Blog: Podcast Planning
This post provides the shared document we used to outline the podcast so that we’d have a guide for creating content in the future.
The hardest part of starting a Podcast, especially with 2 OCD marketing guys behind it, was deciding what to do first: create content vs. create a plan.
It took about 6 years to get from a silly, half-hearted Instagram channel with about 10 posts and then nothing for years to this point. Rather than belabor this into a long story, we’ll get to the punchline. We used Google Docs to share a document and tweak it for a month or so.
Being in marketing, we knew about a “Creative Brief,” a document that gets an idea down on paper and fleshes it out. We created an outline of our own to capture the things we knew we’d need to be our guide to get the content started. This is our outline. I populated the first 2 fields to show you how simple it started. Once we filled this out we felt like we had our direction. Then, we cobbled together the gear and found a desk to sit behind and a backdrop to film in front of, and we scheduled our first recording.
Idea Assessment: Podcast
Working Name: Bad Dads
Guiding principle:
Program Format:
Program Flow (interview/story):
Mission:
Core Values:
What it is:
What it isn’t:
Tagline Ideas:
Inspiration from successful podcasts:
Below was a table o guide the setup and ultimately the creation of the first episode:
Format: follow a recipe vs. cook and see if a recipe follows
Time goal: Bishop Baron bit-sized vs. Joe Rogan rambling
Max Rating - do we want our kids to listen? PG vs. PG-13
Video - 2 birds w/ 1 stone, but more setup and editing: Yes, but not live vsl No
Set layout: Across a table (radio) vs. Side by side (video)
Standard Josh & Ron only engineering setup: Headphones (like radio DJs) vs. No Headphones (like interview shows)
Standard 2-Person Positioning (how should we align ourselves on camera?)
Recording, editing, posting software: We went with Riverside.fm as it has a combo of audio + video features we wanted.
Simple video studio setup example:
To-Do’s:
Episode Brainstorm:
We came up with 38 episode ideas pretty quickly and gave each a basic flow and theme so we could choose from these later and have a framework to populate as we plan for each one.
Feel free to reach out to us with any questions.
Blog: Choosing Podcast Gear
Check out this article about how we got started. We list the gear we used for our first episode and why we chose it. We talk about our studio set up and how we set everything up to make for an easier workflow.
We researched this extensively for many weeks if not months. There are 3 key takeaways we want to share with you before we jump into the actual gear we use.
Most online advice is for a 1-person podcast. Because we have 2 hosts, we had to be very discerning of the advice. Many things change, from the mic to the audio interface to the “set design.” Be clear on your ideal setup and research that.
Workflow, workflow, workflow. Josh and I both have a marketing background, fulltime jobs, and multiple kids worth of schedule piling up. On one hand, we added complexity with video and also a website vs. just an audio podcast, but we are engineering a setup and workflow that would streamline our ability to juggle multiple platforms and make it so this endeavor is sustainable.
The internet contradicts itself. This is not cheap. Yes, you can do it cheap. And if you just want to do it so you can stop talking about it, go for it. However, none of the tried and true case studies added up to this being cheap. Our gear plus online apps for editing and publishing came into a year 1 cost of about $1,000. And this was with free mics. I’ll break this down below.