One thing I didn't anticipate when starting the devtools-fm podcast was the amount of tools I would have to evaluate. While choosing my editor was pretty easy (I work a Descript), all of the other tools I needed were unknown to me.
devtools-fm is mainly an interview podcast, and that requires a lot of planning and coordination with guests. How we've solved this is by setting up a discord server that we invite all potential guests too.
Once invited we create a channel named "#episode-{episode description}". We then use doodle.com to find a time that works for every participant in the episode. After we all settle on a time a Google Calendar invite is sent out to all participants.
My co-host and I live on different ends of the country, so a good remote podcasting app is a must. Our current podcast recording app we use is riverside.fm. It will record you computers audio and video locally and upload it to riverside.fm as the podcast is recording. We had a few hiccups with recording, but after getting used to it it's gone pretty well.
This app is all about background noise removal. I use it whenever I'm recording a podcast cause my dogs love to bark! Krisp's AI can remove background noise like barks to a magical degree.
This little app enables you to create virtual device out of multiple sources on your computer. You can use it to do things like play music in a zoom meeting, but what I use it for is to route audio into Krisp and remove background noise for my guests during post production. Read all about it here.
I am a huge believer in dog-fooding.
The use of a newly developed product or service by a company's staff to test it before it is made available to customers.
So I use Descript to edit my podcast. Since I'm an avid user of the product I am able to better do my job. I can easily have empathy for the user since I am one.
Read more about how I [[Podcast Production Process|produce my podcast]] and [[Podcast Editing Organization|organize my projects]] in Descript.
This is another area where I use Descript. From Descript I can publish to a few different places. I am a big fan of video podcast so I make sure to publish each podcast to our YouTube channel
Every good video needs a good Thumbnail. Since both Justin and I have experience with Figma through work we chose to use it for designing both our logo and all of our YouTube assets.
There are a lot of place you can publish a podcast. Because of the there are also a lot of apps that handle this for you and streamline the process. Instead of uploading your podcast to each platform, you use a service that does that for you.
I surveyed the market and I found that Buzzsprout was the best bang for my buck and got me on a lot of platforms. It doesn't hurt that I can export directly from Descript to Buzzsprout either! It also has some AI powered automatic mastering that helps take some work out of publishing a podcast.
Many of the podcast distribution services will also host a simple website for your podcast. But since both my co-host and I are web developers we never miss a chance to over engineer a website!
We built a Next.js powered static website hosted on Vercel. The website uses devtools-ds to mimic the look and feel of the devtools on Firefox and Chrome. Each episode post is written in MDX
The last crucial step in creating a podcast is promoting it! I don't pay for any advertisements but I have accounts set up on many platforms and post Podcast Social Clips throughout the week of interesting bits I find during my Podcast Production Process
Once I have a clip I use later.com to post to all of the platforms I'm on. With Later I can schedule posts throughout the week, and even customize clips for each platform
This is an area we could probably be better in, but it start getting costly. Currently we get analytics in a few different ways:
- Video - Just check YouTube play counts
- Podcast - We use Buzzsprout's built-in analytics
- Social - Nothing other than manually checking
- Website - Here we use plausible so we don't sell you data to google