Ep. 26 - Change is the only constant

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Jul 12, 2023

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Listen to Metacast: Apple, Spotify, YouTube

We’ve heard feedback that listeners really love our metasodes — the episodes where Arnab and I chat about all things podcasting, careers, books, etc. We also heard feedback loud and clear that our episodes are too long…

In the recent weeks, we’ve been heads down working on the product (more on that in the next episode!), incorporating our company, etc. So, we didn’t have that much time to sign up new guests for the show. Besides, we’ve started to reach out to more famous people, sort of working your way up the “guest ladder.”

Those folks are busy and hard to schedule, so we decided not to stress about following the alternating order of guest episodes and metasodes. Instead, we’ll be doing short-ish metasodes every week and, every now and then, we’ll have a guest. Rest assured, we have three really amazing guests already scheduled for recording in the next four weeks. Those will be epic.

On today’s episode, we chat about these changes, producing a video episode in Descript, Conway’s law, our new merch store, our upcoming book, and a few more things.

Merch store

You can support our show by purchasing one of our T-shirts. All the graphics are mine, most are hand-drawn. The lettering reflects the spirit of the podcast — it’s perfect in its self-deprecating imperfection and is constantly evolving.

Check out Metacast T-shirts on our merch store.

Here’s the one just hot off the press — the episode 26 t-shirt! The language we used for this is javascriptian or seeplusplusish. The language is in the eye of the beholder.

We’ll probably make it a tradition to release a t-shirt per episode.

A book about podcasting is coming soon

In a couple of weeks, we’ll release a book about starting a podcast the pragmatic way. We’re sharing principles and approaches that will help you launch a podcast within a week, while doing this with the full understanding of what you’re doing and why.

The book is broken down into three parts:

Day 0: Before you record your first episode — figuring out the format, choosing a microphone, setting up your room, etc.
Day 1: Recording and publishing your first episode — sourcing guests, preparation, recording, what software to use, basics of post-production, publication and marketing.
Day 2: Improving your skills and workflows — once you’re on a roll, you can make improvements with each new episode and the book offers you a lot of tips for becoming a better podcaster.

We’ll make an announcement when the book is available, so sing up for this newsletter to get an update!

Segments of this episode:

[00:56] We’re slightly tweaking the format
[03:58] Discussing feedback from our listeners
[10:23] Our experience producing the very first video episode
[14:44] Working with Descript’s Studio Sound
[19:54] Our book about starting a podcast
[24:26] Conway’s law
[25:42] Publishing books on Amazon (or not)
[27:23] Book recommendations
[29:44] Improving one thing at a time
[36:37] Send us inputs for our product
[37:24] How to send us a voicemail

Key podcasting takeaways

Using the iPhone for video. To seriously up the quality of your videos, use iPhone connected to your Mac in a continuity mode.
Good enough is good enough. We could agonize over quality but the matter of fact (or the fact of the matter) is that 80% is good enough.
YouTube automatically creates segments. If you add timestamps to your YT video’s description, it’ll automatically add segments. Neat!

Show notes

Podcasts

Books

Videos

How to Speak

Software

Other

Mike Semashko (our sound engineer prior to switching to Descript)
Conway’s law

Get in touch

We’d love to hear from you!

Email: hello@metacastpodcast.com (both of us get it)
Arnab’s Twitter: @or9ob
Ilya’s LinkedIn

You can also leave comments on this substack post. Don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already!

Bye for now.

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