Two lifelong friends, a random topic, and just enough beer ...

My co-host Jim and I have been friends for more than 35 years. We met as co-workers in our early 20's at a large insurance company as programmers in their IT department. Those were crazy, hilarious, and memorable times, and the friendship bonds remained strong despite our not running into each other for more than 20 years. Though both of us would move on to pursue our own career goals, get married, start a family, etc., we managed to reconnect within the last 5 years or so and simply picked up where our friendship left off.

Both of us had had our own ideas on starting up a podcast, and one night over drinks we discussed the possibility of hosting one together. We've always found our conversations to be entertaining, either one-on-one or with our collective friends, and now that we're well into our 50's and have a wealth of experiences to share, we thought why not just record'em and share them to the world as a podcast?

We're not entirely sure whom our listener base is just yet. We suspect it'll be folks of a similar age range who might connect with one (or more) of our chosen topics and (hopefully) find us entertaining.
 

We created this podcast as a way for us to let off a little steam and have a bit of fun. The only topic we both agreed would be off limits is POLITICS. The last thing this world needs is another political discussion forum and although Jim & I share similar ideas on the subject, it's just best for us to avoid the subject entirely. Anything else though is open to discussion and/or interpretation :-D

Jim & I are both podcast subscribers, we have a shared interest in music and music production, but I'm more of a sports nut where Jim is not. We started our podcast in the Fall of 2020 and it took us about a month of part time research to work out the particulars on which software and hardware components we would utilize to produce our podcast, and what the format, style, and frequency of our podcast would ultimately be.

We set a conservative goal of publishing 1 episode per month and agreed to bump up the frequency if we gained any traction and were able to establish a set of listeners/followers.
 

Our podcast is entirely self-funded and both of us work full-time at our regular jobs during the day/week. At the moment our podcast is entirely recreational (like most folks who start these things we're hoping to change that), and we find time late in the evenings either mid-week or on weekends to record episodes.

The initial cost of hosting our podcast was $0. We found a service that lets you create a FREE startup plan that includes the first 5 hours of content. That gave us roughly 10 episodes to kick the tires and take our podcast for a test drive. I've listed details on the equipment we use to record our podcast in the questions below.
 

At the moment we have no monetary gains from our podcast, it's all been in good fun up to this point. We'd most definitely be open to sponsorship, but we don't necessarily have a target market segment on our radar ... but we're happy to discuss options :-D

Our podcast currently benefits our mental health, friendship, and inherent curiosities. It's an interesting way to have regular conversations over cocktails with a lifelong friend and share our irreverence and a few laughs) with the masses :-D
 

A typical podcast session for Jim & I is to strike up a Zoom session and each of us records our own audio locally at home using Audacity software. We are each remote in our own homes when we record. We've experimented with capturing Zoom recordings, but we get higher quality recordings through Audacity. Once the audacity sessions have been captured, we upload those to a shared cloud drive. I then use MixBus DAW (digital audio workstation) software by Harrison Consoles to mix the vocal recordings and edit in any sound clips, sound effects, etc. that makes our podcast fun and unique.

Jim & I are both musicians, so we each already owned good quality microphones, but the software was very inexpensive. Audacity is FREE software and is used by a large population of pod-casters (and music aficionados alike), and the we were able to purchase a license for MixBus for $20 (with the proper promo code of course). Why are we not just using MixBus for recording? Good question .. it's just easier to capture the audio with Audacity and mix the final production with an actual DAW. As we've come to learn with podcasting, there are many ways to skin this cat, and this works best for us. We use Podbean for distributing our podcast episodes across multiple platforms. Podbean costs us $9 per month for unlimited content uploads and general tracking statistics.
 

Podbean assists us in listing our podcast on multiple platforms. We are currently listed on Apple, Google, Spotify, Podbean, PlayerFM, and (of course) Listen Notes. Podbean provides excellent statistical breakdowns on distribution and downloads. We've only just begin to engage potential marketing channels, we hope completing this interview will help ;-)
 

Best advice we can give new pod-casters is to simply say, it's not as daunting to get started as it seems. You should invest some time and learn the proper way to record so that the quality of your recordings is exceptional. Nothing kills a podcast quicker than "bad audio". Don't expect to get the format right "out of the gate", it takes time to find your way, but that's OK. Experimenting is the only way to find a style that works for you (and whomever your co-host might be). The most important is to have fun, if you're enjoying what you do, you're listeners will pick up on that and they'll enjoy it too! Happy podcasting!
 

You'll find us at:
Email: guysourage@gmail.com, or guys.our.age@gmail.com
Website: https://guysourage.podbean.com/
We hope to have an @Instagram page sometime soon.