Part 1: Building a Podcast - My journey
As I celebrate completion of first year of my podcast - Product Talk with Malthi, I decided to pen down this process and journey
I want to start this piece with a lot of gratitude to my audience, industry colleagues, my agencies and community who have whole heartedly supported me in translating this vision into reality, listening to the conversations and sharing feedbacks.
Last one year has been truly transformative as I ventured into this completely new space. Huge amount of learnings in lot of different ways. Hence I decided to write a 3 part articles on my journey of building it so that it can be useful for anyone who is setting out on this path.
Part 1 - Take the plunge and “Level Up Prodcast” was born
I am capturing some of the most important questions, one needs to ask before starting a podcast. Did I do this well before starting, honestly NO.
I would do it differently if I start all over again. While I thought I will quickly build an MVP, iterate, keep it frugal and DIY project - I could have avoided some very obvious blunders. Let me give an example - The title “Level Up Prodcast” was not at all SEO friendly and I could not find even after 3 episodes. Sigh!! Check out these questions to probe before you start on this path.
Overall Theme
What is the purpose of making this podcast?
What is the end game?
Who is your user persona?
What should they expect from this podcast?
Who are the other players, what is their approach?
What is your value proposition and how are you different?
What kind of topics will you be discussing, is this something your users want to listen?
What mechanics will you use to research about the guest, topic?
How does the overall process of pre-recording research, recording, post-production and distribution looks like?
What kind of team or support does one need to get started?
What is the budget you are willing to invest in the podcast?
Do you want to do it alone or with someone?
Production
What is the right frequency of publishing?
Should it be audio only, or audio + video
Do you have high quality microphone, camera?
How should the background look like?
What is the right duration of the podcast?
What should be the name/title? Is it resonating with your brand messaging ?
What are the brand colors, logo?
Role of light and sound during recording
What are the options to record and how is the quality of the recording?
How should you introduce your speaker?
Distribution(Post-Production)
How will you crack distribution?
What distribution channels will you publish?
How will you engage with your audience?
What tools can be used for editing ?
What and how many artifacts will need to be created?
Best ways to highlight key take-aways
Understanding the concepts of thumbnails, cover arts etc
Getting an understanding of YT studio, how to make your video easily searchable, and break them into chapters to be more palatable
How do you write your post for different mediums
How to encourage your speaker to share the episodes and artifacts on social media
How to gather feedback and distill it?
You may not have answers for all the questions but make sure that you are constantly thinking about them, research how other podcasters are doing it, find a mentor podcaster who has done it, hire an agency if you can afford.
I have an intern, Nitya who has been extremely supportive in this journey and was building this with me.
Here are my first six episodes and mostly done with people whom I am very comfortable chatting and build my MVP. We started posting in Spotify and Apple Podcast from our 3rd episode. We acquired our first 250 listeners with these videos.
The learnings were amazing and I was thoroughly enjoying the conversations and process.
I bought new camera, mike, lights and could see that it was getting better with every episode. Creating Reels was still a pain but we were getting better.
While the content was being appreciated, the reach was still limited and discoverability was miserable and from here I decided to make a shift.
Read more about it in the next write-up.
I concluded this phase with this summary video.