Cutting-Edge Podcasting: How AI is Changing the Game with w/Josh Nielsen

By Dan Sanchez · Episode published March 22, 2024

I recently sat down with Josh Nielsen, founder of Zencastr, to talk about how AI is revolutionizing podcast production. What started as a technical discussion about podcast tools quickly evolved into a fascinating conversation about the future of content…

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I’m passionate about finding tools that save time while improving quality. Zencastr has become my go-to for podcast production, and after speaking with Josh, I understand why it’s changing the game.

The Genesis of a Podcasting Revolution

Josh didn’t start out to build a podcasting platform. Back in 2013, he was actually building a tool for electronic musicians to collaborate online. That project didn’t work out, but it laid the groundwork for what would become Zencastr.

“As we were working on that and as that project kind of petered out, the browsers kept launching more and more features,” Josh explained. “When I started, you couldn’t access the microphone from a website. Then they launched this getUserMedia API.”

The turning point came when someone suggested focusing on podcasters instead of musicians. Josh initially shelved the idea, but a few years later – with a baby on the way – he revisited it.

When he interviewed podcasters, he found they were struggling with recording quality. They were either using Skype call recorders (which only recorded one side with decent quality) or asking guests to record themselves with Audacity (which was too complicated for most guests).

Many podcasters had simply stopped having guests because the technical hurdles were too high. Josh saw an opportunity to solve this problem with browser-based recording.

The Multi-Tool Problem in Podcasting

What struck me most about our conversation was how fragmented podcast production used to be – and still is for many creators:

“When we started Zencastr, people were using an average of like 6 or 7 different tools, spending 10 hours per episode sometimes jumping between all these services.”

I experienced this firsthand at Sweet Fish Media, where I was the Director of Audience Growth. Turning around a single podcast episode took our team two weeks! The workflow was ridiculous:

Producers had to download recordings from platforms like Riverside
Set up the project timeline for editing
Writers had to listen to the entire episode to write headlines and show notes
Find timestamps for important segments
Send clip instructions to video editors
Audio engineers had to clean up the audio
All assets had to be assembled in a Google folder and sent to clients
Clients still had to manually post everything

No wonder so many companies abandon their podcasting efforts – it was simply too much work!

How AI Changed Everything

What fascinated me was how early Zencastr was in embracing AI. Josh revealed they’ve had their own machine learning team for 3-4 years, primarily focused on cost-effective transcription.

“If we were doing all of our transcriptions through Google’s API, it would cost us like $200,000 a month. But with our own technology, we’re spending maybe $15-20 a month on transcriptions. And we’re only about 1% word error rate off of Google.”

This investment in AI transcription was just the beginning. The team quickly realized that once you have accurate transcripts, you can start understanding what people are talking about in the podcast – identifying topic transitions, interesting segments, and funny moments.

This led to features like automatic clip detection and social media publishing – capabilities that once required an entire production team.

The Content Marketing Revolution

What I find most exciting is how tools like Zencastr are enabling a revolution in content marketing. The traditional approach to B2B marketing often relies heavily on webinars, which are notoriously inefficient:

You have to schedule them in advance
Promote them before the content is even finalized
Hope people show up at the scheduled time
And then figure out how to repurpose the content afterward

Podcasting flips this model on its head. You create the content first through natural conversation, then distribute it across channels. The promotion happens after you already have the valuable content in hand.

What’s even more powerful is that with the right tools, you can transform a single podcast recording into dozens of content pieces:

The full episode for podcast platforms
A YouTube version for video consumers
Short clips for social media
Blog posts from the transcript
Newsletter content summarizing key points
Quotes and insights for social posts

As Josh pointed out, this is the same approach that major content creators like Jason Calacanis were using years ago – but they needed teams of 10+ people to execute it. Now, a single person can do the same with the right tools.

Beyond Podcasting: Content Creation for Everyone

What struck me in our conversation was how Josh views the future of the platform. He doesn’t see Zencastr as just a podcasting tool, but as a content marketing platform.

“We’re thinking in terms of more just content marketers,” he explained. “The less time you can make it take for them to do [content creation], the more people will be able to create.”

This mindset explains why features like AI clip detection and social media scheduling are so important. They’re addressing what Gary Vaynerchuk and others have been preaching for years: content at scale across multiple platforms is the key to growth.

Josh summarized the challenge perfectly: “Gary will say it’s really simple. You just need to post multiple times a day across 8 to 10 different platforms. And I was like, man, that sounds so simple but hard.”

That’s exactly what tools like Zencastr are solving – making the “simple but hard” into “simple and doable.”

Creative Use Cases That Surprised Me

One thing I love about talking to founders is discovering unexpected use cases for their products. Josh shared a few that I found fascinating:

Podcasting as a Sales Channel

More companies are using podcasts to connect with potential clients. It’s much easier to get someone to join your podcast as a “thought leader” than to take a sales call. You get to have a genuine conversation, build a relationship, and create valuable content – all while opening the door to future business conversations.

At Sweet Fish, we called this “content-based networking,” and it was incredibly effective.

Audiobook Creation

Authors are using podcasting platforms to release their books chapter by chapter as audio content. This not only serves as a promotion for the book but also reaches audiences who prefer audio content over reading.

Niche Content

From sleep podcasts that deliberately read old public domain content in a soothing voice to fitness podcasts with specialized beats for running – the format is incredibly versatile for serving specific audience needs.

The Future of Content Creation

What excites me most is how much easier content creation is becoming. What used to take a team of people 2 weeks can now be done by one person in 90 minutes. Between Zencastr for recording, editing and distribution, and Cast Magic for content generation, the barriers to entry have never been lower.

Josh sees this as just the beginning: “If we can really just make it super duper quick and easy – functionally as easy as posting on Instagram and adding some filters – that’s when I think we’re really gonna see a huge explosion in the number of active podcasts out there.”

I couldn’t agree more. We’re entering an era where content creation is being democratized in the same way social media democratized publishing. The difference is that longer-form content like podcasts allows for deeper connections and more meaningful conversations than social posts ever could.

For marketers who embrace these tools, the opportunity is enormous. While everyone else is still struggling with traditional content creation processes, you can be creating more content, with better quality, in less time – and building authentic connections with your audience along the way.

If you’re interested in learning more about implementing AI marketing tools like Zencastr in your content strategy, I’d love to hear about your experiences and challenges.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can AI help podcast production?

AI can help with prep, transcripts, show notes, summaries, clips, blog posts, newsletters, social posts, and follow-up workflows.

What should stay human in an AI podcast workflow?

The host should own the point of view, guest relationship, questions, strategy, editorial judgment, and final approval.

Can AI repurpose podcast content?

Yes. AI is especially useful for turning one episode into multiple assets for YouTube, blogs, LinkedIn, email, and short-form social channels.

How do you keep AI podcast content authentic?

Start with original recordings and real expertise, then use AI to adapt and distribute the source material instead of inventing the core message.

Who benefits from AI podcast workflows?

Consultants, creators, founders, coaches, agencies, and small teams benefit because AI helps them publish more consistently without a large production staff.

Welcome back to the AI driven marketer.

I'm Dan Sanchez. My friends call me Dan

Chez and today I'm excited to talk to

Josh Neilson, the founder of Zencaster.

So Josh, welcome to your own platform

since we're recording on Zencaster.

Thanks Dan. Thanks happy to be here.

Thank you for the invite.

So if you're listening to this show,

you've already heard me talk about

Zencaster as it's one of the primary

tools that I'm using to speed up my

production workflow in podcasting and

I've loved this platform. I've written

heavily about it. But I wanted to go

back and get a little bit deeper with

Josh on the backstory behind this

platform. It's actually one I don't

know.

How AI's how you got started in AI Josh

and then use cases for this platform.

But to go back to the beginning how did

this start for you in creating

Zencaster?

So Zencaster was sort of born out of the

ashes of a previous

attempt at making a company.

I was building

man, this is like

2013-ish.

I was building a platform to help

electronic musicians collaborate

together online and like swap files back

and forth.

You could upload just like the drum

track, the synth track, the bassline or

whatever and then people could

could collaborate with you and remix you

and that sort of a thing.

That didn't work out in the end for many

many reasons, but it got me working with

audio in the browser trying to figure

out what the capabilities were there.

And as we were working on that and as

that

project kind of petered out

the browsers kept launching more and

more features like when I started you

couldn't for instance access the

microphone from a from a web from a

website.

Then they launched this get user media

API. Now you can grab audio right from

the

microphone and all that. And as I was

out pitching that previous company

somebody along the line said hey I don't

know about musicians, but podcasters

have this problem with I think he just

said like sharing audio back and forth.

And

I was like

yeah, that's cool, but like

I'm really excited about this music

thing and you know, I'm a hobbyist

musician and that was like you know,

felt like that that was back in the cash

in on your passion era and I thought

like okay you got to stick with you

know, this and but I'd always listen to

podcasts. I just never been involved on

the creation side. So the idea just

stuck in my head.

parked on that for like two or three

years.

And then found out I had a baby on the

way and I was like okay, I need to like

get serious about like building

something with long-term value here. So

I came back to that idea.

Interviewed some podcasters found out

sure enough

they were using Skype call recorders at

the time. Yep. What year was this?

20 this would be like 2014-ish

2015.

Yeah. Yeah, I remember Skype call

recording was the thing for podcasting.

I think that was the only thing unless

you were going in person with like a

task cam and two microphones. That was

like the only those are the two options

you had back then. People were doing

that too, but what I found is like

as you know, if you record a Skype call,

it only records on one end. So you could

sound great, but you're fine, but your

guest is going to at best sound highly

compressed at worst dropped out robotic

sounding.

And when I was talking to people they

were like Skype sucks can't use that. So

people were using audacity. They were

trying to train their guests to open

audacity and record export an MP3 send

it and they're like we just stopped

having guests because it was too much of

a hassle. And the quality was poor and I

was like well that's a shame and I was

like you know, now we can do this with

the browser. I think.

Let me try and so

I started building a prototype.

It really wasn't truly possible when I

started to build it but it became

possible as I was building it. I just

didn't realize that

and I got lucky

because the browsers were all launching

these new features. So

that was sort of the genesis of the

company and how I got tipped onto the

podcasting space. There's a lot more

there we could dig into, but that's sort

of the the in a nutshell.

So when did it actually become usable?

When did you launch launch into it where

you actually had customers paying for

Zencaster?

So I think I broke ground on the code in

like 2014 and then in 2015

about I thought it was going to take me

like six weeks. It took me like six

months to like launch a very

duct tape together like open prototype

of it and

I ran it as a free service for almost

two years

because as I mentioned this is very

nascent technology. The browsers were

like changing their APIs all the time.

It wasn't very stable in that regard.

And so I wanted to wait for that to

mature up a little bit. I also

had I think the same sort of fear of

charging cuz you know,

I was excited that I built something

that people were using you know, there

was thousands of people using it while I

was still in a free

plan. I built lots of other things that

nobody cared about and so I was just

stoked on that. I was contracting on the

side.

And so I had

basically I was doing like

you know, four to six hours a day

consulting for other companies and then

spend the rest of the time on Zencaster.

Live pretty lean and so I had basically

infinite runway if you want to call it

that to kind of figure it out. And then

you know

on the side here I during this I'd moved

to Australia and then New Zealand. My

wife's from there. Had the baby there.

Then we moved to Thailand. And that's

where we launched that's where I

actually kicked the launched the paid

plans almost two years into the project.

And yeah within the it was very strong

product market fit. This is a problem

everybody had. It was pretty easy to get

new users. I'd just go on Twitter search

for people that were complaining about

Skype screwing up their podcast or like

defending themselves against their

audience cuz their audience was

attacking them about their the quality

of the show.

Yeah, even big shows were doing it. I

remember Michael Hyatt big podcast was

using Skype for his guests because that

was the only way to do it at the time.

Yep. Yeah. early podcasting days. I

remember I mean podcasting had its

second wave around 2015 through

today, right? So it got it got big. I

remember that's how Sweetfish really

became big or B2B growth when I was

hosting that show. I mean James started

that around 2015-2016 back when

podcasting was really making its its

comeback.

Yeah, and that was the other thing is

when I started Zencaster podcasting was

not a hot market. Like it was this weird

thing on the side of social media that

just kind of wouldn't die and like had

all these diehards that were in it. A

lot of them coming from like radio and

things like that and then

as you saw like

and this was as I was building it then

like Serial and This American Life were

the two that I really remember being

those milestone shows where they were

like wow, we're getting a million

downloads an episode and we're making

money with ads and

that turned a lot of heads. Suddenly

Spotify and pretty much all the major

players announced some sort of

podcasting initiative around that time.

And that's when

A we realized we kind of had a tiger by

the tail and B we realized we probably

needed to raise some money at some point

cuz you've got billion and trillion

dollar companies jumping into jumping

into the mix.

Yeah. Cuz I certainly remember I mean I

I think the first podcast I downloaded

was in 2007.

Back when you know, you're holding those

original iPods and they added it into

the iPod just to bring more value to the

iPod back then.

Yeah.

like manager tools

and was a podcast that's still around

like that taught me my 101 on how to be

a good manager. Still a fantastic

podcast that I feel like no one's ever

heard of, but they've up there huge.

One of the original OGs in the business

world in podcast.

And then uh there's this awesome podcast

called Podrunner and all he does is come

up with really fast beats timed beats

per minute for running so that you can

you know, run at 160 beats per minute.

It really is cool. And it's fun.

Interesting and he does that as a

podcast. Yeah, he's been doing it. I

dude I've been listening to it since at

least 2007. I think he probably started

only a few years before that because

podcasting wasn't a thing until 2004. I

think it was first podcast launched, you

know.

Wow.

Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't heard

that one. You did that's something you'd

think would be more like an app or

something, but it's fun to see how

creative people get with it. I think he

tried an app, but you know, people get

in the groove and then code is difficult

to deal with and there's upkeep on it.

That would have been a great paid app

for him, but he ends up just getting

sponsors for it and probably is a

lifestyle business for him. I'm sure

he's been coasting on that cuz he still

uploads. So I'm still listening to new

Podrunner tracks and he's been doing it

for

you know, almost 20 years now.

That's awesome. We'll have to check it

out.

Great little beats that are different

speeds that you can pick.

Yeah.

So podcasting's been around. You caught

those second wave that podcasting came

through when it was more than just a few

few people and churches which was a big

market for podcast. Yeah, it still is I

think. Podcast early on.

Big use case there. But you caught the

second wave and started riding it in.

When did AI start becoming getting on

your radar?

Did build into the platform?

that's something so I

started the company solo but then

trying to think exactly when this

happened.

Eventually I brought on a co-founder.

A few years in, Adrian Lopez, awesome

guy. He was a friend of mine from

earlier startups that I'd worked at in

LA.

And he had gone to startup after startup

and became part of

the founding team of a company called

Flipagram and they got bought by

ByteDance and turned into what became

TikTok.

And he stayed on for a little while

after that transition, went to Beijing

and all that, but then

moved on and

when I brought him onto the team, you

know,

uh, A, I just needed help growing the

team, managing the team, um, but also he

had been at a company

product that was, um, user generated

content. They became the fastest growing

app in the App Store ever through

product led product led growth and got

acquired and he has he he had already

experienced what I saw as the next step

in the road for Zencaster, so it made a

lot of sense in that regard. But

you know, when he came onto the team, he

was like

I was very product focused, like talk to

the users, they'll tell you what you

want, uh, you build the build that into

the product, rinse and repeat.

But he is sort of, uh,

bigger thinker, I suppose, on and he'd

already see cuz he'd been experienced in

in these companies already on knowing

the value of like information and

understanding the data

giving you the ability to like

connect users with similar that talk

about similar topics or connect

advertisers with users and

building a network out of out of the out

of the user base, basically.

And

to do that, we needed transcripts. You

can't understand what's in a podcast

easily unless you have it transcribed.

It's very expensive to transcribe

content back then even now.

And so we've had for,

I mean, three or four years now our own

machine learning team.

And

the initial goal was we just need to be

able to cost effectively transcribe the

content. A, it's just something that

realize you guys had your own

transcription engine.

Yeah, and that's one of our major

advantages because if we were doing all

of our transcriptions

through Google's API, it would cost us

Yeah.

200 grand. It's a ton cuz podcasts are

freaking long. Yeah. So

social clips. We're long it's long form.

Yeah, like we I haven't checked

recently, but there was a time when it

was

uh,

you know, we're probably spending,

uh, you know, 15, 20 grand a month on

the transcriptions, uh, but it would be

like 200 grand a month if we were using

Google's API. And we're like about 1%

word error rate off of Google, so it's

pretty dang close.

But a lot more cost effective. And so

that was the

our initial inroad into like

productizing AI into the company. But

then comes now that you've got the

transcripts, let's topic model it. Let's

start to understand

what people are talking about, when are

the transitions between topics,

what is potentially an interesting

topic, what's a funny top what what's a

funny section and those sorts of things.

Because

as you know, podcasters

especially when they're just getting

started, they're trying to find their

niche, they're trying to find what hits.

And, you know, if you've got the

transcript and you've or you're serving

the content and you get a sense of

what's most interesting and then you

open that up to the users, you can then

give them analytics back about when you

talk about

you know, dogs on TikTok, that's what

really hits or digital marketing on

LinkedIn, that's what's, um,

engaging there, you know, at a on a

granular basis.

it gets real broad. I mean, there's all

sorts of fun stuff you can do with AI,

but we've been

I don't know if it's

boring. It's more it's it's sort of the

things that you would already

How do I put this?

Podcasting

is still catching up with a lot of other

mediums. So things that you just think

go part and parcel with creation like on

Twitter, I

make a tweet and people see it and I get

new audience members because people

retweet it and there's like this way for

you to find an audience or TikTok, I

just get suggested to the right people

in a growing audience. That doesn't

exist in podcasting inherently on its

own. No. And It's a black box, man. Yes.

ask me being the director of audience

growth for Sweetfish and I was helping

lots of podcasts grow.

They'd ask me like, how do you grow a

podcast? I'm like, here's the hard

answer. It's really hard because you

can't grow a podcast through podcasting.

Unlike every other channel almost. Yep,

exactly.

you don't have to go outside of YouTube.

You can hack you can do YouTube just

through doing YouTube.

Right? Through search or their their

algorithm.

LinkedIn, you can go through just

through LinkedIn. Facebook, Facebook.

Instagram, Instagram. There's ways to

grow on the channel without having to

bring in outside influence.

That's not true with podcasting. You

have to bring in audience from somewhere

else.

Unless you were lucky and you caught the

wave early and you caught the downloads

needed to grow get some SEO rankings,

you know, for like B2B podcasting or B2B

marketing, which is how B2B growth grew

initially. It was just an SEO play and

people searching for B2B marketing or

B2B growth. Their podcast ranked, they

got users slowly and steadily and now

they're big enough to where they always

rank now.

Podcasting, not so much. It's about

other platforms there.

Yeah, and so a lot of what we're trying

to do in the podcasting space, if you

compare it to like other mediums, it

kind of sounds like old old or we

already know this or that sort of a

thing. But that's sort of the beauty of

it. The road map's already been built on

all these other platforms. We just got

to get podcasting up to speed and make

it simple and easy to to to create

there. I mean, when we started

Zencaster, people were using an average

of like six or seven different tools,

spending hours and I forgot what the

exact it was like 10 hours per episode

sometimes, like

you're jumping between all these

services and there was no road map. It

was like you had to figure out how to

put this tool chain together for

yourself. And so that was our main one

of our main things to just lower the

barrier of entry to creation. But then

once you do that, then you realize

that's not the only problem. Like that's

just the beginning. And then you've got

to figure out how do they how do they

actually distribute the content? And

then most importantly, how do you find

and grow the audience? And these are all

just things that have been solved in

other places already. We just need to

actually implement them into this

somewhat old kind of old style medium,

the this this weird, uh, podcasting

space.

I remember three years ago I was working

for Sweetfish and it podcasting was

complicated enough that big companies,

tech companies, smart companies were

coming to Sweetfish

to help walk them through the process or

just do it for them because there was a

none of the steps in themselves were

hard, but all together so confusing,

intimidating. It was for me and I'm

technical. I was automating the heck out

of CRMs and marketing automation

sequences, SMS, email, direct mail and

creating these awesome journeys. Still,

my first podcast Sweetfish did for me

because I didn't know how to do it. Once

I learned all the steps, I'm like, you

know, these are really simple. We did an

analysis one time. We're like, Sweetfish

was the biggest B2B podcast agency

uh, three years ago. We had 100 shows.

The next closest agency had like 44 or

something.

And we're like, you know, what what

could another competitor do that's going

to put us out of business?

And out of that brainstorm of like

what's most likely to disrupt Sweetfish,

I had a revelation three years ago. I'm

like, it's not going to be a service

industry.

It's going to be a SaaS company.

Because all these steps of making a

great podcast that we're currently doing

for customers, that would take us

usually two weeks to turn an episode

with all the assets.

All these are going to be automated.

And that's when we started

we we tried to build tech, but it's it's

really hard to be tech focused when

you're a service focused company. It's

just a different skill set and we didn't

have it. We tried. We wasted money on

it.

Now Sweetfish at that time or now now

Sweetfish has decided to go up market

and do stuff that can't be automated, it

can't be done with AI, which is good for

them. That's a smart move. I've decided

to just lean into

tech. I'm like, I'm just going to learn

how to do the tech and make the most of

it. But when I was I met you like or now

I met Zen I discovered Zencaster a year

and a half ago

at, um, it was a conference, uh, pod

podcast movement.

Year and a half ago and I knew it was

coming. I'm like, someone someone smart,

it's almost here. Some vendor is going

to figure out how to connect hosting, do

just enough editing and publishing.

Someone's going to bring it all together

cuz I could see publishing pushing back

into editing. I could see the hosting

platforms pushing into editing. I'm

like, someone's going to pull it all

together and I was walking around the

vendor space at podcast movement. And I

was literally just asking them like,

hey, can you pod can you do these three

things? And they'd be like, well,

almost. Almost. And then I got to the

Zen I got to the Zencaster booth.

They're like, we just launched the

all-in-one. I'm like,

yes.

Somebody finally did it. Because it's

such a pain to move from one platform to

another and I hate working through

Descript, which would link something of

the some of these things together, but I

hate Descript, so.

You guys were exciting and then you

hadn't even added the clips thing. The

clip the clips the automated clips came

a year later.

Yeah. Which was awesome because that was

the other that's the main

way to distribute a podcast is to turn

it into clips. And it was freaking hard.

Even with AI tools today, it's hard. You

upload it to video and video does a

great job of slicing and dicing it.

Horrible and then now you have like

what? Five, 10 clips you got to post to

four or five different platforms.

Oh, that's a social media nightmare. Now

you got to go write copy for all of them

and it's buffering. Go to Buffer. It's

still way too many steps.

Yeah, we um

you know, that kind of the clipping tool

I mean, I think the writing was already

on the wall in the market for that. Like

that's become I think the more primary

piece of content people are consuming as

opposed to full length episodes. But for

us personally, as a company, we were

like, "Hey, we need to get really good

at our social media marketing." And so I

was doing a lot of research on social

media marketing. And because it's, you

know,

it can be very cheap or free, a very

cost-effective way to to market and

grow.

But, you know, you you'd start listening

into these, you know, you end up running

into

uh like Gary Vaynerchuk content or um

I forgotten I've forgotten the other

guy.

Alex Hormozi. Yeah, Hormozi, the the the

big stacked dude. And um

you know,

really, there's a lot of fluff around

things you can do. But really, at the

end of the day, their advice is you just

need to pump out a ton of content on all

the platforms all the time. Like Gary

Vaynerchuk will say, "It's really

simple. You just need to post eight like

uh multiple times a day across eight to

10 different platforms." Or something to

that effect. And I was like, "Man, that

sounds so simple but hard." And that was

sort of the goal with the clipping tool

can we make it so that you can actually

execute on a strategy like that

while only do in like, you know, an hour

of your time once a week or something

like that. Or something very contained,

maybe a couple hours. Like if you could

do record your podcast for 30 minutes,

spend the other 30 minutes,

you know, setting up your clips, have

the AI find the clips for you, have the

AI write the summaries. Of course, you

can edit them. And then connect that all

to your social accounts and then auto

schedule them out throughout the month.

Then you've got something

approximately close to what those guys

are recommending you can do to um grow

your social media and your and your

audience a lot faster. And

yeah, so that's sort of our was our

internal

motivation for building that out as well

as those external kind of market

factors.

It's working, man. You guys have made,

in my opinion, the right bets on the

right things. Um making it easier to

record, do the minimal editing. Of

course, you can download it and do more,

which for some of my clients I do.

And then publish it. And then have it

clipped.

It's it's such a smooth system that I

can't imagine going back now because

Sweetfish man, it used to take 2 weeks

to turn an episode. And rightly so, it

was a freaking lot of steps. You cuz our

team hadn't heard the episode, the

client recorded it, we'd go grab it and

download it from Riverside. And then

what happens? Well, the producers got to

go set it up and build the timeline for

one episode for every single episode.

Remember, we're managing 100 shows.

And they're all doing like an episode,

two episodes a month or one episode a

week or something. And the writers got

to listen to it to even know what to

write for a headline for it, let alone

the show notes. Sometimes write a blog

post for it. And then create like go

through and manually like find the

timestamps for the clips to send to the

video editor who would then hand caption

the thing

based on based on the the in and out

points the writer had set. And then that

writer would write the blog post and

then it would go

to the audio engineer to clean up the

audio part, have to go separately to a

video person to clean up they're doing

YouTube.

Um and then all these assets would have

to be assembled in a Google folder, then

sent back to the client. Of which the

client still had to take the painstaking

time of like other than we'd put we'd

post the episode. But the blog post, all

the social media posts, they'd have to

post themselves.

So much work. 2 weeks

just for us to get our part, let alone

them posting it out on social, which

most of the time they freaking wouldn't.

We delivered the assets to them. We find

out they don't post it. It takes too

much time to post. Now with Zencaster,

what took Sweetfish 2 weeks

between something like Zencaster and I

use Cast Magic to come up with all the

written content,

it it it's done in 90 minutes per

episode. Like this as soon as we're done

recording this episode, I will go and

start I will click the

click a few settings, you know,

I will click render.

It will be done in

5 minutes or 10 minutes or so, however

long. And then I'll download it, put it

in Cast Magic.

And I'll probably spend a little my all

most of my time is actually going to

making thumbnails because a good

thumbnail can go pretty far.

Um if you make a good podcast cover out

of it, it makes for good YouTube

thumbnails, too. Yep. I discovered. So I

spend extra time using AI tools to make

that. Um but now the editing's kind of

done for me automatically unless I have

a big edit to make uh through Zencaster.

And then it just publishes. Cast Magic

writes all the content for me. Blog

posts, show notes, title ideas.

I mix and match a little bit, publish

it, bam. This thing's done and we're

scheduled out. It'll be scheduled out

weeks, but it'll be done within 90

minutes of when we're finished writing

or uh recording this because of just the

efficiency of the program plus the AI

tools in doing the smart stuff they do.

It's amazing.

Man, I'm glad I'm glad uh it's working

so well for you. That's definitely what

we're trying to empower. And because in

a lot of like you said with your

clients, in a lot of cases, the

difference between making it that much

easier, that much less time is the

difference between doing it and just not

doing it. It's not like a lot of people

it's not like they're just going to do

it poorly for a really long time. If

it's not working, they're going to stop,

you know? And so

if we want

to really empower podcasters and quite

frankly, now we're thinking in terms of