How to start a podcast?

As i started a podcast last week with a friend, i want to share my learnings and how we roll our podcast.

Create a concept

In the first place we thought a short bullet list with our contents would be enough, luckily for our first episode we created a detailed bulletlist with the topics we wanted to talk about. It helped us a lot to focus on the topics and gave the whole podcast some structure. So we would advice to do so yourself :)

Choose a podcast hosting platform

To get your podcast to your listeners you need to host your podcast somewhere. You can do so yourself, but we think it doesn't make sense if someone can do it for us. We use Anchor as our podcast hosting platform. It's free and super easy to use. So far we're happy with them and everything works as expected.

Recording Setup

We record remote. This might seem harder than recording in one location, but it's totally fine. We use a ZOOM meeting to connect us. We've choosen ZOOM because you can record seperate audio tracks for each speaker. That makes it easier in the post production if for example one speaker talks louder than the other one. We do not use this feature right now, but we might take on guests and then in makes the whole process easier. So we thought it's better to get the process right in the first place. Right now we record locally with Quicktime on Mac OS (not sure on Windows) and use the ZOOM recording as a backup solution.

Gear

My friend uses an Auna Mic 900B and i use a Shure MV88+. Even though the microphone from your phone would be good enough we opted in for a microphone you can plug into your computer. The Auna microphone starts at 50€ on Amazon sometimes and the Shure is definitely a little more expensive. What we found out is that the Auna lacks support for audio monitoring out of the box. This makes it harder to "hear" problems right away. Ontop of that you need headphones, otherwise soundquality will be bad. Any pair of spare headphones you have should be good enough. Make sure your microphone gain is correct, being too loud or too quiet will become a problem in the postproduction. So some testing might be necessary.

Postproduction / Cutting Tool

We use Garageband, if you're a Windows user you might take a look at Audacity. Both options are free. Here we put together both audio recordings and cut it a little bit. Than we check that the audio tracks are in sync. That's it, nothing special to mention here. Last step is to export the file and upload it to your podcast hosting platform.

That's how we do it. We took a lot of time evaluating different tools and reading about how to start a podcast. It all boils down to: think about it and get started. Of course better gear produces better sound quality, but remember content > sound. The first episodes might be a bit rough, so as everything in life it needs some practice.

Have a great day! Thanks for reading :) And if you have question about starting a podcast just contact me, i'm happy to help!