What I Learned Publishing a Daily Podcast for 3 Months

As I write this, I feel stuck between two idioms. The first is, “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 that with a mini podcast to create a fantastic back catalog of podcasting tips for anyone at any stage of podcasting.

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. Then you can decide if I was shooting for the moon to land among the stars, or swinging for the fences and striking out.

How the Show Worked

OK, first, let me lay out the vision for you. The show would be every weekday — Monday through Friday. Each episode would be less than 7 minutes long, and usually based on an email or social post I created.

The exception is the Wednesday episode, which was a narrated version of my 2000–3000 word deep dives that started this website. I wanted those to be more produced, with music, sound effects, and sound clips when possible.

I think the Wednesday episode more than anything set me up for failure. But we’ll get to that in a bit.

Here’s the first lesson:

You Probably Need More Runway Then You Think

I launched the show with 15 episodes recorded — given my cadence of 5 times per week, that gave me 3 weeks’ worth of content. Not bad, considering I could record 4–7 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 2 hours to create1.

What ended up happening was I’d batch 1 month 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 have.

In-fact, in my deep dive on daily podcasts, I gave very different advice:

The trick here is that pre-launch, I intend to record and schedule 40–45 episodes, so I’m always at least one month ahead — two months at launch, then recording 10 episodes every 3–4 weeks.

So what happened? Well, I got impatient and launched the show early. Done is better than perfect, right?

I didn’t account for how long the Wednesday episodes would take — or really, how quickly those articles would dry up.

Each of those deep dives takes 8–10 hours to research and write, and I had 6, maybe 7 done. Between those and producing the show, I didn’t have enough time to do it all.

I planned all of this in a vacuum, not considering other commitments I had. So while I was working with a good back stock of content, I didn’t account for how long it would take to convert that content into an audio format.

You’d also be surprised how quickly you can burn though content when you’re publishing daily.

You Need A LOT of Ideas

I had 50 episodes, thinking that’s so much content, and that surely I’d come up with more before publishing all of it.

And that was mostly true. Heck — I came up with several new ideas for Podcast Advent, right?

Plus, with the deep dives, I could make each top takeaway its own episode. That’s 3 per deep dive, and with 6 deep dives done, that’s 18 more episode ideas.

But once again, even if that’s the case, the deep dives — those Wednesday episodes — ended up being the problem. Between that, and throwing out bad, out of date, or repeat ideas, those 50 dwindled pretty quickly to 40…the total number I wanted to have recorded and scheduled pre-launch.

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’ll need 100–150 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 so soon after launching.

This is almost where it works out better for a daily news podcast. Sure, you have to record daily, but you also have stuff happening every day to talk about.

Now, runway and idea generation were both miscalculations. Outside of those, I made two crucial, completely avoidable mistakes.

It Takes a Team

The first one is I tried to go it alone — despite knowing the importance of having a team.

I figured since they were solo shows, I’d record and edit them myself. With the Wednesday episodes, I wanted to record and edit a few first so 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, I’d just do it myself. I literally did everything in Descript.

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 a home run instead of 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.

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 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. But I punted.

I punted because of the other, massive bottleneck I’ve referenced multiple times here: the Wednesday episodes.

Let’s recap:

1. These episodes were longer, higher production value that took 2 hours to record, edit, and schedule.
2. The articles they relied on took me 8–10 hours to write.
3. They were in the middle of the week, every week.
4. I had the least amount of source material for these from the outset, trusting I’d be able to keep doing the show 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 the deep dives at all. Or I could just do one per month. Or I could do mini episodes on each takeaway, then point people to the long-form article.

If we look at the original goal of doing the show daily, to create a fantastic back catalog of podcasting tips for anyone at any stage of podcasting, the deep dives didn’t fit as well into this box.

But I wanted to do them anyway. And that led to issues very early into the experiment that I waited too long to fix.

Let’s Recap!

If you’re considering starting a daily podcast, which I still think is a fun project, make sure to 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 launching.
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.

I hope this helps! If you enjoyed it and want to keep reading, you can become a member to learn what I could have done differently, and my plans for the show.

Become a member over on Substack.

Originally published at https://podcastworkflows.com on January 9, 2024.