Easy Steps for a No-Fail Podcast Launch and Big Wins | James Gurd

Sadaf Beynon: [00:00:00] Welcome to Podjunction, where business meets podcasting. Whether you're on a morning jog, driving to work, whipping up a meal, or just taking a moment for yourself, our weekly bite sized episodes promise fresh insights from successful podcasters who have cracked the code of using podcasts to grow their business.

So whether you're a podcasting newbie or seasoned podcaster, grab your notebooks and get ready.

Matt Edmundson: Hello and welcome to Podjunction. My name is Matt Edmundson. Beside me, pointing a finger at the screen, telling me there's something wrong, is Sadaf. We fixed it now. Yeah, welcome to the show. Great to have you join us. This is a show where we talk about podcasting, we talk about business, we talk about how podcasting can help us grow our business and probably all kinds of other random stuff in between, right?

So yeah, it keeps us busy, keeps us entertained. That's the main thing. So yeah, welcome to the show. [00:01:00] If this is your first time with us, make sure you do that, that thing where you subscribe to the show. You'll be grateful that you did. Or I'll be grateful that you did. Somebody's going to be grateful somewhere.

Matt Edmundson: So you may as well subscribe. It'd be great to have you join those subscribing to the show. And of course, if you're up for it, come check out the website podjunction. com. Fill out the newsletter form. It'd be great to see you in there as well. There you go. Plug over.

Sadaf Beynon: Plug over. Okay.

Matt Edmundson: How you doing?

Sadaf Beynon: Good.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah.

New day.

Sadaf Beynon: New day.

Matt Edmundson: New day. New day. New day. So yeah, welcome. Tell us why. Why don't you tell people about yourself? Because it's normally me that talks.

Sadaf Beynon: About myself?

Matt Edmundson: Yeah. Yeah. You normally ask me a question. I'm getting in there first. What is one piece of information that most people don't know about you?

Sadaf Beynon: Okay.

Any time today. Most people do not know about me. Okay I don't know, Matt.

Matt Edmundson: It's so not known that I don't know it myself.

Sadaf Beynon: I don't know what to [00:02:00] share.

Matt Edmundson: Like when people ask me that question,

Sadaf Beynon: just

Matt Edmundson: to give you some ideas,

Sadaf Beynon: things

Matt Edmundson: I will say, my grandmother thinks that the Earl of Sefton was part of our family and he had to marry, he married a common girl and renounced his title.

Something my grandmother told me before she passed away. I have not been able to verify this fact. The Earl of Sefton, by the way, is based in Liverpool. Oh. Which is where I didn't, but yeah, it

Sadaf Beynon: makes sense. Near your house.. Oh, okay. I was near Sefton Park. .

Matt Edmundson: Yeah. No, Croxteth apparently. Okay. There's, apparently, there's a painting of my great grandfather somewhere in some.

I've not been able to verify any of what you told me, and it may have been that she had one or two cherries that maybe she shouldn't have had. I don't know. I don't know. But she was convinced that at a wedding somebody went up to, I think it was her grandma. And told her about her great grand, I don't know, it's one of those things, if there's a historian out there that can verify or de verify this fact, I would genuinely love to hear from you.[00:03:00]

Anyway, that's one of the things I

Sadaf Beynon: was saying,

Matt Edmundson: which is an interesting fact. That is an

Sadaf Beynon: interesting fact. Shall we move on?

Matt Edmundson: I want an interesting fact from

Sadaf Beynon: you. I don't know. There's nothing interesting

Matt Edmundson: about

Sadaf Beynon: the fact that I can't remember stuff.

Matt Edmundson: Or that you have no microphone technique.

Sadaf Beynon: Yes, that is true. We

Matt Edmundson: were establishing that this morning. You re recorded some video, didn't you? For the, and you put the microphone

Sadaf Beynon: like that,

Matt Edmundson: because you have to watch the video to see what I've just done, but basically. Normally, when you do a podcast, the microphone is pointing towards your mouth and you tend to speak over it rather than directly into it, like a musician saying to avoid the plosives but Sadaf, no, she puts her microphone pointing entirely away from it and goes, Oh, it's a bit quiet.

Sadaf Beynon: Oh, I got something interesting.

Matt Edmundson: Okay, go.

Sadaf Beynon: Because everyone was laughing at me in the office this morning.

Matt Edmundson: Oh, is that what that was? I heard lots of raucous laughter. I wasn't actually in the office, I was in the warehouse, but yeah.

Sadaf Beynon: I [00:04:00] couldn't find my water bottle this morning, so in my rush, I grabbed

a vase. Can I show them?

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, if you can reach it. So if you're watching the video version of this, you will now see a vase. Or a vase? For American cousins on the screen. Do you say vase? Not vase?

Sadaf Beynon: I do both when it comes to them.

Matt Edmundson: Okay. And yeah, so Sadaf needed a container big enough to contain copious amounts of water.

So you got a vase?

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah.

Matt Edmundson: Rather than just a really big glass.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah, because they just, the, yeah, the water finishes way too soon out of a glass. So something more like this is what I recommend.

Matt Edmundson: Okay, so top tip if you're, trying to deal with your hydration. Drink from a vase.

Sadaf Beynon: What you missed actually was after you went out, I don't know where you went, but Michelle came in with one of those big jugs.

You might need this instead, in case you're [00:05:00] dehydrated.

Matt Edmundson: Is that what that was? A really big vase? Okay, good to know. Good to know. And if you're listening and not watching, she has taken the flowers out.

Sadaf Beynon: Yes, I'm not drinking them.

Matt Edmundson: What are we talking about today other than drinking from a vase? Yeah,

Sadaf Beynon: okay.

We're talking you had a conversation with James Gurd.

Matt Edmundson: Another legend.

Sadaf Beynon: Yep. And in this segment, he is talking about how he started his podcast and why he chose podcasting over other mediums, such as writing blogs.

Matt Edmundson: Ah, yes. The legend that is James Gurd. Should we run that VT?

Sadaf Beynon: Yes.

Matt Edmundson: Do you know what VT is?

Nope.

Sadaf Beynon: But I think yes is the right answer. You work

Matt Edmundson: in this industry, VT just stands for videotape. It's what they used to say, like in the 80s and 90s when it's like videotapes. Yeah. Run that segment, run VT. And they play that segment. So let's run VT, here's James. What was the reason for [00:06:00] starting the podcast?

Did you, was it an epiphany one day or was this something that you'd thought about long and hard?

James Gurd: I wish I'd had an epiphany at any point in my life, to be honest, I'm still waiting, I'm still waiting. So if I look at what I'm trying to do, I've run my own business for 15 years and you have to, I'm not an agency with loads of people, I don't have a business development team, I'm doing everything, so I've got to win the business and I've got to do the business and so I have to do business development in some context and for years I've built up my network through doing like guest content and blogs and reports for people like Econsultancy I've got a good relationship with.

So I was doing things for other people. Yeah, so it, their content, but my voice on their platform. Then I realized that's great and I really do value that, but actually it's not really, it's not adding anything to. Value to me in terms of establishing me as a thought leader.

With an assistant voice.

Then I start writing, thinking about writing a [00:07:00] blog. And I don't really like writing. I've decided, there's so much content out there, written content. And to write long form content and get people to read it is a massive challenge. Yeah. So much drop off in long form content. And just having listened to a few podcasts and enjoying the format, I thought, do you know what, actually, I think I'm better.

I think this is better suited to. My personality and my skill set and how I like to communicate. And I'd like to be able to not just be me talking, but me guiding the conversation with other people so that there's a broader perspective in the content that I produce. So it was a bit of a pivot towards a moment of, do you know what, let's see if there is interest and Paul is massively enthusiastic about ecommerce a wonderful person who's got a lot of complementary skills that I don't have.

So I just pitched it to him because we worked on a few projects together and he was interested. I didn't want to do it on my own because I think for me, it was going to be harder to maintain the enthusiasm and the motivation. So yeah, I guess that's my rambling way of saying where it came [00:08:00] from.

Matt Edmundson: You were in the content creation game at the time. And you looked at this and thought there's, this is probably going to be a better fit for us. So you went along with the podcast. Was there anything, when you started the podcast then, was there anything Any, did you do a course? Did you read a book or did you just go, I'm going to watch this video on YouTube and jump straight in?

James Gurd: If only I was a professional. Yeah. No, I'd listen to other podcasts. There's obviously, there's so many out there now, I think that's interesting. When we started planning it back in 2019, although podcasting wasn't new, it wasn't as popular as it has been because obviously the pandemic kicked off a load more.

So I've been aware of various ones over the years. And listened in and listened to what people did and how they did it and thought I had an idea. What I didn't know and what we didn't know is the platform. How, so how would you syndicate it? How would you record it? How would you edit it?

The practicalities, because, sitting and talking is easy. It's knowing that you're doing it the right way, that you've got the right quality of [00:09:00] outputs and that you've got a place that's good. Because you suddenly realise when you look at the podcasting landscape, there's a lot of distribution networks out there and there's so many players and how do you get on those players and what do you do and which ones are most popular and what most

We did some basic research, we got some advice from people we knew at the time.

I wish I'd known all of you guys because we haven't, we connected later on in this journey with likes of you, for example, I wish I'd known that. I wish I'd have made those connections earlier and asked the advice. It'd probably been a lot easier, but yeah, we just, we decided to to pick. A route which was using Anchor as a distribution platform.

And because somebody else had said that they'd used it and found it quite easy and to learn on the go, because we thought if we'd spent ages and ages researching, we'll never start it. We wanted to get started to, because the biggest barrier was, we can put this off for a few more months. So we were like, no, get it live and then finesse it.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, and I think that's such an important point, isn't it, if you're thinking, is podcasting right for me and my business? [00:10:00] Fundamentally, one of the key things is you've just got to start, and just getting out there and just giving it a go, I think you can do that with mobile phones now, but can I ask, what tech did you start with?

James Gurd: Yeah, before we settled on Anchor, we looked at a couple of other recording platforms, and me and Paul did a few dummy episodes to Okay. Get up and record and work out how we do all of the distribution settings, connections into things like Spotify, Apple, you name it. And the other ones were okay but they didn't, we didn't find it that easy.

Anchor, because somebody else flagged it and said this one's alright and Paul had heard of it as well, so we got onto them. We just found it. Very intuitive the user interface to get set up your account to upload episodes to, to connect to the different players where you want your podcast distributed to set up your RSS to get basic data out of it.

It was just quite easy to use and very low cost. So for us, we podcast was going and would anyone listen. For all we knew, six months down, we'd can it. So [00:11:00] yeah, a load of money into the high end. The most elite platform we could find. We wanted a platform that gave us the basics. And we're not pretending to be the sleekest.

podcast on the planet. We are just like meeting up in a coffee shop. So it doesn't have to be, the most brand smooth pixel. Perfect. I'll focus on content and guests and hopefully, just making sure that the audio and video quality is good enough so that people can enjoy the episode.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, no, that's fair play. It's interesting, isn't it? That was the kind of route that you went down. And I'm intrigued by something that you said. You mentioned you did a few dummy episodes. Tell me a little bit about that.

James Gurd: Yeah, so because we, I guess, I could ask the same question to you about how do you settle on the format?

Or how do you decide how you start an episode? How do you frame it? How much do you prepare? How much is it off the cuff? We didn't have a clue having not podcasted at all. So me and Paul had done lots of history events and lots of content and stuff, [00:12:00] but we hadn't actually done podcasts before for other people.

So our key thing was what is our format? It's all well and good having the player and the distribution network. And having a good, the other thing, yeah, the tech is a good mic. That's because the sound quality on those dummy ones were shite.

And really tinny room off of MacBook speakers. So basically, we came to the format of, okay let's do, we want to try out a few dummy ones to work out how we run this. If it was an episode just me and him, what would we do? So we did one where we just turned up on the topic and just riffed.

We did ones where we planned out discussion guides and we then we started to realize that people were going to jump into an episode with us just starting talking with no context like this is basic 101. You wouldn't write an article without anyone knowing what the title is and what it's about and what they're going to get from it, right?

You go back to your 101s of what customer experience is and then we did the whole thing, okay, so we've got to frame this, we've got to introduce [00:13:00] in each episode, we've got to set the scene so people know what they're going to get and if it's not relevant they don't waste their time. And if it's relevant, they know what's coming next.

So I guess it was just a teaser that we didn't get it right first time at all. I reckon it took us 12 months to get to the point where it felt polished.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, that's interesting. And how many episodes did you do in that 12 months? Is it a weekly show?

James Gurd: We started off every two weeks because we didn't want to bite off too much.

Cause again, when you start, you don't know how much time and effort. And I think one of the biggest, and I'm sure we'll get onto this, one of the biggest. Surprises that a lot of people get podcasts is the time and effort to plan properly, record, edit, get it up, do the marketing. It's not to be underestimated, although once you've got a process and a routine, it's quite smooth.

But, so we started off every two weeks and then we quickly realized that if you wait two weeks, a lot of people have forgotten about it because we're so transient. Therefore, we decided we needed to go weekly. And I think after a couple of months, we went weekly. And then at that point. We were more focused on getting guests on than we were on really trying [00:14:00] to polish and hone.

The podcast delivery. So I think that was like, it's like a lot, it's like MVP approach to launching an ecommerce site is get the bloody thing up and running, working and sell, then worry about finessing your user journeys and your customer experience. If you're intrigued and

Sadaf Beynon: want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out Podjunction Cohort, where you can listen to the complete interview and much more, simply visit theplotjunction.

com for more information about how to join.

Matt Edmundson: Very good. Welcome back. Thanks, James. Great conversation. The thing I loved about James talking was if you didn't know James, and the industry that he worked in, you'd go, he has got to be involved in some kind of digital thing, just because of the phraseology, like MVP, you've got to get your MVP, your minimum viable product up and running, and then you know, refiners as you go along.

All very sprint, all very good, all very interesting. And it's just interesting how I think it's very interesting. [00:15:00] He has brought his sort of digital knowledge into how we approach podcasting, if that makes sense. Yeah. So yeah, the whole idea of the MVP, I appreciate there are industries outside of digital that use the same thinking but that's just the industry that I know.

And it's very, very trendy language.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah. Does that reflect at all on the name of his podcast?

Matt Edmundson: Re:platform.. His whole business is about helping ecommerce businesses change their platform. So if you want to move from the platform you're on to another platform, which quite often you do if you're an ecommerce business, because you grow, you develop, it needs to expand.

And so yeah, his company is all about helping you do that. Those guys do a great job. And heard lots of good things about them. Yeah, I, What was your question? Totally lost track of thought then.

Sadaf Beynon: No, you were saying like his lingo that he uses. Yeah, digital, yeah, replatform.

Matt Edmundson: So yeah, that's what he does.

He's involved in the e com space, the digital space, all power to him as they say. Yeah. So what'd you gather?

Sadaf Beynon: He would, I liked what actually you said it in response to what he [00:16:00] was saying that to just start and not overthink it too much. And then he went on to talk about how they fine tuned it.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah.

Sadaf Beynon: As they went. So they just started and like not with tech, but also with, what are you laughing at?

Matt Edmundson: No, I'm just, I'm smiling because that's our story. Yeah. I'm just thinking that we did exactly the same thing. We just started and refined it as we went along. Yeah.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah. Yeah. So the tech as well as the content or rather the format.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, absolutely. It's it's really interesting how our journeys are very similar. Again, I think this is very much a digital thing. It's like you just start something, you figure it out as you go along, you pivot. There's that word again, which I really can't stand. We pivoted. But it's, it is very much the case of you start something, you learn something, you figure out the next step, you try that, you, we call it, I call it discover, try, learn, and then you go, okay, that worked, that didn't work.

What's next? And you refine, don't you, as you go along pivot, [00:17:00] and so yeah, very digital, very ecomm, very straightforward stuff. But yeah, we, our stories, I think are very similar because where our podcast started and where they've ended up, two very different places.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah. Yeah. And I think something else I'll keep talking about how we're similar, something else that resonated was that he has small team.

Yeah. And then doing the daily grind plus business development at the same time, like trying to hold those two things together. It's not always easy.

Matt Edmundson: No, not at all. And he's right in the sense that I think when you start a podcast, it's easy to underestimate how much work is involved in doing it.

Sadaf Beynon: Sure.

Matt Edmundson: But conversely, I think it's also easy to overestimate how much work you should do in it. Yeah. Yeah. Because, things like, when it comes to your audio, I remember talking to a lady called Amelia about this. Has Amelia been on this show? She's been on EP. No, not

Sadaf Beynon: on Podjunction, no.

Matt Edmundson: We should get her on this show because she does a podcast. She's [00:18:00] super cool, Amelia. I really like Amelia. In fact, Amelia and I are going to do a live stage podcast recording this summer at SubSummit.

Sadaf Beynon: At SubSummit. Yeah. Which will be

Matt Edmundson: great. I remember talking to her about it and she was like, she would record a podcast episode and they'd spend eight or nine hours on this episode.

And they would edit that episode out. And they would be like, they would take out all the ums and the ahs and the filler words. And yes, you can use AI now, like Descript has a feature where you can push a button and it will just take all of that stuff out. And it's on the whole, it's pretty good.

You don't have to do much correction afterwards. Yeah. And talk about refining it and polishing it and spending that amount of time. And I remember saying to Amelia, My challenge to you Amelia is for you to edit an episode in two hours or wonder and she was like, you are, and I was like no, you should totally do it in that time, because I don't think you should take it, especially if it's an interview chat show type thing. Why would I want to take all the errs and ums out?

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah,

Matt Edmundson: because it, I don't know if it makes a blind bit of difference to the listener because it's like the podcast is 45 minutes [00:19:00] long and I've saved six seconds by taking all the errs and the ums out.

And I think it's more authentic when you leave them in, so you can over polish these things. Now, do we do that for reels? Absolutely. Because I think short form video, 30 second, 60 second video has got to be like, bang on. But for a podcast, I think you can over edit and you can spend way too much time trying to get everything perfect.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah. So I think this is really interesting, you can either be one or the other and I think, I don't know, what do you think? How long do we spend on an episode? Is two hours a reasonable time?

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah, actually, I think we're, I think we, we do it quite quickly. Yeah. Yeah, I think my, maybe take it into account reels and stuff like that, maybe takes a bit longer, because as you said, you want it to

Matt Edmundson: be

Sadaf Beynon: cut down and it wanted to be just right, because you're trying to get a message across in just that many seconds.

Yeah. But

Matt Edmundson: yeah, if you took out, if you took out the short form video, which I don't know if I would advise doing with the way social media is at the moment, but if you did, it saves an awful lot of time. But our process is fairly [00:20:00] straightforward, isn't it? We record the interview, we have a sheet, what do we call it?

A one sheet? I don't know. Is there a name for it?

Sadaf Beynon: We just call it AMP document.

Matt Edmundson: Call it the AMP document. Named after the software we've developed called AMP which we've developed for podcasters. But it's that kind of thing where we, at the end of the recording and I do it straight after I've recorded the podcast, cause that's when I remember I go on there and I go what were my top takeaways from this conversation?

And I'll write those in there. And then once we've got that key information, the rest of it is pretty straightforward, I think in terms of data creation. So we, or content creation rather. So then we take the video. We upload it to Descript translate, not translate, transcribes, transcribes a video, maybe it translates it as well, I don't know, I don't think it does, so it transcribes a video which gives us a full script and then the other thing that I do is I look at that podcast and I decide which bit we're going to use for the reel, now we only create one [00:21:00] reel per episode, usually, if people do what we call the fast track service, which is where they pay us money, we do two reels.

Is that right? Yeah. Now we have used software to try and do this. We've tried AI in the past, haven't we, where we've uploaded full clips and had AI generate clips. Which we've then used for Vertical Video. Which one did we try? Memento.

Sadaf Beynon: Memento.

Matt Edmundson: Memento, something like that. What did you think of it?

Sadaf Beynon: I didn't like it. Why not? I didn't, I love the fact that it was trying to do something helpful.

Matt Edmundson: But just like my kids.

They're trying to do something helpful, but they are failing miserably.

Sadaf Beynon: But I don't think it was what we need, what we wanted, like as concise as we wanted.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, I think AI is getting better at trying to figure it out, isn't it? But as things currently stand here in the start of 2024, we [00:22:00] do those clips manually. So we have tried AI, but we think manually is still a better route.

Yeah. Granted, we could use AI. And shave off that time. . And I think we will, as AI gets better Yeah. At figuring out the kind of thing that we want.

Sadaf Beynon: I think at that point we were spending more time going through all the clips that was suggesting Yeah. To see if it would work. And it was easier to just make that alone.

You just, I just want that one. Yeah.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah. But I think if you wanted 30 clips and you didn't care about them, you could just take all of those clips and whack 'em on. Can you? Yeah it's one of those things, isn't it, with AI? AI is both good and painful at the same time, because you still got to spend a lot of time with it.

Yeah. So yeah, we do that. We get the full transcript. From the transcript, we create the blog post. Which goes alongside the podcast. The reason we have the transcript now is obviously it's very good. Apple just announced with the new update 17, is it 17. 1? I don't know. I don't know what we're on with Apple right now.

But I was listening to their webinar last week, went on to the Apple podcast webinar. You can sign up for that actually. Whenever they do their webinars, find out what's going [00:23:00] on, but they've just introduced a transcription service where actually if, even if you don't upload your, cause you could always upload your own transcript, but now they will actually transcribe your podcast.

And so when you upload it, they will, you actually have to turn it off if you don't want that feature. All right. So the default is they will transcribe your post. I think it's only available in English right now. But they will transcribe your podcast, which obviously is a beautiful thing. One, because Apple then knows what your podcast is about from an SEO point of view, which is good.

And also obviously people sometimes hard of hearing, they need to be able to see, with subtitles, what's going on. And so why not? So giving them the transcription as well, it's easy because we've created it. And yeah, that's our process. Yeah. It's a whistle top. It's a whistle stop to all of our process, but it takes about two hours.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah. Maybe just over, but not nine.

Matt Edmundson: But definitely not nine. Don't tell Amelia

Sadaf Beynon: it takes more than two hours.

Matt Edmundson: And it takes more than two hours because we do the short form video, which I don't think Amelia does. But your actual podcast, actual process of once you've recorded [00:24:00] the podcast, getting the audio done, polished and uploaded to your podcast player, even if you include the blog post to go on your website, I think it should take less than two hours.

Yeah. Is that fair enough? Yeah. I would say so. I don't manage production, you do. Yeah.

Sadaf Beynon: No, I think about that long. Yeah.

Matt Edmundson: That's where Sadaf goes no, we're all taking about 12 hours talking nonsense again. Yeah, but no, that's where we drifted slightly there, didn't we? In terms of process.

But yes, the time invested in an episode. Is quite fascinating in terms of what that is and yeah, we'll get Amelia on the show and we'll ask her how she reduced it from eight hours to

Sadaf Beynon: two.

Matt Edmundson: I'll talk to her about that in the summer. What else did we get from that?

Sadaf Beynon: I'm trying to read my notes.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah. Good luck. Do you need glasses?

Sadaf Beynon: He talked about being on Zoom.

Matt Edmundson: No, he didn't.

Sadaf Beynon: He didn't? Did he not?

Matt Edmundson: No. Were you listening to the same episode I was listening to?

Sadaf Beynon: How

Matt Edmundson: did he talk about being on Zoom?

Sadaf Beynon: No, I didn't get that one. No, you know what, it's because I'm listening to the full length [00:25:00] episode and yeah.

I'm just drawing some, yeah. Okay, so he does talk about Zoom. He does. On

Matt Edmundson: the full interview, which you can get. He does. In the cohort, if you want to flip to the foot, which I strongly recommend you do with all of these interviews, actually.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah, because he was talking about that in the context of tech.

So that's where I went from there. So yeah,

Matt Edmundson: okay.

Sadaf Beynon: So yeah, go listen to the full interview and find out what he says about some of it.

Matt Edmundson: I was a bit like Zoom. But no, all very good. So yeah, do check it out. And also I think the final point from what James was saying is it took him a year to get really to a place where he was happy with his podcast.

Yeah. It's an important point. Yeah. And

Sadaf Beynon: sorry, didn't Rich Brooks say that, yeah, do 52 episodes.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah. Yeah. It's quite a common theme. Actually, you'll notice there's some common themes with the different podcasters we talked about. One of the common themes is just be prepared. We always. We have this thing when we do the strategy sessions with clients, we talk about the first 10.

So the first 10 episodes we say on any [00:26:00] podcast are going to be utterly useless. And if you're doing an interview, I say utterly useless, that's probably unfair. They're not going to be as where you want them to be. Because in the first 10 episodes, there's some rapid learning going on, especially on an interview podcast.

Figuring out your interview style, what kind of questions to ask? How do you come across on the microphone when you're interviewing people? All those kinds of things. Yeah. And so getting through your first 10, I think is the first milestone but getting to your first 50 is probably the next milestone after that.

And you'll hear these sort of common things with podcasters that actually a lot of people drop out before episode 20, a lot of people, unbelievable amounts of people drop out before episode 20. And so actually by the time you got to episode 50, not only have you stuck around, which already puts you in a class of your own.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Edmundson: You're going to, you're going to be well polished, but I think you've got to think about it in that kind of terms. Yeah.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, awesome. What's coming up next week?

Sadaf Beynon: James Gurd again.

Matt Edmundson: And is he talking about Zoom?

Sadaf Beynon: Don't ask [00:27:00] me now. I'll tell you in the next episode.

Matt Edmundson: Next episode on Sadaf gets confused on what we're talking about.

Do join in to the show, do come listen to what we're talking about. Hopefully it will be relevant. But yeah, do check out podjunction. com for more information about this show, how you can subscribe, how you can sign up to the emails newsletter. And also, I can't even talk. And how to find out and access the full interview with each guest in the cohort.

Check it out. Do check that out and do check out the full interview with James because James is a legend. Reach out to him, especially if you're looking to re platform your eCom business because he will be able to help you. He's a great guy. He's a guy to go talk to. But yeah, anything else from you?

No. Awesome. All right. Have a great week, ladies and gentlemen. We'll be back next week. Bye. Bye for now.

Sadaf Beynon: And that brings us to the end of today's episode at Podjunction, where business meets podcasting. [00:28:00] If you enjoyed the insights from today and wish to hear the full conversation with today's special guest, don't forget to visit thepodjunction. com, where you'll find more information about how you can join today.

Whether you listen while on the go or in a quiet moment, thank you for letting us be a part of your day. Remember, every episode is a change. Chance to gain insights and to transform your business with podcasting. So keep tuning in, keep learning, and until next time, happy podcasting.