How we made the ASOS Tech Podcast — our top 7 tips
Following on from our previous post “The story behind the ASOS Tech Podcast”, we wanted to share some of the must-know tips we learnt along the way. Things like what equipment you need, what software you should use and other key things we discovered from the very beginning up until launching Season 01.
If you’re interested in starting your own podcast or you’re just curious to hear about what we learnt, read on for our top 7 takeaways.
1. Finding the Right Content 🔎
With so many podcasts out there, you need to make sure you’ve got the right content to engage with the audience you’re aiming to reach.
We openly asked our ASOSers in Tech about what things they had worked on that they were really proud of and would like to share as, for us, it wasn’t just about the latest technical achievements; we also wanted the passion and unique personalities of our ASOSers to shine through on each episode too.
Pro Tip #1: It’s also important to get your episode length right too. From doing our research and getting feedback from our ASOSers, we opted for around 30 minutes as an ideal episode length. This time period is long enough to cover 3/4 topics and is short enough so that you can listen to a full episode on a typical commute to work, while exercising or going for a walk.
2. Episode Planning 🧭
Once we knew what the key topic was for an episode and we had found our guest speakers, the podcast hosts and the episode producer spent half an hour together with the guests to discuss the episode content at a high level.
The goal of this planning meeting was to identify 3/4 topics to discuss and to also make sure the order of the topics had a natural progression, telling a story as they flowed. Everyone loves a good story and we knew this would really help engage with our audiences and keep the episode content interesting.
We kept these planning meetings brief and didn’t go into much detail on each of the topics purposely, as the hosts didn’t want to know too much about what the guests would be discussing. We felt this kept things more natural, as we were intrigued and wanted to ask our guests more about these areas as the conversation flowed. It also meant our guests had a good idea about what they wanted to say and could prepare their thoughts on this but also encouraged them to speak naturally in a conversational way rather than reading from a pre-prepared script.
Pro Tip #2: Help keep your audience engaged and more easily communicate ideas using the STAR technique: Situation, Task, Action, Result. It’s a great tool to use to help structure your content and also for hosts when interviewing your guests.
3. Equipment 🎙
It’s easy to get carried away with all the tech like mics, amps, boosters, pop shields, you name it! Due to dynamic working being the norm for ASOS Tech now, we knew we would likely be recording the episodes with some people working remotely from home. Therefore, we invested in a few sets of the following equipment that we could lend to people for each recording.
- Mic — if you can, invest in a dedicated mic to help make the audio sound crisp and sharp. Something like the RØDE PodMic is a good starting point at just over £100.
- Amp — you’ll need something to convert the sound from the mic to a digital signal that your computer understands. Something like the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 USB Audio Interface is a solid starting point and costs just over £100 too.
- Mic Booster — we noticed early on that the audio level from our mics was not great. Adding a mic booster is a quick and easy way to increase the mic signal. Something like the Klark Teknik CT 1 Dynamic Microphone Booster is a good starting point at around £38.
- Pop Shield (optional) — if you really want to keep your audio sounding professional, you can grab a pop shield for just over £10. This instantly filters out plosives that can come from saying P’s and sibilance (hissing sound that’s created when saying some letter combinations).
Pro Tip #3: If you cannot invest in the above equipment then a decent headset can work quite well. We strongly recommend a wired headset but if anyone is using a wireless headset, remind them to fully charge it before the recording. Depending the audio recording software you use, we’ve had issues where if someone’s wireless headset loses power during a recording, and the whole recording was automatically stopped for everyone!
4. Recording ⏺️
This probably sounds obvious, but it really does make a big difference if people are located in a quiet environment that ideally doesn’t have high ceilings or hard floors. To help us get the best-sounding recordings, we made sure to let our guests know about that well ahead of time so they could plan appropriately. We actually found recording remotely really helped with this as generally peoples’ homes were quite well suited, with soft furnishings that helped reduce reverb and there was little background noise.
Pro Tip #4: Make sure any headset is positioned slightly to the side of the mouth, in front of your cheek and not too close so that your face so any hair will not knock against it. Also plan to do a quick sound check with all of the guests before you start any recordings to make sure the audio sounds clear.
5. Keep Editing Simple 🎬
We found editing by far the most time-consuming task when creating a podcast. Without the right software and a simple, well-defined editing process, you can spend tens of hours trying to edit a single episode.
After trying various different editing software, we came across Descript and it was a game changer. In a nutshell, Descript allows someone to quickly pick up the skills needed to edit a podcast episode without any formal training or background in sound editing. It flips the editing paradigm on its head; rather than editing sound waveforms as is the convention for most audio production, instead, you focus on editing the words said during the recording (transcript). It was pretty much as easy as editing a document. Our team couldn’t believe how quick and easy it was to edit an episode and we could even simply copy and paste our standard intro and outros into each episode within seconds.
Our episode recordings were normally around 1.5 hours long and we found it was taking someone around 10 hours to edit the episode down to around 30 minutes of running time. After we introduced Descript, the editing time came down to around 4–6 hours per episode. This was huge for us as it not only saved us lots of time but we didn't have to spend hours training everyone up on how to edit an episode.
An additional bonus of using something like Descript was that it could automatically filter out filler words (erm, you know) and also allow people to comment on recordings in real time, which made it really easy to get feedback from different people in the business prior to publishing an episode.
Pro Tip #5: If you have any budget to spend then we recommend spending it on sound editing software first, as that will save you time and make the editing process easier for people. There are lots of sound editing tools out there but we recommend going with one that allows you to edit the sound recording via a transcription, rather than a typical sound waveform only.
6. User Guides 📄
After we recorded, edited and reviewed the first few episodes, we were keen to empower other people that wanted to help and get involved. Rather than sitting down with people ad-hoc to take them through everything, we recorded a short video explaining each process from recording to editing. We posted the videos onto our internal wiki and then shared them with the group. This not only saved a huge amount of time but people found the videos extremely useful as they could easily go back to them for reference. It also allowed them to watch them when they had some time in their working week.
After the success of the recording and editing guides, for future seasons we are planning on creating a video for our podcast guests, explaining everything they need to know around preparing for a recording session, what a typical recording session looks like and all the things they need. We’re confident this will really help make our guests feel more at ease and also save us a lot of time explaining the process to each guest.
Pro Tip #6: Most video chat applications have the ability to record meetings including sharing your desktop. Why not try setting up a meeting with yourself, sharing your screen, hitting record and then talking through a process others in your workplace would find useful. Once you are done, you can easily share this with anyone. This will save you time as you can direct people to the video if they ask about that topic and it will also allow many others to learn from your experience and skills. As an added bonus this can help with improving self confidence while speaking in front of a group and even overcoming the pain of listening back to yourself.
7. Distributing 📩
Once you have some podcast episodes recorded, edited and reviewed you’ll want to share them with the world via all the popular podcast platforms. Rather than trying to upload your episodes to each podcast content platform, there are many free websites that can do this for you and save you lots of time and hassle.
You typically create your podcast show, add an episode, and then upload the final recording, your episode artwork and show notes. You can then easily choose which podcast platforms you want to publish your show to and then the show will get automatically uploaded for you. You can also normally schedule episodes to be published at specific times in the future which further saves you time and allows you to release new episodes using a consistent cadence. This is something audiences generally engage well with as they’ll then know when to expect your next episode to drop and can look forward to listening.
Pro Tip #7: Make sure to add show notes to each of your episodes including the hosts and guests, a summary of the episode content, and include links to any initiatives or helpful resources mentioned in the episode. Try to keep a consistent format for the show notes as this will help your audience find the information they need.
Lewis is a Principal Software Engineer at ASOS. In his spare time he aspires to be more than a bedroom DJ, loves exploring nature with his family and jumps at any chance to play with Lego.
Seasons 01 and 02 of the ASOS Tech podcast are now available on all popular podcast platforms so make sure to have a listen now in Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
