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Welcome to About Podcasting,
a show for podcasters.
We talk about podcasting practices, tools, successes, and failures
mixed with interviews and music.
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Hi, and welcome to another episode of About Podcasting.
In this episode, I talk with Jamie Taylor from the modern.netshow.
This episode is chock full with knowledge and expertise from Jamie,
where he talks about things like rebranding the show, like renaming the show, what impact that had. He talks about analytics,
how he uses that for his own goals and also for advertisers.
We talk about his gear,
his software, his hosting,
a little bit about podcasting 2.0
as well.
And we talk about how he's able to invite guests for interviews
and lots more.
So please enjoy.
Is that a that's a Shure,
m what what is it? M k 4 or something? It's the m v
7. M v 7. That's it. Yes. I I got 2 of those as well. Are you like Oh, nice.
Yeah. It's way better than the Samsung q 2 u that I used to use.
I'm I'm in It's a relatively quiet area now,
but I have a permanently switched on,
what do you call it? Extractor.
Like, an extractor intake fan because I work in the basement, so we need the fresh air rolling in. So if you strain to hear it, you probably can hear it because it's going.
Yeah. I can hear. So it's right at the back. You're right. It's right right at the the lower frequencies.
But with the the Samsung Q2U,
you couldn't hear anything but that. So Oh. I'm really happy with this microphone.
Yeah. It's really good. And it is USB. Or Absolutely. It's just USB. Yeah. Yeah. USB and XLR as well. I usually have,
when I'm when I'm doing, my shows, what I'll do is I'll have, I have a Zoom H4n
that I use as a hardware recorder. Just plug it into this microphone
via XLR, and then I could capture the USB and XLR at the same time, which is what I really liked about the, the q two u right up until I needed this intake,
extractor fan, which has now switched itself off. So thanks.
Okay. Well, it doesn't matter. This thing doesn't pick it up. So it's good.
Excellent.
I see you regularly post,
things about your podcast. That's why I also reached out.
Mhmm. You know, I wanna talk to everybody that I know that has a podcast.
And
that's you and your very enthusiastic voice online about your your show as well, and it's still going after many, many years.
Maybe you can,
you know, why did you even start this podcast? Why did you start podcasting in the first place?
Right. So, like, my history with podcasting goes all the way back to around
2,008.
A friend of mine had said to me, dude, you should you're into video games. You should totally listen to this podcast called Giant Bomb. So I started listening to that, and then I found a whole bunch of different shows that were all about different interests.
And, whilst this wasn't the very beginning of podcasting, it was still kind of the early days. Right? Yeah. And I I actually I checked on my, my phone, before we hit record,
and I do actually I'm using, Antennapod, which is podcasting 2.0 ish,
but I love that app. And I've got something like a 136
different shows that I'm subscribed to. I don't listen to every single episode,
immediately, but most shows, I'll actually I'll look at the title, look at the description, and just make a decision straight away. Oh, maybe I should listen to this. Maybe I shouldn't.
But there are a core few shows that I just hit download immediately. Like, oh, there's a new episode of Coding Blocks. Download. You know? There's a new episode of Barry's about podcasting. Download. Right? Just because I'm really interested in what the the host and the guests are are interested
telling me about.
But yeah. So, yeah. Podcast consumer for for years.
And then in around 2016,
so we're gonna have to get a bit technical here. Barry, I know you're a you're a dev, so you'll appreciate this too.
Microsoft announced that they were creating essentially an open source version of dot net framework.
And I was like, this is super interesting. I'm running a Mac at home and a a Linux machine at home. Linux isn't the operating system I know. There's some people pushing their glasses up the bridge of their nose whilst they're saying, well, actually. But I was running a machine that uses Linux on the desktop, and you're running a different machine that runs Mac OS. And I wanted to do some dotnet stuff at home. And I've been using some other stuff that allows me to do that, some cross platform study. We're getting into the implementation details. We won't talk about that. Anyway, so the announcement of .net going open source across platform was really exciting to me. So I immediately started writing about it. So I fired up a new, WordPress instance because, of course, if I'm gonna write about .net, it has to be a WordPress,
And and started writing a bunch of blog posts about it. I did that for about 2 years. And then I was like, you know what? I'm staying up until 4 AM trying to decide whether it should be a full stop or a semicolon
or an em dash. And I just
I I couldn't do it anymore. I got to the point where I was writing 3,000 plus, word
blog articles, and I'm like, I can do this easier if I can speak. So I looked around at the different,
podcasts in that space, in that dot net space, and there were quite there were a few.
But what I noticed was,
some of them were focusing on, here's some dot net topic, but also here's some, JavaScript y stuff or here's some DevOps y things, some things that are related to it that you might wanna know about.
And I decided, wait, there isn't one that's just about dot net or at least as it was called then.netcore.
So I thought, you know what? Why don't I? I took myself off to my local coffee shop. I won't say which one because they're, they're big chain.
And I took myself to my local coffee shop with my, my, at the time, MacBook Air, opened up a blank markdown file, and I gave myself the challenge of in if in an hour, I can't think of 5 topics
that I could just write bullet points about,
then this this idea of a podcast is not gonna go anywhere.
After 2 hours, I realized that the coffee that I'd bought had gone cold, and I had 14 different episode topics. So I was like, ah, maybe there's something here.
Interesting. Yeah. And, yeah. So that that became,
essentially the first
three of those topics became, monologues that I released in 2018. That's just like, here's an idea I'm kicking around, just that I'm playing with. Is there something here?
And then people started getting getting in touch with me and saying, have you thought of doing an interview show? And I was like, okay, it's now an interview show.
And it's been going since.
Yeah. That is excellent. So it started out as like a spoken blog just to make it easier for yourself. Yeah. And because you have something to say about this particular topic, dot net in this case, and now it evolved into this,
bigger interview show. That's awesome.
No. Yeah.
I remember it was called the dotnetcoreshow.
Right?
Yeah. Yeah. The original name was the.netcorepodcast
just because I wanted to get that, the title of the thing in the thing. Right. So I was like, I was hoping for some SEO stuff. Anybody pulls up,
Apple Podcasts or Spotify and types in .netcore, I was hoping it would come straight to the top. What I what I kind of forgot about is that most search,
implementers,
most devs who implement the search will will, like, slice out characters like full stops and commas and things like that. So it wasn't matching on dotnetcore, but it was matching on netcore. So I was like, ah, that's course enough.
Yeah, exactly.
And and then Microsoft renamed it to, just dot net.
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So, about 3 years in, Microsoft
realized that they
that they were having a bit of a problem with the naming system,
because, you know, naming things in programming is hard. Right? We both know this, and any devs listening in will know this. Naming things in development is hard. And so they decided,
for one reason or another, we're gonna rename the thing we've made from dotnetcore
to
.net. Presumably because it would be the future of .net,
and everyone, even back in the .netframework days, people would refer to it as .net. So I suppose it made it easier to to call it that,
Which then I was sitting there going, well, if they're renaming theirs,
mine kind of no longer matches.
So I gave it a couple of months and waited till the end of, season 5,
which was, 5 years into the yeah. 5 years into the show.
And then I recorded a couple of little teasers during, the break. Because what what what I do is I have a a break during the summer. So in the northern hemisphere during the summer months, I don't put out any new episodes
mainly because I figure,
the reason I do this is because I've looked at the stats. We'll get onto all of this in a moment, but I looked at the stats of the geo, location of most of the listeners. Majority of the listeners are in the northern hemisphere.
So, what I say to them when we come up to the end of the season, let's say, hey, folks. It's, you know, it's summer, at least here in the northern hemisphere.
I don't want you to be sitting at home listening to me talk to you. I want you to go out and do something fun. Right? Go out. We don't get much sun here in at least in
parts of Europe.
And not much, warm sunshine anyway. So go out and have some fun. I'll see you all again in September when it starts to get cold again.
So during that season 5 to season 6 break, I record I worked on I worked up the name a whole bunch of different ways,
and I was talking to,
a friend of mine,
Mark Price,
who's a a a author in the dot net space. And he kept saying modern.netmodern.net.
Yes. This modern.net stuff. The way we do things with modern.net. And I was like, that's the name. Right there, that's the name. Because then, like, it's it it it there's the double whammy the yeah. The double whammy of this is the modern.net stuff that you need to know. But also, hey, we're talking about the stuff that's coming out now that's modern, that's, you know because, what I've noticed, and this is definitely going into the weeds of development,
is that when a new technology comes out, there's usually 3 groups of people.
There's the early adopters,
who are kinda like you and me who are like, this is amazing. Let's see what we can build to, see what we can do. Oh, wow. Apple have released a new device. Let's go. You know, we saw this with the, the Apple Vision Pro. A whole bunch of people bought it. They were the early adopters. There isn't there wasn't really a reason to buy it at that time, but now that they're starting to bring our apps and services.
And then there's the the late adopters who are like, hey. This thing's been around for a while. I've known about it for a while. Let's get in interested in that. How do we build it? How do we use it? And then, there's a group of people who,
through one reason or another, don't ever get to try it out or use it.
And my my target audience in my mind when I'm making these episodes are those people in that 3rd group. Because what I've noticed, especially in development, is
some folks will get trapped in, a piece of work that is,
brownfield. So, like, they're working on legacy applications. They're working on code that has been around for 20 years. They don't get a chance to try out the new things in their day to day work. So if I can gently introduce them to some new thing that's happening, like, oh, there's this new library. There's this new way of building apps. Here's a one zero one style episode,
about that.
Then at least those folks who listen then have the ability they have they have the knowledge of the phrases and words and ideas that they can then go to Google, Bing, whatever,
and actually learn some more in their own time rather than going, oh, wow. I'm at work and I want to build a new app. I'll go use this new technology. Actually, the boss says I have to work on this legacy code, so I don't get the chance. Right? And so that's my that's my end goal with this show. It's just to introduce gently introduce people to these new things that are going on in that dotnet space.
Okay. So you just covered a bunch of things that I was gonna you're like, what what your goal is, also why you do seasons,
and you just spoke about, renaming the show. Now
whenever you do anything big to a show, like, move a show or rename a show,
it it's scary. Right? Because things might break.
Mhmm. Did that happen? Did you lose listeners or downloads?
So what I noticed was, during the break, I actually started the the rebranding effort. So I went into the podcast house, changed all of that, rebuilt the website with a new design, new logos, all that kind of stuff,
and I didn't see any kind of drop offs. I waited a few weeks, I waited about, 3 weeks after the final episode of season 5. That way, most of the people who were going to listen will have
absorbed it as the dotnetpodcast.
The dotnet. Yeah. The dotnetpod the dotnetcorepodcast.
Sorry. So they would have absorbed it as that.
And then, and then what I did was partway through the, that season break, I just released something just saying, hey, just in case you didn't realize, we've we've rebranded. It's okay. We're still the same show, still the same topics. Just trying to make it a little bit more,
up to date, that kind of thing. Just so that then people would see in their players, hey, there's this new thing from what's this the modern dot net at the modern dot net show. What's this? Right? And then it would kind of explain it a little bit. And I went out and did some things on Twitter and, you know, LinkedIn and places like that, places where I know the audience are. Right? Yeah. And I think there's a there's a little a little tip in there from me, about,
I've noticed,
I'm I'm part of a a whole bunch of different groups
of podcasters who try to help each other out with, should I post it? Should I do this? What's the best time for this? What's the best time for that? And the thing that I'm always telling them is be very aware of your own personal bandwidth. Right?
You can only do so much in a 24 hour period. Right? And this extends to the digital realm as well. Right? With all of your social media profiles. Like, I know one podcaster who has, like,
I'm gonna call it x. I mean, I said Twitter earlier, but x and Facebook
and Instagram and,
TikTok and Snapchat and
LinkedIn and a whole bunch of other social media sites. And every time they create something, they're posting it in different places with different formats
in all of these places. Because what they're doing is they're casting the net really wide and hoping to just catch everyone.
And I said to them,
where does your audience hang up?
And they said, I don't know. And I was like, well,
perhaps
if you can try and find that out and then just focus on that space for a little bit, right, or or your potential audience. Right? Think about who your potential audience are and focus there first for maybe a week, 2 weeks. See if you get anything out of it, and then you can maybe decide, oh, well, I'm not getting anything off of Snapchat, so maybe I could just retire that account and refocus my efforts over here because,
yeah, we only have so much, personal bandwidth.
And I think that,
I've I've kind of lost the point of where I was going, but I've ended up with that top tip.
I like that a lot because I do that as well, and I I automate all that stuff. So whenever a new, episode of About Podcasting, publish it, it goes
to Zapier, and then it goes through Buffer, which is structural media planning thing, and that's supposed to whatever is connected to there.
Because I'm not sure where my target audience exactly is. They are kinda spread all over the place, I think.
So how would you find that out?
So the way that I find it out, there's a bunch of ways you can actually, ask directly ask the audience. You know? Some podcasters I know will include, like, a survey link and just be like, hey. We're just trying to find out a little bit more about the audience. Would you mind filling in the survey? It's in the show notes.
Click this, and it will have, like, what's your big geographic location? What's your, if you were to put yourself in an age group, would you would you mind putting yourself in an age group? That kind of thing. It's more for demographics because then the podcaster themselves can use that as as well to try and,
get, sponsors and things. You can then say to sponsors, hey. We we've got people. You know, 50% of our audiences in North America, they're in the 18 to 35 range. They are, you know, cybersecurity
enthusiasts. They're video game players. Are you interested?
But I also noticed that a few of the podcast hosts offered that kind of statistics based on download location. Now the problem with that, of course, is that I can jump on a VPN and download an episode, and it will appear like I'm in the other country wherever the VPN exit node is. But most people aren't gonna do that.
And so, the podcasting host that I that I, am currently using and was using at the time,
allowed me to see all of that geographic
location data
based on, like, a rough, I think they get down to the city level, which in America is pretty vague, but over here in Europe, not so not as much.
But then that doesn't take into account if you're commuting between cities over here in in the slightly smaller,
countries. That doesn't take that into account, but it doesn't really matter, I suppose, because you still got that, like, country data.
Yeah. And so a lot of people will just outright ask the audience, hey. Can you do this? Would you mind doing that? But then, you could also get details from people like, Apple Podcast Connect
because the Apple Podcast app is baked into the iOS,
operating system.
They can get vague access to,
things. They can get full access to things like how long someone has been listening for, whether they've downloaded and not listened and things like that. But then they also can get access to things like if someone is actually, like, they call it following, but, like, subscribed to the show,
because, obviously, if you're if you're using the Apple Podcasting app, you're using Apple Podcasts, formerly Itunes.
It's tied to your account, so then they can see exactly how many people are subscribed. It's not entirely possible to do that at all outside of,
things like, those closed gardens like, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, things like that. But those services then allow you to see, things like,
the user is registered in, say, Nebraska,
and has downloaded 25 of your episodes and listened to 23 of them. They've listened for 90% of the episodes length from the start to about the 90% mark.
But then you can use those statistics too. And then then
if you want to edit your show in such a way that your episodes are longer or shorter. Right? So if people are listening to 100% of the content, you can then maybe throw an extra 5 minutes in and say, hey. People can listen to more of it. Try that out for a few episodes. And if they're then only listening to 90% of it, well, the extra 5 minutes wasn't really worth it. But then you can also do things like my friend Steve.
He used to put out these really long form interviews. Really, really interesting long form interviews.
But he was looking at the Apple Podcast stats, and people were turning off at 40 minutes, but there's another hour of content to go. So what he did was he was like, right, can I? What I'll do is I'll record the full version of the interview
and then maybe splice that up, sort of radio lab style or Freakonomics style where it's like it's more like an audio essay. I'm telling you my points and then splicing in parts of the interview that back up the points Yeah. That I'm making. And he saw greater success with that because that reduced his run time down to 30 minutes. He was able to, like, pick the best bits of the interview,
like, move them around at his,
commentary around it and put that up. So, yeah, it's it's all a metrics game. Right?
Yeah. And that's a good tip to use those, the closed gardens, as you say, Spotify and Apple Podcasts because,
even though we might not want them to, they still,
account for a huge amount of the downloads,
and listeners. And so they have all this data. They know exactly,
you know, when somebody presses the play and pause button and where they are in spot files. So, tells you if
they are a man or a woman or whatever they can can capture from that.
So that that isn't very useful. Absolutely.
And, and so you also said at your host Lipson, you know, I also run a host. As a host, you don't have all that rich data, you just have to download, and whatever comes with that, right? So a vague location,
time,
maybe, and some user agent which tells you, okay, it's probably this device with this app, hopefully. And we do our best through that and deduplicate all that stuff and make it nice.
Do you use that the rest of that data for something else?
Do you have goals with that data?
Most of the time,
no. I usually just grab the the latest bits of data.
And then I put that, what I well, actually, I do kind of reuse the data a little bit. I collate all of the the data from Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
YouTube, because I put the episodes out there as well. They don't get a great deal of views, but, like, 80 80 views is better than no views. Right? That's 80 more people who've had the chance to absorb that information.
Take all of that information along with the podcast host they use, as you pointed out, was it's limited.
All of that data that I have and then put that together and put that on the website,
partly as a,
for sponsors, but also as a press kit. So that then if there's any journalists interested in talking about the show or if anybody wants to learn more about the show, they can click through there. They see a couple of paragraphs about me, a couple of paragraphs about the aim of the show, maybe the, couple of the art assets that people can just grab and use for whatever reason because I don't mind about people using that.
And then things like, blocks of information about statistics. So, on the,
the PressKit version of the web the PressKit on the PressKit page. Sorry.
There is a section that's like, where are the listeners located? You know, 48 or 56 or something like that percent are North America. A percentage are in the UK, and a percentage are in,
I'm gonna look it up, but I think it's I think it's Sweden. Let's have a look. I'll load it whilst we're talking. Right? Do that really horrible, awful thing of talking whilst I'm talk.
45%
US, 15%
UK, 10% Sweden, 30% everywhere else.
Right? So then, listener like, interested listeners or people who are interested in learning more about the show or perhaps potential sponsors could then see that, data at a glance. They don't have to dig through, you know, pages and pages or paragraphs of of content that's there or linking to pages.
The only problem with all of that data
is there are no APIs to extract that data.
So I have to manually one of my, one of my tasks at the end of every week on a Sunday evening as I'm sort of winding down for the weekend, I get the laptop app. I go to each of those websites, collate all of that information, and then update the page. So it's updated manually every week because none of that information is available via any kind of APIs or any kind of automated access.
That would be wonderful if I could do that, but, it's a 20 minute job. Right? It's not it's not the end of the world.
When it becomes the end of the world, then I'll be upset about it.
Yeah. Well, that's that's why they are closed gardens. Right? Mhmm. That is their stuff.
Yeah. Okay. So, and then you say you you can use this stuff potentially for sponsors,
advertisements. Do you use sponsors?
Yeah. Yeah. So I, what I tend to do is, I look for, companies that align with what I think the audience are looking for.
So I'm not gonna like, there's nothing wrong with,
insert name of razor company here, right, or, you know, insert name of mattress company here. Right? There's nothing wrong with that at all. Everyone
everyone will need a mattress at some point in their lives. You know?
A percentage of the human race will need to shave some part of their body at some point. So that's cool. You're gonna hit a lot of the audience. But what I try to think about is, like, what is it that the audience are going to need? What tools are they gonna need? What software are they gonna need? What things they're gonna need in their life? So then I'll approach those companies and be like,
so currently, we're we're,
we have episodes that are sponsored by Avalonia, which is a company that does user interface stuff that's greatly reducing what they do, but that's one of the things that they do.
And I figured, hey. There's gonna be a bunch of people.
For one reason or another, there'll be a bunch of people who will need to use Avalonia or a similar
system very soon.
The short version is a lot of people bought, built Xamarin apps, which is a dot net technology for running dot net on your mobile phone. Xamarin, by the time this goes out, Xamarin will have been,
retired by Microsoft completely.
And so people will want to continue working on those apps and make them,
you know, secure and all that kind of stuff. And one of the ways you could do that is using Avalonia or Project Uno or, sorry, Uno platform or any of those other, things. Reached out to all of those folks and was like, hey.
You're you're about to see a bunch of customers.
Would you like to, sponsor an episode of the show and get even potentially get even more, customers? And then that conversation becomes, hey. These are the stats. I I'll go to the websites whilst I'm on the conversation with them, and I'll pull the stats whilst I'm there. Like, look. You can see them on screen, or I'll send them in an email. You can see these stats. This is what we have.
Because that then means that,
the potential sponsors know that there is an audience. Right?
A lot of the shows that I, I listen to a whole bunch of shows that are indie podcasters,
and they they they're proper like a gorilla indie podcasters. They've got, like, 15 listeners or something like that, or now I'm one of them. And they're brilliant shows. But then they're always,
asking, how do I get sponsors? How do I get sponsors? And I'm like, you need an audience first. Right? I know that's that's really horrid to say, but you need the audience because the sponsor is, is looking for getting their message out to as many people as possible, as many targeted people as possible. And so that's what I use those stats for. It's so that I can go to these people and, these companies, these organisations and go, hey, there is an audience here. You have a product, you have a service, you have a thing.
Why don't we work together? Get your thing, your product, your service out to these people so that then these people know about it and they can click a link. Maybe there's a 10% discount. Maybe there's no discount. Maybe whatever. Right? But then the other problem there is, and I know I've gone slight I veered slightly around something here. Is that,
what I found is
a lot of the and this is podcasting 1.0. Right? I realized that, you you know, Pod Home is podcasting 2.0, which is way better.
But podcasting 1.0
sponsorship is, hey, click the link in the show notes. Or when you go through the checkout, use our discount code.
And the problem is that
sometimes,
you know, the user isn't the listener, sorry, isn't in a position where they can pull up their phone, go through the show notes, scroll all the way down to the bottom, and click the link if you've got the link at the bottom. That's why I put the link at the top. They they, you know, they can't press the link, go through to the thing, fill in all of the details required, get their credit card out, do the thing, and then press purchase. Right?
Because of that, sometimes what happens is people will remember the product or service name. They they may not remember the discount code, and they'll search on Google or Bing or whatever later,
find it, and go through it. So you've got that sort of indirect marketing. They haven't gone through your link. They haven't used your,
your discount code, but then there's no way to tie that purchase, that view, that whatever
back to the podcast. And so that's, I think, one of the big problems that,
sponsors have at the moment is that that tends to happen. Right?
During during the the the event that happened at the last few years, I try not to say the thing,
for a bunch of reasons. But during the event that happened during the last few years, a lot of people were working remotely, so they were at their computers. So they could, oh, I'm listening to this thing. Barris just said go to the website, use the coupon code. Guess what? I'll bring the website up now. Here's the coupon code. Here's my wallet. I will type in my credit card. Boom. We're done. But now that we've come out the other side
and people are going back to the offices, some people are driving, taking the train, they're on a a maybe they're cycling to work, maybe they're on a bus, they might not be able to actually, at that very moment, press the link and and go into it. And so we saw what I saw was,
during that, those number of years very recently, there was a spike in people clicking the link and using the coupon code, and then there was a drop.
And just because it it was super easy for someone to go, you know what? I'll go to the show notes on the laptop, press the link, and they there we go. Because I'm here, and I'm working, and I've got my headphones on. I'm listening to the show or whatever.
But now that
I'm very aware of,
the,
the danger of saying this phrase, now that life is getting back to normal,
people aren't doing that anymore. And so I think that's where maybe podcasting 2.0 is coming in, and I'm sure I'm sure I'm the guest here, but I'm sure you can talk a little bit more about that
than I can.
Yeah. And I I think,
there will always be
this. So actual sponsors, host read ads, things like that,
because there's lots of value in there, where you talk about a product that you recommend. So you choose to actually talk about that product. It aligns with your values, and therefore, the audience trusts you to only talk about things that you actually trust. So you're not gonna try and and sell them some crap that doesn't work or something.
That's why it's valuable.
So that that will always be the case. And I think it will always be very difficult to attribute
that to your show per se.
Well, you could use a unique code or something like that, but still, it will be very, very difficult. And you will always have that asynchronicity
where people listen, and then they do something because that is just a use case of podcasting, I think,
Audio only podcasting,
where people just have headphones on. They're just doing stuff. They're doing they're doing shopping. They're doing cleaning. They're working. They're pretending to, be on a call with their boss or whatever. You
know?
There will always be that. And then podcasting 2.0
has a different model, right, where people can stream
value to you in satoshis, for instance. They can stream it whilst they are listening. That can go on right there, then and there. Or they can send you a boost, which is also an on purpose thing with a little message. Okay. I'd like to show this a question.
Why is,
why is Semoran going out of, out of style or something?
But that also requires the same thing, right? It requires an action. They need to go to their phone.
Yes. They can use exactly that app where they they are already using, but they still need to do that.
So they might also not do that directly right then and there. They might have to go back or something like that. So that that asynchronous
use case will still be there. It's just a different way of doing it and more integrated
with what you're already doing because it's all in the same app, which is a good thing.
But, yeah, I I think
it it can coexist. Right? It will always be
a a mix, I think. And it depends. Like you say, if you have an audience, then you have something of value to give to potential sponsors. If you don't have that, they're obviously not gonna invest in you because they want Their thing is to get the message out to to as many people as possible.
Where if you are a hardcore indie podcaster, as you say, if you're smaller and you don't have an audience per se, then
especially then, the model of, sets and boosts and streaming works better because then people can just sponsor you directly, provide value to you directly instead of going through a middleman who requires you to have,
an audience of size.
So that that's also a difference there, I think.
Mhmm. Yeah. And and I think,
there is there is the 3rd tier.
One of the things that I see a lot in the, video gaming and podcasting space, because I'm a very keen video game player. I have been since I was about 8.
And, one of the things that I I see in that space is a lot of use of, like, Patreon and,
buy me a coffee and things like that just for, like, single the the buy me a coffee is more of a single one time support, and the the Patreon sort of thing, you know, that kind of model is like a monthly recurring. But what I've seen in that sort of space is a lot of people
I'm I'm making a lot of presumptions here. I I tend not to talk to people about finances. I don't wanna talk about money because it seems a bit I don't know. Maybe it's just my generation. It seems a bit of a dirty subject. But what I've what I think I've noticed is that let's say I put out a podcast about video gaming and you put out a video, a podcast about video gaming as well, Barry. What will happen is one of us will pay the other one a a nominal Patreon subscription of maybe $2 a month, then the other one will pay the other a $2 Patreon subscription every month. Right? So no one's actually making anything,
but actually, we're both supporting each other in that sort of small monetary value.
And then that that then has the double whammy effect of people will hit the Patreon page, and it won't say 0 supporters. It'll say, Barry is supporting Jamie and so is maybe Nomad who does a a podcast, and maybe the folks at this podcast are supporting and the folks at that podcast are supporting. So that is more like a, it's, what is it? It's a a tip that I once got from a busker was
put put a couple of coins in your in your collection plate before you start playing because then as people walk past, it's not empty. It's already got some in there. So there's like a social almost like a social contract of sorts to actually start supporting you as you walk past.
Whether that is the case or not, I don't know. But what I have noticed is that a lot of these folks are supporting each other, which is brilliant. But then it also then it it increases the chances of someone stopping. But,
and I think that those those personally, I think those kinds of support will continue,
but I think maybe they'll start to dwindle off because what I've noticed with Patreon and the other sort of
monthly,
support,
monetary support systems
is they're starting to charge a little bit more a month for, for the the, cost of, like, handling your account or whatever. And so what I think is maybe
that they'll start to Peter off a little bit.
And then maybe the satoshis, the value for value and maybe things like buy me a coffee, kofi, things like that. Those are one off support me and help me get a coffee so I can make the next episode or something. That I think is definitely going to be the next the next big thing, in my opinion. But what do I know? Right? I'm still only podcasting 1 by
0. No. I think that, that too. And I think it should be much easier for people to just go to,
your your website or something or hopefully in app someday,
and they could just say, you know what? Here's, £5
Fiat money one time. Or you know what? I'm gonna do that every month. Here's 2 to £2 or something. Set me up. All I need is an email address or something, and that's it. And just make it very easy. Instead of Patreon,
taking that 10% or whatever they take and making it, more difficult.
But, yeah, it is a feature that we're also thinking about to create, like, an accompanying page. We already create, like, a podcast page and then an accompanying page where people can just,
do that. Other hosts do that as well. Like, Buzzsprout, for instance, they do that as well. You have the sponsorship page,
but that, does not allow for all
values. So you can only set certain values. I want to make it so that listeners can say, you know what? Today, I wanna give you, €4. Tomorrow, I wanna give you €1. The next day, I wanna give you €10. Whatever. Whatever I feel the value is for
the time of day, however I feel. Maybe I'm sitting in the sun. I'm feeling good. I'm feeling generous.
Here you go. You know? So that's definitely, I think I agree with that. That's definitely,
the next step I think in there.
Let's switch gears a little bit. So
you do an interview podcast
as we're doing right now. And in my experience, it can be very difficult
to find people to interview.
And and you also interview lots of well known people in the space, right, in the in the technology space.
I've had a show like that once called Developer Weekly, ran for 52 episodes. I interviewed many of, the people that are have also been on your show.
How do you find those people and how do you get them to go on your show?
So, I'm in a in a lucky position. Right? I try not to,
downplay how kind of lucky and fortunate that I am,
because I firstly, I have the show. Right? That that's one of the ways that I'm quite lucky. I could say, hey, This is the show. I don't know if you've heard of it. I'd love to talk to you about x, y, or zed. And that's what I do. Most of the time, it's direct outreach. So I'll approach someone that I've known about for a while that I'm a fan of, and I'll say, hey, like,
Scott Hunter. Right? Yep. A a huge fan of what he's done at Microsoft as one of the 3 Scotts.
And,
I tried to reach out to him directly. It's not easily possible. But then I found out he has a personal assistant, so I was like, hey.
I would love to talk to Scott about x, y, and z. Is that possible?
And and that that started a conversation of, yep, let's talk about when that can happen, who's gonna be on it. Is it gonna be video? Is it gonna be audio? What's what what's the topic? What's the subject? And so that with with the with the really big names, it seems kind of easy to do. Right? A lot of these, especially the .net space, a lot of those big names are very,
vocal over on, x on socials, whatever.
And so I I literally will just I'll I'll go, hey. You know what? I'm gonna shoot my shot. I'm gonna try and get, say, Richard Campbell.
And, you know, sent him,
this was, what, years ago, sent him a, tweet and that it didn't get read because he gets a million of them every day. Yep.
And again, I'm I'm very lucky in that, my friend, James, had already interviewed him for his now retired show. And I was like, hey, James. Would you could you
you've got his email address. Could you email him and ask him whether it'd be okay
to do an intro?
And he said, you know what? I'm just gonna do the intro. It doesn't matter. So he just he just sent me the sent an email introducing the pair of us and said, you know, Jamie's interested in talking to you, Richard, about x, y, and zed. I'll leave you guys to it, that kind of thing.
And and that really that really worked. And sometimes I have people reach out to me directly and say, hey. I've come up with this product, this service, this thing. I'd love to talk about it. Yep. Totally. And then we'll have, regardless of how I get connected with people,
have a bit of a back and forth over email or messages or whatever.
Just getting an idea of what the the crux of what they want to talk about is and then laying a few ground rules for if they're they're talking about a new product or service or a book or something. I'd be like, okay. You can have 5 minutes at the beginning to talk about how great this is and 5 minutes at the end, but the majority of the content needs to be value for the listener. Alright? I don't want it to be an hour long advert for for you. Right.
Because, you know, these folks these folks are listening in their own time. They're wanting to learn a bit bit more. So you've gotta call new service. Okay. Let's have 5 minutes talking about the service. Now let's have 40 minutes talking about how you built it, and then another 5 minutes at the end. That way, folks can get that double where we we can then becomes almost like an advertisement sandwich. Right? There's but but the knowledge is in the middle,
and the grit the value is there.
And that's always my my goal. And sometimes that conversation takes days, takes weeks, takes months, just as we sort of fine tune it.
And then after that, I'll then do a discovery call, where it's it's kind of like a conversation we're having right now, except it's not recorded. And I limit it to about 30 minutes. I'll jump in and I'll be like, right. Okay. So let's figure out a date and a time. Let's talk about equipment that you need. Let's talk about, how you're how you sound right now as we're talking. Are you gonna be recording in this space? Do you need any software installing?
And then we'll run through, like, 5 or 6 points that we wanna talk about, and then done. We're we're ready to record on a different day.
But, yeah, getting those getting those people in it. I don't use, like, an agency or a service or anything. I've had so many reach out to me, and I'm sure you've had the same barrier. This is one of the things that people who don't create podcasts don't know, is that traditionally
your email address would be in the RSS feed.
So all of these agencies,
these interviewing agencies and product companies would just scrape at a whole bunch of RSS feeds, grab everyone's email address and they just send emails about you should have this person on your show because they're, you know like, mine is, is, you know, dot net software development. So I've had people approach me about nutritional information
and and and sports. And I'm like, totally, but it's not the audience. Right? Yeah.
Maybe you should you know? And then I'll try and redirect them. I I it's pointless because it's an automated system. I'm not getting through to a person.
But, yeah, I don't use any kind of booking agencies or anything. I will talk to personal assistants if there is a personal assistant. But most of the time, it's just reaching out to people directly and just saying, hey. I know you directly.
Could I talk to you about x, y, or zed on the show? Or, if I don't know them directly, hey, James. Hey, Barry. Do you know this person? And, you know, if you do, would you mind asking them if they'd like to be on the show sort of thing? So,
I've interviewed a couple of the engineers at Microsoft
and, who've worked on different parts of of dot net. And I've had a conversation on Twitter in public no. On Mastodon, sorry, in public with,
David Fowler. And I was like, I'd love to talk to you about everything you're doing in this space because you're a genius.
Right? He's like, absolutely. Yeah.
And he's like, I would love to do it. Let's do something for the show. And then the conversation ended.
And I had to I had I did this thing, and it felt really,
icky when I was doing it. But I I reached out to one of the people at Microsoft that I then interviewed. I
was like, here's a link to the conversation. Here's some screenshots in case you need it.
Could you if you know anyone or or or can if you bump into him at some point, would you mind asking him to get in touch?
And sometimes it feels a little weird to do that, to sort of pull
on a a a a, like, a a new relationship or friendship or acquaintanceship
just to say, hey. You know, I'm trying to reach this person. Is it okay if you do that? But most of the time, I found that that if I do that and I'm really honest about it and I provide the, as my friend, Cher, says, bring the receipts. Right? Here's a link to the conversation. Here's some screenshots in case you can't see the link or whatever.
People tend to be quite,
quite accepting of that and say, yeah. Yeah. When I see him next, I'll bring it up or yeah. I'll send an email or whatever because it's 30 seconds of their time. And you're just saying, hey,
if if it's possible, fantastic. If it's not possible, I totally appreciate it. Right?
Rather than kicking the door in and saying, yo, Barry, send this email to this person. I wanna talk to them. Right? That's not gonna work.
No. No. So so, just ask. Right? Don't be afraid to ask. Mhmm. And obviously, use the the people that you know. Use your network.
And they, you know, they are usually happy to help, especially when there are previous guests, for instance, or guests on another show or something like that.
That
that all helps. Absolutely.
I agree with you.
So you already talked a little bit about your workflow. Like, you do a discovery call. You do all that stuff. You set up a date and time and and things.
Can you maybe talk us through your workflow then? What what happens next? You're gonna record, and and then what?
Yeah. Yeah.
So, I won't say the tool that I use is different to the tool you're using. I can if you want. I just want it to turn into an advert for them. That's all. Okay. Sure. We we share all the tools because we're all interested in what tools are being used. Cool.
Yeah. So I use a a system called Ennui Castor. It's very similar to the system you're using in a minute. It's similar to SquadCastor. It's a, Riverside, similar to all of those, Zencastor.
Personally, I've had issues with
those
3 those 3 big ones in the past. And and,
it it is what it is. Right? Sometimes the recording doesn't come out right or whatever. But the problem is that you're using you're you're relying on,
I have a computer that I've set up in the way that I've set it up. I'm using a browser. But then between you and me, there are, like, a million other devices, and the Internet,
is full of bugs. Right? And so there's no actual guarantee that the signal is actually gonna make it there.
We're also using TCP over IP, which is, you know, it's it's it will get there eventually, but it may not get there in the right order. Right?
So anyone who's done any kind of,
software dev or or networking will understand that.
So I use this software called OnWeecaster. And the reason I use that is partially because it's like an indie developer. It's one developer. I like to support, like, the individuals, right, where I can.
But,
also because it uses a Opus, so then it's like the audio is really, is losslessly compressed, so it's using hardly any bandwidth.
But then the third thing is because the UI is completely bare bones. Right? It doesn't do video, so you're not spending loads of bandwidth sending video backwards and forwards.
It uses that compression,
but it's lost lossless compression. So then the audio is then compressed in loads of different ways, similar to SquadCast Rivercast at SquadCast Riverside
Zencast. They all they should all have the same name, Barry. That's what they should have. You're gonna call yours Barrycast. Is that what you say now? But,
what they,
those similar to those 3 apps, our week after records inside of your browser and on a remote server as well. So then you've at least got 2 versions of it. The difference that I've seen between
the big 3 and on Wecaster is on Wecaster uses the Opus recorded version in your browser as well. So it's still losslessly compressed, whereas the big 3 use, like, m p 3 and it's,
splits it up into time,
like timed chunks and you have to glue it back together, whereas,
on week after, we'll do the best it can.
So I use that. We we record,
what I do is I I ask people to block out maybe 90 minutes of their time. So an hour and a half.
But then I'll aim for 45 minutes to 60 minutes for the conversation,
and then, I do the double whammy of,
the project management side of it. Hey. You get 30 minutes of your time back. But also, it's if we have a problem connecting,
then I can throw together cobble together a different way of connecting. So,
a couple of my my backups are I have a bot on a Discord server that uses the same technology as it's written by the same person as on a week after called Craig.
That allows me to just spin up a room and hit record, and it does the same thing,
in my Discord instance, in their Discord instance, and on a server, it records the audio.
But then I can also fall back on things like Google Meet or any other kind of VoIP app with maybe Audacity or the Windows sound recorder as a backup. But that way, you know, I've got 3 separate ways of recording in case things fall over.
And then once the recording is done, what I do is, grab all of that audio, give that over to, I have an editor on staff,
and,
he he does the the editing and the mastering and all that kind of all that kind of stuff that, I used to do myself, but I realized it takes way too much effort. I may as well hire someone to do that. I give that over to him,
and then he then, produces a a rough cut m p 3. There's no intro. There's no music. There's no nothing. It's just, like, the raw interview,
but with,
some things cut out and with a little bit of equalization and normalization and things like I then then send that over to the guest or guests and say, hey,
I don't want you to sign a release because then that gets all kind of
legally and that kind of thing. I don't want it to be release tastic. I don't want, like,
legal to be involved or anything like that. But here's the interview. I can provide a transcript as well if you like.
But, what I'd like, if you have the time, is just listen through to it. Just make sure you haven't said anything that you weren't allowed to say. Right?
I don't want people coming on the show because, obviously, there's a lot of almost everyone that comes on the show is devs. Right? And I don't want devs to accidentally say, oh, I'm really excited to tell you about this product that's coming out in 2 years' time. I don't I don't want them to do it because they'll get in trouble for that. Right?
And so I give them the chance to just send me and I don't even need to know what it is. I just need time stamps. Like, 45 minutes and 11 seconds through to 46 minutes and 12 seconds.
I said something it needs removing. Right? My editor assigned an NDA with me, so as soon as he's done with it, it just gets deleted and never gets released to the world ever. The the the worst that it gets is it gets to his computer,
but then he's using a a nondestructive
editor so that the audio is still there, but it's it never gets rendered. Right?
And so that way we do that,
the the guests then have a chance to, like I said, send some,
some,
any kind of edit points that they need, anything they need removing.
But I also say to them, if there is a legal team or if there is a whatever, can you please check with them as well to make sure what you've said is is okay? Because, again, I don't want anyone getting in trouble for being on the show. And then once we've done that and, we're happy with it, I'll then go and record an intro and an outro because, you know, my plan might be, let's talk with Barry about,
Pod Home and how great that is and what technology that's built in. But we may actually go in in a direction where we talk about, scalable architecture for a little while, or we talk about,
durable functions and things like that. And so what what I'll do is I'll work that into the intro, and I'll be like, well, we talked about this, but also we talked about these things. Then, I then pick out a few clips and add ask the editor
to put, like and and anyone who listens to this I'm giving away the secrets for free. You can have these for free. What I do with mine is, I've noticed because we're in the I'm going it sounds like I'm going in a different direction, but I am bring bringing it back. I'm giving you the reasons first. Because we're in the TikTok generation, people want,
value instantly. They want something immediately.
And a lot of the shows that I listen to, they have, like, a 30, 45
second, maybe a minute long just intro music, and then eventually content happens.
And I'm like, even I'm getting to the point where I'm going, yep. I know the intro music. Where does the episode start? Just skip, skip, skip, skip, skip.
And that's that's just because I want the content. I don't
for me, I don't want the the music. Right? And so what I've said to my editor is I I want 15 I want 5 seconds
of just music and then something. Right? And so the first thing that happens, if you if anyone listens to the show, they'll hear a couple of seconds of music and then a quote from the person from the episode. Like, here's something that we're talking about. Here's a thing. Here's some immediate value. Here is what Barry had to say about durable functions for, you know, for 5, 10 seconds. What is a durable function or whatever?
And then my intro with another quote from Barry spliced in about, hey, I'm Barry and I'm a developer and I created a Pot Home and we did this thing and this thing and this thing and how great I am. And then a little bit more about the show, and then interview starts.
Because what I want is, like I said earlier, I wanna front load as much value as possible.
So then if someone's only listening for that half an hour, they get half an hour of as much value as possible. Right?
Because then
it's it's value for their time. Right? I'm trying to be very,
respectful of the time that people give me their absence. So anyway, we get that produced.
And then there's 2 versions of that that get produced. There's, a version
without any kind of,
call to actions or CTAs about supporting the show by sending it around to a friend or perhaps,
going on the the the press kit page and learning a little bit more. Or perhaps if folks are interested in supporting the show with, like, buy me a coffee or, or, Patreon or anything like that, or if you're interested in sponsoring that, so get in touch there. The or none of that is included in the first version. That's then uploaded to Patreon because there's a Patreon for the for the show.
And then, the second version with that CTA, with, any ads where I've sold sponsorship spots, that gets uploaded to the public RSS feed, which then goes out to the the public hosts and out to people's pod catcher apps and all that kind of stuff.
And then once I'm done with that, I'm still not done,
because that's just the getting the audio uploaded.
I also then produce a transcript. I use a tool to help me with that,
and then I use those same clips that I've I've cut out of the episode partially for the intro, partially just some here's a really interesting clip that I think people would be interested in, and manually create, people are calling them headliners,
but, I see it as audiograms. You know, it's that video with the, yeah, the video with the audio in the background and, like a little,
maybe some kind of animation and some subtitles,
and then upload those onto, onto socials and just say, like, here's a free clip from the episode.
Here's something that again, I'm picking on you, Barry, but here's something that Barry said that I think is really kind of interesting and really kind of important.
And here is that value. You don't have to go listen to the episode. Here is the value that I'm giving you. So I'm even giving people free value on socials and then saying, but if you wanna hear the whole thing, there's a whole hour of this. Click this link or, you know, go find it in your podcatcher or whatever.
And so then I've gotta I'm not embedding the transcript into the episodes because that's still a brand new thing. Right? So, for I know folks are listening in because they're interested in podcasting, but only in the past few, months as we're as we're discussing this have some of the podcast hosts
added support for adding a transcript
into
the episode via one of the tags. That was,
I try not to be critical of the the software that I use, but that was one of the things, I can see very smirking. We're using a video thing to convert to to do this with. Okay.
And, and and Libsyn were very much a case of we're not doing anything podcast in 2.0. Nothing podcast in 2.0.
Then Apple Podcasts rolled out an auto transcript, and they're, oh, by the way, we're also doing transcripts now.
So I found that really interesting. So I still haven't worked that into my workflow yet,
but, but each episode has a page on the website with the full transcript.
And the reason I'm doing it, again, is is to provide more value. Right? I want people to be able to go, wait. What did he say? Like, go to the website. Do a control f for you know, Barry said durable functions are great, and you can do them on anywhere. Boom. Alright. That and then there's his there's the spiel that that that Barry said about, I'm picking on you a lot here, Barry, but it's because you're right in front of me.
Or, you know, there's that bit where where Jamie said it was a Wally. Wally, did he say it was a Wally? It's like in Wally and then we could find it. Right?
And that way,
it's more for the consumer. Right? I'm giving it I want I want it for the consumer.
There is the added bonus
of and it's a bonus in in in bunny parts of SEO, and I hate that too. But essentially, because the each because the website is full of content by different people talking about different technologies,
technically,
the web,
can like, the the search engines can index that page and look for things like dot net or, like, in Jira functions or link it to Barry or whatever. Right? It can then do that. So then if people search on the Internet for, you know, things that are related to the show, it will come up eventually. But the main goal for me is,
to provide that value. And part of that value, I'm sure that we'll talk about it in a moment, but part of the value of the transcript is for people who are unable to listen. Right?
Perhaps they have the there's I think there's 3 kinds of,
disabilities. There's a temporary,
disability is probably the wrong word, accessibility issue.
There's a temporary accessibility issue. Maybe,
I can't, do maybe I can't use,
a 2 handed device for something because I'm holding a baby. Eventually, I'll put the baby down, and then I can carry on using that 2 handed device.
Maybe I have a
a, a permanent,
accessibility issue. Maybe I only have one arm. Right?
And then there's a location based,
accessibility issue. I can't really think of one that works for this. Maybe I'm holding open a gate and I can't use a 2 handed thing. Right? Yeah. I will eventually that is that is conditional on me standing next to the gate. It is temporary, but also location.
And what I want to do is I want to provide all of that information for people who are anywhere within that,
I guess, spectrum is the right word, that spectrum of accessibility.
If someone has no accessibility issues through temporary to,
to time based to permanent
accessibility issues. I want anyone to be able to access the content, which is why I put that transcript online.
And then once that's done,
I then enter this this situation of, well, let's start publicising it.
Scheduling tweets, scheduling LinkedIn posts again, because those are the two places where,
the audience that I know of for the show hang up, scheduling all of that content.
Does that answer the question? I realized I I
talked in lots of different directions there, so I I apologize. No. It totally really does. So it sounds like, a lot of work, which it usually
how much time would you say one episode
takes you?
Oh, goodness.
Mister Bob. Geez, Louise. Yeah. So obviously, production of the episode, the recording is about an hour.
Pre production could be a couple of hours, could even be a couple of days if it adds up to lots of back and forth over email. But what I tend to do is I get to the point where we've had maybe 5 or 6 emails, and then I'm like, right, Let's just jump on a call. This will be so much easier
rather than this asynchronous email back and forth.
So, yeah, maybe maybe 4 or 5 hours preproduction,
an hour or so production.
Thankfully, I don't do the editing,
so I hand that off to someone else. I also don't have to deal with,
you know, like, if someone's mic suddenly switches off or someone's Internet goes down during the recording. My editor does that. I don't know how he does it. He's just magic.
So he's able to do that. And then, like the post
post creation? Post? Yeah. Post production.
Post production is the wrong word. But, like, social stuff, that one may be taking another 2, 3 hours just scheduling things out and and setting up this transcript. Like I said, I have a I have a a system for creating the transcripts. I use,
something called
insanely fast whisper,
which is a command line tool, that I use on my Mac Air. So my Mac Air m 2
has an m 2 chip, which means that, because it's got these neural CPUs or whatever they're calling them, I don't need a graphics card to be able to do AI stuff. So I can use things like insanely fast Wispy. Give it some audio,
and it creates I think it took about 25 minutes to create a a an SRT formatted transcript
of an episode.
I then have to then listen to the episode and read through the transcript and fix it, but it gets me about 90% of the way there. Right? I'm not having to go right at this time stamp to that time stamp this person said. The only thing it doesn't do is diarization which is,
recognizing each of each individual speaker and naming them. So it doesn't do that. So that's the other thing I need to fix is that, like, if you and I are talking,
it won't say Barry said this, Jamie said that, Barry said that. It will be here is what people said for the last 2, 3 minutes, you figure it out. Which is fair enough. That gets me about 90% of the way there. And I can't complain. It's free. Right? It's a free tool that I can run. So, you know, I'm not gonna complain. Free open source software, I'm not complaining. I'm happy.
But then I'm then wondering, is it even worth me doing that? Because around half of my audience are on iOS.
And iOS 17.4,
I think, provides these automatic transcripts.
So half of the audience are getting those transcripts. I don't know. It is definitely worth me doing, but I just need to figure out the workflow of adding that in
and then providing that as part of the the episode download as well. So there's what I'm saying, folks, is there's loads of effort.
Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. I think it is worth doing, like the transcript because you also, paste it on your website,
and that adds lots of value. You know, people can just search through it. I think that's very valuable,
because, you know, people sometimes lots of people sometimes also just listen on the web,
or they just look through this transcript. Hey. What's being said here? I'm not even listening to the episode. I'm just doing that.
Yeah.
There there are easier ways to do that, for instance, with Pod Home. Yeah. And then it adds value because in Pod Home, for instance, you can we do do diarization.
So you can then tag, well, this was when I was speaking, this was when the guest was speaking. And that does then show up in Apple Podcasts as well.
That's an added value there. The transcript itself, you know, Apple Podcasts does a good job at that as well, especially in English.
So you don't add lots of value there, just the names, which is okay. You know, it doesn't add huge amounts of value.
Jam.
Okay. So lots of effort.
You've dropped
so many
tips and and wisdom already.
Maybe we can end on,
what would you say to podcasters and or aspiring podcasters
that want to achieve whatever goal they have with their podcast? What would be the one thing that they need to pay attention to?
Oh my goodness.
I think,
I think
the one thing that's worked for me, and I say worked for me. Right? I feel I feel very lucky. I feel like a lot of the stuff that's happened with me is right place, right time. I can't really say, hey. Serendipity will get you through it. Right? But right place, right time has worked for me. But also what I've done is I I spend a lot of time,
like,
not not criticizing, but being critical about what I've produced
and being critical about how I am on the episodes.
So a lot of my early episodes, you can hear me say, yeah. Yeah. That's great. That's great. Whilst I'm trying to find the words to say. Whereas actually, what I've started doing now is I'll pause
and think of what I'm trying to say because there's no rush. Right? But also that helps because then sometimes,
the person you're speaking to might then go, oh, wait. Hang on. Did I say that correctly? Let me start again. And then they'll say something else. They'll reinforce what they're saying. So it's a double whammy. Right? You get twice as much, value for that. But, yeah, being able to actually listen back through to something you've created
with a with a critical not criticizing
here, I, whatever, mindset and say, right. What could I do better next time? And and not go for the, right. I've got a 1,000,000 things I need to change for next time.
Pick 1 and pick the smallest one.
I try to, go through life using kaizen, which is this wonderful Japanese idea of small,
small incremental
continuous changes
to make something better on a on a on a grander scale. Right?
And for those of those in the development space, we already do kaizen because kaizen is where the talk, the Toyota production system came from. And the Toyota production system became DevOps, which is
what,
you know, what we use nowadays for producing content and continuous integration, continual delivery, all that kind of stuff. So Kaizen, go all the way, like, 100 of years back and you see this idea of how do I make this better in the smallest possible way so that then tomorrow, it's already that little bit better. And then the next day, it's already that little bit better.
People in the in the, the physical fitness space will know this because they say, hey, You know, I I beat my personal best today. I was able to bench press. I'm gonna pick up some numbers out of the air. I don't know if this is a good number. I was able to bench press 85 kilos today. Tomorrow, I'm gonna try and bench press or when I've healed or whatever. Next time I'm at the gym, I'm gonna try and bench press 87.5.
They're not going for, I'm gonna bench press 85 and then stay there and bench press a 100 reps. I'm gonna get to 85 where it's safe and I can do it. I'm gonna rest, then I'm gonna put 2 and a half kilos on either on on in total and do the next one. Continual improvement
through small incremental changes.
And so that's what I always say to people. Let's just look at whatever the the small thing that you can change, the tiniest thing that you can change or alter or edit or remove,
because sometimes it's removing something, sometimes it's adding something. Like I said, my friend Steve, he looked at his stats. He was getting people dropping off at 42 minutes. So he was like, right. The episodes have to be no longer than 40 minutes.
And through that, that was a big change. But how we got to that 40 minutes was he he initially started to try and reduce the length of the the conversation,
but then found that that he felt like there was those loads missing. So then he took it the other way. He just flipped it and went, I'll record the hour and a half, and I'll pick the best bits and build something out of that.
Maybe that's the way to go.
Maybe it's doing things like me. Like like, what I did to get to that point where I'm reducing the intro
down to a couple of seconds. It was 30 seconds, then it was 25, then it was can we do 20? Can we do 15? Can we do 10? Does it still sound okay with 10? How about 5? Does 5 sound about right? 5 is a bit too short, maybe 7. Those small changes.
Right? And it wasn't
produce it, release it, see how people react. For me, that one was produce it. How does it sound? Okay. How does it sound at 1 speed? How does it sound at 1.5? How does it sound at 2?
I know some people who are I think it's a bit silly, but listen to a podcast at 2.5 or higher. How does it sound at those speeds? Like, does it sound like it is it producing
the effect that I want? At 3 speed, I don't think there's a point of having an intro because you may as well just go straight to the exit of the episode. But,
what do I know?
But, yeah, I think I think Kaizen just approach
approach things with how can I do it a little bit better next time? The the I'm sure there's some folks can look it up, but there's a chart online of, like,
continually getting 0.1 per I think it's from Atomic Habits.
Getting 0.1%
better
every day for 365
days leads to something like a 3 three time three x improvement.
Whereas getting 0.1%
better
over a year leads to almost no growth whatsoever because it's compound interest. Right?
That's it. Yeah. Magic of compounding.
Absolutely.
And so where can people go to, find your podcast and find more about
you?
Yeah. So,
the podcast is,
the modern.netshow.
It's still using the old URL. But if you go to
d0tnetcore.show,
so that's the word.netcoreshow
and then a period
show.
So sorry. The the words dotnetcore.netcore.
If you click that link, that will take you through to the the modern.net,
show, which has all of the episodes on there. I think we're a 155
episodes so far, so we're we're doing pretty well.
You can also, like, I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on, X.
If you like, I'm sure,
if you wouldn't mind, Barry, put some if I send you some links, you might be able to put them in the show notes. Or, you know, I could put together, like, a a a Bitly or something where people can just jump to. But, yeah, if you find me on on x as podcaster
j, so the word podcaster as in, like, the noun of someone being a podcaster, And then jaypodcasterjay.
That's me, and then I've got links there for all of the different things that I'm doing.
Yeah. I think that's probably the best way to get in touch.
Excellent. And I will put all of those things in the show notes so that people can connect with you and listen to the show.
Okay. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you very much, sir.
Thank you very much. It's been an absolute pleasure. Long time listener, first time caller.
Thanks for tuning into the show. For more episodes, go to about podcasting dot show, and remember to host your podcast on podhome.fm,
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