What I Learned Doing a Daily Podcast
As I record this, I feel stuck between two idioms. The first is to, shoot for the moon and you'll land among the stars. The second is, he's always swinging for the fences.
The former has a positive connotation. If you aim high, even if you fall short, you'll still do something great. The latter can be negative. You're constantly trying to hit a home run and striking out when a single will do.
Last year, I was pretty set on doing a daily podcast. I loved the idea of combining a daily podcast with a mini-podcast to create a fantastic backcatalog of podcasting tips for anyone at any stage in their podcasting journey. It also allowed me to experiment and really understand what goes into creating a daily show. The short, it's a lot of work. I'm going to share everything I learned with you in today's episode. Then you can decide if I was shooting for the moon to land among the stars or if I was swinging for the fences and striking out.
Welcome to Podcast Workflows. The show that provides you with insights into how to improve your podcast systems, allowing you to create and grow a high-quality podcast by showing you how to best spend your limited time. You'll get deep dives into how popular podcasters create their shows, industry news, experiments, and tutorials about automation, tools, and productivity.
Okay. So first, let me lay out the vision for you. The show would be every weekday. That's Monday through Friday. Each episode would be less than 7 minutes long and usually based on an email I sent or a social post I created.
The exception is the Wednesday episode, which was a narrated version of my 2,000 to 3,000-word deep dives that started [podcastworkflows.com]. I wanted those to be more produced with music, sound effects, and sound clips from the podcaster when possible. I think the Wednesday episode, more than anything else, is what set me up for failure, but we'll get to that in a bit.
First, I wanna tell you about my first lesson, and that is you probably need more runway than you think.
I launched the show with 15 episodes recorded. Given my cadence of five times per week, that gave me three weeks' worth of content. Not bad considering I could record 4-7 episodes in an hour, except there's the Wednesday episode. That one, because of the longer script, higher production value, and more in-depth research, takes me around two hours to create. This actually works really well and falls right in line with the 4-1 ratio for production time versus finished minutes. So at least I knew I was on track there.
What ended up happening was I'd batch one month's worth of mini-episodes and then record the Wednesday episode the Friday before. That's not really ideal for the type of show I was trying to create with the schedule and workload I already have. In fact, in my deep dive into daily podcasts, I gave very different advice. I said the trick here is that prelaunch, I intended to record and schedule 40-45 episodes so that I'm at least one month ahead, two months ahead at launch, and then I'd record ten episodes every 3-4 weeks.
So what happened? Well, I got impatient, and I launched the show early. That's right. I Leeroy Jenkins my own podcast. Done is better than perfect after all. Right?
The other thing that happened is I didn't account for how long the Wednesday episodes would take or really how quickly those episodes would dry up. Each of those deep dives takes 8-10 hours to research and write. I had six, maybe seven done when I launched the mini-daily podcast. So between those and producing the show, I didn't have enough time to do it all. We were looking at 10-12 hours of work for one piece of content. And I planned this entire show in a vacuum, not considering other commitments I had. So while I was working with a good backstock of content, I didn't account for how long it would take to convert that content into an audio format. You'd be surprised how quickly you can burn through content when you're publishing daily.
And that leads me to the second lesson: You need a lot of ideas. I had fifty episodes thinking that was so much content and that surely I'd come up with more before burning through it all. And that was mostly true. Heck, I came up with a bunch of new ideas during Podcast Advent. Right? Plus, with the deep dives, I could make each top takeaway its own episode. That's three top takeaways per deep dive with, let's say, six deep dives done, which means 18 more episode ideas. But once again, even if that was the case, those deep dives, those Wednesday episodes ended up being a problem. Between that and throwing out the bad, out-of-date, or repeat ideas, those 50 dwindled pretty quickly to 40, the total number of episodes I wanted to have recorded and scheduled prelaunch.
I tell people who are starting a weekly podcast to have 20-30 ideas before they launch because it allows them lots of time to gather feedback and come up with new ideas. Extrapolating that out for a daily podcast, you will need 100 to 150 ideas. Good ideas that you'll definitely use. You could still get away with recording 2-3 months ahead of time, but you would rather not be in a situation where you're reaching for ideas for a daily podcast soon after launching. This is almost where it works out better for a news podcast that's daily. I mean, sure, you have to record daily, but you also have stuff happening every day to talk about, presumably. Now, runway and idea generation were both miscalculations. Outside of those miscalculations, I made two crucial completely avoidable mistakes.
The third lesson and the first crucial completely avoidable mistake is that it takes a team. I tried to go it alone despite knowing the importance of having a team. All of my coaching clients and students who are listening to this right now are shaking their heads at me saying, Joe, you tell us all the time that you need a team. I figured since they were solo shows, I'd record and edit them myself. And with my Wednesday episodes, I wanted to record and edit the first few so that I could give my editor some direction on the edit. I wanted them to be a lot different from the edits he usually does for me. And while I did set up a publishing SOP for my VA, I figured the record-to-schedule workflow was so simple, that I would just do it myself. I literally did everything in Descript, record, edit, publish.
But ambitious projects require help. When you're shooting for the moon, you have a team to help you get there. When you try to carry the team on your back by hitting home runs instead of just getting on base and trusting the next guy up, you strike out.
History Daily has a team. Ryan Holiday has a team. Unless all you do is The Daily Podcast, you're probably not doing it alone. My other show, my flagship show, How I Built It, is a well-oiled machine because all I do is record. I forgot that lesson with Podcast Workflows which led in part to the second crucial completely avoidable mistake. Don't create artificial bottlenecks.
Me trying to do everything created one of the bottlenecks in my process. I didn't just record and pass it on trusting that it would get published. Part of that was not giving myself enough runway. If I had done 40 episodes before launch, I would have worked out the entire process with my team before launch, but I punted. I punted because of the other massive bottleneck I've referenced multiple times in this episode, the Wednesday episodes.
Let's recap. The Wednesday episodes were longer, higher production value that took two hours to record, edit, and schedule. The articles that served as the scripts for those episodes took me 8-10 hours to research and write. They were in the middle of the week every week.
And finally, I had the least amount of source material for these from the outset, trusting I'd be able to keep doing a daily podcast on top of my other obligations and writing a new deep dive every week. That created a giant bottleneck that prevented me from scheduling a full month's worth of content ever. I never had more than one Wednesday episode done at any given time because I underestimated how long they'd take me to produce. It's artificial because I didn't need to include these deep dives at all, or I could just do one per month, or I could do many episodes on each takeaway and point people to the long-form article.
If we look at the original goal of doing the show daily, which was to create a fantastic back catalog of podcasting tips for anyone at any stage of their podcasting journey, the deep dives don't fit as well into that box, but I wanted to do them anyway. Maybe I was trying to be too much like History Daily or one of these other storytelling deeply researched podcasts. But that led to issues very early in the experiment that I waited too long to fix.
So, let's recap. If you're considering starting a daily podcast, which I still think is a fun project, make sure you keep these lessons I've learned in mind:
1. Create way more runway than you think you need before you launch the show.
2. Have 100-150 good ideas ready to record so that you're not reaching for ideas too soon after launch.
3. Get help. Hire an editor or work with other people in your organization.
4. Don't create artificial bottlenecks. You can always start slow and add or iterate to keep the show moving.
So that's what I learned producing a daily podcast for three months. If you're wondering, “So, Joe. What do you think you could have done differently?” Or, “Hey. What are your future plans for this podcast?”
Well, I make that information available to members of Podcast Workflows. You can head over to [podcastworkflows.com/join] to sign up at the $10 per month level to get ad-free extended episodes of all of my podcasts, regular newsletter articles, videos, and more. Again, that's over at [podcastworkflows.com/join].
Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, I can't wait to see what you make.
Hey, before you go, I want to tell you about a free resource I have called my Podcast Process Templates. They are a set of Notion documents that give you a full podcast planner, a show planner, and even some AI prompts to help you get the creative juices flowing. You obviously want to improve your podcast workflows and save time and these templates will give you a basis for all of your other processes. Through my Notion and Airtable templates, I am able to automate a number of things as well as stay organized so that I am using my podcasting time more efficiently.
If you wanna get your hands on these templates completely for free, you can head over to [podcastworkflows.com/templates]. That's [podcastworkflows.com/templates] to get your free podcasting process templates, today.
