56: Using HelloCast to Achieve an Organized Podcast Workflow with Brandon Hull
Brandon Hull is the co-founder of HelloCast, a podcast planning and workflow solution that helps podcasters fall back in love with producing their podcast. He's also the host and producer of Freelance to Founder, a podcast featuring one-time freelancers who have scaled their businesses to be much bigger than themselves.
In this episode, Brandon talks about his 14-year journey with podcasting, the personal frustrations that led him to co-create HelloCast, how HelloCast helps podcasters fall back in love with podcasting by helping them stay organized, the upcoming features to the platform that he hadn't planned on revealing this soon, why he says HelloCast isn't for everyone, who HelloCast is for, and more!
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Transcript
Welcome to podcasting for coaches. I'm Britany Felix and I'm a podcast launch consultant who specializes in helping coaches and consultants utilize the power of podcasting as a way to build brand awareness and generate new leads for their business. I realize not every new coach or consultant can afford to hire someone to help launch their show. So I created this podcast as a way to guide you through the process of launching and utilizing your very own podcast to help you grow your business and reach a new audience of adoring followers and potential clients. If you're ready to get your voice and podcast out into the world, head over to podcasting for coaches.com to learn more. Brandon Hall is the co founder of Hello cast, a podcast planning and workflow solution that helps podcasters fall back in love with producing their podcast. He's also the host and producer of freelance founder, a podcast featuring one time freelancers who have scaled their businesses to be much bigger than themselves. Right. And thank you so much for being on the show.
01:06
Brittany, I'm delighted to be on thank you so much for having me.
01:09
I am super excited to chat with you. We spoke a few weeks ago where you gave me a really in depth look, you know, with Hello cast. We're obviously going to talk about that today. But to start off, let's give everyone a little bit of an introduction to you. Besides the formal one I just read and let us know how you got into podcasting and how you got to where you are now.
01:27
Well, it hasn't been continuous. But it does go way back in time, the very first podcast, my first introduction to podcasting was actually in 2005, I ran a podcast channel or a network within the pod dango platform, if you've ever heard of that, they didn't exist, or they didn't they didn't survive the first wave of podcasting. But that's when I first got started. I ran a podcast channel there and had four or five contributors on that channel. And I've had two podcasts since then over the course of time. So it's been it goes back a long, long ways. Britany.
01:59
Right. And I'm kind of curious, we don't have a lot of time. But really quickly, how do you go from not having a podcast to like working as part of this channel or this network with multiple shows?
02:10
I hate the word hustle. I'm not gonna say that. So I will not I just invoke that word. But the short version of it is, I saw many years ago that podcasting was going to be a thing. And I was extremely drawn to it. My dad I discovered, used to have 33 albums, you know, the old mess of albums, used to have albums that taught him how to do radio ads, and so forth. And I think I've just been fascinated with the idea of, of that kind of on microphone work. And I genuinely felt like this is where it's gonna go, I wanted to do it. I knew I didn't have a credible voice in the world that I wanted to podcast about. So I reached out to four or five different consultants and said, Hey, you want a podcast with me all? I'll do all the admin work, and you just have to show up and your talent, your content, and they were on board with it back then.
02:54
That's awesome. Well, I'm imagine that gave you a crash course and everything podcasting, and all the different ways you can handle things. And you have probably experienced quite a bit, even even coming back to it later, like over the years as you get an out of it and come back into it. Because it just changes so rapidly. Yeah,
03:11
I've noticed that 14 years hasn't changed the fact that everybody's still consumed with gear, and equipment and that sort of thing. And that's the first question that people ask about is, you know, what equipment should I have? I'm on a budget, I want to go free or 50 bucks or something like that, right. But that aside, not a whole lot has changed with what people feel like they need or what they should be focusing on, you know, after they get the gear all squared away. And that's what's been kind of cool about this, as I see it, come back around to see how excited people are about it and getting their voices out there no matter what, either niche, or I like to call it a subdivision, whatever, you know, locale or subdivision or group that they represent. It's just been really cool to see how it's come back around. And everybody loves the idea of it now. Right? Yeah, I
03:51
mean, it has a huge resurgence, which I think a lot of people aren't necessarily familiar with, they think podcasting like just started, it just came into being you know, a few years ago. And that is so not the case you were in in 2005. And there have been people who have been in this podcast space, it just hasn't been mainstream. And now it's finally getting to be words mainstream. It's mentioned in movies, there's TV shows about it. Granted, they didn't stay around very long, but they got at least got green lighted. popular enough for that now.
04:20
Yeah. That's good. And I don't say bad, but that's good. And it comes with some additional consequences. Whether you want to call them bad or they're just consequences is up for interpretation. But the number of celebrities like well known names, celebrities, YouTubers, and people that are bringing audiences with them to podcasting are shining a light on it in ways that I don't wanna say it never would have been, but would have never gone mainstream if you didn't have some major names come into the space. Having said that, they dominate the charts. They're the ones that are often recommended in top 10 lists and the people who created the industry I feel like are I don't want to say they're gonna be sort of thrown by the wayside but they I don't know if they get the credit that they deserve you now because the mainstream group are going to be thinking about the DAC shepherds of the world, in the NFL, in the world, and they're not going to be thinking about some people that that did this a long time ago, and they had a niche podcast or something. And that's a shame. But it's also means we'll all get a little bit more visibility from their work,
05:16
right, it is a trade off, we're not going to get listed in like you said, you know, these listicles, these top 10 articles that people put out, and we probably won't be ever featured, again, in, you know, Apple's featured sections or whatnot, or whatever. But we should see massive growth and just listenership in general, which also means maybe more, you know, ad dollars and revenue from that. So it's a trade off for sure. Absolutely. Completely agree. Yep. So let's go ahead and talk about Hello cast. How did that come to be? I know that you have a freelance founder. And it's been going for a couple of years now. But where does Hello cast fit into everything?
05:52
Yep. So I've been running freelance founder for about two and a half years. And it was a show that for two of those years was a lot of moving parts. It was a narrative podcast. That was I don't even dare compare it to like how I built this, but it was it was a narrated version of my interviews with people who had started with nothing and built a business to be bigger than themselves. And because there were so many pieces of the puzzle, it was a lot for me to stay on top of the massive number of guests, I wanted to, to invite to beyond the production status of numerous episodes at any given moment, and a co producer and a VA who needed to be in the loop because they had tasks that they did to help produce the show. And honestly, it was a ton of stuff to stay on top of that we tried, you know, like Google Sheets, we tried Trello, I eventually built a really cool customized air table to manage all of it. And I just wanted everything in one place from contact info to even my attachments, like their headshots for the episode post, like all of that. And I felt like even though podcasting is a small thing, there's got to be a tool that exists to do this. There wasn't one, I had a developer friend that I approached about doing it about building something as a minimally viable product. And he was on board with it. So it was really I guess it's they say what scratch your own itch or something. It was honestly something that felt like something like this should exist, I would use it probably three or four times a week. And I do and so far I I've gotten some pretty good feedback. So I'm pretty happy with where we're headed so far.
07:22
Yeah, I know that I'm impressed with it when you gave me a you know, a full walkthrough of it. But for those listening who are not familiar with it, and they haven't seen it yet, do you mind explaining just very briefly like what it is and what purpose it serves what people can do with it, those kinds of things?
07:35
Yeah, sure. So I look at a hosting company, like a Lipson, or a pod bean, or those, I look at those types of companies as responsible for getting your episode published and making it visible to all of your listeners. They care about what happens in the last 10th of a mile, so to speak. But what often happens with podcasters. And what causes the biggest problem with people getting disenchanted with podcasting or getting frustrated with podcasting is not that and it's also not the time on the microphone like that doesn't frustrate podcasters it's feeling like everything is too much work, either securing guests or whatever. So we wanted to create a tool where you could plan out your future episodes like looking ahead, as opposed to looking into right now publishing an episode, we wanted a tool where you could plan out what your episodes were do some show research, you could attach guests, either aspirational guests, or actually guests that you got committed, you could track all of those people almost like a contact manager, or guests where you could fill in all their social details, their contact details, and bio and all of that, and attach that to an episode which is a separate entity, you can upload any file, your backup of your recordings, all of that sort of thing, we're not a host, but we want to at least free up your hard drive. So every attachment that you have related to an episode or a guest, you can upload that into the system, it's genuinely a planning and productivity tool so that you can stay on top of all of the behind the scenes work. And hopefully feel a little more stress free, so that you can actually focus on the content of your shows,
09:03
right. And one of the features that wasn't in place when you and I did the walkthrough, but we just spoke before this interview is in place now. Because you guys are constantly working on adding things getting feedback, you are very, very, very open to what your customers want and need. And I love that. So please keep doing that. But one of the things that you mentioned that I think is going to be really beneficial, especially for the people listening to this show, is the ability to have multiple people in this one program and working on various aspects and different tasks, because that's how it is for a lot of people listening. They're the host of the show, but they like to hit it off as much as they can. So they have, you know, one, maybe two V's, they handle different aspects. They have a podcast editor, they have a social media person, a whole team behind these episodes as you did. And I think it's great that now everyone can kind of work together in this program. So do you mind talking about that feature of it a little bit and how that works?
09:56
Yep. So we didn't really have a precedent When we were creating Hello cast, like there's just nothing like this, there's tools that are productivity tools that you might share across a team and so forth. But because you have the podcaster, and a podcast and a potential collaborator, like it felt like this is new precedent we're setting. And so we're testing all kinds of things. And one of the things that we want to do allow for is a person to have, let's say, It's me, and I have one podcast, but I have two people that helped me with it. So we added the feature to allow you to add additional collaborators. That's what we call them collaborators, or additional podcasts, because we also have people like actual customers today who they don't have an admin at all. But they do have a second podcast that they're just now starting to work on. So giving them a place where they can choose between either adding an additional collaborator that you has a user account, or additional podcast was one of the first things that we wanted to add that now exists, the immediate requests we started getting from network owners, as well as editors was okay, this really doesn't work for me, if I can't go back and forth between this client and this client, or it's the network, I want to go to this show and see what the status is of their next episode versus this show. So we built that we now have a what's called a pro plan, a custom plan and allows for numerous collaborators on a single on a single podcast. And honestly, it might take a little bit of time to figure out the perfect blend of features versus the pricing over time. But for now, we've gotten some pretty good feedback on on the standard plan, especially and a lot of requests for what we call our custom plan, which is kind of aimed at network owners,
11:27
right. And so for that custom plan, because I imagine anyone listening to this who wants to check out Hello past, that's going to be the point that they're at if they're not there. Now, that's what they want to get to where they have a team of people or at least even just one person and editor helping them. How do they go about getting that particular plan or getting information about it is broken down on your website? Do they have to contact you,
11:47
they do have to contact us. So you can sign up and start using Hello cast for the basic and standard plans, like out of the gates, the custom plan is one that we want to actually have a conversation with somebody because we want it to be more of a white glove experience, even though it's not a white glove price. And so you have to click a button that says you're requesting it, and then I will enable it for a person that they can then upgrade to that plan. So today, you can sign up for a standard plan. Even if it's just a trial account, you can request custom plan and I can check a box behind the scenes and give it to you.
12:15
Awesome. Okay. So for the podcaster, who is listening to this, and they already have a system in place that they feel works, but maybe it's not perfect. You know, I showed you how I do everything in air table, which I love. And that's that's my system I've been using for a while, but it's not perfect. And I know people that use Trello. I know people that use Asana, and all of those, they all have their weird little quirks, but they're working. So it's kind of as if, you know, it's like it's not perfect, but it works. Why would they want to switch over to Hello cast?
12:45
Yep, that's a great question. We get asked that a lot, especially on Trello. But any of the tools that you mentioned, especially air table, because you can customize it so perfectly, you know, in a million different ways. So we do get asked that quite a bit. And the answer I come back to is much like you could write down your to do list, you know, on a legal pad or a piece of paper or even use the reminders app on your iPhone. People like Asana exist for a reason, too. It's a dedicated task list and project management tool, for example, and you can customize it, it's designed to be something a tool for people to have a little bit more sophisticated needs. In our case, with Hello cast, we wanted to provide something that is dedicated for show producers of podcasts, and people who want something out of the box that works. No customization is necessary. You can tweak some things if you choose. But you don't have to like it works immediately. You don't have to figure out how you want to use Google sheets or figure out how you want to use air table. It's all there. And the other part that I would mention is it's literally all in one app, the fact that you have a full blown contact manager, as well as your episode planner, you know, with all the training resources that we provide in a library as well. There's really nothing like that, you know, that's dedicated for podcaster in that way.
13:50
Yeah, and I will concur. So I am still using air table even after going through this read through. But that's just because I'm an Aries and ridiculously stubborn. So I will probably say with my presence. Well,
14:00
we know that too. Like we as a productivity tool. Like that's the biggest challenge every productivity tool maker has is you're offering a solution that does require people to learn a new system, even if they're not totally married to the current system, like they do have to learn a new process. Right,
14:16
right. But what I really liked about Halo cast was You're right, it is set up for you. So if you're coming into this and you have no clue necessarily what that process should even be yet. Hello cast is amazing for that. And with Asana, I love it for like big scale projects. Like when I do a launch with a client. We do the entire launch process in Asana, because it is great for just checking off those tasks. But it's not great for ongoing work where the tasks are the same every week. And it's also not great for just keeping track of information. It's task management, that's what it is. It's not necessarily contact store or you know, management or you know, storage of files for like your artwork or your audio files, anything like that. So there are definitely drawbacks to each system. And I think for anybody who doesn't have a system in place or who isn't in line With their current system, I would have zero hesitation, recommending Hello cast to them as the perfect place to get started. Real nice,
15:07
nice, thank you. And you know, so on that point, we're not going to be for everyone either, you know, if you have bootstrapped everything with regard to your podcast, and the only thing that you've really spend money on in an ongoing way is your actual host, that we may not be the best solution because we don't have a freemium plan, and you have to pay for the service. And so we kind of look at, like, if you're taking this seriously, and you don't want it to cause a stress for you, like you got into it, because you wanted it to be fun. That's why, you know, like you said, We want people to fall back in love with it, right? fall back in love of doing their podcast again, because it's, it can be cumbersome. If that matters to you, then we're like literally a couple copies a month, you know, right?
15:48
Yeah, well, and so I have a variety, I have these new coaches or consultants who have kind of just started their business, maybe they're in the first year or two. So they're not necessarily super profitable, but they are looking to start a podcast as part of that. So maybe they need to go the bootstrap way. And air table is great for that. It's free. But I also have more experienced coaches and consultants, they've been in business three years, five years, 10 years, they do have the money to invest back into their business and back into their podcast. And I could see this being perfect for that group of people.
16:17
Yep. 100 green goodness, I better myself.
16:21
So when can we expect some new features? I know, people haven't checked it out yet. So everything's gonna be new to them when they first go on there. But I know that you're constantly working on improving it. So when can we expect some new features? What does that look like? Do you have a plan for how often you're going to roll things out? Basically, the future of Hello cast?
16:38
Yeah, I'm gonna get in so much trouble for doing this. But I'm going to mention two features that we have pledged to finish during this quarter q2, of this calendar year. One of them is a lightweight version of calendly. Probably the most often requested feature we have is I want to be able to schedule my guests not just do the scheduling in Hello cast, but I want to be able to send a link, like calendly allows or acuity scheduling, I think in your case, I want to be able to send a link to my guests today, select an available time that works within my available times as well. Once they've selected that time, I get a notification. And now I've got that guest booked. That's a feature that we're going to include. And I'm going to again admit it's a lightweight version of that we can't be everything right. And then the other one is checklists. We also know that while we do have statuses, customizable statuses of a podcast in the system, people want to be able to have like checklists like these are the five things I need to do. At this stage in the podcast planning and being able to allow people to add their own five items, or 10 items, whatever the item is, before they call it an episode complete. And before they click Publish with their their hosts. allowing people to be able to do that is also an anyone for us as well.
17:45
And so for someone who has a customizable plan, because they have multiple collaborators, they have a team of people working on it, are they going to be allowed to have their own separate checklist? So
17:53
yep, every podcast will have its own checklist, they either could be used across multiple podcasts, or you can have a separate checklist that you follow for this podcast versus that podcast. Because you might have a different like, if you're an editor, you might have a different client, you work with them in a different way you have a different arrangement with them, and what you'll do or what you won't do for them. So checklist has to be a little bit different. So yeah, those will be completely customizable.
18:15
Okay, so like if somebody is handling the show themselves, and they have a VA who does all of the like guest management, and then they have another one who creates social media posts, those kinds of things. Can they assign? How would I guess how would that look in terms of and No, you haven't created it yet? So I change, but what are you thinking that will look like in terms of how various people can do various tasks?
18:36
Yep. So we have a couple of calls scheduled with other podcasters and editors that we're trying to get some more feedback on that type of thing, because we realize that some people's needs are more sophisticated than others. And being able to say these three tasks are going to be assigned in this collaborator who has an account with Hello cast, right? You know, they need to be able to farm those tasks out to what another user versus just having a checklist of tasks in general, I don't know exactly where we'll net on the first version of that. But I know that that's one of the issues that that at least a couple of our current customers are telling us that they want to be able to do, they won't be able to say, you know, Joe does these four tasks, and Brittany does these five tasks. And I don't want you to be able to do those five tasks. That's Brittany's email. So we have to scroll through a little bit of that. But we're eager to get started on because we know that that would really be a difference maker for Hello cast, we feel.
19:22
Yeah, and I absolutely would agree. That is one of my favorite things about something like Asana is that you can assign it to certain people. But you can I mean, you can see what's assigned to everyone all at one time. If you're you know, the top person that that pyramid, but you can also sort it if you're not the top person, then you just want to see your tasks. And I think that's a great way that they handle that. Not to say it needs to be replicated or anything you guys can have your own take on it. But I love that you're at least thinking about this and talking about it. And that's one thing I want to point out in case the people listening didn't catch on you say that you are talking with people about these things. And I love that you do that you don't just go off of your experience and Well, here's what we think people need you actually find out what people need and what they want and how they want it to work.
20:03
That's been the most fun honestly of this, whether it's a live chat on the site or reaching out to people that I know or people I just respect, and I've never actually worked with them, they're not even customers of ours. That's been a fun part of this is just forming relationships with podcasters. And making sure we're building a tool that is totally dedicated to their needs. Knowing Of course, no two podcasters are exactly alike, necessarily, but building something that a podcaster could step in and say, okay, and this makes sense. This makes sense. This looks like somebody who gets podcasting made it that matters to me
20:31
a lot. Right? Yeah, for sure. Well, I want to wrap things up here with one final question. And that is for the bass podcaster, who is not necessarily the most organized, they're feeling a little bit overwhelmed. What would be the first piece of advice that you could give them? And obviously, we want them to check out Hello cast, but just from your own experience of feeling overwhelmed? What has really helped you kind of feel like you have a handle on everything?
20:57
Boy, that's a big one. I like to think that a good podcaster is not just somebody who's good on a microphone. And I don't mean somebody who's starting off with episode one or 1000. I mean, it doesn't matter what your experience level is, because there's talented people out there who have never podcasted before but I think it's important for somebody to if they want to be good at this to become a student of podcasting as well to like literally listen to the shows and dissect them and identify what separates one from the other so that you can find a place to offer something new to the market. You know, there's a million interview shows out there right now. And there's a million shows with that literally. But there's this kind of shows where it's two guys in the basement having a beer and talking about the beer that they're having, you know, for their for the first 20 minutes of the episode. And I'm not saying that you shouldn't do that. I'm just suggesting that if you really want to be good at this, and you really want to talk about, you know, earning sponsorships or something like that down the road, you do need to find a place that you fit in that your show is genuinely entertaining, and unique. And being a student of the industry, I think is the first place I would tell them to start, study good shows what makes them good. Perfect. Well, Brandon,
22:04
thank you so much for being on the show today.
22:05
Thank you for having me on Brittany.
22:09
Before I wrap up this episode, I wanted to do a quick little outro touching on a few things. First is that I want to make it really clear that at the time of this recording, I am not an affiliate for Halo cast, I don't earn any kind of a commission if you sign up. None of those things. I just really like this product. I really like Brandon and I really like the company, and how they are really, really, really focused on giving their customers exactly what they want. And this amazing service that they are providing for podcasters. If you are on a super tight budget, and you just cannot afford Hello cast, I do recommend using air table that's what I use. And I actually talked about air table in Episode 41 of this podcast, which is tips and tools to make your podcast workflow more efficient. So if you want to check that out, you can but if you do have a little bit of room in your budget and you are looking for a solution to help keep you super organized with your podcast. Check out Hello cast, it really I think could be a great solution for many of you. There will be a link to Hello cast as well as their social medias in the show notes for this episode, and you can find those by going to podcasting for coaches.com click on the podcast I'm in the main menu and go to episode number 56. Thank you so much for joining me this week. And I of course want you to come back next week where we are going to dive into how to deal with podcast tech overwhelm. This is a topic that has been asked for and I'm finally going to cover it for you guys. Have a fantastic week. And that wraps up another episode of podcasting for coaches. If you'd like to connect with me further, you can do so on Instagram at podcasting for coaches. If you know it's time to finally get serious about starting your podcast, go to podcasting for coaches comm and click on the work with me tab in the main menu to learn more about my one on one launch consultation packages or my self paced online course. And I look forward to seeing the podcast that you create and put out into the world.