Manufacturing professionals, leaders and entrepreneurs talk about what it really takes to build the physical products that power our world

The Means of Production is a podcast about what it really takes to build, maintain, and scale the processes that produce the physical products that power our world. Every episode, we ask a manufacturing expert to walk us through the nuts and bolts of how they do their job. We explore how and why they got into manufacturing, dive deep into the hardest problems they've solved on production lines, and discuss their thoughts on what's broken in manufacturing today and how those things can be fixed. This podcast was started by Pashi, the YC-backed software company building the operating system for manufacturing.

I'm Siddhit Sanghavi, Pashi's US Operations Lead, and former assembly engineer at Ford Motor Company.

Our listeners are manufacturing professionals, leaders and entrepreneurs.
 

A podcast because other forms of media were not suitable for real stories from the shop floor. Those people are hardly represented in the spoken world and manufacturing is always portrayed with cold numbers. Plus, there is an urgency and stress in dealing with factory-floor challenges that really comes out when the guest is reliving it on a podcast (compared to pictures or the written word) since it is capital and speed intensive.

We started this podcast to better understand the community of people who would probably use the Pashi platform. We knew that if we listened to them, we'd get great feedback on what challenges they face and the kind of impact Pashi can drive to make their work of producing things we depend on, a little easier.

We started our podcast in late March 2021 based on our founder's idea and direction for our marketing efforts. He has his own personal podcasts and had experience setting up, hosting, editing and publishing them.

As a startup, we had no resources, this was a part time gig for me and we kept it very lean and bootstrapped and released our first episode in about a week from the day of naming it.
 

We release once a week. It takes me about an hour or so to record, probably two to edit and process, and say two more hours to distribute on our website (where we add links to the transcript) and Anchor and then write social media copy. This is excluding transcript work which is outsourced. We have an in-house writer to help with copy.

This would never normally be part of my day job (I'm an ex-manufacturing and data engineer) but then it was so I'm lucky there but many a time, guests can only speak after hours and weekends and then it feels like it's outside my day job. In a startup, this is very normal.

We practically spend nothing. Just around $200 for the initial instrument setup and the only recurring cost is the transcript (only because auto-transcript services are not great). We already have a company website so we don't have to spend on domain but we coded the webpage ourselves too and Anchor handles the rest.
 

We are quite young (only 7 episodes released) but we'd be happy to take sponsorships but we never actively looked for them.

Podcasting has benefitted us in spreading the word about Pashi, improving my own speaking, writing and listening abilities and being able to set up and run podcasts myself.
 

Hardware: Blue Yeti USB mic, regular PC (recording)

Software: Audacity (editing)

Services: Anchor, Jekyll (website), Cleanfeed (it's like Zoom but for remote podcasting), Headliner (audiograms), Canva (album art)
 

We mainly market on LinkedIn and Twitter (where we think manufacturing professionals would be). So far, word of mouth and posting to specific groups based on topic has been useful and we're happy to take suggestions. The majority of listeners are coming in from Apple (37% according to Anchor, which is owned by Spotify) and also a majority from iOS devices.
 

It's completely possible to start a podcast for dirt cheap but hard to keep quality up consistently so you have to select topics that you're genuinely curious about and not something that's just hot. Many people are genuinely shy and uncomfortable and putting them at ease greatly improves conversation quality. If you're interviewing professionals, giving them total control over what is being recorded and allowing post-record edits and changes helps them since it's easy to get into trouble for saying something their employer finds even remotely against company policy in these very sensitive times. Sound quality is number one and no one likes the sound of their own voice but that's okay.
 

For more information, visit https://pashi.com/podcast/. To know about Pashi, please visit https://pashi.com/