I started a podcast. Yes, you read that correctly, I did in fact start a podcast.
As an avid podcast listener, this decision to create my very own podcast was a long time coming. I love podcasts so much; I probably listen to at least three daily.
However, something that has always held me back from this endeavour is that I felt I had literally nothing new, important, or valuable to contribute to this space. In many ways, the “lifestyle” podcast genre that I tend to listen to the most is a heavily saturated division of the podcast world. Without a creative angle or large previous following, I felt for the time being that any podcast I would create in this division would fall kinda flat. I’m definitely the kind of person who doesn’t do things halfway, but I’m also kind of lazy; so if I’m going to independently start a project, it had better be one with an ounce of potential.
Cut to early June, we’re in the middle of a global pandemic, I had just BINGED through BBC’s Normal People and was properly obsessed. My Uncle introduced me to the show at the very beginning of the Canadian release, so by the time I finished watching the show, only four of the twelve episodes of the mini-series had been released in Canada (thank you Watchseries). At this time, Normal People was the hottest thing in the United Kingdom and was gaining rapid momentum on Hulu in the United States as well; yet, it was still quite new in Canada.
One night while falling asleep (yes, like everyone else, this is when I come up with my best ideas), I was thinking back to the after-show style podcast I used to listen to that discussed The Handmaid’s Tale. This is when it hit me… A PODCAST DISCUSSING NORMAL PEOPLE. Not to toot my own horn, but this genuinely sounded like such an incredible idea.
But before getting too excited, I did a search on my podcast apps to see if this content had become overly saturated as well. To my excitement, there was really only one other prominent podcast that had covered Normal People, and they were a BBC podcast that covered all sorts of different popular things, so I really wasn’t too worried. That same night I downloaded the Anchor podcast app (an app which helps you create and launch your own podcast independently), and created the page and branding for The Normal People Podcast.
The next logical step was to find my podcast co-host. Immediately, my friend Rachel Fiset came to mind, as she is also majoring in journalism, and the very first time we met we talked about doing a podcast together (lol). I texted her that night and eagerly awaited her response.
I was slightly nervous as she had never actually seen or even heard of the show. However, I thought this could be a cool dynamic and spin for the podcast as one of us would come to the show as a huge fan, already bingeing through the entire series and reading the book, and the other one would come to the show with completely fresh eyes.
The next morning I awoke to her response — she was in!
Now that Rachel was on board, our next move was figuring out how to use the technology that was required to create a podcast during a pandemic. This step was slightly daunting at first and took a LOT of time, but we eventually figured it all out. We settled upon Zoom to record and Garageband to edit our episodes.
The very first thing we recorded was our podcast intro. This turned out so well and sounded way more professional than we actually were; it even surprised us. This then inspired me to create all our podcast social media, which has been very helpful in growing the podcast and communicating with our audience since the podcast’s launch.
Everything seemed to be moving in the right direction. I was so excited and had a lot of faith in our project.
Then we were hit with a bit of a rude awakening when recording what we thought would be our first episode. I’m not gonna sugar coat it, but the podcast sounded truly awful. This can be attributed to several different factors, but most importantly, we hadn’t done any structuring or planning of the episode, so we were very much all over the place.
Let me say it again; we sounded awful.
I was left feeling extremely discouraged after that first try at recording. It was at this moment that I also realized that if the podcast was to be any good, it was going to be a lot more work than I had anticipated.
Since then, Rachel and I have devised a plan for turning out our podcast episodes. First, we watch the episodes individually and take a significant amount of notes (feels very reminiscent of lecture notetaking). Our next step is to meet over FaceTime and structure our episode in a shared Google doc (we normally get extremely sidetracked during these meetings and they last much longer than needed). The third step is where we actually record the podcast over Zoom. Then I edit the podcast, which is the most time-consuming part of the whole process and at times makes me want to run into oncoming traffic. Lastly, the most rewarding part of the whole process, I get to post the podcast and do all the marketing for circulating the new episode. Weekly, the whole process takes around eight hours.
I must say, starting a podcast has been extremely time-consuming and a lot of work. However, I love The Normal People TV show, so it’s been a great outlet to talk about my obsession for the show, without driving the people in my life up a wall. Overall, I would say that it’s been an extremely gratifying experience to see the podcast grow and most notably when listeners interact with us on social media.
You can check out The Normal People Podcast on Apple and Spotify!