Episode 8: Priorities

David: This is (A Podcast About) Making Better Podcasts. This is Episode 8, and it's called “Priorities.”  

I'm a small business owner, and inevitably, I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, for better or for worse. And, of course, the algorithm feeds me a lot of posts about podcasting. And lately, I've seen a lot of a particular kind of post that drives me a little bit crazy. They're all variations on a theme, written by a particular kind of self-proclaimed marketing guru who is usually trying to sell some kind of turn-key system for B2B podcast production. They all go something like this:

 ”You want to start a podcast to promote your business, and THOSE GUYS are going to tell you you need to buy lots of expensive equipment, and do lots of editing, and all that kind of high-falutin' nonsense. You don’t need all that FANCY-SCHMANCY stuff to be successful. Just have good conversations! Your expertise will shine through. Oh, and buy our app."

OK. Right. So. Aside from buying their app or whatever, the rest is kind of true, in a way, but it's also  misleading, counterproductive, and silly, and I'm going to do a whole episode about why I dislike it so much.

This is that episode. Welcome.

I'm going to start with something that feels like a complete digression, as well as being, admittedly, a bit high-falootin', but please bear with me, I promise it will make sense.

In the 1940's, there was an American psychologist named Abraham Maslow. And one day, he was getting philosophical, and he started thinking about happiness. What is it that makes someone happy? Not in the short term-sense, like eating a cookie or whatever, but long-term: what are the things people need to lead a fulfilled life? So he started listing things: you need food and water, and you also need a pleasant place to live, a good job, companionship, and so forth.

What he realized was that all of these things are important, but some of them are more urgent than others. You can't think about a fulfilling career if you're starving, or don't have clothes to wear.

So what he did was come up with a theory, which someone later on organized into a famous pyramid graph, called Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. It puts the most basic stuff —air, food, water, shelter, clothing — at the bottom, stuff like employment and health care in the middle, and more abstract things like self-esteem at the top.

The point here isn’t that the top-of-the-pyramid items aren't necessary. You cannot live a happy life without  feeling loved and appreciated and spending your time in ways that you find meaningful. But the top of the pyramid items cannot be addressed before the ones below them. It’s not a hierarchy of important things over unimportant things, it's an order of operations: you have to start with this problem, then move on to this one, then this one.

And that’s what the “forget the fancy-schmancy” posts are missing: if you want your podcast to be all that it can be, you DO need the fancy-schmancys, but they aren't the FIRST things you need.

And so, with apologies to the good Dr. Maslow, I present what I will call:

Hoffman’s Hierarchy of Podcast Needs.

These are seven categories of things that I think any podcast needs to be as successful as possible, and I’ve organized them in order of urgency: you absolutely need number four, but it won't help you much if you haven't worked out numbers one through three first.

So, to present these, I'm going to talk about them in order, except I'm going to save number one, the most fundamental thing, for last.

So let's begin with Number Two, the second most fundamental element of a successful show, which I think is what I'm going to call Concept. This is the overall creative idea for the series — the thing that would be the elevator pitch for when someone asked you about it. 

  A good concept for a show is all of three things: it is aligned, meaning it fits who you are as a creator. You're qualified to talk about whatever you want to talk about. It’s interesting — you're going to approach whatever topic that is in a way that is different from all the other people who are talking about it. And finally, it’s generous — you're giving your audience something they want and need. 

"We're just going to hang out and roll some mics and see what happens" isn't good enough. There's no there there. "We're going to interview famous people” isn’t good enough. “We’re going to interview people who know things about our favorite subject" isn't good enough either, unless it's a subject that no one else has ever done a podcast about. 

Maybe you have that — you're an expert in post-modern interpretive paleontology, you're tapped into the global  post-modern interpretive paleontology community, and you know there are no podcasts about current advances in the field. Awesome, go for it, now that's a strong concept.

But there are A LOT of podcasts out there, and even though I just made it up,  Post-modern Interpretive Paleontology Today, and Post-Mod Pale Buddies, and PMIP-B, The Podcast all probably already exist. Which isn't to say you shouldn't go for it, it just means you need to find an angle: a point of view, a format, a style that is different from all of those others.

How do you find it? Start by looking around. See what everyone else is doing and think of a way to be different. Just make sure you're putting yourself in the mind of the audience you want while you're doing it. 

 You see, most people start a podcast for one of a handful of reasons: they think it'll be fun, they think it'll be lucrative, or they have something they're dying to say and they want a platform to say it. 

And there's nothing fundamentally wrong with any of those. They're all perfectly valid reasons to wanna begin a project. The problem, though, is that all three of those are about providing value to the podcasters. None of them have anything to do with the audience. It's all well and good to think about why you wanna make something, but you also have to spend some serious time thinking about why the heck someone else would want to consume it. 

It's like that person we know who cannot stop telling long, boring stories. They just love to talk, and so they talk and talk and talk, endlessly rambling on about how this happened and then that happened and this happened… and none of it connects to each other and none of it connects to anything you would  actually care about. 

This is unbearable because you, listening, are a victim, a bystander. As much as they are talking, as much as you're trying to listen, none of it is for you. They'd be telling the same story no matter who happened to be standing there. You might as well be a lamp for all they care. 

And honestly, a lot of podcasts are like that. They're making it because it's fun or because they have something they wanna say, but they're not thinking about you, the listener, at all. You might listen once to a show like that, maybe twice if it's being made by one of your roommates, but you will not keep coming back. 

The shows that hook you, that you come back to again and again, fill a need in your life. They reach out to their audience and welcome them into an experience that is interesting and fun and special. They teach you something. They make you laugh. They give you a thrill, inspire you, comfort you, make you happy. This is easier said than done, but the foundation of it is a good concept, which is a core of welcoming, interesting specialness that the whole welcoming, interesting, special thing can be built on. 

All right. Enough about concept, though. Let's move up to the third level of our pyramid, which I'm going to call Structure.

In the original blog post I wrote about this, I called this "presentation", but I think structure is a better word. 

Now that we have a good idea of what we want to say and why and who we’re talking to, how are we going to say it and who is going to do the saying? 

Are you the host? Should you be? Do you need a co-host? Why or why not? Would this be better as a group discussion? Should we have guests? Should we start with a conversation just between the hosts before we bring the guest in? Should we have, like,  the same final question we always ask?

I already spent two whole episodes of this series talking about this stuff: Episode 1 is all about different formats, and Episode 3 is all about structural elements, so I won't get in the weeds about either again here,  but suffice to say that these are the things that lift a show from “That’s a good idea” to “You should listen to this”.

So now we can move to the fourth level of our pyramid, which I'm going to call Polish. How do we get this to not just sound good, but also, you know, SOUND good? 

How much recording equipment do we need, and how much post-production do we need to do? 

I think the myth of “you don’t need the fancy-schmance” often comes from placing this step in the wrong place in the chain. When people start their process by buying equipment, they very often over-purchase or just buy the wrong things. Mics and cameras and software aren’t interchangeable, and which is “the best one” very much depends on what you are trying to accomplish.  One mic setup is going to be better for an in-person group conversation and another one for a show that's totally remote. You're going to need more post-production if you're doing a documentary than if you're doing an interview. 

If you spend $20,000 on a pizza oven, and then later figure out that what you want to do is serve Chinese food, then yes, you probably wasted a lot of money. But that doesn't mean there's something wrong with pizza ovens and no one would ever need one. It just means you need the right tools for the job, and you won't know what that is until you do all the initial creative work on the lower rungs. 

But whatever you're doing, getting the right tools and the right skills involved is really important. Bad sound is unpleasant, and it will absolutely make it harder to build an audience. To say you don't need to worry about having good equipment is silly. 

And now we’re up to number five: Packaging. You might also call this "branding", or even just "graphic design". This starts with your show's logo. Spending time thinking about this is another thing the anti-shmance crowd loves to waggle a finger at as being frivolous and unnecessary.

“I mean, you have to have a logo to publish it, but don't spend your valuable energy and money on it. Use our AI-powered template and bang! You can go back to concentrating on your content.”

Here's the thing: we all judge books by their covers. That's why books HAVE covers.

Have I listened to and enjoyed shows that have an ugly logo? Absolutely. But we're not talking here about the minimum amount of stuff that you could possibly get away with and still have a chance of having a series that could possibly be considered successful. We're talking about the elements that go into making a series its best self. And I have absolutely also checked out a show just because it had a particularly good logo. Would I have found that ugly-logo show sooner if it had a better logo? Probably.

And the shows that are really, really good at packaging have found ways to package themselves inside all kinds of things. They have beautiful websites, and a robust social media presence, and all kinds of auxiliary things — affinity groups, Slack channels, merchandise, live meetups — that really allow them to build community around the show, to let people feel that they are a part of it. It might sound silly, but to me that really all starts with a logo, and the idea that you're building a brand and not just a podcast.

And so that brings us to number 6, Promotion. In my original article, I had this combined with number 5, but that was a mistake. It is really its own thing, and a very important thing. We're going to do at least one entire episode of this show about how to promote a podcast, because there is a heck of a lot to say about it.

For now, it's enough to say that however great your show is, its audience isn't just going to appear. You have to go out and find them. There are all kinds of ways to do this, but you have to do SOMETHING. And maybe more importantly, you have to be prepared to do something — to know from the beginning that this is a necessary, time consuming, and often expensive part of the process of launching and maintaining a successful show.

And now, finally, we’re at the top of our pyramid, level seven: Persistence — The gumption to keep going, episode after episode, season after season, and also the willingness to observe and modify. What’s working and what isn't? What are people responding to?  What's a new way to be engaging our community? How can we make the next episode better than the last one?

Some shows have undergone tremendous renovations . And that's good! The only way to learn how to do this is to do it and then do it again, and try to do it better.

And so, this is our pyramid so far from the second level up: Concept, Structure, Polish, Packaging, Promotion, and Persistence. But what about number one? The foundation?

At the bottom of the chart, the first, most fundamental thing, is Energy. By which, I mean... bandwidth — A sufficient commitment of time and resources. 

No matter what the AI snake oil salesmen will tell you, producing good media is hard work, and someone — meaning actual human people — are going to have to do it.

A lot of that hard work is, with apologies to Liam Neeson, learning a very particular set of skills. Being a good interviewer, writing good scripts, being comfortable on the mic, editing, doing post-production, all of these are hard, and learning to do any of them well is going to take time for study and practice.

And even when you're good at these things, you've put in the time and energy to develop these skills, using them to make something good is still really hard. Coming up with good ideas and executing them takes time, even if you're really skilled and talented. Honestly, then it might take even more time, because skilled and talented people are… pickier. They know what they're capable of, and they're always working to get better. 

Having people who can put the work in, at every level, doesn't make it easy to make a good show, it makes it POSSIBLE. There's no other way.

Now fortunately for those with a lack of time, talent, skill, and/or energy, there is a magic potion that can substitute for any of them. This, of course, is money. People with skill and an open calendar can be hired (at, for instance, Citizenracecar.com, I’m just sayin').

But one way or another, this commitment of energy is the most fundamental requirement. Without it, you are dead in the water, and nothing higher up the chain will make any difference.  It doesn't matter how good your idea is, or how good a host you are, or how good a microphone you buy if you don't have the time to put the work in or the money to hire someone else to do it. 

And so that's our pyramid, from the bottom up: Energy, Concept, Structure, Polish, Packaging, Promotion, and Persistence. 

All of these things are necessary to make your podcast all that it can be, but they won’t make sense if you address them out of order.

So, when someone tells you that you don’t need expensive mics or professional graphic design or paid promotion, consider the possibility that you really do need them, but maybe just not yet.

(Closing Credits)

This is (A Podcast About) Making Better Podcasts

My name is David Hoffman, and I’m the Host, Writer, and Producer of this series

Alex Brouwer and I collaborated on the Post-Production

Publication and Promotion by Candice Chantalou

This is a Production of CitizenRacecar, CitizenRacecar.com