DEV Community: Heavybit Inc

So You Want to Start A Show: Podcasting Best Practices

Mina — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 18:39:19 +0000

Hi everyone~ Excited to be making my first submission with this guide that my team and I have spent a lot of time putting together. Since 2015, we've launched 18 shows with a combined 350+ episodes, and some of those shows have served as the foundations for global, standalone communities, so folks come to us for advice on where to start and how to keep the show running.

You can find the full, in-depth blog post here.

Preparing for Launch

Objectives and Strategic Planning

The first, and most important step to making your show succeed is understanding why you’re doing it. Before you get started, think through the following questions

Goals: What do you want to accomplish with the podcast? What does success look like for this show 6 months from now?
Logistics: How frequently do you want to release episodes? Who will host the show? Who will own the different steps of the process (booking, promoting, etc.)?
Content: Who is your target audience? What topics would you like to cover? What are the criteria for a guest?

Assets

Every show needs a name, a description, and artwork. You’ll not only be asked for these things when you submit your feed to various podcast directories but preparing these things is a good forcing function for thinking through the whats, whys, and hows of your show.

Sourcing Guests

Where you source your guests will depend on what the objectives of your show are. Is it to meet customers? Is it to educate your users? A great way to source guests is to ask your audience or end every episode with a question for your guest, “who would you recommend we talk to next?”

Recording Your First Episode

Recording Gear

Luckily, in our remote world, the minimum viable setup is really just a recording app, a quiet space, and a decent mic, which most everyone should have by now.

Microphones

Pretty much anything will be better than your laptop’s built-in mic. USB ones like Blue Yeti and Blue Snowball are popular among podcasters for their ease of use and affordability.

Recording Apps

We recommend using Zencastr for recording remote podcast audio. The app records each speaker on their own computer and splits each speaker into a separate track to ensure high-quality sound capture – no more strange artifacts and hiccups from unstable internet connections.

Where to Record

Minimize background noise and echo. Avoid recording in larger, reflective rooms with harder surfaces like glass, tile, rock and metal. Try to find a smaller room where surfaces are largely made of softer materials (wood, sheetrock, carpet, rugs, furniture, etc.) like a small home office or carpeted bedroom.

Being an Effective Host

Conducting in-person interviews requires a lot of energy and confidence. Interviewing remotely can be harder because of latency issues and dropped connections. The one thing all great in-person and remote interviewers have in common is a lot of practice.

Editing and Publishing An Episode

Avoid Having to Edit

In addition to the recording tips above, the better prepared your hosts and guests are, the better your episode will turn out. The more composed everyone is, the easier it is to find and cut the awkward parts. The more experienced the host, the better they’ll be at rephrasing confusing points.

Tools

There are lots of tools out there to help with post-production. We use Frame for folks to be able to leave feedback with timestamps for edits. Transcribing is time and resource intensive but the payoffs are high; transcripts provide accessibility to folks with hearing disabilities, cater to folks who prefer to read, and make your show discoverable to search engines.

Promoting Your Show

Social Channels

If you’ve done your homework of determining who your target audience is during the objective-planning stage, then you should already know the channels they’re likely to be hanging out in. But lately, people are so hungry for podcasts, submitting your feed (with the correct categories) to as many podcast directories as possible is a great way to increase listenership.

Repackaging Your Episodes

You should be promoting every episode but don’t miss opportunities to promote the show itself. Individual stream and download counts are important but what’s more important is encouraging people, who stumbled upon your one viral episode, to check out the rest and ultimately, subscribe to your show.

Lean on Your Guests

Episodes don’t need to be released in the order that they were recorded in. If your guest and/or their company has an exciting launch coming up, take advantage of that and publish the episode to coincide with it.

We’ll be updating our guide regularly with additional tips so check back often, and let me know if you’d like to add anything or if we’ve missed something. Good luck!

COVID Resources for DevTools Startups

Ashley Dotterweich — Thu, 14 May 2020 21:15:11 +0000

Large or small, over the past few months all organizations have been impacted by COVID-19 in one way or another. For startups with limited resources and small teams, adjusting to the downturn has been especially difficult. As we collectively adjust to the new normal, Heavybit has been collaborating with industry experts and experienced leaders to learn what teams can do to weather uncertain times more effectively and develop educational COVID resources for startups.

Read on to learn more about some of the expert AMAs, working sessions, and guides we've created, and to learn how to stay in the loop as we continue creating new resources moving forward.

Navigating the Shift to Remote Work

As teams go remote, the challenges and benefits of distributed teamwork are more apparent than ever. It's unclear for many organizations when co-located working can resume, so it's important for founders to consider how they can help their teams stay productive in the long term. Darren Murph, Head of Remote for Gitlab, shared his advice on how teams can build processes and cultures that make remote teams more efficient (and happier).

Adapting Your Sales Strategy to Preserve Pipeline

Sales during a recession is about focusing resources on the deals that will make the biggest impact and strengthening relationships with your existing customers.

Sales Priorities in a Downturn

Tidelift’s Bridget Gleason and Chris Grams shared how revenue teams can navigate the economic downturn. After their presentation, Bridget and Chris fielded questions from our members on everything from accelerating POCs to understanding when it's time to drop a prospect. Check out the transcript of our Q&A with Bridget Gleason and Chris Grams.

Customer Success in a Crisis

With a stronger focus on retaining and upselling existing customers, customer success strategy is paramount during COVID. Identifying opportunities to educate and empower your users now will pay off in the long run. Dremio VP of Customer Success Ohad Almog discussed how customer success in a crisis can help teams weather uncertain times and foster stronger relationships with their customers.

Marketing and Brand During a Crisis

It seems like every brand is jumping on the "we're in this together" bandwagon right now. But making a true connection with your customers requires a measured approach. Look for opportunities to engage with your audience in the ways they need it most.

Comms Strategy During COVID

We asked GitLab’s Director of Corporate Comms Natasha Woods to share how teams should think about internal and external communication strategy during challenging times, and why how you communicate is essential to your recovery strategy.

Pivoting From to Live to Online Community Engagement

While many teams had big plans for event marketing at the beginning of the year, it's now critical to explore digital-first marketing and community engagement opportunities. Readme co-founder Greg Koberger shared how he and his team pivoted an in-person speaker lineup to a WAPI Radio, a digital radio station to combat shelter-in-place anxieties.

We also spoke with Developer Advocate Dawn Parzych about how LaunchDarkly has changed up their community engagement strategy during COVID. They've moved transitioned their live monthly Test in Production meetup to a Twitch-streamed weekly event, and introduced ToggleTalk to keep a pulse on the community via Twitter.

Defending Pipeline and Bottom-Up Adoption

This week we hosted ex-Heroku CEO and Dropbox exec Adam Gross for our Speaker Series on The Defensibility of Developer + Self-Serve Go-to-Market. Adam shared his framework on how developer and enterprise startups can gain early adoption, land, and expand while others are at a standstill.

Financial COVID Resources for Startups

In an AMA with Heavybit member founders, Burkland Associates’ Stephen Lord shared what startups need to know about the Payroll Protection Program (PPP). For more from the Burkland team, check out their extensive collection of COVID-19 Financial Resources.

Many members of the Heavybit community have launched their own initiatives to aid in COVID recovery. Learn more about how the Heavybit community is contributing to COVID-19 efforts here.

Learn More about Heavybit's COVID Resources for Startups

We're continuing to develop COVID resources as our community recovers. To stay up to date on the latest articles, interviews, and expert sessions as we release them, subscribe for updates from Heavybit.

Fostering Remote Fluency: Remote Team Tips from GitLab Head of Remote Darren Murph

Ashley Dotterweich — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 23:36:19 +0000

While many teams have been experimenting with remote workforces in recent years, few have taken the leap to go fully-distributed. As recent events have forced many organizations to take their teams remote, many of us are learning how to stay productive, stay in touch, and stay sane.

With over 14 years of remote work experience himself, Darren Murph now owns the process for the world’s largest all-remote organization as Head of Remote for GitLab. Last week Darren joined Heavybit for an online group session on how to foster remote fluency and build better distributed teams. Watch his presentation here:

Here are some of the lessons we learned from Darren on fostering a happy, effective remote team during the session:

Embrace Asynchronous Workflows for Your Remote Team

Distributed work lends itself well to flexible work schedules, since the physical lines of being “at work” and “at home” are blurred. Embracing asynchronous work allows your team to design a work schedule that works best for them. This workflow is especially helpful for teams with children or other family members to care for right now. It can also be beneficial for night owls who tend to do their best thinking in later hours.

Since real-time interactions have to be a bit more intentional remote teams, it’s important to make sure that you’re making the most of the time that your team is working together. Setting agendas for meetings is a great forcing function for keeping meetings focused and cutting down on unnecessary sessions. Darren recommends keeping rolling agenda doc attached to recurring meeting invites to ensure that everyone involved can easily see what’s been discussed.

Tips for Getting Started:

Communicate your work hours to the team
Set agendas for meetings and working sessions to keep them focused

Document Everything

An important aspect of asynchronous work is ensuring that every team member has the information they need without relying on their team members in realtime. One of the challenges of remote work is that information can easily become siloed, which is why one of GitLab’s core values is to write things down. Darren told us, “The way a GitLabber thinks is, if you get asked a question, you should be able to answer that question with a link. If you can’t, then you should document it as you answer it.” Baking documentation into your team’s workflow helps make information discoverable for whoever needs it, whenever they need it.

Tips for Getting Started:

Encourage teams to document everything on an ongoing basis
Carve out time after every meeting to document

Keep It Human

While your Slack might have been all work and no play before, for your remote team it will become the hub of social interactions. Create dedicated Slack channels to give folks a break from work-related conversations. The GitLab team has a number of different forms of informal communication to give the team opportunities to get to know each other better, connect beyond their shared work, and build an inclusive remote culture.

Darren also mentioned that he starts every 1-1 with a life update before diving into work details. Taking these pauses to connect with your coworkers on a personal level helps build strong connections that might be missing from a distributed team otherwise.

Tips for Getting Started:

Create Slack channels dedicated to non-work activities and topics
Add life updates to 1:1 and team syncs
Avoid celebrating long work hours

Iterate, Iterate, Iterate

Ultimately, every team will go through a transition period as they figure out how to work remotely. Darren stresses that what works for one team, or one moment in time, might not work for another. Always be open to changing things up, experimenting with your processes, and communicating what’s working and what isn’t working with each other.

He also noted that it’s critical to have someone in charge of the remote experience — especially when external forces are pushing your organization into a remote team structure before you’re ready. “It’s important to establish a remote leadership team — it can be cross-functional, if you don’t have time to hire someone in. But there needs to be a task force focused on just getting the remote transition right,” said Darren.

Tips for Getting Started:

Designate a remote leadership team
Create channels for offering feedback
Continually look for opportunities to experiment

Learn More about Gitlab’s Remote Team Best Practices

Taking your team remote is a challenge of workspace, communications, and mindset, and getting all the pieces in place doesn’t happen overnight. But the infrastructure you lay out now will have long-term benefits — whether you have a fully distributed team, employees spread out across a few floors or even just the occasional individual working from home.

If these takeaways have whetted your appetite for more, you’re in luck; Darren’s team at GitLab has documented their remote experience in detail. Check out GitLab’s Guide to Remote Work and their company Handbook for a deep dive into everything from the organization’s processes to how they’re building a strong remote culture.

_This article originally appeared on Heavybit.com. Check out more content like this in the Heavybit Library.