How You Can Grow Your Podcast with the Help of This Tool? | Virtual Collaboration Tool

I am a computer scientist. I went to art school. I am a full stack software engineer, amateur artist. I did my internship on the Chrome team at Google. Learned a lot how they build software and a lot of that has come to life in Squadcast. And my personal mission is to. Is to. Is to connect creatives.

Hey guys, this is Avi Arya, father of two girls, six dogs, husband to a superwoman, a streetcar racer, turned hotelier, now social media marketer and founder of Internet moguls. Welcome to my channel. So guys, I'd like for all of you to join me in welcoming the guest for Today, Zach from SquadCast. Zach, how are you doing?

Hey Avi, I'm doing great. How are you today?

I'm well. Thank you for taking the time out to make it for this call. Once again, you were on my podcast a couple of weeks ago, which was recorded, by the way, on squadcast. How are you doing?

Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Can't, can't be happier. We have our first child on the way and business is growing and so much to look forward to. So very grateful for that.

That is fantastic. Where are you right now, Zach?

I'm in the Bay Area, Oakland, California.

Also. Nice sunny weather.

Yeah, it's been weirdly windy here, but can't complain. I love the Bay Area weather.

Excellent. Oh yes. Oh yes, the Bay Area weather for sure. So your squadcast is not moving to Texas like all the others?

I'm actually grateful there's people moving to Texas. It's very crowded here. It's like, go, enjoy Texas. That's cool. There's plenty of space there. We'll hold it down here. I love California, so I can imagine that.

I can imagine that. I am in San Diego for one month every year for the last so many years. Except this last Covid year. We start our hike with the social media Mastery World conference, which is like 5,000 marketers from around the world and there's one conference after the other. So 30 days of being there in San Diego, then coming back to Vancouver. By that, by the time you come back to Vancouver, it's nice. And summer here as well.

Yeah, they do the conferences really, really well in San Diego. My, one of our advisors, Pat Flynn, has Flynn Con and that's in San Diego. And social media marketing world, Comic Con, I mean, they do it really well. And then, oh yeah, I love Comic Con.

Last two times I want to do that. I believe it's crazy. And yeah, I've never been. We know Pat is, Pat is a good friend. Pat is amazing and yeah, he loves San Diego. Yes, yes, of course he does. Absolutely. So we have about 60 entrepreneurs right now. We're expecting about 40 more in the next couple of minutes. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, how many people have ever, ever. So, Zach, I'll tell you a little bit about these awesome entrepreneurs. They're all part of this online school that we've created for entrepreneurs only, which is called the Internet moguls of the world, where they all come in for 52 weeks of training and we help them launch their products or services and take it, take it online. But we also have our every Thursday masterclass series for them where we have guests coming from all over the world and essentially giving them a global school experience. We have people coming in from Stanford. We have people, people like you coming in. Heartfelt, I say the most heartworking. You're a hard worker. We're all hard working. But if you put hard work with your hard work, become better entrepreneurs who love their families and still leverage the Internet to grow their business and spend time with them, these are our Internet moguls. So this is the school that we built. And these are the entrepreneurs who've taken part in the one year program.

Wonderful, wonderful. I think I can't say enough good things about community, like the podcast community that we serve, our community of customers creating content remotely on Squadcast and then also, also just, you know, the community of entrepreneurs. We just wrapped up a year long accelerator for that exact reason. And that was remote, that was all online. So I think we're in good company here and I'm glad people are learning from you, Avi.

Awesome. Zach, do you want to do a presentation style, a demo style, or just, you know, that's Q and A, whatever works for you.

I'm happy to do like a lightning demo and then take some questions from you, Avi, and your community.

That sounds fantastic. So, guys, let me tell you, let me tell you a story. I recently interviewed Zach. Zach is friends with so many of my friends, one of them being Tyler Basu. He just here in Vancouver, Canada. We had so many friends in common. We said we need to talk and we spoke. And I said, I'm starting a new podcast. And the thing with podcasts was that normally there's a forum for podcasts, but where you'll come up with a nice mic and all your equipment on one side, but the other side, your guest has a very strong possibility of ruining the experience because he's not a podcaster. Right. So Zach and his partner, they came up with an idea of Having a great audio experience on both sides, I still didn't jump in. I'm normally the first adopter of every tool. I collect tools like I used to collect comics in the, in my childhood. But I still hung, you know, waited because I wanted the video option to come in. And now I think it's a complete tool because when I now interview people, I have video and audio both. So all of you people, audio is the new frontier. The reason being that people are allowed to multitask. I go to the gym every day and I'm listening to somebody or the other. I go for a walk with my dog, three dogs, three times a day. I've been telling my wife, can we do twice? Oh, yeah, I know, because some of these guys are really big and they want, you know, extra walks. And my daughter's like, you're big too. You can use a walk as well, Daddy. So anyway, so we go for these non stop walks and every time I'm like, on my walk, I want to come back and say, I learned something new. So three walks a day, you learn so much stuff. It all happens because of the audio experience for all of us in India. Guys, I'll tell you one thing. The podcast market has just about started and you can, you can put your flag in the ground and use your micro niche. We talk very much about the micro niche, Zach. How you can hone in on one specialty and then tell the world, put a flag in the ground and say, this is who I am and that's what I stand for. So, guys, for all of you people, Zach is going to talk about how the tool works, how to get started with podcasts, and then we'll take some questions. Great. Zach, over to you.

This is SquadCast FM and we have a list of my upcoming sessions. I have past sessions here. You can see I've been recording for a while, and a recording session is just a way to organize and say, hey, this is like going to a physical studio. I'm going to record a session. So I'll just make this one real quick. You can send invites through email and we take care of that for you and make it super easy for your guests to connect. Or you can just save it and copy, like an invite link. I'll skip over that for now and just go ahead and start the session. We have a secure experience on Squadcast, so we need a camera and microphone permission. We have some best practices here for recording. Like Avi said, your guest isn't always a professional podcaster. So, you know, why does Quality matter. It maps to credibility. And that's been shown in research here by usc. So we all want to sound credible. Influence doesn't come for free. You need to present credibly. So some other things like wearing headphones and why that's important. You can see we both have headphones on today. That's not a fashion statement. They actually hurt my ears quite a lot because I trained Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and that's, that's a thing, Internet stuff, all that. So just make it easy. And I have a couple cameras here, so I'll go ahead and switch to the same one you see me on. So you can kind of see a preview of yourself. You can see this is private backstage kind of green room experience. And I can, I can check my hair and make sure my, my microphone's all wired up using the right headphones before I join. So I'll go ahead and join the session real quick. And you can see I'm here by myself, but I'm going to do some magic real quick and copy that same invite link I mentioned before and just kind of invite myself as a guest. This will be a little trippy, but I think you'll get the picture. I'm the host over here on the right. And then you can see the guest joining experience here in Chrome Incognito on the left. So can see permissions, best practices. I'll go ahead and select some equipment here. Hopefully I don't hear an echo and you can see right away that I'm connected to myself here. I can give myself a high five. I'm going to mute. I am hearing an echo. There we go. That's better. You can see this would be your guest on the one side and you on the other side. You can record with two or three or four people on squadcast and everybody's going to be the same. Constant, very high quality audio. And I believe this account for me is on video as well, so I don't have to jump through any hoops to record video. We just have this big record button. And you can see as soon as I click that, I start recording for everybody. Everybody can kind of see what's going on, have control of their, their own equipment, see each other's equipment and what network connectivity looks like. That's a really powerful feature when it comes to confidence that everybody's connected and using the right equipment. This is a bit of a contrived example because I'm recording muted audio, but we'll have video as well. So I'll just record like 30 seconds here. Go ahead and click stop and you can see right away. Right? That was kind of magically fast. I already have the audio that I can download in WAV and MP3. We already have the video only in webm and you can see that those are rendering as well. I get a preview over here if I want to see that 32 second long video that was recorded locally and in studio quality. So quality really, like I said, maps to credibility and that's why we make this super easy to. To download the audio, download the video and make that easy to share. If you have like a producer that you work with, I know Avi, you have an amazing team. That's something where you don't necessarily want to download and upload. It's already in the cloud, so we can just copy a link to that. All good there. So I'll just let that keep doing its thing. Looks like that other video is taking a second, but I think that's a pretty good lap around the experience on squadcast. So I'll go ahead and leave as the guest that takes me back to the homepage. Let me move Zoom out of the way and come back, leave as the host and you can see that I'll have that session here that we just recorded with two recordings and I can access those playback, I can download and share and all that good stuff. So we're all about making that super easy. And I think that's where it's a similar experience to what we're doing here on Zoom. The biggest difference is that it's a recording studio first and conversation, like remote conversation, platform second. And that emphasis on quality is very meaningful when it comes to creating content, content creators. And if you're going to have a long term relationship with your audience or monetize your content, quality matters a lot. So that's really some. Let me touch on some things that you didn't see, right? You didn't see my guests need an account or need to sign in or install anything. All I did was copy that link and I opened it in another browser. But your guest, all they would need to do is click it and they're in and recording with you. They didn't have to send you any files, they didn't have to, as I said, create an account. So that's a very minimal experience on the guests to connect and they get to sound great and make your life easier when it comes to producing that content into your podcast, into video content on YouTube or social media and all of those creative possibilities really come to life with the same amount of time investment. That's the other beautiful thing, is that you record a half an hour hour long conversation and you have audio, you have video, if you're into that. And you have the option to. On squadcast, you don't have to record video if you don't like to. But that's cool too. We started with audio and yeah, our standards are very high when it comes to the quality. So I think that's a pretty good lap around what we do at squadcast.

Lovely. So I'll just recap it a bit. So you're saying if I. The initial premise was most people, when they're doing a podcast session, they might get mic'd up because they want the right audio and video audio experience. But on the other side, when your guest comes in, they have an echo, they might not have a mic and you know so many things and so therefore the listening experience gets ruined. So you came up with squadcast, which is a tool where the audio experience with up to four guests on one chat is, is, is the same all around. Number two, to invite a guest to my SquadCast podcast, all I need to do is send him a link. He doesn't need to download an app or a software. It's a web based application. And so therefore he can log in, log out without having to download anything.

Or have any, any browser. Yeah, any computer, like we have people who record on like Chromebooks, like very, very minimal hardware is needed. You don't need like some beefy computer to do recording on squadcast. Yeah.

Awesome. And so, and now you have the video and audio experience as well. Both the files get saved differently, separately. And so as for me, I'll tell you how Zach, and you can, you can tell the audience what kind of experiences that you have, how people are using this. What I normally do is I'm in Vancouver, Canada and my teams are in India and I'm doing at least two recordings every week. And the recordings sometimes happen at 3am in the morning or sometimes at 3pm, which is 3am in India. So what I do is, all I do is I have a Squad cast link which is all set, set up. My guest has it, we do a recording. As soon as the recording is done, I record the intro and the outro. Hey guys, in today's episode, I'm going to be bringing in Zach, the founder of SquadCast. And you're going to learn ABC. Stay tuned for this amazing podcast with another Internet mogul of the world, Zach from SquadCast. And then hey, then I'll do an outro. Guys, I hope you love this as much as I did. What are the three best takeaways that you got from this interview? Don't drop it in the comment box. Make a post, put it on Instagram, tag me Askaviharya. And one lucky winner every Sunday gets a book on entrepreneurship courier to their house from us. Once again, thank you for watching the Internet moguls of the world. Stay tuned for another episode next Friday, same time. I record both the intros and outros at the end of the episode and I just click save and the files start saving and I'm off to doing whatever I'm doing, walking the dog or doing whatever I need to do.

And.

And the files can be accessed by the editing team because everything is on the cloud. The editing team has the intro, they have the outro, they have the meat of the matter and then they edit everything. They, you know, they sort of put everything together and they upload it on my podcast and this as simple as that. So any other, you know, you have so many clients around the world and you have so many people using this podcast and you have lots of celebrities using this as well. So. Yeah. Do you have any other ideas on how people are using SWATcast?

Yes, yes. A lot of great ways people are using it. I think what you just described is a fantastic workflow. So I want to applaud you on that quick performance as well. The vast majority of the creators that we serve are podcasters working on long form content interview styles. But we also have more narrative style podcasting where you can start and stop recording and do as many takes as you like. You can have two voice actors on there acting out a scene and a director as a third person who their audio never makes it into the production. But you're left with these voice actors or those could be interview people with more of like a director. We also have a lot of audiobook creators on the platform. So audible and. And acx like Penguin Random House, autovita Productions, like recording both podcasts and also audiobooks. So we have. You might have caught when I opened the download menu there that you can also download the audio as an MP3 file. You might say, Zach, you're talking a lot about quality. MP3 is. Are not the highest quality. Like what are you doing? That's because that. That MP3 actually maps to the audible standard for uploading to their platform. So of course we have the uncompressed wave. You have a choice, right, of if you want to save some file size if your your Internet connection you don't want to you want to save that data that's cool too. So so yeah and then and then we added video recording as you mentioned at the end of January which opens up this whole other side of the coin when it comes to remote content production is how we think of it. That's the new category that we're that we're defining and working to create. So with video the possibilities get amplified towards creating teasers for each episode of the best quote of your guest. You can share that in advance to get people hyped up for your episode that drops on your podcast like the next day. We have seen a bunch of creative work going on to make YouTube is the second largest search engine on the web so why should audio creators podcasters care about YouTube is a really good question and we found a very meaningful answer in that you can create funnels so you have a bunch of clips and.