “the conversations we have after we stop recording are sometimes more interesting than what was said during the recording”. There’s a lot more to be said about bringing structure to an authentic conversation, much of which we’re still figuring out ourselves so I’ll save that for another letter.
Logistics: Podcasting is easy to get started with. Unlike other forms of media, there’s a low barrier to entry in terms of a financial commitment and finding platforms to distribute on. I bought a mic($115), subscribed to Descript(editing software at $16/mo), subscribed to a Buzzsprout(hosting software at $14/mo), and subscribed to Zoom Premium($12/mo). With one click, I can submit an episode to multiple platforms simultaneously, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
If you’ve been thinking about starting a podcast and had questions or if you have feedback on what I’ve written or if have feedback on the podcast itself, feel free to DM me on Twitter: @NextVasanth or email me at vthiruvadi@gmail.com.
PS: If you think somebody else would find this helpful or interesting, please forward it to them. Chances are they aren’t subscribed :)