Over the last few months I’ve been floating around the idea of creating a podcast, mainly because two things were happening in my life:
- My podcast consumption was starting to get higher, and with the 2hr commute I make every day to and from work I was beginning to hear from a tonne of amazing people through my car speakers about how they build products, market them, and evidently become better people by doing so.
- I also realized my role in the company at Sendwithus is growing and I’m becoming “the product person”. I’ve been a big proponent of bringing ideas into the company from what I hear in the podcasts I listen to.
A few weeks ago we wrapped up our team-wide “Growth Week” at Sendwithus where everyone in the company is in our Victoria, BC office to work on growth-related projects and launch them friday, October 2nd. They were all awesome projects, and the one that I proposed was to finally pull the trigger on starting a podcast, somehow incorporating company growth into it. I recorded some metrics that I would use to measure my growth (set number of downloads by the friday) and presented them to the team.
After some nervous banter on my part, I got the greenlight for starting the podcast so I spent the week building a content outline for the first episode, getting assets built, building launching a website, and finding a podcast host. I’ve never done anything like this before so I thought it would be good to document things as I went. What I didn’t realize was how much work is actually required to create a podcast.
Here’s a comprehensive list of things I did:
- started out by building a content outline for what the podcast should be about and what I wanted to talk about
- came up with a title (thanks @alexophile) and a tagline
- created a CodePen pen for the logo design to easily hack on it and iterate
- acquired some sweet intro/outro music from Free Music Archive
- acquired an awesome domain: faviconvalley.show
- built a website with jekyll hosted on surge.sh
- setup a Soundcloud account to upload episodes initially, but later moved to Simplecast
- setup a mailing list for people to subscribe for episode updates and powered it via RSS updates from Simplecast
- learn how to use Garageband in OS X for editing the show
- finally record the first episode, arguably the hardest part of all this
… and a list of some of the gear I used initially:
- recorded with a coworkers Blue Yeti USB condenser microphone
- already owned some Audio-Technica ATH-M50 studio headphones that are amazing
After recording episode 2 and doing some more research on microphones (I couldn’t borrow my coworkers mic forever you know), I settled on an Audio-Technica AT2005USB cardioid dynamic mic from Amazon. So far I’ve been satisfied with the sound quality, and it doesn’t pick up even half as much noise in the background as the Yeti condensor mic!
So without further ado, you can check out the show available at (the coolest domain ever) Favicon Valley ~http://faviconvalley.show~ (no longer accessible)! I have 2 episodes up as of publishing this post and I’m working on content for a third episode.