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- [00:00]
Jordan
Okay, so for this quick cast, I wanted to talk about a blog that was shared internally in the company chat. It was written by Tom Raftery, who is a Buzzsprout podcaster and a listener of Buzzcast.
- [00:13]
Tom
Super fan.
- [00:13]
Jordan
Yeah, super fan. He's a host of Resilient Supply Chain and Climate Confident. And he wrote about his podcasting workflow after 800 episodes.
- [00:23]
Priscilla
Yeah, 800 episodes. What an accomplishment. That's. That's massive.
- [00:27]
Jordan
So, I mean, his podcast is about, like, supply chain. And, you know, you. You got to make sure that everything's, like, running really smoothly. And it's so interesting reading through his process of podcasting and also his, like, philosophy of podcasting, like, when it's working through that lens of, like, supply chain, and he kind of, like, ties it all in. So he. He wrote, I think of the workflow as a media supply chain. Their inputs, quality gates, dependencies, production steps, packaging, hosting, publishing, feedback loops, and a constant search for the next bottleneck.
- [01:01]
Tom
I love it. That's great.
- [01:03]
Priscilla
Yeah.
- [01:04]
Jordan
So some of my favorite takeaways from his experience. I read through this. I'm gonna link to it in the show notes. I highly recommend that you read through it. It's. It's so well written. Tom's got a great voice in his writing, but one of the things I really enjoyed, he said, consistency happens when you remove as many pain points as possible. And I think a lot of us kind of assume that we're going to be consistent with our podcasting. We're gonna stay consistent just through, like, pure grit. And he's saying, like, no, actually that's a good way to burn out. And the best way to continue podcasting and make sure that you are continuing is by making it as easy as humanly possible on yourself.
- [01:43]
Tom
Isn't almost everything like this? Like, you can white knuckle your way through a few workouts. You can force yourself to a diet for a short period. You, anything. You're like, I really want to do this. I'm going to do it. You can do it for a couple days. And it's when anything goes slightly off plan that you're like, oh, gosh, my two workouts every day plan actually is going to be kind of tough when we're on vacation. I have no clue how to solve this. And it all unravels. And, like, podcasting fits into this group. Like, you can force yourself to do a few episodes no matter what. You know, you're. No matter how bad the supply chain, the media supply chain is. But at some point, you need to have, like, smoothed it out so that it kind of is happening naturally. Like the equivalent of laying out the gym clothes the night before so that you can just wake up and go, rather than having to, like, figure it out on the fly every single day.
- [02:39]
Jordan
One of the things that he mentioned is a bottleneck that I've personally been encountering in my podcasting experience too, which is probably why it resonated so much with me and I included it in this list. He said that your prerecord needs to be, like, completely bulletproof, foolproof, and if you do that, that will ensure that the rest of the podcast runs so much more smoothly. And so he says, like, you need to make sure that you're vetting your guests, you know, and making sure that they're a good guest for your podcast. You need to always be prepared, so make sure that you have, like, backups and contingencies. He says to include, like, recording details in the calendar invite, which I love. This is a big one, coaching guests on audio and video. The thing is, is I've encountered, especially with our podcast, happy to help the people that we have on as guests. They're not podcasters. Like, the vast majority of the time, they're not. They don't have experience with that. They might be doing, like, some zoom calls and consultancy kind of things. And I think that Tom often encounters the same thing where the people he's interviewing for his podcast, like, they're not podcasters. And so he has to kind of like coach them and get them comfortable on the camera. And so one of the things that really helps that is doing like a pre recording warmup, which I love doing this. It's. It's great to just kind of like, chat with people about something that they're passionate with and. And it makes them a little bit more comfortable in front of the camera and they feel like, okay, I'm at ease, like, I can do this interview now because this is a friendly encounter. But I've. I've totally had things where I wish that I did the painful thing and had, like, a tough conversation with a guest, you know, because there's been so many times where I kind of like white knuckle through a recording, even though I know it doesn't sound quite right. And I'm like, I could. I know I can fix it in post. Like, I know I can, but really, that makes so much extra work for me in the long run. And then I start, like, dreading editing this episode. Right.
- [04:40]
Priscilla
It's a great point. The stuff that he's listing here, I think is the stuff that when it goes wrong, it's not insurmountable. Stuff like if you have a guest on your show and they're uncomfortable on camera, like, you can grind through that, but it's removing a lot of the joy and it's removing a lot of the polish that you've worked so hard for your episodes. If you have a guest who's like, talk, talking off topic or they're whatever, like, you see a lighting change that they could make, that would be an easy adjustment. But now you're into the recording and you don't want to mess up with stuff right in the middle of the recording. These are little things that steal the joy and the craft. Or maybe what makes your show unique and different and getting it right up front, I think is a great protection measure to protect your joy, to protect your time, and protect sort of maybe the brand or the style of your podcast. And so I, I, I love this as a checklist and I think everyone could have their own version of that, for sure.
- [05:33]
Tom
I like these little things like recording details are in the calendar invite, and I think I'm always the stickler for these in my own life where I'm like, okay, we're gonna use the same Google Meet room every time no matter what. And over time, like, you just, it gets a little bit easier. Cause you don't sit there and go, hey, guys, you got the, got a room? Got a link for us? It's always the same room. And so everybody knows where the how to get there. The room is always in the calendar invite. The calendar is always the same time unless we want to change it. And each of those, like, it's already decided, just takes one of the things off the table so that when there inevitably are, I'm running 10 minutes late. It's not the third inconvenience. It's just the one tiny one that doesn't really matter.
- [06:21]
Jordan
Yeah, that's a huge one. And especially because you want to keep the energy up during the recording. And so if your pre recording is painful, it's going to be like, oh, gosh, okay, it took us forever to get in here. We had to do, like, troubleshooting. And, you know, I had to ask for this thing like a million times and they didn't respond. And now I'm not excited about the recording. And so, yeah, there's, there's so many advantages to making sure that everything runs really smoothly. All right, so I have a third one here that I love. And this is. I mean, I don't want to say this is, like, my favorite part, but it's pretty close to my favorite part, so. And you'll see why. Tom talked about how instead of being, like, loyal to, like, your tool set, ask yourself, like, what part of the workflow keeps breaking and improve your tool stack from there. And in this point, he talks about how important it is that a company has. Has support. And so he talks about how he uses buzzsprout to host both of the podcasts. And he said that support is easy to undervalue until something breaks, which is so true.
- [07:27]
Tom
All right, can I tell a story on this point? I think I'm a huge Airbnb advocate, and it's always so smooth. You can find a great place. I come from a big family, so if we all get together, we need a big house, and Airbnb is the best way to do it. And we've stayed in tons of Airbnbs over the years to the point that, like, we don't look for hotels, we look for Airbnbs. And so when I went to this wedding a couple weeks ago, we got a really bad Airbnb. And it wasn't Airbnb's fault, but there were a bunch of bugs in it, and it was bad. So we just messaged him and go, hey, we, you know, we can't stay here. It violates the policies. We got a hotel, and then the support was so bad for a few days. And I was talking to my wife, and I was like, I'm not upset that we lost the money from this Airbnb. If that's the result, what I'll be really upset about is that we'll lose Airbnb, because there's no way I can do this again. Like, I can't commit to, you know, if we went on a big vacation to Italy or something. Like, you can't get an Airbnb under that scenario. If they don't solve this. And I'm, like, lamenting this and going, I don't think they're going to pull it out. And then, like, the next day, my wife's like, let me step in. I'll. I'll email them. And she sends them one message, and she got the right person because they go, oh, I'm sorry, Our mistake. We refunded it. Everything's taken care of. Tickets closed. And it had been, like, five days. I was like, oh, wow, it's good to get that money back. But the big part was, as soon as you lose your Trust in a product, it's, like, gone. And it stinks for everybody, stinks for the company, but it also stinks as the user because then you don't feel like, even if it works 99% of the time, I'm just kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Does that make sense?
- [09:13]
Jordan
Yeah. There's a lot of products that I have stopped using because it's impossible to find their, like, support email. You'll. You'll go through all the help articles and they have, like, a ton of, like, unhelpful help articles that maybe are, like, outdated. It was for, like, previous versions or something like that. And then you're like, trying to find, like, okay, no, how do I just, like, talk to somebody? And then the chat just, like, keeps sending you to, like, these help articles that weren't helpful in the first place. And, like, you just never reach a person. And those kind of things can definitely sour my relationship with a company big time.
- [09:48]
Tom
Yeah, there's something too. You just want to know at the end of the day, even if the AI chat bot was really smart and the help article was well written and everything helped, like, I kind of want to just know at the end of the day, at the end of the path, I can go to a person and say, do you understand? Like, this stinks. Even if you're not going to give me the money back or you can't solve this bug or whatever it is, like, you kind of still want that human connection in there.
- [10:13]
Jordan
And I think that Tom, like, in his writing, he really reflects that. He said that when you publish every week, support is part of the resilience architecture. And if an upload fails, a feed behaves strangely or metadata issue appears just before publication, you do not want to shout into a ticketing void. You want people who understand podcasting and respond with clarity. And he says buzzsprout's own customer support podcast, Happy to Help, is a useful signal. Here it is hosted by Priscilla Brook, buzzsprout's head of podcaster success and focuses on making customer support better. In a company willing to talk publicly about support, usually understands that support is part of the product. And I love this so much because I really, truly feel in my heart that our support, the support that BuzzSpro has, is a feature. It is absolutely part of the product. It is like, one of the most shiny things that we have. I just love that one of our customers feels that, like, that they understand that and they see it.
- [11:16]
Priscilla
Yeah, we could do a whole episode on support. I think we have done partial episodes at least. Priscilla's been on the podcast a few times. But it's, it's. It's such a difficult balance to strike between. You want every customer to experience your support at some level, especially when it's really good and you really care and you love connecting with people and interacting with them again. But then again, you don't necessarily want them to because that means something. Probably they're struggling somewhere, something went wrong. The majority of our support tickets are not necessarily because something is broken. It's usually the result of a misunderstanding or, um, I don't know how to do something. And I love that when people get to interact with us, you know, just because they want clarity around something or they want to do something better. I hate it when it's the result of something breaking. But either way, I love it when people get to experience our sport because our team, we only hire people who really do care about helping people succeed. Why we rename the team from Support to Success. Again, I don't want to go on and on about it, but I do love the fact that Tom wrote about that and it is a good part. Are an important part of being able to run a successful and consistent production is making sure you have a team around you and not necessarily meaning like a co host and a producer, but also like the software that you're using. The team behind those products being a part of your team.
- [12:30]
Tom
One thing I would add to this Jordan I really like from this episode was he treats the finished episode as a metadata factory. And the idea is at the end of the episode, you're trying to make sure that you're not losing value after you record. You've got titles, guest profiles, transcripts, thumbnails, all these extra pieces is you need to make sure that your flow of your podcast is easy enough that you have energy at the end to still optimize the episode somewhat and make sure you're writing a title and you're not just burned out. So you don't you just skip all these extra steps that he's basically optimized it so there's still energy at the moment of publication. And so there's this one quote. If I can send us off with one quote from Tom. Heroics are a poor operating model. If a publishing system depends on repeated last minute rescue missions, it's not a system, it's theater with a deadline. Surprise for me is that podcasting has taught me as much about supply chains as supply chains have taught me about podcasting. Flow matters, bottlenecks matter. Quality control matters. Consistency matters. Support matters. Resilience is built before the disruption arrives.
- [13:41]
Jordan
I love it. I told you. Like, the writing in this whole blog is just amazing. It's a really fun read. I think that there's a lot of wisdom in here from Tom's experience, you know, in supply chain and then also as a podcaster for 800 episodes, which is incredibly impressive. And so I highly recommend that you read it. I will leave a link to this in the show notes and until next time, thanks for listening and keep podcasting.