The Ultimate Guide to Create a Podcast From 0 With a Detailed Example

Outline:

• Starting from scratch is not the same as starting from zero
• The why: triangle of purpose
• The who: podcast participants
• The what: defining our show
• The how: producing your podcast
• Summary

Starting from scratch is not the same as starting from zero

A guideline on how to create your first podcast will take you from embarking on a titanic endeavor (a.k.a. not going to happen) to a relatively quickly achievable project. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, others have already paved the path to a successful podcast show. Take advantage of their experience. You’ll be digesting hundreds of hours of trial and error summed in their journey and you’ll avoid making the same mistakes.

Now, not everybody is willing to share so openly about what works and what doesn’t, but let’s make up for that with our own comprehensive guide to creating your first podcast. At Rumble Studio we specialize in helping hundreds of podcasters achieve their goals and the journey wouldn’t be complete without having our in-house podcast to understand and walk alongside our customers as well.

We’ll show you a detailed fictitious example of how to create a podcast and walk you through all the important steps. We’ll also leave you with a free PDF template at the end of the article to help you get started with your podcast show. Let’s dive in!

The why: triangle of purpose

Without the purpose, there’s no reason to do a podcast. You need a beacon to guide you through the “what” you’ll do, “how” you’ll do it, and for “whom”.

Here’s how we would do it.

• Host’s purpose: We want to become a point of reference for the European startup community and raise brand awareness with potential customers, investors, and the press.
• The what: To do this we’ll create a podcast focused on growth hacking by early-stage startups in these countries
• Unique perspective: by portraying our guest’s stories on how they acquired their first 100 clients

The show will be oriented towards startups (who’ll monitor their competition with our show), wantrepreneurs (who’ll get inspired by us hopefully), and early-stage investors (who’ll discover investment opportunities through our show). Once we know our purpose, this is the purpose we intend for our audience. Thus, we have the second corner of our triangle of purpose.

Last but not least, we want our guests to get exposure to their companies on our show. We want to create free content that they can use for their marketing and our audio scene can help them practice their startup pitch to potential investors listening to the show.

Now we’ve completed the triangle of purpose: host, audience, and guest’s reason to do and be part of this podcast.

The who: podcast participants

We have cleared out the purpose of everyone involved in the podcast and now we have to specify who’s going to be part of the actual podcast. Let’s bring those ideals to Earth.

Thinking about our target audience, we found that we want to reach pre-seed and seed-stage startups in Europe, early-stage investors, wantrepreneurs, and innovation departments at corporations. Now, they can become our guests because they’re the most interested and experienced in the startup community and they’ll be more willing to take part in the show. 

Guests can come from different industries, role types, employees in these startups, thought leaders, and even current or potential customers. But remember, a podcast is a soft sell, so we don’t want to through our sales pitch at them and spook them out.

Then we have the host for our podcast. It doesn’t need to be the same person as the creator and we can choose from a variety of people: internal staff (authentic but what happens if they leave the company?), celebrities/influencers/thought leaders (credible but can be expensive), or a synthetic voice/ voice clone (less authentic but faster and cheaper).

The what: defining our show

We know our topic (growth hacking by early-stage startups) and our unique angle setting us apart from other podcasts in this niche (the first 100 clients' stories told by the startup). But we need to define some other things that will guide the overall structure of our show.

How do we want our listeners to feel while listening to our podcast?

In our case, we want them to feel educated (e.g. about other startups in their field), inspired (e.g. that they can also achieve similar goals), and stimulated (e.g. to get them thinking about their startup’s future). 

We need a specific tone to achieve this. 

We want to sound professional, but not too serious. We want to convey a clear opinion, but without recommending either what startups should do or recommending they buy certain products. Our podcast will raise brand awareness and position us as a go-to show for everything startup related.

We have to define if and how we’ll monetize our show. We didn’t want to include sponsorships on our show, but you might want to consider some of the following options:

• Podcast promo swaps: exchange a mention on your show of other podcasters as they will on their show.
• Affiliate sales: get a percentage of every product sold with your referral link. We would recommend sticking to high-ticket items so that selling two or three of these products will be worth your while.
• Ad reading: the host would have a brief narration of the product or service of the sponsor. This might be a better idea compared to inserting a dynamic ad (which tends to spoil the show and usually doesn’t pay much).

Sponsorships take a lot of work to implement so think about it twice before including them on your show.

Lastly, consider what you’ll ask your audience to do that benefits you (the host) on one hand, and your guest on the other hand. This is your call to action. We decided to have a CTA to sign up for our newsletter and mention the guest’s website and offer a promo code for a discount on their products or services. 

You can also ask your audience to follow you on social media, promote a course, book, or some limited deal for your product’s purchase, or just have them leave a simple brief review. There’re many options but remember that a podcast should not try to sell anything too hard because you’ll just push your audience farther away.

The how: producing your podcast

There were a couple of things to consider when setting up our podcast.

We had to decide the format, timeframe (episode length and release frequency), artwork, text-related aspects, and other items that enable you to carry on your podcast as smoothly as possible.

Due to the multiple benefits of asynchronous podcasting, we chose this technique to create one set of questions and send them to all our guests who would record them on their own time. This technique enabled us to produce enough 15-minute episodes that we could release weekly. We automated the process as much as we could so we pre-recorded the intro and outro, created a show notes template, and used Canva’s templates for the artwork.

Even if you feel pressure for naming your podcast as soon as possible, take your time with it. Brainstorm and check if these names have already been taken by another podcast, avoid infringing any copyright, and when you get to choose a name use an unambiguous spelling so that when you say it out loud people can easily search and find you. 

We chose a very straightforward one, Startup Growth Hacking Stories, to make it easy to remember. The same should go for your episode title where you mention the topic, guest name, and role, and make it clear and enticing to attract listeners.

To make our podcast more efficient, we created batches of 3 to 10 episodes at once under the same topic: identifying your target market. We would focus on helping our early-stage startup listeners to plan how to segment their potential customers and the non-startup listeners; they’ll get an intro to the startup world through our guest’s stories. 

Always consider the value you add to your audience!

We ended up having one host ask the questions and follow up on them and we created a list of guests to invite to our episode batch. We considered more guests than we needed in case some didn’t accept our invitation. So for 6 episodes, we identified 10 guests from different industries and European countries.

But what should we ask them?

We had open questions (starting with what, when, where, why, and how) to get them to talk freely on their topic:

•  What does your company do, what clients does it serve, and what problem does it solve for them?
• How did you define your market segments, and identify your ideal customer profile (ICP)?
• Why was it important to have a clear strategy?

And so on.

As a rule of thumb, consider around 2 minutes per question so when you have a 15-minute episode, you’ll be able to cover around 5 questions in addition to the intro & outro questions.

And finally, schedule the release of your episodes and plan the promotion of them around those dates. In our case, we announce the podcast episode a couple of days earlier and promote it on social media and in our newsletter for a week. We also email our guests and ask them to share it with their network once it’s out. 

To enhance it even further, we create an article on our blog for each podcast episode and we also repurpose the audio as audiogram videos and how we see fit in the days after the official launch.

And that’s it, we’re good to go!

Summary

Several steps go into creating a podcast from scratch: the why, what, who, and how. They’re part of every podcast journey, but with our example (for educational purposes only), we help you go through it more smoothly. We explore each step of the way to give you a clearer overview of how to plan and adapt it to your personal podcast journey.

This is just a glimpse of a complete workshop we did last July that you can watch here. You’ll find everything you need to start from scratch. And to give you an extra push on this endeavor, get our free PDF templates to create new podcast shows and episodes here. It’s the fastest way to create your first 100 podcast episodes!

Useful links:

• Interactive Workshop – 5-Part Workshop (Rumble Studio)

• Rumble Studio - Create your free account!