In case you haven’t heard, I’m doing a daily podcast challenge for the month of February. Why? Well, I got inspiration from fellow podcaster Matt Gilhooly. Matt hosts the Life Shift Podcast, a video podcast where he talks with people about pivotal moments in their lives. He’s an incredible and empathetic host and I’m glad he stepped in front of the camera and mic to show off his storytelling skills in a new way. I feel like I learned a lot about him and got to hear more from him. I think as podcast hosts we forget that we are the main constants on our shows, and our audience often comes back for us, not just our guests.

Matt did a month of daily, solo podcast episodes sharing different elements of his story and core memories. I’m doing my daily podcast challenge in honor of Black History Month, and will be a multitude of different stories – some of them will be my own, some of them will be of other Black creators and entrepreneurs, and some will be topics relevant to you. 28 episodes in 28 days is quite the undertaking, so I thought I’d share my process for making it happen, from pre-production to upload and marketing.

P.S. The first episode is live! Check it out on Apple or Spotify.

It all starts with determining what to talk about. I used Obsidian to capture ideas and make a rough list. Then I transferred those ideas to Notion to begin script writing and drafting an upload schedule. Notion databases are powerful and perfect for this use case. Many of the deep dives were names that were already on my radar, but many of the topics came from looking at similar YouTube channels for ideas (like YC Combinator, Entrepreneur, Forbes, etc.).

When you’ve nailed down what to talk about, then it comes to deciding which ones will be audio only, and which episodes will be paired with video. Arguably, all of them could be video and audio episodes. But realistically, with writing two newsletters and producing client projects, I simply don’t have time for that. My current aim is 1-2 videos per week that get paired with these episodes, we’ll see if I manage anything more than that. I think if I cared less about the production AND wasn’t doing anything else (like writing this) I could do a daily upload a la a daily vlog.

In terms of structure, I’m taking a note from Matt D’Avella’s book and putting a call-to-action to the paid version of this newsletter. I didn’t do it for the first three episodes but will be incorporating it in future episodes. Captivate allows for dynamic ads, so I could theoretically add this retroactively with my first 3 episodes.

I’ve been using a combination of Descript and Premiere Pro for my post-production needs. Premiere Pro has text-based editing, so in theory, you might only need one of these programs. But as someone who’s used both, the text-based editing is noticeably better in Descript. Descript helps me get to a rough cut much faster, while Premiere Pro gives me more powerful tools for audio editing/audio enhancement, and sound design.

I host my podcast on Captivate and highly recommend it. For now, I’m uploading videos to YouTube and not really focusing on making shorts/reels. My main audience is on Linkedin, so I’ll be sharing my progress on that platform. I may also share my progress on Twitter, Threads, and Bluesky but I don’t necessarily put a lot of stock/effort into those platforms. Much of the YouTube views will come natively from the platform if packaged correctly (i..e your title and thumbnail get people to click). I want 95%+ of the views to come from YouTube to grow the podcast listenership. My YouTube views always outpace my audio downloads, so we’ll see if that holds true this month with fewer video uploads than audio uploads.