The SquadCast Interview
Episode Show Notes
On this PodOn episode, we chat with Zach Moreno and Rockwell Felder, the cofounders of SquadCast, what started as a small startup and has since become a leader in the podcasting industry. SquadCast is a remote recording platform that not only aims to help podcasters become more professional, but also attempts to improve and standardize the whole industry with the data they’ve collected. Join us in this special episode to learn more about how Zach and Rock put their company together, the technical trends of the community and what the future holds for the curious, scrappy podcasters.
Jump straight into:
(00:55) - Fixing a recurring problem: how SquadCast was born - “It started out much more organically and kind of out of frustration with the state of the art of how to record content remotely.”
(07:07) - From childhood friends to business partners: on Zach’s an Rock’s synchronized mindset — “I have always been captivated by people that had their own thing and were super creative, even though I never saw myself as artistic or creative.”
(12:58) - Building a company from scratch and becoming an active part of the podcasting community — “It’s beyond connecting… you have to contribute, go and speak!”
(22:47) - Company naming lessons with Zach Moreno — “We just never came up with something better, and that is because it’s a good name.”
(39:44) - The headphone dilemma — “It’s not obvious to many podcasters or their guests how headphones impact the quality of their audio.”
(44:07) - Educating the strong community and improving podcasting — “The cool thing about podcasters is not that they podcast, it’s that they have something unique and use podcasting as a vehicle to connect with people.”
(49:22) - Why SquadCast is still solving emerging problems as podcasting gets more complex — “We’re always looking for opportunities to improve the quality of both the experience and the recordings that we’re capturing.”
(51:28) - Zach’s and Rock’s advice for the curious, scrappy podcaster — “If you have a desire to do it, you should just do it. You are going to get a lot better over time.”
Resources
SquadCast (enter code STUDIOPODSF to get $10 off your first month -affiliate link)
Connect with Zach through LinkedIn
Connect with Rock through LinkedIn
PodOn is hosted by TJ Bonaventura and Julian Lewis, founders of the full-service podcast company based in San Francisco, StudioPod. If you want more details on how to fully record and produce your podcast with our services, you can reach us at http://studiopodsf.com, send us an email at info@studiopodsf.com or contact us through our social media channels as @studiopodmedia. Music by GaryOAKland.
Episode Transcript (via Rev.com)
Rock:
We did not know how many new people would be coming to the space or how much our work would involve. A lot of educational stuff and I think that's what got me the biggest buzz after the webinar was feeling like people got that information from that webinar. That we were making them all better as podcasters. We were making podcasting better almost.
Julian Lewis:
This is the PodOn Podcast.
TJ Bonaventura:
We're your host, TJ Bonaventura that's me, and Julian Lewis.
Julian Lewis:
That's me. As founders of a podcast media company, we had to start a podcast.
TJ Bonaventura:
So join us each episode as we and our guests drop knowledge on podcasting for you, the curious and scrappy podcaster.
Julian Lewis:
Welcome Zach. Welcome Rock to the PodOn Podcast. Glad to have you guys on.
Rock:
Happy to be here. Thanks guys.
Zach:
Yeah, thank you for having us.
Julian Lewis:
Awesome. Just so the listeners know, you gens are the founders of Squadcast. Do you want to tell us a little bit about Squadcast before we get into the interview?
Zach:
Yeah. Happy to and thanks again for having us on. So we, as you said, co-founded Squadcast and the goal there is to connect podcasters and their guests record content remotely in studio quality. So the experience on the surface is much like you'd have with Zoom, something like that, except you're are creating quality audio content that sets you up for success in post-production and your listeners don't know that you weren't in the same location and have a really great listening experience will with consuming your content. So we've been at that about three and a half years and Rock, and I go way back before that. So that's what we've been working on.
TJ Bonaventura:
I want to go into how you guys met, because you guys have a bit of an interesting story, because you guys were connected before Squadcast, but before we go into the specifics of how you met, when did you guys realize or I think Zach this is a question for you, but when did you realize that there was a problem that you were trying to solve that ultimately became Squadcast? Was it always this idea of connecting podcasters?
Zach:
No, it wasn't. And yeah, it didn't start off as this startup idea or opportunity to build something new for podcasters. It started out much more organically and out of frustration with the state of the art of how to record content remotely for a podcast that we wanted to create. I wanted to do a creative side project. My brother is an audio engineer and my best friend is a decorated playwright and I had written some stuff. So I wanted to get away from software engineering. I went to art school in a past life.
Zach:
So I wanted to do something in a new medium and podcasting. Rock had introduced me to as a consumer years prior. I always loved it as a medium for learning quickly and a lot of things, which is pretty near and dear to my heart, just education in general. So I think of podcasting from a consumption perspective as a step towards personalized education, but then I got hit in the face with this new emerging category within podcasting of audio dramas and fiction.
Zach:
It occurred to me all at once, like if your podcast app were a bookstore and you walked into it, or a library, it would have nothing, but non-fiction. And then all of a sudden, there was this other side of the coin with fiction and audio dramas and specifically science fiction audio dramas. So got really inspired by some of the early audio dramas with The Bright Sessions and ars PARADOXICA and it was like, this is something completely new not for the purpose of education. I love sci-fi. So let's bring those things together and make something with our skills that we had. We thought we had the skills that we would need to produce something of high quality.
Zach:
We did, that is true, but we ran into this bottleneck of quality with our audio recordings because we were a remote distributed team. And that was a real bottleneck and a frustration to start with and sat on that for about a week or so and found a way to turn that into a huge opportunity to really have a fresh take on how that problem could be solved with some new technology.
TJ Bonaventura:
I want to dive into a little bit of what you just talked about because I had the similar experience with the remote podcasting. So if you can recall, what was that process like? How did you get the different recordings with everyone being in different locations?
Zach:
Yeah, so we just kept assuming that it was a solved problem because podcasting had been around for quite a while at that point and just got curious and started researching, what is the state of the art? How do the podcast OGs like Harry Duran or Evo Terra or Dave Jackson, what do they say to do? What's the best practice here? And we found pretty quickly that the answer was pretty unanimous, like use Skype plus some other application, duct taped together to record the audio.
TJ Bonaventura:
E-cam or something.
Zach:
Right. Yeah. So that set up, but then we started digging deeper into that and realized that the host sounded great because they're recorded locally, but then the guest audio was coming over the network and if the network wasn't optimal, which it oftentimes is not, you would hear the network, call it disconnection, or network sounds. I don't know what you'd really call it, distortions, and that would impact the quality of the guest audio quite dramatically and seem to be a bottleneck even for the pros, people that I mentioned before.
Zach:
So once we started talking to them, they were like, "Yeah, we have a solution, but everybody understands it's not purpose built, it's not for the purpose of podcasting and it's good enough. Like our audiences just roll with it and nobody really says too much." But as podcasting has grown up, that quality of specifically everybody in the conversation having an equal footing of their quality has become more and more important as studies have come out to say that listeners perceive credibility from the quality of the audio of the guest and every the conversation.
Zach:
So I think that that importance of quality is coming to the foreground and that's where we can help with capturing quality audio for everybody in a remote conversation.
Julian Lewis:
That's awesome. And it's funny that both you and TJ were talking about having the experience of realizing that this is a problem and I did do, but I just took it different path. I was just like, "Forget it. I'm just going to do everything in person." If I can't do it in person... Because I probably read a lot of the same articles that you did about how people pieced it together and I was just like, this is something I want to do for fun. Like, this is going to be a lot of work for me to figure out. And then luckily after meeting team TJ and then him introducing me to Squadcast and then me having the pleasure of meeting you guys, I was able to land on a solution which I'm happy about.
Julian Lewis:
But yeah, so we did skip over how you two came together. It sounds like Rock, you introduced Zach to podcasts, but how did you two even come together in the first place? How did you guys first meet?
Rock:
Yeah. So I think that's what made this whole thing easy is that from day one, we were at least starting off the Squadcast journey from a place of trust. We didn't know if we were going to have the talent skills or stamina to get this far or even further. Many ways we feel like we're still getting started. But yeah. So when I first met, Zach was at a racketball club that my mom used to work at in Sacramento. Young Zach was 13 then. So I must have been 15 and I met his brother Vince that day as well.
Rock:
So Vince must have been like, what? 16 Zach, if you were around that age. So man, you were seventh, eighth grade. Yeah. So I met him and I think the friend that was with me, who I was at the gym with his name was Sal and I think he called them the bash brothers. It's just for whatever reason that memory stuck with me and then a few years on, in high school, I got reintroduced to Zach, Vince's little brother. They're very tight and so Zach was always hanging around with Vince and then more and more, we got to hang out with them, he just was Zach. He became our friend and now he's running laps around us.
Rock:
So I think that's the thing about Zach that I don't want to say he was on my radar. I don't know the right way to put this, but he would push the envelope on what the rest of our friends were doing and would set these goals or expectations on himself where we're just like, "You're going to write a book? Oh, okay, cool." And then I remember us talking. I'd call up my friend, like, "Hey, Sal, can you believe Zach's like going to write a book?" And then a year or however long it took you, he came out with a book later.
Rock:
So stuff like that. You see that enough times you start to realize like this person does stuff and makes stuff happen and what they say they do, they do. I like to think of myself like that in a similar tone. I didn't do something as impressive as writing a book quite yet, but who knows? Certainly being around people like him is inspirational. So I just remember thinking, there's going to be... He seems like he's thinking about something and making that something else. We have always been interested, just captivated by people that had their own thing and that were super creative, even though I never really saw myself as artistic or creative. But I just didn't realize how creative business is.
Rock:
It's like one of the most creative endeavors I feel one can do. So when he asked me about becoming his partner for Squadcast, it was pretty awesome, man, because I had already on my own personal journey been mentally and financially prepared myself to leave my corporate job that I had, which was a pretty awesome job. And honestly, I wouldn't be here now if it wasn't for that job. I think that job gave me a lot of the skills and confidence to believe that I could make this jump into something more independent and entrepreneurial.
Rock:
So when's Zach asked me, I was already ready and it was just more like, and it's podcasting. So I was already a fan as a listener. Wasn't a creator, but definitely had that thought of, I should start a podcast with so, and so. Like when you're mid conversation, we should just make a podcast out of this. I remember thinking that and thinking why wouldn't more people have that thought? I just always thought Squadcast would be making that happen for everybody. And so it was more so right partner.
Rock:
The mission felt already from day one. Even though it wasn't completely clear, the cool thing is relatively speaking, the vision is pretty similar to what we wanted to do from day one, which is really help people create high quality content that weren't in the same location. And like, "We get you Julian, we're not going to debate saying in person isn't better or you always need to be remote." I mean, our hypothesis was that more people would want to collaborate remotely and want to do it in high quality, but we certainly get why there's something magical with being in person as well.
TJ Bonaventura:
I was going to say, the beauty of having a tool like Squadcasts, you prevent any limiting factor. So while Julian would love to have someone in person and interview couples in person for couple collective, he's stuck to a let's call it 100 mile radius. I don't know how far you'd want to travel, but that's how far you'd want to go. Whereas with Squadcast, now you can bring people in from all over the world.
Julian Lewis:
Yeah, 100 mile radius, I think is generous. I mean, if I'm in that city and I know you and you're in that city, like we're going to record, but otherwise, it's people that are in my backyard. I think the thing that I took away from that story as well, and well, one with Squadcast it's scalability. The ability for you to reach people and connect people on a global level. But in terms of your story of coming together, that like-mindedness, we haven't talked about it yet on our podcast and I'm sure we will at some point, but if you do decide to have a co-host or you do decide to start a business with somebody, you need to make sure that even if you have different skill sets, at least you have that like-mindedness to be able to start something and that patience with one another to keep it going.
Rock:
Oh yeah. Patience has certainly been something that has always being tested one way or another. So the best we can do is at least be patient with each other. I think that's the thing is like, I always knew that we had the skills to become what we needed to, to do it. It was just more so like, would people buy this? We had never done anything like this before. So a lot of stuff we fumbled and stumbled our way to, but luckily we have the benefit of serving people that talk for a living. So we don't have to go very far and have a big ear to hear what they're saying.
TJ Bonaventura:
So let's talk about you guys. Okay, you guys have met, you have this idea, you're thrusting yourself into the podcast industry. What was it like developing the product? How long from the point that you guys decided, you know what? Let's start this company. Let's start with Squadcast, which we want to know name in a second here too, as well. But like you have this company, you have this idea and you want to just put yourselves out there. What was that timeframe like? What was that process like? How did you come up with different iterations until you came out with V1 of Squadcast?
Zach:
It's a bit of a funny story on its own because we started off like we've to hold the story with this core problem and thinking there was a new way to solve it. That was legit where we started and we started researching our way from there and we are big on removing risk and we felt like we're not going to take the plunge into this until we can try to disprove ourselves enough times where we just come up empty handed. Rock and I had talked about some other startup ideas before Squadcast just here and there, nothing too serious. We both had good jobs on this typical American track, right? A lot of us are. And not knocking that at all, but just talking about other ways to do things and opportunities that we spotted.
Zach:
It always just ended with a laugh and a cheers and then we just move on and say, "Oh, that's illegal. That's funny or whatever." But this one we couldn't disprove. That was the first indicator to us that there was something here. Any previous attempts at trying to solve this problem either ended in failure or the industry wasn't happy. It did it didn't actually solve the problem and was reliable. So we started from there and then we made, I would say is now in hindsight, a prototypical first time founder mistake.
Zach:
We started out with this core idea and then we blew it up into this giant platform and idea of like creation, consumption, monetization, distribution, everything. Like everything in podcasting, all under one umbrella was basically the idea. So you're welcome anchor. And that's what we started building legitimately. We wrote a lot of code to bring that to life. We built a very forward leaning recommendation engine that never saw the light of day that used graph data structures to do next nearest neighbor lookups on recommendations from other people's listening behavior, much like Netflix does to recommend to people.
Zach:
So we took giant steps in that direction as far as engineering. And that was a lot of fun, but once we launched our, our beta, we went to podcast movement. So thank you to the podcast movement team for taking a chance on Squadcast, the company they had never heard of and nobody had ever heard of before then allowing us to sponsor the event. That was a big deal for us and was terrifying just to be transparent, because that was our first step into that world, which was misplaced by the way. The podcast community is tremendously open and welcoming.
Zach:
So that lasted about two minutes or so, but we got really great advice at that first podcast movement from who later became our first founding advisor and that's Harry Duran. And Harry said, "Throw all that other stuff away. All the other sponsors at this event are solving those problems in their own way, or they're already solved problems. Do you want to waste your time building something that already exists or competing or trying to replicate something, but what you started with the core problem and idea is a legit problem. There's not a good solution and nobody in this room is even trying or if they are they're failing. So widow it back down to what you started with and be the best in the world at just that."
Zach:
That was very liberating. It allowed us to throw all of that stuff away, go back to the core of it and focus on solving these problems that we had found with new ideas. I'm really, really grateful that he saved us all that work and in trouble of trying to spin our wheels and go in these different directions, compete with an entire industry as first time founders. It just sounds insane now that I say it out loud, but at the time we thought that's what startups did. That's how you go and pitch and get a unicorn round of funding and whatever else startups do. But there's a lot of things about our journey that being the one of first things, but that's one of the first moments where I can look back and think, "Okay, we actually are a bit counter to a lot of the conventional startup success stories out there."
Julian Lewis:
I love that story because one, it shows you're you were open. You were open to feedback and open to having somebody tell you, you know what you want to like reign it in a little bit and to help out the curious scrappy podcaster that's listening to this, it seems like they should be open with the ideas that they have when it comes to podcasting or how they're going to solve maybe a problem in podcasting like y'all are. And then in addition to that, I'd love to understand a little bit about podcast movement and is that a place that only the Squadcast of the world should go to? Or if I'm somebody who's into podcasting who wants to start a podcast or have started one, should I be there too?
Zach:
I think it's for everybody in the podcast community and I've had borderline debates with people on social media about the impact and benefits of going to these conferences. I think it's magical. It's hard to put into words until you really experience it in real life and seeing all these people lift each other up and grow their show and yeah, sure, there's tactics and there's different approaches that people share. And those could be easily read on blogs or on YouTube or podcasts or whatever, but connecting with other podcasters and learning from each other, interpersonally podcasting can be a lonely endeavor, it turns out.
Zach:
I mean, it's a bit strange because you're talking to other people most of the time, but the connection with the audience is something that is not given to podcasters for free like it is on YouTube. It's something that you have to establish. And I think that that is one of the things that makes it less lonely engaging with the podcast community, learning from each other is one of those things. And then it's beyond just connecting, contribute. Go and speak. The love of presentations and delivery and speaking at these events is the highest bar that I've ever encountered because everybody is essentially a professional speaker.
Zach:
So if you can be one of the lucky few that gets a speaking position there, that's a high bar. So everything is of that standard and it's very hard. I've I routinely put in requests proposals for speaking at these events and gotten shot down because that bar is so high and I have no ill will about that because I know that's a high bar and I'm striving for that. And sometimes I get them in there, but everybody else is innovating at the same time and trying to get their presentation in. A lot of people are better than me, so that's fine too. I contribute to podcasting in a different way. So I think that there's something to be gained for everybody, especially those that contribute in an active way.
TJ Bonaventura:
It's a great point and coming from the StudioPod perspective, we attended our first podcast convention earlier this year. I was definitely nervous because we are putting ourselves out there for the first time and then introducing StudioPod. We're trying to be this all inclusive studio media company or podcast media company. It does help because we have someone like you who introduced us to a bunch of other people, but also other people that we met there were introducing us to other podcasters. And there's no one that's too big, right? There's no one that is saying, you know what? We're not going to talk to you because we have 100,000 downloads a month or whatever it may be.
TJ Bonaventura:
Everyone is trying to help each other out. I've never seen an industry grow this fast, but still have such a tight-knit community and keep everything within the fraternity is the wrong word, but it is a fraternity of podcasters alike. How everyone can help each other out. How they can be guests on each other's podcasts. How they can leverage different editors, producers, using tools like best practices around using tools like Squadcast and things like that. It was eye opening for me and I loved every minute of it and I would also encourage any of our clients and listeners to look into the many different podcast conventions that are going on throughout the year. A lot of them are virtual now given the situation, but definitely look at that. Sure.
Julian Lewis:
Yeah. And I will add with evolutions, there were different tracks that you can go on, whether you're a podcaster or a professional, which gave different price points in case you were nervous about putting the dollars out there. But in terms of what TJ said, we were a little bit intimidated. I mean, we were two dudes like TJ, how tall are you? Like six, three. He's six, four. I say I'm five, nine. I'm like five, seven. We're walking around with these army colored jackets that say, "Pot On." On the back. We have stickers that were just littering at the table by registration. And I think we were just trying to get our name out there, but then we asked people to meet with us.
Julian Lewis:
You guys helped us in terms of introducing us to Mark, but we met with Mark from Captivate in person. We met with JP from Storyboard. We met with the folks from Noda Labs and Editing. We were able to just walk up to people and have conversations. And at the same time, there were other scrappy podcasters there that were asking us for advice. So it was really, really cool and I also would recommend that. Our clients or anybody who's interested in the space go there.
TJ Bonaventura:
I want to touch on where the names Squadcast came from. Was it your first name you chose? What was the back and forth? I love hearing these stories. I'd love our audience to know where you guys were headed with it and what you were thinking behind it.
Rock:
So I'll let Zach answer it because he did come up with the name, but I'm really happy you asked that question because it's funny how little that question I guess gets asked hearing it. I don't think anyone's asked us that. It is funny so ake it away, Zach.
Zach:
There was a bunch of attempts at naming. I'm admittedly, not the best person on our team to name things. Kind of inside joke, we'll say within software engineers the hardest part is naming things. I feel that that's true, especially for startups because it's got to, as Paul Colgan would say, it's got to pass the caveman test where the name actually communicates what it is that you do. And there's a lot of startups that that's not true for. Like what does Zenga mean?I think Facebook actually does come a little bit close even though today it's like makes less sense, but they've already gotten over that hurdle anyway.
Zach:
So we struggled with naming. We struggled with our branding because as I said before, I went to art school. Our designer, Alex, and I went to our school together. So I only bring that up because we end up being our toughest critics for design and branding and the name being chief among that like it's, it's really hard to meet all of those constraints and come up with one thing that's memorable that also passes the caveman test and all these constraints, right? Anybody who's a graphic designer knows how hard it is to produce a logo. It's similar to that where coming up with the actual word is a tough one.
Zach:
So we wanted something that ideally would rhyme with podcast, but then there were all these other names that already existed in the industry and we didn't want to step on anybody's toes. That's not cool. So we wanted to take that opportunity to come up with something new. The word Squad had not been used in podcasting as far as we could tell up to that point outside of a few podcasts that just called themselves A squadcast. If you look on YouTube, there's some of those people, around that time, the Suicide Squad movie had come out and there were some people who had created these amalgams of like Suicide Squad podcast. But they had like two or three episodes. So not a huge following or anything like that, it would seem.
Zach:
And then I didn't like it. I'm notorious amongst our team and for trying to fight against it for so long, even though I came up with it. I was trying to come up with something better. I think Squadcast was actually one of the first things that we came up with and it just stuck in the conversations, but then I kept trying to disprove it. I kept trying to come up with something better and we just never came up with something better.
Rock:
What was the other one? Yeah. You came up with another one.
TJ Bonaventura:
I want to hear some ideas.
Rock:
Yeah. Because we were like, yeah, we had Squadcast and we were all set on it and then Zach comes out with something else like, "Well what about this one?" I was like, "Oh heck no." Now we got to think about this name?
Zach:
I kept resurrecting it on our agendas. I mean like, no it's not good enough. It's fine for now, but the conversation's not over. I think the second runner up was Speakeasy because I felt like that passed the caveman test. It's like, okay but it didn't have that collaboration group aspect of it. And Squadcast does, of course but I kept thinking of it like a military thing. Like it's a Squadron but then my fiance at the time now wife, Becca, she would be like, "No, it's like a cool thing. When people go to like bachelorette parties, they wear shirts that are like squad." And it's just like, "Okay, I guess that's cool." You know?
Zach:
We just never came up with something better and that's, I think because it's a good name and it does pass. It does meet all those constraints. In hindsight, I say Squadcast so many times. Like at first when it would come out of my mouth, it just didn't sound right. Like Squadcast? I don't know. It didn't sound right in my head, but a lot of startup names are like two words mixed together, like Dropbox or Descript, I think is another one of those multi syllable. So I don't know. It's not a very poetic story with a hero and an ending, but it was just this long drawn out process that we just know ever came up with something better.
Rock:
Well, do you not remember the other names though? I think there was like Casthub and Master Caster and there was some other ones that just sounded silly, but...
Zach:
Yeah. I kept thinking like GitHub, right? GitHub communicates collaboration. So it was like, "Okay, let's do something like Podhub or something like that. It's like GitHub, but for podcasting. Something weird like that, but Speakeasy I think was my secondary one, but of course that name's been used a lot and it was like, okay, that's going to be hard to differentiate. Even in the Bay Area, there's like Speakeasy Brewing Company, which is like a huge company. So it's like, I don't want to butt heads with them on SEO or whatever, or geographic stuff.
Zach:
So there was a lot of other ones and there's funny stories about our logo as well, where we kept trying to have like a mascot and a persona into like some sort of animal that would communicate Squadcast to people. So Alex and I are both ocean nerds. I used to work at the California Coastal Commission. He is a saltwater aquarium nerd and a half. I don't know how else you'd say it. He collects rare coral. He sells rare coral online. Most of the rare coral websites that sell online, Alex has built. He's a huge influencer in that little microcosm of the internet. And we kept wanting to who create this octopus animal mascot.
Zach:
We came up with this name Mictopus and we're trying to create this thing and I'll save the punchline for offline, but it did not work out well. I'll put it that way. So the microphone logo that Alex came up with was so very rigorous process and hard fought because we had a lot of those high standards.
TJ Bonaventura:
I think StudioPod should get a mascot. Julian, what do you think?
Julian Lewis:
Yeah, I mean and we have the Panda.
TJ Bonaventura:
We do have the StudioPod Panda. Yeah. We'll have to go with that.
Zach:
I'll be honest with you. As somebody who by trade, I'm not a designer, I do enjoy thinking creatively and trying to do things creatively. I actually do not hate the octopus, the name I don't like, but I just like with all the tentacles and like bringing something together, I don't know. I actually do. I like it.
Rock:
Yeah. That's what we're going for.
TJ Bonaventura:
I mean, you guys have a much more interesting story than how StudioPod name came about. It was just a girl I was dating said, "You should call it StudioPod." I'm like, "Done." All right. Great.
Zach:
Much more efficient than the amount of hours we spent talking about should it be Squad should it be cast? Yeah, it was all over the place. That was one of the things that we validated really, really clear validation at that same event, a podcast movement. Everybody loved our logo. Everybody loved our name. Everybody loved our branding and our colors and Alex probably I know for a fact he felt like a rockstar because I don't think he had designed a brand for himself that landed so well within a community all at once. I think that was an achievement unlocked for him.
Julian Lewis:
Yeah. I mean, Alex has been great. We've had an opportunity to work with him on the report that we put together for the webinar. I mean, he's been awesome to work with.
Zach:
Alex is a Jack of all trades. He is a unique individual and has the experience to back it up. I cannot say enough good things about Alex. So thank you, Alex.
Julian Lewis:
Yeah, thank you, Alex. And so we've had a chance to work with Alex on the Remote Podcasting Stats or RPS as you're coining it, and then we had our webinar, the State of Remote Podcasting that we recently did and he and I got to collaborate on design of the actual content around it. But we definitely want to talk about that and where you see that report going. And just for people to know, you guys sit on a lot of valuable data in terms of how people are putting together a remote podcast, what equipment they're using, whether it be headphones, a microphone, how often they're actual really in a session when the recording. How much of that time is actually recording time, as well as what time of day that people are recording. So tell us a little bit about that report and we're happy to add additional colors since we partnered with you on it.
Zach:
Well, we're grateful for that. Having a partner on it certainly was a catalyst for us actually bringing it to life. So thank you both and it came to life beautifully. So that was a big, big deal for us, so thank you. It was not our idea. It was again, Harry Duran, our founding advisor. It was his idea. So thank you, Harry. But it was a long time ago that he first of through that out there and it was before I think we were even thinking about our data as a valuable asset. I'll pause there because a lot of startups come to that same conclusion and they sell it for a profit. It's a revenue source to sell people's data, consumer data, whatever it is.
Zach:
We never wanted to do that. We wanted to make it valuable to everybody and open it up to the podcast community. And that's where I think Harry came up with the idea of, well, like let's establish an industry data report. There are other industry data reports like Edison's Infinite Dial Report, or Libson. Every year Rob Walch produces a presentation at the different conferences on the State of Podcasting, I think is what he calls it. I always am a big fan of those reports, but that title's a bit of a stretch in my opinion. That's half true. It is the state of podcast distribution and consumption, but these events that we're at are for creators producing content, which is upstream from distribution and consumption.
Zach:
So what happens before? It's like the audio just magically appears on podcast feeds and people to it. That's an incomplete picture in my estimation. So Rob, if you're listening, thank you for listening and we should collaborate on an actual full state of podcasting report, but we felt like there was a huge opportunity, the other side of the coin, so to speak. As you said, we have a lot of interesting data and we use that data internally to make decisions and we generally are open about it.
Zach:
I think like James Cridland with Podnews and the founder of Alitu, Colin Gray, the podcast host had this Twitter back and forth about people using speakers versus headphones to record their podcasts. And we were like, "We actually have that data. Let's like bring some measured qualitative data to this conversation where typically it's just anecdotal." Just back and forth like, no, I think it's this or that or whatever. And we actually have at scale data for people actually producing their podcast.
Zach:
So that was our first step was, "Hey, James and Colin and everybody in this Twitter debate, here's a chart of our actual data from the last couple months." And it took like an hour to put together or whatever, but we felt like that was the first step. And then we started talking with you both and saw an opportunity to actually create this report and bring it to life with the 2019 box around the whole thing. That's what we did. We brought that to life in the Remote Podcast Stats Report. And for the first time, it's an industry first turns out and then we wanted to have a webinar, not just put a PDF out on the internet and we wanted to bring that to life and have a conversation around it. And that's what we did about a week ago with the state of remote podcasting webinar. So thank you again for being a big part of that.
TJ Bonaventura:
Yeah. We were happy to support. And a lot of that goes to Julian for owning it from the StudioPod side of things. And the thing that I found most interesting about the report, there's two different things. The first thing that caught my eye was the time of which podcasters were recording their podcast. I could not get over this. It turns out that most podcasters are recording between the time of 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM during the day, no matter where they're at locally. I did not foresee that coming whatsoever, especially for us who were creating a podcast and helping the curious scrappy podcaster. I thought this would be more of a side hustle type gig. Turns out necessarily the case.
TJ Bonaventura:
The other was the equipment being used. Now, obviously we have a studio here with what we'd like to consider the top of line equipment, but-
Rock:
It is.
TJ Bonaventura:
Thank you. I found that certain equipment that was being used by potential clients and other podcasts weren't the best. So I was into understanding and wrap my mind around why they chose certain equipment. And we can go ahead and talk about it, particularly the Blue Yeti, as an example, I'm sure many of our listeners here have looked and researched or even bought a Blue Yeti. Oftentimes we had a client right now, dog patch advisors that coming out with a new podcast. By the time this comes out, it will be released. It's called Ground Truth. Shout out to them. It's a great podcast. Everyone should check it out.
TJ Bonaventura:
Anyways, one of the hosts decided to buy a Blue Yeti because when they went to Best Buy or one of these larger department stores that was recommended to them by one of the associates. And that blows my mind because for anyone out there, Blue Yeti is a very cool looking device. No doubt about it. Their branding is really nice and they do a really good job of that. However, from a functional standpoint, not the greatest tool to use. So I think having this webinar ultimately validates that the knowledge of having a highly produced podcast or high quality podcast is important, but the education isn't there because Blue Yeti is not a cheap mic.
TJ Bonaventura:
The ATR2100s that you guys are using right now, which by the way, we should mention that this podcast is, we're using Squadcast is I think cheaper than a Blue Yeti, but the quality is significantly much better and it's also a USB mic. So it's like how can we educate the people out there to use the right equipment, to ultimately allow them to create the highest quality podcast possible?
Julian Lewis:
Yeah, and I want to tie together two things, one thing that you said TJ, with something that Zach said in terms of, if we just send out the PDF, they would've seen that the Blue Yeti was the most used mic and people would've taken that as Bible and then they probably would've gone and purchased it, but the conversation that we had around it and the conversation that was happening in the chat people were able to educate one another about like why you should be using another mic.
Julian Lewis:
I also want to say going back to our conversation about the name Squadcast and the potential Octopus, the Blue Yeti has this beautiful packaging with a Yeti, an actual Yeti. And so like that's appealing and honestly, that was my first mic. Then I got the Snowball because I thought I was progressing in the Yeti family before meeting TJ and realizing like, maybe I should just get this ATR2100, which is what I have at home now. And then the one other thing that I want to touch on in terms of the time in which people are recording. So you touched on like when they're actually doing it and I mentioned a little bit earlier in terms of when they go into a session on Squadcast, the percentage of time they're actually recording versus maybe being in the green room or spending time getting acclimated after the recording.
Julian Lewis:
For us, when somebody comes into the studio, we say, get there early, greet your guests, get them a drink, sit in this room that we're still trying to name, but I'm going to call it the living room for now and start to have a conversation before you step into the studio and hit record. And that same behavior is happening on the platform whereby a third of the time people are recording and the rest of it, they're either getting acclimated with their guest or debriefing from the conversation, which was had, which I thought was very interesting.
Zach:
Yeah, those are both insights that we weren't necessarily aware of either. So we're learning from this data at the same time and that was one of the first leading indicators that this would probably be valuable to our industry partners, our peer companies, every podcaster and not just keep it internal and use it to build stuff or whatever. We can use it for both and the community can learn from it as well. That's why we felt that we should bring into life. I'm grateful that we did. I agree with both of the things that you said, and then the one for me, that's near and dear to my heart is people recording with headphones versus speakers. It's not obvious to many podcasters or their guests, how headphones act the quality of their audio.
Zach:
They think quality audio, what's recording my voice is actually my microphone. Why would headphones or speakers matter at all? And that's agreeably something that's not obvious. To your point, Julian, we got to have a conversation around that as well. I think it's something that is absolutely that. It's an opportunity to educate around these are the trends that we see. This is the best practice. There are alternatives that are actually better. And headphones are a simple solution to keep your quality high with your audio.
TJ Bonaventura:
I want to make a statement right here on the pod podcast with Squadcast as our guest, everybody should be using headphones. Whether you're in a studio, whether you're using Squadcast, whether you're using a Zoom recorder by yourself, you should always have headphones. It allows you to manage your gain, your volume, how to make adjustments as necessary. Please, please, everybody use headphones. It will allow you to even the most novice podcaster out there, understand how your levels are coming in and how your editing team can ultimately make the changes necessary or yourself. It's always easier to edit loudness down. You can never make quiet podcasts louder without having a little bit of distortion.
Julian Lewis:
And if you wear hats like me, I have options for you. I'm not wearing a hat right now. So I have over your headphones on, but I have some good in recommendations as well.
Zach:
For somebody like Rock and I, we're on podcasts quite a lot these days and no argument. They're not the most comfortable thing to wear. They don't look cool, really. I don't know unless you're like Dr. Dre or something like that, but it's not a fashion statement to wear headphones. I mean, I guess it can be these days. So thanks Apple, but there are actual quality benefits that come from it like you're seeing TJ and if you're remote, it even is more so because you have sound coming out of the speakers. So you can actually have this dialogue with your guest and headphones prevent any echo and feedback.
Zach:
We've all experienced holding up a microphone to a speaker and hearing that ringing back and forth. You don't want that to show up in your audio and you don't want a software solution to that problem either because it degrades the quality. So a simple solution is to wear headphones. And these days, because smartphone have been around for like a decade, everybody has headphones, like pretty much everybody has headphones or go to Walgreens you can get like a pair for like $2 or something like that.
Zach:
So that is surprising to see so many people using speakers as their output device in our data. Even though we do everything we can to educate podcasters, I think that this data report is that next in that evolution of taking the data that we see and using it for educational purposes around quality, why it matters and how you can actually improve your quality with simple things. And then, yeah, the time of day is a very interesting one to us. One from a support perspective, cause we care deeply about support and have a dedicated support team on Squadcast, but also because yeah, you would expect it to be nights and weekends, but the podcast industry has been growing up.
Zach:
There are more and more people who are professional, whether that's their podcast as their product or they have another product and their podcast helps get people to their product is the one we see more often, but I think that that's surprising to us as well. And then yeah, the networking benefits of roughly one third of the time spent connected to have a conversation. Only one third of that is spent actually recording. So the other two thirds, one third up front, one third at the end are spent networking and connecting and building these deeper connections with people. And that's where I think that that can actually impact how much time you schedule into your podcast. Give yourself more time. Give yourself more networking potential.
Zach:
It can always be shorter. You can always finish early and that's even great because you have this new time in your calendar you didn't have before. But I think book ending your interview with actual time to connect as real humans off the is a secret superpower of podcasting that I think when else are you going to talk to that author? When else are you going to talk to that industry influencer? So actually build those deep connections.
TJ Bonaventura:
I want to switch gears for a second and ask you Rock, since you started, you've become a consumer, now you've immersed yourself as a subject matter expert from a Squadcast perspective on remote podcasting. What have you seen the biggest change in the industry or how do you see it morphing over the past three and a half years that you've started this to where we're at now and where eventually you see the industry going?
Rock:
Yeah, well I think just hearing you guys talking about that webinar that we had, I think a lot of what it boils down to is something we realized early on, but maybe we were just too new in the game and too new to podcasting to really realize it. But it's something that the, the folks at rebel based media and Mark Asquith with Captivate, who we talked about earlier, they do really well is that our work as servicing podcasters is doing what we directly do with Squadcast. It's helping people record their podcast remotely with StudioPod. It's helping people produce dope podcasts if we had to put it into a few words. But also in addition to that to really get the full benefit of what we're trying to help them with, there's all this other educational stuff that we have to help people out with as far as podcasting.
Rock:
So that's why we got to tell them to wear headphones or what mic to use. I mean, Zach pointed this out to me maybe within, after a year we were into Squadcast was like the cool thing about podcast is not necessarily that they podcast, it's that they have something else that makes them special or unique and they use podcasting as that vehicle to like connect with people. The great part about that is that's what makes it so dynamic and have so many different personalities and people. But I think that's also the downside is like these people aren't familiar with audio or familiar with technology by nature, usually.
Rock:
Maybe a little bit more willing to try new things than the complete person who's still using the flip phone or the razor or whatever. God bless you if you're out there, but there's still so much education that needs to be done. It's really been pretty interesting, I think. And we're seeing it even more now, ever since the shelter in place. Just more people that want to start a podcast, maybe they want to document what they're going through. Maybe they want to connect with a family member and document that too.
Rock:
There's just so many new people to podcasting and just recording remotely in general too. So again, that was always our hypothesis is that this intersection of podcasting and people wanting to collaborate remotely would be Squadcast's ultimate opportunity. But we did not know how many new people would be coming to this space or how much our work would involve, like a lot of educational stuff. I think that's what got me the biggest buzz after the webinar was feeling like people got that information from that webinar. That we were making them all better as podcasters. We were making podcasting better almost.
Rock:
So maybe that's what was so exciting about that report, because at first it's like, if you just read it and I think you might have said this on air or you definitely said it off air, if it wasn't on air Julian and was like, if you just read through the report or just hand it to them, there's one way to read that and interpret that, but then there's the way that you can really get behind it and know like, "Hey, there's actually this like little invisible war going on, where all the veterans in podcasting think you're a total new if you have a Blue Yeti and here's why."
Rock:
We got to unpack that a little bit, but it's because there's just so many new folks to the space and it's still... That's why just a couple of folks like us can just come in there and be super nervous because we know we don't know anything or we know enough, but it just doesn't feel like that. That imposter syndrome that seems like everybody seems to suffer from to some degree. You can still come in there and still be somebody and connect with people is because everybody has come from that in a way. So it's interesting because it's what makes it special and awesome, but it's also what fills up our day, at least ours. Right Zach?
Zach:
Yeah. And one other thing that I'll add, I completely agree with that is we've also noticed a listener taste of quality changing. There's a more of a dialogue going on around quality of audio whereas before it was like, it's a miracle we have audio on the internet at all let alone is high quality. So I think that that's been one of the things that is an indicator to us of, of course, we're out here trying to make quality podcasts accessible to everybody. You shouldn't have to work at NPR to sound awesome. You can do that with your guests from anywhere in the world. NPR does as well.
Zach:
So it's one of the things that we've seen changing is around the conversation of it used to just be like, well, it's good enough. It's amazing. We could do it at all. And now it is, well, how do we do it and preserve the quality and do it remotely with people who have never done this before and aren't professional podcasters? That's really where I'm tremendously grateful that we can be part of that conversation and actually help podcasting evolve in this way.
Julian Lewis:
Before we wrap up, the one question that I want to ask the two of you. So for a lot of people, Squadcast has solved the problem. But I guess my question for the two of you is where are you in terms of solving that problem that you sought out to solve?
Zach:
So we're always looking for opportunities to improve the quality of both the experience while recording on Squadcast, but also the recordings that we're capturing together on Squadcast. So if we can think of those as two independent things, that's helpful. So the experience of the conversation that you're are having on Squadcast is something that we plan to enhance through a collaboration with our friends at Dolby. We are bringing 3D specialized audio to the conversation that we're having like video does today to make the conversation feel and flow more naturally like you would have in real life.
Zach:
And that's one effort. Another effort is the audio we record on Squadcast can further be enhanced with the post-production mastering capabilities that Dolby brings to life. Things like background noise reduction and loudness normalization can all be push button within Squadcast to further save time in post-production. Those two things should go quite a long ways towards improving the experience on Squadcast. And then beyond that, we plan to add video recording to the platform the same rigorous quality standards that we hold today for audio.
Zach:
We will be applying those to video in the near future here with a locally recorded 1080P video for everybody in the conversation, upload it in the background progressively so you get that same level of reliability with automatic backups and all the things that we do with audio today, we'll be bringing that to life with video.
TJ Bonaventura:
That's super exciting. I know a lot of people have been asking for that for a long time and I know when you're creating a company, especially a technology company, even though you have aspirations there's baby steps, you got to take. So it's exciting that you guys are there, exciting about the partnership with Dolby. You guys are doing some really great stuff. I know Julian wants to ask his final question. This is how we end every podcast.
Julian Lewis:
Exactly. So what advice would you have for the curious scrappy podcaster?
Rock:
Man, I would say it's one of the things that we see get discussed a lot in the various meetups that we go to or the events that we go to is like, people get really hung up on the equipment or the services, or pretty much everything other than just like just starting the thing. It's just here to do it. You should just do it and you are going to get a lot better over time. But the equipment is not going to get you any better in the way that just learning and starting and putting yourself out there. And again, like leveraging off of the community because the community understands what it's like to be in your shoes so well that they will help you more than any mic or headphones will.
Rock:
That stuff is important. A microphone is definitely going to make you sound better, but it's not worth getting hung up over and it's definitely not worth spending more than 100 bucks, but you can definitely spend less and be okay. And so I think that's the most common thing. I mean we have a product that we would love to sell you and help you with your podcast, but none of that stuff needs to get in the way of just starting and then everything else will come there. And there's so many different ways that you can figure out all the other... The tech and the hardware, but just starting the show and not getting overwhelmed by so much of the other stuff.
Zach:
To further expand on that, keep going, push through and show up. I think that's one of the things that a lot of times we tell our startup story, a lot of it is just showing up. It's amazing how much of that actually is a factor. So pod fade this term in our community is something that I am hopeful that we can overcome at some point. And for sure start, look for and expect and hold yourself to higher standards and look forward to getting better. And that's one of the things that can keep you going is not just the next guest or the next number of listeners or whatever, but do it for yourself, but do it for your audience.
Zach:
Build that connection with your audience and they're the ones who actually benefit from your stories and your quality and your mic choice. Through that lens of what's best for my audience and my listeners, everything else follows organically from there. So like Rock said, just get off to a solid start. Don't overthink it, just start and look for ways to get better.
Julian Lewis:
Awesome. This has been great, really appreciate y'all coming on and joining us.
Zach:
We're grateful to be on your show. Thank you for having us. We hope we've added value for your listeners. You can find us at squadcast.fm. I'm zach__moreno on socials. Come to podcast events and meetups. They're accessible and all over the place now or if you can't find one, start one. There's a lot of great resources out there for that. The benefits of the community are tremendous. So thank you to the podcast community. And to help share our thanks, we have the PodOn coupon code. So P-O-D-O-N. When you check out at Squadcast, that'll get you $10 off your first month, which is depending on what plan you choose will be your first month free or half off your first month, or however you want to slice it and we're really grateful we can help you with your remote interviews.
Julian Lewis:
Thank you.
TJ Bonaventura:
Awesome. Thanks guys.
TJ Bonaventura:
Every episode of the PodOn Podcast is produced and edited by StudioPod Media. For more information about our work and our clients go to studiopodsf.com.
Julian Lewis:
Shout out to Gary Oakland for the Fire track.
TJ Bonaventura:
Gary O.
We did not know how many new people would be coming to the space or how much our work would involve. A lot of educational stuff and I think that's what got me the biggest buzz after the webinar was feeling like people got that information from that webinar. That we were making them all better as podcasters. We were making podcasting better almost.
Julian Lewis:
This is the PodOn Podcast.
TJ Bonaventura:
We're your host, TJ Bonaventura that's me, and Julian Lewis.
Julian Lewis:
That's me. As founders of a podcast media company, we had to start a podcast.
TJ Bonaventura:
So join us each episode as we and our guests drop knowledge on podcasting for you, the curious and scrappy podcaster.
Julian Lewis:
Welcome Zach. Welcome Rock to the PodOn Podcast. Glad to have you guys on.
Rock:
Happy to be here. Thanks guys.
Zach:
Yeah, thank you for having us.
Julian Lewis:
Awesome. Just so the listeners know, you gens are the founders of Squadcast. Do you want to tell us a little bit about Squadcast before we get into the interview?
Zach:
Yeah. Happy to and thanks again for having us on. So we, as you said, co-founded Squadcast and the goal there is to connect podcasters and their guests record content remotely in studio quality. So the experience on the surface is much like you'd have with Zoom, something like that, except you're are creating quality audio content that sets you up for success in post-production and your listeners don't know that you weren't in the same location and have a really great listening experience will with consuming your content. So we've been at that about three and a half years and Rock, and I go way back before that. So that's what we've been working on.
TJ Bonaventura:
I want to go into how you guys met, because you guys have a bit of an interesting story, because you guys were connected before Squadcast, but before we go into the specifics of how you met, when did you guys realize or I think Zach this is a question for you, but when did you realize that there was a problem that you were trying to solve that ultimately became Squadcast? Was it always this idea of connecting podcasters?
Zach:
No, it wasn't. And yeah, it didn't start off as this startup idea or opportunity to build something new for podcasters. It started out much more organically and out of frustration with the state of the art of how to record content remotely for a podcast that we wanted to create. I wanted to do a creative side project. My brother is an audio engineer and my best friend is a decorated playwright and I had written some stuff. So I wanted to get away from software engineering. I went to art school in a past life.
Zach:
So I wanted to do something in a new medium and podcasting. Rock had introduced me to as a consumer years prior. I always loved it as a medium for learning quickly and a lot of things, which is pretty near and dear to my heart, just education in general. So I think of podcasting from a consumption perspective as a step towards personalized education, but then I got hit in the face with this new emerging category within podcasting of audio dramas and fiction.
Zach:
It occurred to me all at once, like if your podcast app were a bookstore and you walked into it, or a library, it would have nothing, but non-fiction. And then all of a sudden, there was this other side of the coin with fiction and audio dramas and specifically science fiction audio dramas. So got really inspired by some of the early audio dramas with The Bright Sessions and ars PARADOXICA and it was like, this is something completely new not for the purpose of education. I love sci-fi. So let's bring those things together and make something with our skills that we had. We thought we had the skills that we would need to produce something of high quality.
Zach:
We did, that is true, but we ran into this bottleneck of quality with our audio recordings because we were a remote distributed team. And that was a real bottleneck and a frustration to start with and sat on that for about a week or so and found a way to turn that into a huge opportunity to really have a fresh take on how that problem could be solved with some new technology.
TJ Bonaventura:
I want to dive into a little bit of what you just talked about because I had the similar experience with the remote podcasting. So if you can recall, what was that process like? How did you get the different recordings with everyone being in different locations?
Zach:
Yeah, so we just kept assuming that it was a solved problem because podcasting had been around for quite a while at that point and just got curious and started researching, what is the state of the art? How do the podcast OGs like Harry Duran or Evo Terra or Dave Jackson, what do they say to do? What's the best practice here? And we found pretty quickly that the answer was pretty unanimous, like use Skype plus some other application, duct taped together to record the audio.
TJ Bonaventura:
E-cam or something.
Zach:
Right. Yeah. So that set up, but then we started digging deeper into that and realized that the host sounded great because they're recorded locally, but then the guest audio was coming over the network and if the network wasn't optimal, which it oftentimes is not, you would hear the network, call it disconnection, or network sounds. I don't know what you'd really call it, distortions, and that would impact the quality of the guest audio quite dramatically and seem to be a bottleneck even for the pros, people that I mentioned before.
Zach:
So once we started talking to them, they were like, "Yeah, we have a solution, but everybody understands it's not purpose built, it's not for the purpose of podcasting and it's good enough. Like our audiences just roll with it and nobody really says too much." But as podcasting has grown up, that quality of specifically everybody in the conversation having an equal footing of their quality has become more and more important as studies have come out to say that listeners perceive credibility from the quality of the audio of the guest and every the conversation.
Zach:
So I think that that importance of quality is coming to the foreground and that's where we can help with capturing quality audio for everybody in a remote conversation.
Julian Lewis:
That's awesome. And it's funny that both you and TJ were talking about having the experience of realizing that this is a problem and I did do, but I just took it different path. I was just like, "Forget it. I'm just going to do everything in person." If I can't do it in person... Because I probably read a lot of the same articles that you did about how people pieced it together and I was just like, this is something I want to do for fun. Like, this is going to be a lot of work for me to figure out. And then luckily after meeting team TJ and then him introducing me to Squadcast and then me having the pleasure of meeting you guys, I was able to land on a solution which I'm happy about.
Julian Lewis:
But yeah, so we did skip over how you two came together. It sounds like Rock, you introduced Zach to podcasts, but how did you two even come together in the first place? How did you guys first meet?
Rock:
Yeah. So I think that's what made this whole thing easy is that from day one, we were at least starting off the Squadcast journey from a place of trust. We didn't know if we were going to have the talent skills or stamina to get this far or even further. Many ways we feel like we're still getting started. But yeah. So when I first met, Zach was at a racketball club that my mom used to work at in Sacramento. Young Zach was 13 then. So I must have been 15 and I met his brother Vince that day as well.
Rock:
So Vince must have been like, what? 16 Zach, if you were around that age. So man, you were seventh, eighth grade. Yeah. So I met him and I think the friend that was with me, who I was at the gym with his name was Sal and I think he called them the bash brothers. It's just for whatever reason that memory stuck with me and then a few years on, in high school, I got reintroduced to Zach, Vince's little brother. They're very tight and so Zach was always hanging around with Vince and then more and more, we got to hang out with them, he just was Zach. He became our friend and now he's running laps around us.
Rock:
So I think that's the thing about Zach that I don't want to say he was on my radar. I don't know the right way to put this, but he would push the envelope on what the rest of our friends were doing and would set these goals or expectations on himself where we're just like, "You're going to write a book? Oh, okay, cool." And then I remember us talking. I'd call up my friend, like, "Hey, Sal, can you believe Zach's like going to write a book?" And then a year or however long it took you, he came out with a book later.
Rock:
So stuff like that. You see that enough times you start to realize like this person does stuff and makes stuff happen and what they say they do, they do. I like to think of myself like that in a similar tone. I didn't do something as impressive as writing a book quite yet, but who knows? Certainly being around people like him is inspirational. So I just remember thinking, there's going to be... He seems like he's thinking about something and making that something else. We have always been interested, just captivated by people that had their own thing and that were super creative, even though I never really saw myself as artistic or creative. But I just didn't realize how creative business is.
Rock:
It's like one of the most creative endeavors I feel one can do. So when he asked me about becoming his partner for Squadcast, it was pretty awesome, man, because I had already on my own personal journey been mentally and financially prepared myself to leave my corporate job that I had, which was a pretty awesome job. And honestly, I wouldn't be here now if it wasn't for that job. I think that job gave me a lot of the skills and confidence to believe that I could make this jump into something more independent and entrepreneurial.
Rock:
So when's Zach asked me, I was already ready and it was just more like, and it's podcasting. So I was already a fan as a listener. Wasn't a creator, but definitely had that thought of, I should start a podcast with so, and so. Like when you're mid conversation, we should just make a podcast out of this. I remember thinking that and thinking why wouldn't more people have that thought? I just always thought Squadcast would be making that happen for everybody. And so it was more so right partner.
Rock:
The mission felt already from day one. Even though it wasn't completely clear, the cool thing is relatively speaking, the vision is pretty similar to what we wanted to do from day one, which is really help people create high quality content that weren't in the same location. And like, "We get you Julian, we're not going to debate saying in person isn't better or you always need to be remote." I mean, our hypothesis was that more people would want to collaborate remotely and want to do it in high quality, but we certainly get why there's something magical with being in person as well.
TJ Bonaventura:
I was going to say, the beauty of having a tool like Squadcasts, you prevent any limiting factor. So while Julian would love to have someone in person and interview couples in person for couple collective, he's stuck to a let's call it 100 mile radius. I don't know how far you'd want to travel, but that's how far you'd want to go. Whereas with Squadcast, now you can bring people in from all over the world.
Julian Lewis:
Yeah, 100 mile radius, I think is generous. I mean, if I'm in that city and I know you and you're in that city, like we're going to record, but otherwise, it's people that are in my backyard. I think the thing that I took away from that story as well, and well, one with Squadcast it's scalability. The ability for you to reach people and connect people on a global level. But in terms of your story of coming together, that like-mindedness, we haven't talked about it yet on our podcast and I'm sure we will at some point, but if you do decide to have a co-host or you do decide to start a business with somebody, you need to make sure that even if you have different skill sets, at least you have that like-mindedness to be able to start something and that patience with one another to keep it going.
Rock:
Oh yeah. Patience has certainly been something that has always being tested one way or another. So the best we can do is at least be patient with each other. I think that's the thing is like, I always knew that we had the skills to become what we needed to, to do it. It was just more so like, would people buy this? We had never done anything like this before. So a lot of stuff we fumbled and stumbled our way to, but luckily we have the benefit of serving people that talk for a living. So we don't have to go very far and have a big ear to hear what they're saying.
TJ Bonaventura:
So let's talk about you guys. Okay, you guys have met, you have this idea, you're thrusting yourself into the podcast industry. What was it like developing the product? How long from the point that you guys decided, you know what? Let's start this company. Let's start with Squadcast, which we want to know name in a second here too, as well. But like you have this company, you have this idea and you want to just put yourselves out there. What was that timeframe like? What was that process like? How did you come up with different iterations until you came out with V1 of Squadcast?
Zach:
It's a bit of a funny story on its own because we started off like we've to hold the story with this core problem and thinking there was a new way to solve it. That was legit where we started and we started researching our way from there and we are big on removing risk and we felt like we're not going to take the plunge into this until we can try to disprove ourselves enough times where we just come up empty handed. Rock and I had talked about some other startup ideas before Squadcast just here and there, nothing too serious. We both had good jobs on this typical American track, right? A lot of us are. And not knocking that at all, but just talking about other ways to do things and opportunities that we spotted.
Zach:
It always just ended with a laugh and a cheers and then we just move on and say, "Oh, that's illegal. That's funny or whatever." But this one we couldn't disprove. That was the first indicator to us that there was something here. Any previous attempts at trying to solve this problem either ended in failure or the industry wasn't happy. It did it didn't actually solve the problem and was reliable. So we started from there and then we made, I would say is now in hindsight, a prototypical first time founder mistake.
Zach:
We started out with this core idea and then we blew it up into this giant platform and idea of like creation, consumption, monetization, distribution, everything. Like everything in podcasting, all under one umbrella was basically the idea. So you're welcome anchor. And that's what we started building legitimately. We wrote a lot of code to bring that to life. We built a very forward leaning recommendation engine that never saw the light of day that used graph data structures to do next nearest neighbor lookups on recommendations from other people's listening behavior, much like Netflix does to recommend to people.
Zach:
So we took giant steps in that direction as far as engineering. And that was a lot of fun, but once we launched our, our beta, we went to podcast movement. So thank you to the podcast movement team for taking a chance on Squadcast, the company they had never heard of and nobody had ever heard of before then allowing us to sponsor the event. That was a big deal for us and was terrifying just to be transparent, because that was our first step into that world, which was misplaced by the way. The podcast community is tremendously open and welcoming.
Zach:
So that lasted about two minutes or so, but we got really great advice at that first podcast movement from who later became our first founding advisor and that's Harry Duran. And Harry said, "Throw all that other stuff away. All the other sponsors at this event are solving those problems in their own way, or they're already solved problems. Do you want to waste your time building something that already exists or competing or trying to replicate something, but what you started with the core problem and idea is a legit problem. There's not a good solution and nobody in this room is even trying or if they are they're failing. So widow it back down to what you started with and be the best in the world at just that."
Zach:
That was very liberating. It allowed us to throw all of that stuff away, go back to the core of it and focus on solving these problems that we had found with new ideas. I'm really, really grateful that he saved us all that work and in trouble of trying to spin our wheels and go in these different directions, compete with an entire industry as first time founders. It just sounds insane now that I say it out loud, but at the time we thought that's what startups did. That's how you go and pitch and get a unicorn round of funding and whatever else startups do. But there's a lot of things about our journey that being the one of first things, but that's one of the first moments where I can look back and think, "Okay, we actually are a bit counter to a lot of the conventional startup success stories out there."
Julian Lewis:
I love that story because one, it shows you're you were open. You were open to feedback and open to having somebody tell you, you know what you want to like reign it in a little bit and to help out the curious scrappy podcaster that's listening to this, it seems like they should be open with the ideas that they have when it comes to podcasting or how they're going to solve maybe a problem in podcasting like y'all are. And then in addition to that, I'd love to understand a little bit about podcast movement and is that a place that only the Squadcast of the world should go to? Or if I'm somebody who's into podcasting who wants to start a podcast or have started one, should I be there too?
Zach:
I think it's for everybody in the podcast community and I've had borderline debates with people on social media about the impact and benefits of going to these conferences. I think it's magical. It's hard to put into words until you really experience it in real life and seeing all these people lift each other up and grow their show and yeah, sure, there's tactics and there's different approaches that people share. And those could be easily read on blogs or on YouTube or podcasts or whatever, but connecting with other podcasters and learning from each other, interpersonally podcasting can be a lonely endeavor, it turns out.
Zach:
I mean, it's a bit strange because you're talking to other people most of the time, but the connection with the audience is something that is not given to podcasters for free like it is on YouTube. It's something that you have to establish. And I think that that is one of the things that makes it less lonely engaging with the podcast community, learning from each other is one of those things. And then it's beyond just connecting, contribute. Go and speak. The love of presentations and delivery and speaking at these events is the highest bar that I've ever encountered because everybody is essentially a professional speaker.
Zach:
So if you can be one of the lucky few that gets a speaking position there, that's a high bar. So everything is of that standard and it's very hard. I've I routinely put in requests proposals for speaking at these events and gotten shot down because that bar is so high and I have no ill will about that because I know that's a high bar and I'm striving for that. And sometimes I get them in there, but everybody else is innovating at the same time and trying to get their presentation in. A lot of people are better than me, so that's fine too. I contribute to podcasting in a different way. So I think that there's something to be gained for everybody, especially those that contribute in an active way.
TJ Bonaventura:
It's a great point and coming from the StudioPod perspective, we attended our first podcast convention earlier this year. I was definitely nervous because we are putting ourselves out there for the first time and then introducing StudioPod. We're trying to be this all inclusive studio media company or podcast media company. It does help because we have someone like you who introduced us to a bunch of other people, but also other people that we met there were introducing us to other podcasters. And there's no one that's too big, right? There's no one that is saying, you know what? We're not going to talk to you because we have 100,000 downloads a month or whatever it may be.
TJ Bonaventura:
Everyone is trying to help each other out. I've never seen an industry grow this fast, but still have such a tight-knit community and keep everything within the fraternity is the wrong word, but it is a fraternity of podcasters alike. How everyone can help each other out. How they can be guests on each other's podcasts. How they can leverage different editors, producers, using tools like best practices around using tools like Squadcast and things like that. It was eye opening for me and I loved every minute of it and I would also encourage any of our clients and listeners to look into the many different podcast conventions that are going on throughout the year. A lot of them are virtual now given the situation, but definitely look at that. Sure.
Julian Lewis:
Yeah. And I will add with evolutions, there were different tracks that you can go on, whether you're a podcaster or a professional, which gave different price points in case you were nervous about putting the dollars out there. But in terms of what TJ said, we were a little bit intimidated. I mean, we were two dudes like TJ, how tall are you? Like six, three. He's six, four. I say I'm five, nine. I'm like five, seven. We're walking around with these army colored jackets that say, "Pot On." On the back. We have stickers that were just littering at the table by registration. And I think we were just trying to get our name out there, but then we asked people to meet with us.
Julian Lewis:
You guys helped us in terms of introducing us to Mark, but we met with Mark from Captivate in person. We met with JP from Storyboard. We met with the folks from Noda Labs and Editing. We were able to just walk up to people and have conversations. And at the same time, there were other scrappy podcasters there that were asking us for advice. So it was really, really cool and I also would recommend that. Our clients or anybody who's interested in the space go there.
TJ Bonaventura:
I want to touch on where the names Squadcast came from. Was it your first name you chose? What was the back and forth? I love hearing these stories. I'd love our audience to know where you guys were headed with it and what you were thinking behind it.
Rock:
So I'll let Zach answer it because he did come up with the name, but I'm really happy you asked that question because it's funny how little that question I guess gets asked hearing it. I don't think anyone's asked us that. It is funny so ake it away, Zach.
Zach:
There was a bunch of attempts at naming. I'm admittedly, not the best person on our team to name things. Kind of inside joke, we'll say within software engineers the hardest part is naming things. I feel that that's true, especially for startups because it's got to, as Paul Colgan would say, it's got to pass the caveman test where the name actually communicates what it is that you do. And there's a lot of startups that that's not true for. Like what does Zenga mean?I think Facebook actually does come a little bit close even though today it's like makes less sense, but they've already gotten over that hurdle anyway.
Zach:
So we struggled with naming. We struggled with our branding because as I said before, I went to art school. Our designer, Alex, and I went to our school together. So I only bring that up because we end up being our toughest critics for design and branding and the name being chief among that like it's, it's really hard to meet all of those constraints and come up with one thing that's memorable that also passes the caveman test and all these constraints, right? Anybody who's a graphic designer knows how hard it is to produce a logo. It's similar to that where coming up with the actual word is a tough one.
Zach:
So we wanted something that ideally would rhyme with podcast, but then there were all these other names that already existed in the industry and we didn't want to step on anybody's toes. That's not cool. So we wanted to take that opportunity to come up with something new. The word Squad had not been used in podcasting as far as we could tell up to that point outside of a few podcasts that just called themselves A squadcast. If you look on YouTube, there's some of those people, around that time, the Suicide Squad movie had come out and there were some people who had created these amalgams of like Suicide Squad podcast. But they had like two or three episodes. So not a huge following or anything like that, it would seem.
Zach:
And then I didn't like it. I'm notorious amongst our team and for trying to fight against it for so long, even though I came up with it. I was trying to come up with something better. I think Squadcast was actually one of the first things that we came up with and it just stuck in the conversations, but then I kept trying to disprove it. I kept trying to come up with something better and we just never came up with something better.
Rock:
What was the other one? Yeah. You came up with another one.
TJ Bonaventura:
I want to hear some ideas.
Rock:
Yeah. Because we were like, yeah, we had Squadcast and we were all set on it and then Zach comes out with something else like, "Well what about this one?" I was like, "Oh heck no." Now we got to think about this name?
Zach:
I kept resurrecting it on our agendas. I mean like, no it's not good enough. It's fine for now, but the conversation's not over. I think the second runner up was Speakeasy because I felt like that passed the caveman test. It's like, okay but it didn't have that collaboration group aspect of it. And Squadcast does, of course but I kept thinking of it like a military thing. Like it's a Squadron but then my fiance at the time now wife, Becca, she would be like, "No, it's like a cool thing. When people go to like bachelorette parties, they wear shirts that are like squad." And it's just like, "Okay, I guess that's cool." You know?
Zach:
We just never came up with something better and that's, I think because it's a good name and it does pass. It does meet all those constraints. In hindsight, I say Squadcast so many times. Like at first when it would come out of my mouth, it just didn't sound right. Like Squadcast? I don't know. It didn't sound right in my head, but a lot of startup names are like two words mixed together, like Dropbox or Descript, I think is another one of those multi syllable. So I don't know. It's not a very poetic story with a hero and an ending, but it was just this long drawn out process that we just know ever came up with something better.
Rock:
Well, do you not remember the other names though? I think there was like Casthub and Master Caster and there was some other ones that just sounded silly, but...
Zach:
Yeah. I kept thinking like GitHub, right? GitHub communicates collaboration. So it was like, "Okay, let's do something like Podhub or something like that. It's like GitHub, but for podcasting. Something weird like that, but Speakeasy I think was my secondary one, but of course that name's been used a lot and it was like, okay, that's going to be hard to differentiate. Even in the Bay Area, there's like Speakeasy Brewing Company, which is like a huge company. So it's like, I don't want to butt heads with them on SEO or whatever, or geographic stuff.
Zach:
So there was a lot of other ones and there's funny stories about our logo as well, where we kept trying to have like a mascot and a persona into like some sort of animal that would communicate Squadcast to people. So Alex and I are both ocean nerds. I used to work at the California Coastal Commission. He is a saltwater aquarium nerd and a half. I don't know how else you'd say it. He collects rare coral. He sells rare coral online. Most of the rare coral websites that sell online, Alex has built. He's a huge influencer in that little microcosm of the internet. And we kept wanting to who create this octopus animal mascot.
Zach:
We came up with this name Mictopus and we're trying to create this thing and I'll save the punchline for offline, but it did not work out well. I'll put it that way. So the microphone logo that Alex came up with was so very rigorous process and hard fought because we had a lot of those high standards.
TJ Bonaventura:
I think StudioPod should get a mascot. Julian, what do you think?
Julian Lewis:
Yeah, I mean and we have the Panda.
TJ Bonaventura:
We do have the StudioPod Panda. Yeah. We'll have to go with that.
Zach:
I'll be honest with you. As somebody who by trade, I'm not a designer, I do enjoy thinking creatively and trying to do things creatively. I actually do not hate the octopus, the name I don't like, but I just like with all the tentacles and like bringing something together, I don't know. I actually do. I like it.
Rock:
Yeah. That's what we're going for.
TJ Bonaventura:
I mean, you guys have a much more interesting story than how StudioPod name came about. It was just a girl I was dating said, "You should call it StudioPod." I'm like, "Done." All right. Great.
Zach:
Much more efficient than the amount of hours we spent talking about should it be Squad should it be cast? Yeah, it was all over the place. That was one of the things that we validated really, really clear validation at that same event, a podcast movement. Everybody loved our logo. Everybody loved our name. Everybody loved our branding and our colors and Alex probably I know for a fact he felt like a rockstar because I don't think he had designed a brand for himself that landed so well within a community all at once. I think that was an achievement unlocked for him.
Julian Lewis:
Yeah. I mean, Alex has been great. We've had an opportunity to work with him on the report that we put together for the webinar. I mean, he's been awesome to work with.
Zach:
Alex is a Jack of all trades. He is a unique individual and has the experience to back it up. I cannot say enough good things about Alex. So thank you, Alex.
Julian Lewis:
Yeah, thank you, Alex. And so we've had a chance to work with Alex on the Remote Podcasting Stats or RPS as you're coining it, and then we had our webinar, the State of Remote Podcasting that we recently did and he and I got to collaborate on design of the actual content around it. But we definitely want to talk about that and where you see that report going. And just for people to know, you guys sit on a lot of valuable data in terms of how people are putting together a remote podcast, what equipment they're using, whether it be headphones, a microphone, how often they're actual really in a session when the recording. How much of that time is actually recording time, as well as what time of day that people are recording. So tell us a little bit about that report and we're happy to add additional colors since we partnered with you on it.
Zach:
Well, we're grateful for that. Having a partner on it certainly was a catalyst for us actually bringing it to life. So thank you both and it came to life beautifully. So that was a big, big deal for us, so thank you. It was not our idea. It was again, Harry Duran, our founding advisor. It was his idea. So thank you, Harry. But it was a long time ago that he first of through that out there and it was before I think we were even thinking about our data as a valuable asset. I'll pause there because a lot of startups come to that same conclusion and they sell it for a profit. It's a revenue source to sell people's data, consumer data, whatever it is.
Zach:
We never wanted to do that. We wanted to make it valuable to everybody and open it up to the podcast community. And that's where I think Harry came up with the idea of, well, like let's establish an industry data report. There are other industry data reports like Edison's Infinite Dial Report, or Libson. Every year Rob Walch produces a presentation at the different conferences on the State of Podcasting, I think is what he calls it. I always am a big fan of those reports, but that title's a bit of a stretch in my opinion. That's half true. It is the state of podcast distribution and consumption, but these events that we're at are for creators producing content, which is upstream from distribution and consumption.
Zach:
So what happens before? It's like the audio just magically appears on podcast feeds and people to it. That's an incomplete picture in my estimation. So Rob, if you're listening, thank you for listening and we should collaborate on an actual full state of podcasting report, but we felt like there was a huge opportunity, the other side of the coin, so to speak. As you said, we have a lot of interesting data and we use that data internally to make decisions and we generally are open about it.
Zach:
I think like James Cridland with Podnews and the founder of Alitu, Colin Gray, the podcast host had this Twitter back and forth about people using speakers versus headphones to record their podcasts. And we were like, "We actually have that data. Let's like bring some measured qualitative data to this conversation where typically it's just anecdotal." Just back and forth like, no, I think it's this or that or whatever. And we actually have at scale data for people actually producing their podcast.
Zach:
So that was our first step was, "Hey, James and Colin and everybody in this Twitter debate, here's a chart of our actual data from the last couple months." And it took like an hour to put together or whatever, but we felt like that was the first step. And then we started talking with you both and saw an opportunity to actually create this report and bring it to life with the 2019 box around the whole thing. That's what we did. We brought that to life in the Remote Podcast Stats Report. And for the first time, it's an industry first turns out and then we wanted to have a webinar, not just put a PDF out on the internet and we wanted to bring that to life and have a conversation around it. And that's what we did about a week ago with the state of remote podcasting webinar. So thank you again for being a big part of that.
TJ Bonaventura:
Yeah. We were happy to support. And a lot of that goes to Julian for owning it from the StudioPod side of things. And the thing that I found most interesting about the report, there's two different things. The first thing that caught my eye was the time of which podcasters were recording their podcast. I could not get over this. It turns out that most podcasters are recording between the time of 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM during the day, no matter where they're at locally. I did not foresee that coming whatsoever, especially for us who were creating a podcast and helping the curious scrappy podcaster. I thought this would be more of a side hustle type gig. Turns out necessarily the case.
TJ Bonaventura:
The other was the equipment being used. Now, obviously we have a studio here with what we'd like to consider the top of line equipment, but-
Rock:
It is.
TJ Bonaventura:
Thank you. I found that certain equipment that was being used by potential clients and other podcasts weren't the best. So I was into understanding and wrap my mind around why they chose certain equipment. And we can go ahead and talk about it, particularly the Blue Yeti, as an example, I'm sure many of our listeners here have looked and researched or even bought a Blue Yeti. Oftentimes we had a client right now, dog patch advisors that coming out with a new podcast. By the time this comes out, it will be released. It's called Ground Truth. Shout out to them. It's a great podcast. Everyone should check it out.
TJ Bonaventura:
Anyways, one of the hosts decided to buy a Blue Yeti because when they went to Best Buy or one of these larger department stores that was recommended to them by one of the associates. And that blows my mind because for anyone out there, Blue Yeti is a very cool looking device. No doubt about it. Their branding is really nice and they do a really good job of that. However, from a functional standpoint, not the greatest tool to use. So I think having this webinar ultimately validates that the knowledge of having a highly produced podcast or high quality podcast is important, but the education isn't there because Blue Yeti is not a cheap mic.
TJ Bonaventura:
The ATR2100s that you guys are using right now, which by the way, we should mention that this podcast is, we're using Squadcast is I think cheaper than a Blue Yeti, but the quality is significantly much better and it's also a USB mic. So it's like how can we educate the people out there to use the right equipment, to ultimately allow them to create the highest quality podcast possible?
Julian Lewis:
Yeah, and I want to tie together two things, one thing that you said TJ, with something that Zach said in terms of, if we just send out the PDF, they would've seen that the Blue Yeti was the most used mic and people would've taken that as Bible and then they probably would've gone and purchased it, but the conversation that we had around it and the conversation that was happening in the chat people were able to educate one another about like why you should be using another mic.
Julian Lewis:
I also want to say going back to our conversation about the name Squadcast and the potential Octopus, the Blue Yeti has this beautiful packaging with a Yeti, an actual Yeti. And so like that's appealing and honestly, that was my first mic. Then I got the Snowball because I thought I was progressing in the Yeti family before meeting TJ and realizing like, maybe I should just get this ATR2100, which is what I have at home now. And then the one other thing that I want to touch on in terms of the time in which people are recording. So you touched on like when they're actually doing it and I mentioned a little bit earlier in terms of when they go into a session on Squadcast, the percentage of time they're actually recording versus maybe being in the green room or spending time getting acclimated after the recording.
Julian Lewis:
For us, when somebody comes into the studio, we say, get there early, greet your guests, get them a drink, sit in this room that we're still trying to name, but I'm going to call it the living room for now and start to have a conversation before you step into the studio and hit record. And that same behavior is happening on the platform whereby a third of the time people are recording and the rest of it, they're either getting acclimated with their guest or debriefing from the conversation, which was had, which I thought was very interesting.
Zach:
Yeah, those are both insights that we weren't necessarily aware of either. So we're learning from this data at the same time and that was one of the first leading indicators that this would probably be valuable to our industry partners, our peer companies, every podcaster and not just keep it internal and use it to build stuff or whatever. We can use it for both and the community can learn from it as well. That's why we felt that we should bring into life. I'm grateful that we did. I agree with both of the things that you said, and then the one for me, that's near and dear to my heart is people recording with headphones versus speakers. It's not obvious to many podcasters or their guests, how headphones act the quality of their audio.
Zach:
They think quality audio, what's recording my voice is actually my microphone. Why would headphones or speakers matter at all? And that's agreeably something that's not obvious. To your point, Julian, we got to have a conversation around that as well. I think it's something that is absolutely that. It's an opportunity to educate around these are the trends that we see. This is the best practice. There are alternatives that are actually better. And headphones are a simple solution to keep your quality high with your audio.
TJ Bonaventura:
I want to make a statement right here on the pod podcast with Squadcast as our guest, everybody should be using headphones. Whether you're in a studio, whether you're using Squadcast, whether you're using a Zoom recorder by yourself, you should always have headphones. It allows you to manage your gain, your volume, how to make adjustments as necessary. Please, please, everybody use headphones. It will allow you to even the most novice podcaster out there, understand how your levels are coming in and how your editing team can ultimately make the changes necessary or yourself. It's always easier to edit loudness down. You can never make quiet podcasts louder without having a little bit of distortion.
Julian Lewis:
And if you wear hats like me, I have options for you. I'm not wearing a hat right now. So I have over your headphones on, but I have some good in recommendations as well.
Zach:
For somebody like Rock and I, we're on podcasts quite a lot these days and no argument. They're not the most comfortable thing to wear. They don't look cool, really. I don't know unless you're like Dr. Dre or something like that, but it's not a fashion statement to wear headphones. I mean, I guess it can be these days. So thanks Apple, but there are actual quality benefits that come from it like you're seeing TJ and if you're remote, it even is more so because you have sound coming out of the speakers. So you can actually have this dialogue with your guest and headphones prevent any echo and feedback.
Zach:
We've all experienced holding up a microphone to a speaker and hearing that ringing back and forth. You don't want that to show up in your audio and you don't want a software solution to that problem either because it degrades the quality. So a simple solution is to wear headphones. And these days, because smartphone have been around for like a decade, everybody has headphones, like pretty much everybody has headphones or go to Walgreens you can get like a pair for like $2 or something like that.
Zach:
So that is surprising to see so many people using speakers as their output device in our data. Even though we do everything we can to educate podcasters, I think that this data report is that next in that evolution of taking the data that we see and using it for educational purposes around quality, why it matters and how you can actually improve your quality with simple things. And then, yeah, the time of day is a very interesting one to us. One from a support perspective, cause we care deeply about support and have a dedicated support team on Squadcast, but also because yeah, you would expect it to be nights and weekends, but the podcast industry has been growing up.
Zach:
There are more and more people who are professional, whether that's their podcast as their product or they have another product and their podcast helps get people to their product is the one we see more often, but I think that that's surprising to us as well. And then yeah, the networking benefits of roughly one third of the time spent connected to have a conversation. Only one third of that is spent actually recording. So the other two thirds, one third up front, one third at the end are spent networking and connecting and building these deeper connections with people. And that's where I think that that can actually impact how much time you schedule into your podcast. Give yourself more time. Give yourself more networking potential.
Zach:
It can always be shorter. You can always finish early and that's even great because you have this new time in your calendar you didn't have before. But I think book ending your interview with actual time to connect as real humans off the is a secret superpower of podcasting that I think when else are you going to talk to that author? When else are you going to talk to that industry influencer? So actually build those deep connections.
TJ Bonaventura:
I want to switch gears for a second and ask you Rock, since you started, you've become a consumer, now you've immersed yourself as a subject matter expert from a Squadcast perspective on remote podcasting. What have you seen the biggest change in the industry or how do you see it morphing over the past three and a half years that you've started this to where we're at now and where eventually you see the industry going?
Rock:
Yeah, well I think just hearing you guys talking about that webinar that we had, I think a lot of what it boils down to is something we realized early on, but maybe we were just too new in the game and too new to podcasting to really realize it. But it's something that the, the folks at rebel based media and Mark Asquith with Captivate, who we talked about earlier, they do really well is that our work as servicing podcasters is doing what we directly do with Squadcast. It's helping people record their podcast remotely with StudioPod. It's helping people produce dope podcasts if we had to put it into a few words. But also in addition to that to really get the full benefit of what we're trying to help them with, there's all this other educational stuff that we have to help people out with as far as podcasting.
Rock:
So that's why we got to tell them to wear headphones or what mic to use. I mean, Zach pointed this out to me maybe within, after a year we were into Squadcast was like the cool thing about podcast is not necessarily that they podcast, it's that they have something else that makes them special or unique and they use podcasting as that vehicle to like connect with people. The great part about that is that's what makes it so dynamic and have so many different personalities and people. But I think that's also the downside is like these people aren't familiar with audio or familiar with technology by nature, usually.
Rock:
Maybe a little bit more willing to try new things than the complete person who's still using the flip phone or the razor or whatever. God bless you if you're out there, but there's still so much education that needs to be done. It's really been pretty interesting, I think. And we're seeing it even more now, ever since the shelter in place. Just more people that want to start a podcast, maybe they want to document what they're going through. Maybe they want to connect with a family member and document that too.
Rock:
There's just so many new people to podcasting and just recording remotely in general too. So again, that was always our hypothesis is that this intersection of podcasting and people wanting to collaborate remotely would be Squadcast's ultimate opportunity. But we did not know how many new people would be coming to this space or how much our work would involve, like a lot of educational stuff. I think that's what got me the biggest buzz after the webinar was feeling like people got that information from that webinar. That we were making them all better as podcasters. We were making podcasting better almost.
Rock:
So maybe that's what was so exciting about that report, because at first it's like, if you just read it and I think you might have said this on air or you definitely said it off air, if it wasn't on air Julian and was like, if you just read through the report or just hand it to them, there's one way to read that and interpret that, but then there's the way that you can really get behind it and know like, "Hey, there's actually this like little invisible war going on, where all the veterans in podcasting think you're a total new if you have a Blue Yeti and here's why."
Rock:
We got to unpack that a little bit, but it's because there's just so many new folks to the space and it's still... That's why just a couple of folks like us can just come in there and be super nervous because we know we don't know anything or we know enough, but it just doesn't feel like that. That imposter syndrome that seems like everybody seems to suffer from to some degree. You can still come in there and still be somebody and connect with people is because everybody has come from that in a way. So it's interesting because it's what makes it special and awesome, but it's also what fills up our day, at least ours. Right Zach?
Zach:
Yeah. And one other thing that I'll add, I completely agree with that is we've also noticed a listener taste of quality changing. There's a more of a dialogue going on around quality of audio whereas before it was like, it's a miracle we have audio on the internet at all let alone is high quality. So I think that that's been one of the things that is an indicator to us of, of course, we're out here trying to make quality podcasts accessible to everybody. You shouldn't have to work at NPR to sound awesome. You can do that with your guests from anywhere in the world. NPR does as well.
Zach:
So it's one of the things that we've seen changing is around the conversation of it used to just be like, well, it's good enough. It's amazing. We could do it at all. And now it is, well, how do we do it and preserve the quality and do it remotely with people who have never done this before and aren't professional podcasters? That's really where I'm tremendously grateful that we can be part of that conversation and actually help podcasting evolve in this way.
Julian Lewis:
Before we wrap up, the one question that I want to ask the two of you. So for a lot of people, Squadcast has solved the problem. But I guess my question for the two of you is where are you in terms of solving that problem that you sought out to solve?
Zach:
So we're always looking for opportunities to improve the quality of both the experience while recording on Squadcast, but also the recordings that we're capturing together on Squadcast. So if we can think of those as two independent things, that's helpful. So the experience of the conversation that you're are having on Squadcast is something that we plan to enhance through a collaboration with our friends at Dolby. We are bringing 3D specialized audio to the conversation that we're having like video does today to make the conversation feel and flow more naturally like you would have in real life.
Zach:
And that's one effort. Another effort is the audio we record on Squadcast can further be enhanced with the post-production mastering capabilities that Dolby brings to life. Things like background noise reduction and loudness normalization can all be push button within Squadcast to further save time in post-production. Those two things should go quite a long ways towards improving the experience on Squadcast. And then beyond that, we plan to add video recording to the platform the same rigorous quality standards that we hold today for audio.
Zach:
We will be applying those to video in the near future here with a locally recorded 1080P video for everybody in the conversation, upload it in the background progressively so you get that same level of reliability with automatic backups and all the things that we do with audio today, we'll be bringing that to life with video.
TJ Bonaventura:
That's super exciting. I know a lot of people have been asking for that for a long time and I know when you're creating a company, especially a technology company, even though you have aspirations there's baby steps, you got to take. So it's exciting that you guys are there, exciting about the partnership with Dolby. You guys are doing some really great stuff. I know Julian wants to ask his final question. This is how we end every podcast.
Julian Lewis:
Exactly. So what advice would you have for the curious scrappy podcaster?
Rock:
Man, I would say it's one of the things that we see get discussed a lot in the various meetups that we go to or the events that we go to is like, people get really hung up on the equipment or the services, or pretty much everything other than just like just starting the thing. It's just here to do it. You should just do it and you are going to get a lot better over time. But the equipment is not going to get you any better in the way that just learning and starting and putting yourself out there. And again, like leveraging off of the community because the community understands what it's like to be in your shoes so well that they will help you more than any mic or headphones will.
Rock:
That stuff is important. A microphone is definitely going to make you sound better, but it's not worth getting hung up over and it's definitely not worth spending more than 100 bucks, but you can definitely spend less and be okay. And so I think that's the most common thing. I mean we have a product that we would love to sell you and help you with your podcast, but none of that stuff needs to get in the way of just starting and then everything else will come there. And there's so many different ways that you can figure out all the other... The tech and the hardware, but just starting the show and not getting overwhelmed by so much of the other stuff.
Zach:
To further expand on that, keep going, push through and show up. I think that's one of the things that a lot of times we tell our startup story, a lot of it is just showing up. It's amazing how much of that actually is a factor. So pod fade this term in our community is something that I am hopeful that we can overcome at some point. And for sure start, look for and expect and hold yourself to higher standards and look forward to getting better. And that's one of the things that can keep you going is not just the next guest or the next number of listeners or whatever, but do it for yourself, but do it for your audience.
Zach:
Build that connection with your audience and they're the ones who actually benefit from your stories and your quality and your mic choice. Through that lens of what's best for my audience and my listeners, everything else follows organically from there. So like Rock said, just get off to a solid start. Don't overthink it, just start and look for ways to get better.
Julian Lewis:
Awesome. This has been great, really appreciate y'all coming on and joining us.
Zach:
We're grateful to be on your show. Thank you for having us. We hope we've added value for your listeners. You can find us at squadcast.fm. I'm zach__moreno on socials. Come to podcast events and meetups. They're accessible and all over the place now or if you can't find one, start one. There's a lot of great resources out there for that. The benefits of the community are tremendous. So thank you to the podcast community. And to help share our thanks, we have the PodOn coupon code. So P-O-D-O-N. When you check out at Squadcast, that'll get you $10 off your first month, which is depending on what plan you choose will be your first month free or half off your first month, or however you want to slice it and we're really grateful we can help you with your remote interviews.
Julian Lewis:
Thank you.
TJ Bonaventura:
Awesome. Thanks guys.
TJ Bonaventura:
Every episode of the PodOn Podcast is produced and edited by StudioPod Media. For more information about our work and our clients go to studiopodsf.com.
Julian Lewis:
Shout out to Gary Oakland for the Fire track.
TJ Bonaventura:
Gary O.