Why don't you tell us a little bit about your personal background, your involvement in the podcast space, and what you are up to now with honest podcasts. Because I know we're really excited in terms of breaking down what it takes to create, produce, and launch a really successful podcast.

Yeah, no, I'm excited to be here. So I've been in podcasting for about seven years, which is like forever in podcasting terms. And so I was podcasting before 2020 when everybody else started their podcast. And I've really seen the industry go through a lot of shifts. And so what started as just like a personal side project, wanting to be creative, wasn't really interested in doing YouTube at the time, did not like writing. So I was like, well, I like to talk kind of extroverted, outgoing, let me try talking on a podcast. And just fell in love with the medium. I fell in love with the long form nature of it, where you don't feel like you have to condense everything into a soundbite in order for people to find it viewable or interesting on social media.

I liked that I was able to kind of set my own terms and rules for what I want to talk about and how I want to talk about it. And I also just loved the engagement. That one thing that sets podcasting apart is that once you establish an audience, that audience keeps coming back and you have a direct connection with them. Where you don't get that with YouTube or social media. You're kind of always bartering with the algorithm to get access to the people that said they wanted to hear from. So for all those reasons, I just love podcasting as a medium. But in developing several of my own shows. I was then given the opportunity to come on at Buzsprout when they were still relatively early on to their content marketing and really head up all of their education based content marketing.

So my job was essentially to take all the people that used Buzsprout to host their podcasts and turn them into experts, so that way they would be successful at their podcasts and they would have as little churn as possible. And so I think over the four years I was there, we averaged, like two and a half percent monthly churn on the SaaS product. And a lot of that was just due to anytime we saw anyone having friction or encountering an obstacle or a hurdle to keep them from continuing in the podcasting space. We figured out how to overcome that, whether that was a feature or a product or just content. Like, here's how you upload something, here's how you record something, here's what kind of microphone you need, all those opportunities where somebody would potentially drop off and say, you know what, maybe podcasting isn't for me. We would step in and partner with them and say, here's actually the answer. Let's keep you. So, you know, Buzsprout grew several orders of magnitude while I was there, which was really fun to be a part of and just an incredible team working on the product and working on the marketing.

And then eventually reached a point where four years in, I'd kind of reached the plateau of what I was going to be able to achieve professionally there. And I knew the next step was to have my own business and to be able to take all the expertise that I'd gathered from working with hundreds of thousands of podcasters and helping them launch their shows, and to do it at a high level for clients, and to serve individuals and businesses that wanted a really well run branded podcast that would also be strategically valuable for them and not just sound nice. And so that's what Honest podcast does. I mainly serve businesses and business owners that see the podcast as an integrated piece into their overall marketing plan, and we make sure to reverse engineer the podcast into however they make money. And so for some clients, that's build a big audience and then sell them products. For others, it's use the podcast as an excuse to get FaceTime with people that you eventually sell your products and services to. And there's a whole number of different strategies that you can use to see an ROI from a podcast. But that's what I do.

So honest podcast is a full service agency. We do everything outside of being the personality being the host and the person actually recording behind the microphone. And what I love is that I just get to, instead of just working on one podcast at a time, I get like dozens. And so that helps my ADHD brain where it's like I can just jump around from one concept to another. And this week, I've got a new client coming on, and we're doing a two hour brainstorm session to hammer out the details on their show. And so I love that I get to work on a lot of podcasts at the same time and serve clients at a high level.

Well, Travis, that's one of the reasons we're really excited to talk with you. Not only have you been doing this for a long time and helping podcasters be able to podcast, years ago at Buzsprout, you're able to see and launch many different shows at the same time. So you know what's going on, what you need to do to launch a successful show, the equipment you need and everything. So before we get too far into all of that, I want to go into just at a really surface level, what does it take to launch a podcast? Right. Let's talk basics in terms of what is a podcast, what's an RSS beat, what's a hosting platform? Just let's give us the basics if you want to dive in and start creating a podcast for yourself.

Sure. So the way people think about podcasting has shifted quite a bit, especially in the last couple of years. Whereas before a podcast meant an audio episode served on an RSS feed to podcast directories where people would listen and subscribe. Now, podcast, colloquially, in the zeitgeist, just means on demand talk show. That's how people think about it. Whether they consume it on YouTube or Spotify or Apple, that's the way they think about it, is there are people and conversations they want to listen to on my time. And so, whereas drivetime radio is like six to ten, that's the spot. If you want to hear sports talk, that's where you have to listen.

Now, I can just pick it up whenever I want to. I can start and stop. I can jump around. And so a podcast today is simply some kind of long form content that you packaged typically for audio and video platforms. And the big ones are YouTube, Apple, and Spotify. Apple podcasts. And so the way to think about it is come up with the idea of your show. Like, what do you want to talk about? Who is it for? Who would actually enjoy listening to it? You don't want to just have one more talk show, talking to interesting people about interesting things.

There's already, like, half a million of those. And so really think through, what would you bring to the world that doesn't exist yet? Why would somebody listen to you? What is the benefit to them? Whether it's to be entertained or educated or both, and really get clear on why does the world need what you have to say? Because if you can get really specific about that, then that makes everything else a lot easier. As far as what kind of guests you bring on, what you talk about, what kind of cadence do you set with your publishing schedule, what kind of branding do you use? Do you have yourself featured on the podcast artwork or not? All those things become a lot easier to answer once you understand, why am I doing this thing? Why am I making this podcast? And it can be, I want a podcast to make money. But then you have to answer the question, what does make money look like? And if you really want to be successful, the answer should not be, I'm going to make a podcast that everyone loves because I'm so awesome, and I'll get hundreds of thousands of people listening, and then squarespace will sponsor my show. The chances of that happening are very small, saying they're zero, but they're very, very small. So if you want to set yourself up for success, you want to really think through. Like, if this is successful in the way that I think about it, what would that look like? Will I be making money from that? Will it be my full time job or not? Who will I be serving? What kind of people will listen to my podcast? What will I get to talk about? And just making sure you're choosing the path that you want so you don't get five years down the road, you've made this big thing, and it's like, man, I wish I had made all these other different decisions, because then I'd be a lot happier with where I am and all the work that I put into it. So, starting philosophically, that's the big thing.

You got to get straight first, and then as far. Go ahead, Ramon.

Yeah, no, I was going to say starting with the monetization side, as you mentioned, that now there's so many channels, and it's not just audio and rss. The challenge with wanting to start it for monetization purposes is that you might start too big too early, and it can be really expensive to try and do everything and be on every single channel. So, I'm curious, how do you think about budgeting for when you're starting out? Your podcast. And how do you think about omnichannel platform? Do you keep it simple? Do you go across all platforms? How do you think about budget?

It depends on if you are spending budget in terms of time or money. So if it's just you bootstrapping it and it's your first time making something, you want to start with an audio only podcast, because it's the easiest to pull off, it's the easiest to do well, and that'll give you a taste of what it takes. You can then add in individual pieces as you scale or as you get comfortable. So once you have an audio only podcast dialed in, then adding video, turning on a webcam while you're recording it, and uploading it to YouTube is one additional step you can take to get more exposure. From there, you can take that long form content and cut it up into clips for TikTok, IG reels, YouTube shorts, those kind of things, to then have a presence of those channels, with the idea being that you're driving traffic back to your full long form content, but that all takes time. And so if you're in a place where you're trying to do this yourself, that would be the order I would do it in. Also recognizing that just because you make short content does not mean that your show will grow, because you could have a really successful TikTok channel that has a lot of followers, and then none of them listen to the full episodes because it doesn't match. Like, the value proposition of your TikTok account does not match the podcast.

So it's not like you just add all these things together, and you build this massive wave of momentum that makes your success inevitable. These are all individual pieces that you have to figure out as you go. So if you're doing it yourself, that's the progression I would go through. If you're hiring somebody to do it for you, then you at least want video and audio. The reason being that once you have video, you can do so many things with it. It's really hard to repurpose audio only content, but video content is much easier to repurpose for other platforms.

So the magic question with video, that I'm sure you get a lot in person or remote, what is the best use of time? I guess, because that's a real trade off when you do. Blaine and I record in person, and remote in person is a huge time constraint. We've been in situations where the guest cancels 10 minutes before showing up, and here we are with the equipment fully set up. But, man, the content looks good. So it's a hard trade off. What advice do you have for that?

Start easy, and then get more complicated as you go. Right. I basically exclusively do remote interviews. The reason being that people that watch video podcasts assume that's what you're doing. Unless you do otherwise, that's just normal. Now everyone's dialing in from wherever they are in the world. Talk on the podcast, and so the threshold you need to cross for it to be a high quality video podcast is relatively low. If the audio is really good and you have video of people talking, then that counts, and that won't be a reason that people will drop off.

If the conversation is good and you're on a webcam, they'll still stick around for the conversation. Doing in person does give you the ability to close up your production, but it also increases your cost quite a bit. Right? So, like, I just watched a behind the scenes video of Chris Williamson, who does the modern Wisdom podcast, and they budgeted $35,000 to do four in person interviews. It's like, that's a lot of money. Unless you have a business behind it, that's a big investment. But if you can just hop in Riverside or Zoom and record that with those same four people for $20 a month, that's not a bad ROI to get those same conversations. Because the kicker is, unless you have a large video audience, then the audio is going to sound the same. It's still going to be the same number of people talking.

And if the audio is mixed correctly or edited, well, then the listener can't tell if it was in person or remote. So unless there's a very specific reason why you're doing it in person, I recommend remote simply because it makes it as easy as possible for everyone involved.

Another thing I'd add in there, Travis, is something that we found in doing our podcast is we like to do it in person. But when you do it in person, you're also introducing other operational challenges into the mix that you may not oversee. And unless, like, you're saying you're really able to pull it off, where you've got your video set up, your audio system, your audio mixers, like everything set up. I find a lot of times recording remotely is easier to do, a lot.

Of the time instead of pulling off.

A really complex production. But if you're going to do it in person, to Ramon's point, I think it's very well worth it. You create amazing content, but we've even had it where Ramon and I have recorded an amazing in person interview and we've had our camera die or something like that. And we're just like, oh, guess we'll just be going audio only for this conversation. This leads me into my next question, which is about what you had talked about, about starting early. Let's assume we want to start easy. Go audio only. What does it take? What is the minimum viable recording situation look like from going from setting up a conversation and having that conversation recorded to actually publishing it so someone can say, hey, I have a podcast that anyone can find and download.

So the first thing you'll need is a microphone because you don't want to use your laptop microphone if you can avoid it. There are microphones out there that are relatively inexpensive, that will do good quality audio and will really set you apart. Because the biggest reason people don't listen to a podcast is because the audio quality is subpar. So the microphone I recommend is the Samsung Q two U. We were actually talking about it before we hit record today. And you can pick it up on Amazon for $60 to $70 in the US. And it just plugs right into your laptop. Via USB comes all the cables you need comes a little desk stand and just use that to start recording your podcast.

It's going to be much better audio quality than you could get on your cell phone or your microphone laptop. You don't need to spend $1,000 on a microphone. You just don't. And what ends up happening typically is the more expensive the microphone, the more ancillary or additional equipment you need to get the most out of it. And so your audio is actually worse than if you just gotten the cheap microphone because you need all these extra pieces in the chain to make it sound good. So I would just get that microphone and then to record. If you're recording just yourself. If you have an Apple device like a MacBook, then you can record strained a garageband, which is a free software that's already in your laptop.

If you have a Windows machine, you can download audacity, which is a free audio recording and editing software, and you just record directly into there. If you're recording interviews with people, then you can use Zoom, if that's a platform that you're familiar with and like using and already have an account with. If you want to get a little bit higher quality, you can use a platform like Riverside, which is what we're recording in right now. So that'll give you a little bit better quality, but it's an additional cost, so you have to weigh the pros and cons of that. And then once you have your content recorded, then you're just putting it together. So you'll use an audio editing software like a garageband or an audacity to remove big mistakes, to chop off the front and the back of the episode when you're kind of talking before you get going. And at the end, when you all say goodbye and you haven't quite hit stop yet on the recording, you want to trim that off. Add in some music underneath if you'd like to, and then you're going to export that project as a single audio file.

Now, how do you get that audio file in Apple Podcasts and Spotify? I'm glad you asked, Blaine. That's a very good question. So you'll want to find a podcast hosting platform that can basically do all that work for you. So, Buzsprout, the company that I worked with, that's what they did. There's a bunch of other options as well. If you just type in podcast hosting, you'll see a ton of options pop up, and most of them will do 95% of the same thing. So it really just comes down to whichever platform you like the best. So then you're going to upload your episode to that platform.

You're going to give it an episode title, you're going to give some show notes, a little description about what the episode's about, and then also you're going to need some square artwork for your podcast to display in Apple or Spotify. So once you get that first episode in, you're just going to submit your show to those different platforms. Once you get accepted there, every time you have a new episode, you just upload it to your podcast host, and then it gets automatically syndicated out to all the places where your show is listed. So once you do the setup one time, every time you add another episode and schedule it for release, it'll be available everywhere that your podcast is amazing.

And the other question I was going to ask about post production was you had mentioned you just go in and kind of clip out the things in a tool like audacity or garageband, et cetera. What are other options if people haven't worked with those tools? Are there editors that you can find to do this process? Are there other things that you should be recording? Should you record an intro to your podcast? You had mentioned music. Where do I get the music? So what does post production actually look like, and how do you make sure you've got it airtight?

So a lot of it comes down to the format of your episodes. So if your episodes are typically interviews, there's going to be most of it like us, where all of us are kind of chatting together, right? And then before we started talking, Blaine gave a little bit of an intro as we were recording. And so it doesn't have to be something you record after the fact. It can just be a little script that you say at the beginning and then a script that you have at the end to kind of be the beginning and the end of your podcast and have the interview in the middle. So that's the simplest way to do it. You just have to have the discipline to every single time, make sure to remember to say those things right. There are other ways you can do it. You can record separate intros and outros.

You can pull juicy clips or bits of conversation to the front of the episode, what we'll typically call a teaser clip to basically give someone a really compelling reason to listen to the old episode. If it's like, man, I can't believe x, Y and z is true, but you left me hanging because you didn't resolve the punchline. So now I have to listen to hear the punchline. Like, you can do those kinds of things. It's just extra work, and you just have to have a process for identifying those clips in a really seamless manner. Almost as if an AI tool could do that. Let me know, Blaine or Ramon, if such a tool. So there's many different ways to format a show.

What I would do is go and listen to the podcast that you like listening to and just model the format that they have as a very easy starting point, because you can always change things later that'll at least give you a framework for what you like to listen to, and then you can just replicate that for yourself. For music you want to find, there's several options. One, don't use Taylor Swift songs. That's the fastest way to get your podcast pulled from Spotify and Apple and everywhere else, because you have to pay royalties for the rights to use those songs, and you can't afford the Taylor Swift song. I'm guessing if you're starting a podcast on your own, so you want to.

Either Blaine is going to have to change. He already had one picked out from.

Taylor Swift, or just raise another round of know. It's up to you. You have to decide. So you can either pay somebody to make a song for you, so you can go on fiver, you can go on upwork and find people that actually can compose something unique just for your show, and give you the rights to do that. You can go on royalty free music websites where you can buy the rights to songs that are there. I like songs that are instrumental because then you can add narration on top of it and you don't have this jarring effect of listening to a song with lyrics while you're also talking on top of it. That's a personal preference, but I know people that do the opposite. Or you can find free music that's available.

YouTube has a music library that you can just download any track that you want for free and use it without worrying about copyright restrictions. The only problem with free platforms is that because they're free, lots of people use them. And so the chances of you finding a song that's unique are very low. So those are your options. And you really just want to make sure that you have a royalty free music track that you can use in perpetuity. It's legal speak for as many times as you want without having to pay somebody for every time that you use it. That could be a free option or it could be a premium option.

Yeah, and I guess for anyone listening. So the way we came up with our music, I used to produce music back in the day, so I had a bunch of music that was like, no lyrics that we could use. So if anyone wants any royalty free music, you can go to my Soundcloud and you can have anything.

I'll send you the file.

But anyway, Travis, that's really helpful. Now, I wanted to talk about mistakes that people make when either recording or publishing or in post production. What are some of the big mistakes that new podcasters or even experienced podcasters make that you and your line of work, you clean up and you make sure to don't happen.

So there's a couple of big things when you're recording, and then there's a couple of big things when you're editing. The first thing when you're recording is making sure that the microphone is turned on and plugged in. It seems like, of course, no brainer. You would absolutely double check that and make sure it happens. But you'd be surprised how many people don't check that. And then it's like some default audio input source that recorded your podcast and you had that $1,000 microphone set up, but it didn't get recorded because it was recording off your laptop instead. So just making sure and double checking that everyone's audio inputs, their microphones are the right ones and then record, like press the record button. A lot of softwares will have an auto record feature built into them.

So if you find yourself constantly forgetting to hit record, just turn that on. So that way you'll have some extra stuff you have to cut off at the beginning, but at least you know it's been recording the whole time. Because that's happened to me a couple of times where I get to the end, I'm like, man, that was a great conversation. I never recorded it, but that was a good dry run for when we'll reschedule and do it again. And depending on what kind of guests you have, that may or may not be an option for you. So make sure that the microphones are plugged in and turned on. Make sure you hit record. And then something that will make your life easier is if you record each participant on their own audio track.

So this is a setting you can set in zoom. It's a default setting in a lot of remote podcast recording solutions like Riverside defaults to every person has their own audio track. And the reason that's helpful is if somebody's kid walks in and starts banging on the door, or if there's a lawnmower next door or you have a coughing fit, you can easily cut that part out when you're editing it later. If everything is mixed into one audio track, then you don't have that option, because the only way to get rid of that distracting noise is to remove all the audio, including the talking that was happening. And so when you're editing it, my personal preference is to leave in as much of the human element as possible. A lot of people model themselves after, like, NPR style podcasts, where everything is completely scripted, which means that every filler word, every small little detail of pacing or breaths or things like that gets edited out because they're editing it to a certain standard, which is not the standard that your listeners will care about listening to a podcast. So I personally like to leave the human element in if there's filler words, as long as they're not super distracting, I will typically leave them in if there's somebody coming up with a thought or following a train of thought. And it might not be super clear, but you're basically capturing your thought process in real time.

I like to think about editing as I'm removing the big mistakes, to leave the meat on the bone of this is the conversation station that happened as it was captured, and we're taking out the stuff that doesn't need to be in there that the listener doesn't care about, like the three minute bathroom break. They don't need to know that that happened. You just cut that part out, come back to where the conversation starts again, and then keep going. If you apply that approach to your editing, it will also help you not edit so long. So I know some people that they'll spend 10 hours editing a 30 minutes piece of content, and it'd be great if you could do that in 60 minutes instead. But a lot of that comes down to philosophy. What you want the end product to look like and sound like, and how much time you have to devote to it, or if you're paying somebody to do it, and the standard that you want them to do it to. So having a remove everything editing approach, if you're doing it yourself, is a mistake that I see where the payoff isn't necessarily worth all the work you're putting into it.

But then the big thing that people forget is to promote the podcast that just because you make something, doesn't mean people are going to find it or listen to it. So you can make the best podcast in the history of the planet, but if you don't tell people that it exists and where they can find it, that you won't grow your show. And so spend as much time, if not more, promoting the podcast than you do actually producing it if you want to have an audience that grows over time.

So, Travis, that's exactly what I wanted to get into. Just, just even talking about it. It's a little bit overwhelming on all of the moving parts there are in the beginning for me as a solo creator to get the podcast up. And so first thing I think of is, man, how can I get this to the point where I can just outsource that work, where I can hire an agency like Honest podcast, and I just don't have to worry about it. And I can focus on other things, such as mastering the craft itself of the content creation. When should someone start thinking about monetizing their podcast? How do you cross that chasm of doing it all myself versus growing it enough to be break even to be able to outsource?

So there's different levels to everything, right? So, like honest podcast, the company that I run, it's full service. So that means that I'm catering to clients that want to pay for the luxury of not having to do those things. And that comes at a cost, because then I have my own team that I'm paying to do that work and have profit so I can pay myself and grow the business and that kind of stuff. So the easy button is the most expensive one. And typically, if you're hiring an agency, you can expect to spend between 1500 up to $10,000 a month for production services, depending on what they're doing and their level of expertise. That's just generally the range that you're going to find. If you are trying to bootstrap it, then what I would recommend is find the piece that you like to do the least and outsource that first. So if you love editing the podcast, but you hate the show notes, figure out a way to outsource the show notes but keep the editing.

Or if you really like promoting the podcast but you don't like making it, then find somebody on fiver that'll edit an audio episode for you for $10 and give it back to you. And then you can upload that to buzsprout or wherever you host it, and then spend your time focused on promoting it. So for people that are thinking about this from an independent creator perspective, the way that I would think about paying to offload some of the tasks is break out those individual tasks and find individual people that can do them at a rate that you're comfortable investing in over the long term. Because then that also removes or lowers the burden for the show to produce the monetization if you can personally finance it, because there's a long game in it for you. Like this podcast is something three years from now, it's going to establish you as a thought leader in your space that's going to turn into more business down the road. You just need to finance it. Now then, instead of looking for an agency to do all that work for you, I would find an individual who can do a piece of something, like your least favorite thing to do, and then pay them at a rate that you're able to pay them. So that way you don't have to worry about how am I going to make an extra $2,000 a month so I can pay for the podcast to keep going? So that's where most other podcast agencies that you bring on will be like, oh, we're the best, everyone should just use us.

It's like, nah, not really. If you're a business and you have a budget, a marketing budget, and there's an attached ROI, then yeah, it totally makes sense to invest in that. But if you're an independent creator, it very rarely makes sense for you to use an agency to produce your podcast. It's much more efficient for you to hire an audio editor specifically who can. If it's a us based editor you're looking at, really do a good job editing your podcast, and then you just have to do all the other stuff. Or if you're more savvy, you can hire overseas where the currency exchange is a little bit better, and so then you can get it for like $10 for an episode. It's like, I don't know many people that can't afford $10 to have an audio podcast produced for them. So that's how I would actually think about it, is not how do I get this podcast to make money, but how do I make the cost to produce the podcast so low that it doesn't matter when I make money or how much I make, and then everything that you make on the backside, you can have the patient of letting it play out.

Yeah, I think that's such a good point, Travis, in terms of really outsourcing the stuff that is giving you the hardest time. Because, like you were saying, whatever piece of the value chain that you don't want to handle, you can outsource the whole thing. You can bring on an agency where you can pay them 35 grand to do four episodes, or you can find an agency that will just help you with one piece of that chain because you don't like to do it. So I think thinking about it that way is really important. And one thing I'd love to actually get your thoughts on are you used cast magic within your workflow? How do you use it? What do you use it for? What do you find valuable in bringing that tool into your workflow?

So, the reason that I use Cas magic is because it speeds up the work I was already doing. And so I think a lot of the misnomer about AI is that people use AI tools and they think it's going to turn them into experts or somebody that's really good at doing something. It's only as good as the inputs that you give it, right? It can't read your mind yet. So maybe with neuralink we'll get there, but for now, you have to tell Chat GPT what you want it to say, and then it'll give you a version of that. And so we already had an internal process for once. We edit an episode. Well, now we need an episode title. Now we need to write show notes.

Now we need to generate a transcript. We need to clean up that transcript, because most of the automated transcripts look like gibberish, right? They're not actually readable. And then we need to be able to identify clips for clients that pay us for short form content. And so the process we had before was completely manual, because there was no really good way to do that. So I'd have one person edit the podcast, then another person come through and watch the whole thing, just to find clips and give those timestamps back to the editor. And then that person would watch the whole thing, or listen to the whole thing, and then write the show notes based on their recollection of what the podcast is about. And then same thing with episode titles. It's like, how do I create a really great episode title for this podcast episode based on what I think it should be, from the frameworks that we use and the standards that we have internally on the team, but then also just from watching or listening to the whole thing.

So it was a highly manual process, because up until we started using castmagic, that was just really the best way to do it. So the reason that we use castmagic is because it optimizes a lot of that workflow, where now the transcript is already generated. Like we don't have to worry about cleaning it up, paying somebody to come through and clean it up. You can pay a service like rev to dollar 50 a minute. So if you have a 1 hour podcast is $90 to get a human edited transcript, that's a lot of money for a transcript. And so if you can get one that's clean from an AI software, that's the best. And then it would give us the standard templates for show notes and video clips and things like that. But what's great is as you've evolved the platform and given creators the ability to customize the prompts and the outputs, my team's been able to basically just test over and over again.

How do we get this as close to what we would write on our own? And some of that is being really creative with how you write your prompts and save those and chain them together, but you can really dial it into like 95% of what you want every time. And then all the person is going in and saying, okay, this is the show notes based on the transcript. Let me go through and clean it up. Let me add this link, let me add this blurb, let me put in this particular call out, and then we're just copying and pasting it in to the podcast hosting provider. And so rather than it taking a couple of hours to do all that work, it's like 20 minutes. And so from a time savings perspective, from an optimization perspective, an efficiency perspective, that's why we use it for all of our shows, is because that really helps us to do things that we are already doing much faster. I love that.

And I love that you guys have really figured out how to customize it and tune it to all the different shows that you work on something we're definitely using it for as well. And as we kind of wrap up here, Travis, we're going to hit you with the lightning round where we're going to give you a couple of questions, and you can kind of drop the first thing that comes to mind. So the first one is, who's one of the creators that you admire the most?

Colin and Samir would be the creator duo, youtubers that I really admire. One because of their perseverance. They were at it for years and almost stopped multiple times before they finally had their breakthrough moment. And so I think that really shows a lot. Just their perseverance and the way that they craft their interviews is exceptional. So if you ever go to their channel, they have, like, exclusive rights, it seems like to Mr. Beast in all of his long form interviews, but they just do a fantastic job of asking questions and following up with those questions. So if you want to be a better interviewer and see content creators that are performing at the highest level, that would be the two guys that come to mind.

Amazing. Who is an upcoming creator that you think is going to be big in the future that maybe not everyone knows about?

That's hard, up and coming creator. Yeah.

Or anyone who's maybe not as big as a call in Samir, that you've followed or you've seen content from. It could be anything. It could be on any platform that you think is on the right track.

Yeah. I'm drawing a total blank because most of the people that I'm thinking about, they're people that I discovered when they were small and then they blew up. So, like, I talked about the modern wisdom podcast earlier. When I first started following that show, it had less than 100,000 subscribers, and now I think they crossed 2 million recently. So it happens very fast. I think what's really cool about the video podcasting space is all the up and comers. They've just started, and so I haven't even had the opportunity to discover them yet. But once I do, then before they'll be back, they'll be with the big boys.

Amazing. And then the last one here is, if you had zero followers, what platform are you picking to grow on? Are you creating your podcast? Are you just going audio? Are you going for social media clips on TikTok or YouTube or Instagram? What platform are you really focusing on? If you have zero followers and you're just starting out.

It depends on what your goal is, right. Every platform is great at something, which also makes it terrible at something else. So, like, TikTok has kind of become the default answer, right? If you can choose anywhere to go viral, get a big following, go on TikTok. But I know very few TikTok accounts that have effectively monetized into a business because it's so ephemeral, it's so fleeting. There's no stickiness to the creator. It's all about the content, it's all about the next trend, the video trend. Right? And so even if you pop off and you get a bunch of people following you, that doesn't mean you can translate that into something tangible. Whereas YouTube, it seems like it takes a little longer to figure out the platform, and it does have that viral engine built into it, but it has more of an established ecosystem and way to monetize.

So it would really depend on what's your goal? So if I'm thinking my goal is to make as much money as possible, and I have a business built on the back end of whatever the strategy is, then LinkedIn would probably be the platform I would focus on, simply because as more millennials get on there and baby boomers come off, it's underpriced attention right now. And there's still good organic reach on LinkedIn, which is hard to find on social media platforms. And you can be really targeted if you're good enough to run paid campaigns, you can actually go after specific titles and companies if you're in the B two B space. So that would probably be the platform I would look at if I'm just trying to make as much money as possible with social media.

Love it. And last question here is, what is one thing in 2024 that you are really focused on from a content side of things? It could be platform related, it could be style related, it could be a new type of content that you're creating. What's one thing that you're trying to focus on and that you think is going to be big as it pertains.

To the content space. So it kind of goes against all the stuff we talked about with cast magic, but it's finding ways to be unique. So as more people pick up AI platforms, especially when you see the complete proliferation of opus clip on YouTube shorts, where everyone's shorts look exactly the same because they're all using the same tools, finding ways to do something that's unique, that stands apart, that's what's going to grab people's attention. And if you can bring as much of yourself into it as possible so they know when they're watching and consuming it, there's an actual person generating this content. That's going to be much more valuable in the future as we move forward, because people are going to start to become skeptical. They're going to assume everything's written by an AI Chat GPT type language model. And so if you can bring your own personality, your own individual artistic take to something, whether it's how you style things, how you talk about things, finding those ways to keep yourself in it and not completely outsource everything you do to an AI chat bot, that's going to help you stand out over the sea of other people that kind of take the easy way out and say, I'm just going to outsource everything to an AI bot because then I can scale to all these different ways of making all this content. It's like, yeah, but then nobody wants to read it because it's just like everybody else's it.

Chat GPT gives you the average answer. So if you want to be average, use Chat GPT. If you want to be above average, take what it gives you and make it your own.

Love that the other thing I've been just one last note on that is the creator's trust and reputation is the one thing that money won't be able to buy, right? So whether it's something that you build over a long period of time, and as AI tools remove the barrier to creating content, ultimately more people are going to question more and more, who is this creator? Who is this person? Why should I trust them? And so having creators play the long game rather than the short game, I think is also a winning strategy. So, Blaine, that was my unsolicited opinion.

Well, Travis, thanks so much for coming on. Where can we connect with you? For anyone who's listening, where can we find you? Are you on social? Just shout out where we can connect.

Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. That's probably the platform I'm the most active on as far as responding and direct messages and things like that. And then if you want to learn more about my company, you just go to honestpodcasts.com and then my own podcast, honest marketing, where we talk about proven strategies to grow your business without selling your soul. You can find that on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, wherever you listen to was awesome.

Thanks so much for coming on the show, Travis.

Thanks for having me.