You Cannot Iterate From a Blank Page
Four frameworks to get your podcast started today (and one very good reason to stop waiting)
It’s been almost a decade since Solid Gold focused entirely on producing podcasts and audiobooks. In that time, the single greatest barrier delaying clients from starting their podcast was never budget. Never equipment. Never talent.
It was overthinking.
Analysis paralysis.
The blank page.
The internal monologue that goes: what should it sound like, who’s the audience, what’s the format, what if it’s not good enough, what if nobody listens, what if—
Stop. We need to talk.
When you look at what podcasting has become, Rogan, Cooper, Bartlett, Robbins, Huberman, Galloway, Ferriss — it’s easy to feel like the table is already set and there’s no seat left for you. These are cultural phenomena with production budgets, dedicated teams, and years of compounding audience growth behind them.
Here’s what they all have in common: they started somewhere. Usually badly. Always imperfectly.
“Don’t let good get in the way of done.”
Nobody knows who said it first. Everybody knows it’s true.
The question that changes everything
Before you touch a microphone, you need to answer one question honestly:
Is your podcast a media offering, or a strategic communications tool?
These are not the same thing, and confusing them is where most businesses go wrong.
A media podcast is a business in itself. You’re building an audience that you eventually monetise - through advertising, sponsorship, or subscription. The metrics that matter are audience size, segmentation, and engagement rates. Everything is optimised around CPM - cost per thousand (milia is Latin for thousand) listeners. You will become obsessed with the numbers, because the numbers are the product.
This is a legitimate model. It’s also not what most businesses actually need.
Most of our clients already have a business and a business plan. They are not looking to start a new media company. What they want - what they really want - is to execute their existing plan more effectively. To reach the right people, deepen the right relationships, demonstrate the right expertise, and move the right conversations forward.
For these businesses, a podcast isn’t a media play. It’s an adrenaline injection… a strategic tool that makes things happen better, cheaper, differently, easier, or faster than they would without it.
The microphone is in service of the business plan. Not the other way around.
Why format paralysis is a trap
Here’s where the overthinking really takes hold.
You know you need to speak to different people at different stages of their journey with you. A prospect has different questions to a new client. A new client has different needs to a long-term partner. Someone considering your category for the first time needs something completely different to someone who’s already decided and just needs to choose between you and a competitor.
No single podcast format serves all of these people. And that realisation - the moment you understand the multiplicity of what you need to communicate - is exactly where most businesses grind to a halt.
How do we serve all these different conversations without a consistent format?
The answer is: you don’t need a consistent format. You need a clear purpose for each episode. And you need to start.
Four frameworks that make starting easy
These aren’t formats. They’re lenses. Ways of asking “what is this episode actually for?” before you hit record. Between them, they cover almost every communication need a business has.
1) FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions
These are the questions you answer every single day. In emails. In meetings. On calls. In WhatsApps at 9pm from clients who should probably know this by now.
Make a podcast episode that answers each one.
Put it on your FAQ page. Link to it in your support emails. Send it to the next person who asks. The episode does the work so you don’t have to — repeatedly, consistently, at scale, without you in the room.
FAQ episodes can be solo or conversational, long or short. What matters is that they’re specific. One question, one answer, done.
2) It Depends
A reliable signal that you should be making a podcast episode is when the answer to a question begins with “it depends.”
“How much life insurance do I need?” It depends.
“Should I buy a diesel or electric truck?” It depends.
“Is now a good time to expand?” It depends.
These episodes don’t set out to answer the question. They set out to reveal the factors, the considerations, the decision-making process that should inform the answer. They demonstrate that you understand the complexity — and that you’re the right person to navigate it with your client.
These episodes usually involve one or more guests, and the conversation naturally leads wherever the expertise takes it.
3) Deep Dive
This is the one that sounds most like your favourite business podcast. You bring in a guest, go deep on their area of expertise, and let the conversation demonstrate knowledge, competence, and credibility in a corner of your industry.
The unspoken message to the listener: you can trust us. We know this world. We’ve got this.
Deep dives are not about explaining everything to everyone. They’re about going further than anyone expects, on a topic that matters to a very specific person.
Stop trying to make episodes that everyone will listen to.
That’s the media model’s job. Your job is the opposite. Make episodes that one specific person needs, and make them exactly right for that person. Narrow the niche. Then narrow it again. The more specific the episode, the more valuable it is to the exact person it’s for.
4) AMA: Ask Me Anything
An AMA episode is one of the most efficient formats in podcasting. Take three to five questions (from emails, social comments, or voice notes from listeners) and answer them briefly and directly. Bring in co-host specialists to help answer these too if they’re around.
These are not deep dives. They’re not comprehensive. They’re conversational, accessible, and fast. They demonstrate responsiveness, personality, expertise, and culture all at once.
They also do something quietly useful: a question that deserves a short answer in an AMA will often reveal that it deserves a much longer answer in a Deep Dive. AMAs are a content pipeline in disguise.
In nine out of ten cases we’ll recommend you start your podcast with an AMA episode. The tenth time, we’ll think about it for a while — and then recommend you start with an AMA episode.*
Start. Just start.
The frameworks above exist for one reason: to give you something to push against. You cannot iterate from a blank page. But you can iterate from a rough first episode. And then a slightly better second one. And then a third one where you finally find your voice and wonder what you were so worried about.
The biggest podcasts in the world are not better than yours because they were born perfect. They’re bigger because they started earlier and kept going.
Your move.
Solid Gold Podcasts & Audiobooks has been helping businesses find their voice — and use it strategically — for nearly a decade. If you’re ready to start, let’s talk.
* With apologies to Darrel Dawson for repurposing his golf advice on when to chip and when to putt.