A weekly true crime/ comedy podcast where two best friends share a glass of wine and discuss the dark side of online dating

You Should Have Ghosted is the love child born from co-hosts Lizz and Shayna’s mutual true crime obsession and Lizz’s cringy dating app adventures. The first half of a You Should Have Ghosted episode is the niche true crime segment covering only crimes that stem from online interactions and online dating. Because of that, most of the cases are more likely to be new and unheard of by listeners. Lizz and Shayna tell these stories to not only remind listeners to be vigilant while meeting people for the first time, but also to expose commonly overlooked red flags and discuss ways to stay safe. Ending the show on a lighter note- Lizz describes her weekly haul of dating app profiles, referred to as “Brofiles©“, prompting Shayna to share her opinions and critiques. Usually this triggers a few hilarious, wine-fueled tangents. Well… it’s hilarious in Lizz’s opinion, at least. It’s also when special guests would be asked to tell us all about their own wild and memorable dating stories.

We came up with You Should Have Ghosted while we were talking about how we’ve both been on dangerous or potentially life threatening dates or scenarios and how dating apps make it easier to get into situations like that. We both listen to a lot of podcasts and realized that this would be a great niche topic that is true crime based but different enough to stand out. It was also a much needed creative outlet to focus on during the seemingly never ending Covid-19 pandemic. It really just started as a way for us to voice our opinions and experiences to whoever would listen and to have an excuse to zoom every week. We really had no idea what we were doing, we recorded and published our first episode with a phone microphone, an unstable internet connection, and 10 hours of editing a 48 minute episode.

The pandemic lockdown gave us both more free time that allowed us to research, design and create our podcast relatively stress free. We already text each other 24/7 so making decisions about designing websites, choosing a host and making the original logo and intro music was actually really fun. Start up costs and funding wasn’t a real issue for us thankfully. We both work full time jobs and the only significant cost was paying for our website domain. Obviously now we’ve upgraded a few things but still it’s really affordable between the two of us since we edit and market the podcast ourselves.

We released our first episode on September 1st, 2020 and since then we have made a whopping total of 30 dollars from making an ad for our hosting platform. The amount of fun we have creating content and making friends from the indie podcast community is far more valuable than sponsorships to us.

We prepare notes and talking points and record episodes 10 or 11 days before it’s due to be released every week. We record on zencastr for regular episodes and we record on zoom for guest episodes. To edit we use SoundTrap to cut out all of the ums and likes and mix the audio, then we import it to our host and publish! We are now using Spreaker but we started out using Anchor.fm.

We use Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to promote our show and it can be found on all major listening platforms. The latest analytics say our plays are coming from 39% Apple Podcasts/ iTunes, 28% Spotify and 30% “other” meaning platforms that anchor didn’t add automating such as overcast, amazon music, Pandora, audible, TuneIn, blubrry etc.

The only piece of advice I stress is to research every single thing. Things that you wouldn’t think that you need to research, do it anyway. Computers or laptops that can handle editing a lot of audio, ESPECIALLY if you have a YouTube podcast. WAV video files are huge and a lot of editing software can’t process files over a certain size. When looking for a host, read all of their information like FAQs, terms and conditions, content regulations. Know as much as you possibly can. Also find out what your local laws for starting a business, taxes and regulations for sole proprietorship/ partnerships.

You can find us on Instagram @YouShouldHaveGhosted Twitter @ghostedpod Facebook @You Should Have Ghosted
Links to our social media, merch store and the major platforms where you can tune in to our show can all be found at http://linktr.ee/youshouldhaveghosted/
Come find us!!