Launch your first podcast in an afternoon
Everything between "I should start a podcast" and a live RSS feed — in about three hours.
- guides
- getting-started
Most people spend six weeks planning a podcast and never record episode one. The fix is not more planning. It is shipping something small, today, and letting the format find itself over the next ten episodes.
Here is the whole path, start to finish.
1. Decide what the show is in one sentence
If you cannot describe the show in a sentence, listeners cannot describe it to a friend — and word of mouth is how podcasts actually grow.
A good sentence names the audience and the payoff:
A weekly show for solo founders who want one concrete growth experiment they can run this week.
Write it down. It becomes your show description, and it will do more work than any piece of cover art.
2. Record something imperfect
You need less gear than you think:
- A USB microphone in a room with soft furniture
- A quiet 30 minutes
- One take, minimal editing
Your first episode should be short. Fifteen minutes of something specific beats an hour of throat-clearing — and it is far more likely to actually get finished.
Export as MP3. Pod Promo accepts MP3 and M4A/AAC up to 2 GB, and never re-encodes your audio, so what you upload is exactly what listeners hear.
3. Make cover art that survives being tiny
Podcast art is usually seen at about the size of a postage stamp. That means:
- Big type, few words
- Strong contrast
- No thin fonts, no busy photography
The requirements are simple: JPG or PNG, square, at least 1400×1400 pixels, under 10 MB.
4. Create your show, then upload
Inside Pod Promo, a show gets three things the moment you create it: a public page, a URL slug, and a valid RSS 2.0 feed. You do not have to configure any of it.
Upload your audio, write a description, and hit publish. Or set a publish date — scheduled episodes go live automatically, whether or not you are awake.
5. Submit the feed once
Your feed lives at /yourshow/feed.xml. Submit that URL to Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and the rest of the directories pick it up from there. You do this once, ever. Every future episode arrives automatically.
Do not change your show slug after submitting to directories. The slug is part of your feed URL, and directories treat a changed URL as a different show.
6. Then do it nine more times
The single strongest predictor of a podcast that works is a podcast that keeps existing. Ten episodes is roughly where the format stops fighting you.
Pick a cadence you can sustain on your worst week, not your best one. Weekly is great. Every other week is also great. Sporadic is the only one that reliably fails.
Now go record.