SaaSy as F**k Episode 1 — A podcast is born!
Cliché, Shmiché
There are a lot of cliché’s thrown around about millennials these days.
You know the ones. They eat avocado on toast, drink oat milk lattes, choose pets over children, and they all have their own podcast.
Well, call me a rebel, because I don’t drink oat milk lattes.
Anymore. I switched to black coffee a few weeks back.
A few months ago (back when I was chugging oat milk lattes like they were going out of fashion), I could have argued that I didn’t have a podcast. But that’s not possible anymore.
How easy would it be to tempt you into a career as a podcast producer?
This was the WhatsApp message I sent to my friend Alex on the 3rd of May this year. It was the first message I’d sent him in over two months, and we’d never discussed making a podcast previously.
He immediately said yes, because he’s a fucking legend!
It’s worth mentioning that Alex is an extraordinarily talented audio producer who had previously produced some music for me, so there was some logic to my decision to ask him. Even if it did come somewhat out of the blue.
The reason I had decided to start a podcast was that I had recently started freelance copywriting, specialising in startups and SaaS. The podcast was an excuse to talk to interesting people from all across the SaaS industry, and embed myself more into what I was writing about.
But first, we needed someone to talk to.
I posted all over the place looking for someone willing to come on a podcast they had no information about beyond “SaaS guests wanted”.
There were a couple of weeks where no-one replied, but finally it happened. GoSquared CEO James Gill replied to my post on Indie Hackers, saying he’d be more than happy to come on our podcast.
In the words of Janine from Ghostbusters, WE GOT ONE!
Baptism by Fire
We booked in a time to interview James, we sent a Zoom invite, we even did a trial run to make sure the tech was working a couple days before.
Then Alex had to pull out of the recording due to circumstances out of his control.
Talking to people, I can do. Talking to people while making sure microphone levels were good, things were recording, staying within a time limit etc? Nope.
I was shitting myself.
James is a busy man (he does run a successful SaaS company, after all), so I didn’t want to reschedule last minute, but I had this voice in the back of my head telling me I was absolutely fucked.
I was sat in the Zoom call panicking. I kept starting and stopping the recording and checking it uploaded correctly. I practiced saying “Hello”, as if I hadn’t been doing it for nearly 3 and a half decades already.
I needn’t have worried. As soon as James joined the call, I felt at ease. Not least because James is the nicest man you’re likely to meet.
He was friendly, chatty, open, and humble. It was a great chat!
We discussed how he appeared on a magazine cover in his early twenties, how he came to found his company GoSquared, the importance in hiring the right people, and much more.
Predictably, I recommend you listen to the interview. Not for my own ego, but because there is so much to learn from what James has to say.
Even after we stopped recording, we kept chatting, laughing and having a great time.
The Magic Macrophone
By some miracle, Alex was happy with the audio quality too. Despite the fact that in the moment I completely forgot to even think about things like audio levels.
It’s especially miraculous because James didn’t seem to be using a microphone at all.
By that I mean that Alex and I both use USB condenser microphones that help us to record high-quality audio for the podcast.
James was just stood in his parents house, talking at his Macbook. No headphones, no external microphone, nothing.
We’re still baffled by that to this day, but we’re mostly just happy that episode one is done. Alex did his magic and turned it into a professional quality podcast, and we released the episode.
We’ve had some really positive feedback on the podcast so far, and we had a great time doing it.
If you haven’t listened to it yet, I hope you do and enjoy it. And if you’ve already listened and enjoyed it, stick around.
We’re just getting started!
