Starting a podcast in 2025

I started a podcast earlier this year. Novel, I know.

Podcasting feels like an established medium at this point. More on par with radio than TikTok. At least personally, my whole Overcast feed is practically identical to the shows that I listened to back in 2020. It objectively feels like we're late to the party. By all measures, Richard and I are showing up when people are already putting away the beer cans.

Back in the early days of TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube, there were more viewers trying to watch than content to serve them. This provided platform-level whitespace: you could get a good baseline of impressions by posting almost anything. It was these platforms that made people famous. Newly minted podcasts in 2026 seem to only thrive when the hosts already have a following. It's the people that make their podcasts famous and not the other way around.

Friends and family are eager to give encouragement. Just do it for fun, they say, or maybe record like no one's ever going to listen. Yes - we have a blast. But if we're being honest, of course we want people to listen to it. Making a show is a ton of work¹. If I wanted to hang out with Richard solo, I'd call him up on a walk around town instead of setting up my lighting rig and getting on Riverside.

Then why the hell are we doing this?

My take, however naive, is we're providing a different kind of good. If we were selling widgets² we'd be totally screwed. But in the marketplace of AI ideas, there's a lot of hype, FOMO, and misaligned incentives. We're trying our best to stay sober and go against the grain.

Second, we don't actually know where we are on the adoption curve for podcasts. If coding agents turn software engineers into something closer to managers than individual contributors, I can imagine there will be some newfound interest in tuning into a podcast while you wait for your PR.³ Asynchronous work can certainly open up more time for leisure.

I admit I have no idea which way the tide will break. You can't really time the social media market any more than you can time the stock market. Maybe you'll be early to a platform that becomes the next YouTube. Or maybe you'll become spectacular at making native content for Clubhouse. Or YikYak. Or Bluesky. For every one victor there are thousands in the dustbin of the app store.

I think you're actually better off focusing on the diversity of your offering, rather than market timing. We're focusing on that alongside production quality. If you're going to do it, might as well give it the best shot that you can: a regular recording schedule, high-quality equipment, etc. Because again - a phone call is always going to be way easier if we're just doing it for us.

If we fail, my hope is it's not for lack of trying.

Footnotes

1. Great shows take tons of work. I'm not going to pretend we're at that level. Even mediocre shows take a ton of work too. Shout out to the 3 star podcasts out there — I see your hustle. ↩

2. i.e., true crime ↩

3. I'm starting to notice an early cohort of my Stanford classmates getting into content production. Some of that is producing content for its own sake, chasing the influencer dream. But a lot of it is more incremental - increasing deal flow for their firm, finding some new clients, or just exercising some creative muscle. ↩