Chris Hutchins: evaluation

Transcript context

…Talking about the time investment, how long does it take you per episode, hours-wise? And then how long did it take you to kind of prep launch? And this has evolved a bit as the podcast has generated enough revenue to hire other people. But in general, I would probably spend, depending on how well I knew the topic or the person, anywhere from two to 10 hours preparing for an interview. If someone wrote a book at the beginning I was like, I got to read the whole book, I got to take notes. Then I was like, "Well, if I read the whole book and take notes, then I kind of know everything. So I'm going to read a few chapters." I wanted to listen to everyone on different interviews. Some people are really hard, some people have only talked about one topic and you want to get them on another topic. I interviewed Carrie Walsh Jennings, who's a three time gold medalist at the Olympics for beach volleyball. And I listened to every interview she'd ever done because only 3% of each interview was about not volleyball stuff. And I was like, "Well, I don't want to talk about volleyball, I want to talk about performance and how you can train." She won a gold medal while she was pregnant. This is a serious level of physical and mental preparedness that I wanted to dig into. So that's one big piece of it. After it's done, then it really depends on the style of show. If you have this NPR style editing where it's very narrative driven, it could take you a long time to go through the editing. For me with interview style, I think it takes me about an hour to go back and listen to it at a little, speed up pace. And then go in and be like, "Ah, this thing wasn't worth keeping in. Or I mean, we had to repeat something and let's cut that out, or this person stumbled on their words." Fortunately there's some amazing software. Now I use a piece of software called Descript, which basically imports all the audio, transcribes it to, let's call it like 95% accuracy. And then you can edit the podcast like you would edit a Google Doc. It's crazy. You're just like, "Oh, let's delete all the ums, control F, um. Ignore all ums." And then you listen through it and you're like, "Oh, that um, was really necessary, let's put it back in." And little edits like that. But that tool makes the editing process really easy. From the get-go, I had an audio engineer who would actually mix and master and add in the music and that kind of stuff. So I would say each guest is probably at least 10 hours plus probably two or three hours of coordination and outreach to three or four people that you reach out to in order to get the one. Now I've since, hired someone who helps do a little bit of research. So they might go listen to two or three episodes, read a couple chapters of book and put up some notes with links to those various places. So I can then take that and take my time from 10 hours to three hours. I'll share my experience briefly. It's a little different, which is really interesting to hear your experience. So I launched the complete opposite of your advice, which is I just launched big with like, "I will do this forever. This is my new thing. I have 40 guests lined up, here's who they're going to be." And I think it's partly because I already went through that initial period of uncertainty, whether I can keep this up with a newsletter, which you said eight to nine months. Which is exactly how long it took me to do the newsletter every week to get to a point where I'm like, "Yes, I can keep this up for years. Let's start adding a paid plan." So I think I was just more confident that I can keep at it. And then I actually planned to monetize from the beginning. I think partly again, because I had the newsletter already. And I will say, so I don't edit that myself. I have a production group that is a game changer. So you can save a lot of time and I don't know if you've gone to a producer or anything, but I feel like most people eventually do.…

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