Unruly Reflections: Launching a Podcast
This is normally only for paying subscribers 😉
This is an example of a paid subscription post. Paying subscribers receive ad-free versions of each episode of Unruly Figures, as well as exclusive discussion posts, behind the scenes glimpses, and the warm, fuzzy feeling of supporting in-depth research and writing. Right now, I’m offering a 14-day free trial to all the subscriber-only posts. Check it out here. Ready to commit? Take 20% off the annual plan by subscribing now. Available until October 6, 2021.
Well, it’s been a little over a week since the official launch of Unruly Figures, and I’m kind of amazed that the time has already flown by! I have two part-time jobs outside of this (ah, to be a creator in America in the 2020s), so I knew that it was going to be a bit of a chaotic time, but I wasn’t prepared for how it would feel like I sprinted through the whole week with barely a second to catch my breath. But, I’m catching my breath now.
Every once in a while, I’m not really sure how often yet, I’ll be posting these Behind The Scenes style glimpses. They’ll usually be for paying subscribers, unless I feel like they really need to be for the general public. (Not a paying subscriber yet? Annual subscriptions are currently 20% off! Ends October 6th.) Today, I just wanted to share some thoughts about starting a podcast, in case anyone out there is considering starting one as well.
Here’s how it all started:
I had the idea for Unruly Figures in early August and launched September 21, so it all went really quickly. I think from inception to launch was only about six and a half weeks. To see if this idea had legs and could run for more than a few episodes, I started searching things like “famous rulebreakers” and began compiling a list. Once I got to 40 potential subjects, I knew I could run this for at least a year, and decided I would commit to it. I was luckily participating in Substack Grow at the time, and was able to use those weekly sessions to bounce the idea off plenty of strangers (some of who are now friends—hey y’all!). In Substack Grow I also learned a lot about how to launch a new publication, how to reach the widest possible audience, and how to make sure the publication looked kickass all the was through.
The thing is… I’d never “done” a podcast.
As quickly as I could, I learned how to. I worked as a freelance journalist and a research assistant before, so I’m used to short deadlines and consolidating a ton of knowledge, so I knew in that sense I’d be okay. I’d been a guest on podcasts before, but I didn’t know anything about recording a podcast. And I knew less than nothing about editing audio! I used a discount code from another podcast to get a free month of Skillshare, and then I binged all the podcast-making and audio-editing tutorials on there. (Pro-tip, listen on 1.5x speed to get through more material!)
When I say I didn’t know anything, I really didn’t know anything. I did a lot of research on microphones and wind screens and googled every iteration of “Do I really need a sound board to start a podcast?” that I could think of. This is the microphone and pop filter I settled on—and, no, I didn’t end up getting a sound board. I’ll upgrade my microphone stand eventually, because the one that comes with the Audio-Technica suuuuuucks. In fact, a candle from Target currently supports the microphone stand I’m using, and it will for a while! Whatever works, okay?
I went over the list of people I’d put together before and decided to start with a few people whose stories I was already familiar with. I scheduled them out and started researching.
The first thing I ever recorded and edited on my own was the show’s trailer. The first recording had several bloopers, but when I went to edit it in Garageband, I messed it up so bad that I ended up just recording the whole thing again. On the second take I got it mostly right, and was able to do minimal editing before calling it done. Since I’m no audio expert yet, I uploaded it first to Anchor.fm, so I could use their tools to add music.
Here’s where I made a big mistake: I didn’t record a few episodes in advance. In fact, I only finished recording Joe’s episode on September 19th and released it on September 21st. This had me at a huge disadvantage because it meant that all the materials I’ve published here since then—transcript, discussion thread, etc—I’ve been publishing as I went, instead of being able to schedule them all in advance. Which isn’t *bad* at all, it’s just that I personally find that stressful. I like to be able to take my time with things.
When I first recorded Joe’s episode, I really stumbled through it. The final cut is 54 minutes, but the initial audio was almost two hours long. That extra hour is mostly just me swearing with frustration as I stuttered through various names over and over again. (I considered uploading that as a fun feature for paying subscribers, but I figured no one would actually want to listen to it.) I never noticed that I have a mild stutter before listening to a raw recording of myself, and this was a particularly annoying time to find out. Though, if I had known before I committed to this podcast, I may never have created it! So it’s probably for the best that no one has ever mentioned my stutter to me.
Editing took me six hours the first time I did it. Six! Hours! Which was about four hours longer than I expected. A lot of that was just getting used to doing it and discovering the various pain points along the way; I think in the future it’ll go faster.
The first problem came when I tried to upload it to Anchor: Turns out that you can only upload files under 250 MB. I had to go back and segment out the episode into four distinct segments, then upload it again. But then the music didn’t sit right anymore—Anchor automatically does a five-second musical intro whenever you add music to a segment. But of course the segments were never designed to be segments—they broke apart in the middle of sentences! So I had to go into Anchor and carefully edit out those five second intros so that the segments would flow more seamlessly. In the future, I’ll just have to plan the segments more carefully so that a five second pause won’t sound way too long.
Through Anchor, Unruly Figures has ads.* Of course, I didn’t want it to have ads for Substack subscribers, but I did want to include the music that is present everywhere else, because I think it adds a lot to the experience. So after I uploaded the podcast to Anchor and added music, I had to download the musically-enhanced version, and then upload it to Substack.
This is where the next pain point showed up. To keep the ads out of the version you hear here, I had to download the four segments separately. But Substack’s current podcasting feature doesn’t allow you to upload more than one mp3 file. (Maybe this will change in the future?) So I had to stitch the four segments back into one single mp3, which I had no idea how to do. I actually entered horror territory in this moment, y’all. What if it couldn’t be done? What was I going to do?
It of course could be done, using iMovie. Some quick Googling got me a tutorial, and it’s actually ridiculously simple. You upload the audio as if you’re making a movie, and then export it as ‘audio only.’ Easy peasy. (This, of course, was only easy because I’ve been using iMovie for my job at Go Fund Bean for months now.)
But then once it was uploaded, things got easier… mostly. My job for Go Fund Bean is as a social media marketing person, so I’m used to writing/designing for social media and engaging online. The two difficult things were the transcript and getting over my own fear of telling people about what I had created! But I made myself be brave for two hours (total; not all at once) and worked fast scheduling things out. I scheduled emails and posts for Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
I don’t plan to do much with Facebook, but I’ve seen a surprising amount of engagement from LinkedIn! I think a single post can get lost in the noise of the other three platforms, since they’re more geared toward social stuff and have millions of people frequently posting. But LinkedIn has a lot less original content being posted to it every day, and so I think things stay at the top of people’s feeds longer. Anecdotally at least, I’ve seen Unruly Figures posts getting more attention for a lot longer on LinkedIn.
During Substack Grow, people advised me to have posts go up every day the week I launched. They encouraged me to think of it less as a launch day and more like a launch week. It would help lodge Unruly Figures into people’s brains instead of being something they heard about just one time then forgot about. In fact, I’ve seen studies showing that people have to be told about something seven times before they’ll take action on it, so I definitely encourage you to think about it that way! (The transcript took me longer to finish than I thought it would, so I missed one day, but I posted every day during launch week otherwise.)
So far it’s going really well! I’ve gotten a few paid subscriptions and several free subscribers already. (Hi y’all!) People have texted me, out of the blue, to tell me they love the podcast. Someone emailed me to say that my podcast is “BBC quality,” which I’m seriously considering framing and putting on my desk. A comment from Cole gave me the idea to do trailers for every episode, not just the one giving people a preview of the podcast.
Obviously, I’m not an expert podcast creator, so you can take my advice with a whole handful of salt. But if I had to give three pieces of advice to anyone wanting to start a podcast, they would be:
Learn how to make a podcast from as many people as you can before you ever hit record. I’d even watch some videos before you buy equipment, because you can hear people’s arguments for why one mic is better than another, etc etc.
You CAN launch a podcast for less than $100. If you can scrape that much together, it can be done. Don’t let people tell you that you need a ton of fancy equipment to get started—my “BBC quality” podcast cost me $91 (including tax and shipping!) to launch.
Record a few episodes in advance. This will push your launch date out, but it’s worth it to have a few ready to go because the first time you do everything, it just takes longer. Don’t make your launch week harder on yourself!
All right, that’s it for this edition of Unruly Reflections. (Too cheesy? We’ll workshop it.) Thanks for tuning in. And don’t forget, annual subscriptions are 20% off until October 6th! Not ready to commit? That’s okay! You can start a 14-day trial today.
*A lot of people have asked me why I chose to have ads in my podcast, especially when the big deal about Substack is that it’s supports ad-free media. I genuinely love this about Substack, and I support an ad-free media future because I think what ad dollars usually buy in practice is bias. However, that model doesn’t really work in the economic reality that I live in—as I mentioned earlier, I work two part-time jobs in Los Angeles and most months I barely make ends meet. Wages are very low and cost of living is very high. While I would love to put out free content now and hope they paying subscribers will come, I simply can’t afford to right now. My hope is that I can remove ads from the equation all together someday.
Some of the links in here are affiliate links. That just means that if you click through and shop through them, I’ll get a small commission at absolutely no charge to you. Thanks!
Hey, thanks for the shout out! Love what you're doing so far!