Podcircle Podcast

 Finally, there's a podcast for podcasters. My name is Kyle Cummings.

And I'm Mickenzie Vought and each week we are going to share the knowledge and expertise that we've gained from years of launching, running, and promoting successful podcasts. Whether you're an aspiring podcaster or you've already got hundreds of episodes under your belt, these conversations dive deep into the topics that matter to every podcaster from marketing and growing your podcast to recording equipment and best practices, monetization, cutting-edge tools, hiring help, and so much more.

Welcome to the Podcircle podcast.

All right, Kyle, how did we get here?

How did we get here? So a little bit of my background is that I was a record producer in Nashville for close to a decade.

Which I loved. And somewhere along the way, a friend of mine reached out and said, Hey, do you edit podcasts? And I said, I don't, but I can. I have the skills. I do have the skills. I live in a program called Pro Tools, which is a music production, editing, mixing, like I'm in there all the time, so mm-hmm.

Let's just try this out. So I kind of just did that on the side for a long time, starting in 2016. And it was about that time that Kristen and I, my wife, started thinking this podcast thing is kind of interesting. Mm-hmm. I could do it from anywhere. And we started wondering like, how cool would it be to travel and just work remotely?

And so the, obviously this is like pre pandemic. Yeah. But we, we just kind of planted this seed of man, that'd be kind of cool. Like, but I was still very much invested in producing records. I would build a studio a few years later. Mm-hmm. We would have our son a few years later, so we kind of put it on the back burner.

And then somewhere around 2020 this pandemic came along and my wife was very much at a, at workplace that was not very work from home friendly. Yeah. And she was really sensing a shift away from doing that and was considering either working for someone else that was fully remote or starting her own thing.

And during the pandemic, the music industry more or less kind of shut down as well. So, I experienced this weird thing where my music business was decreasing and everyone decided they wanted to start a podcast.

Everyone and their brother started a podcast. Right? So I'd say the podcast business probably doubled that year between 2020 and 2021.

Wow. And we kind of started revisiting that conversation of, well, what if we sell the house and hit the road? And what if my wife quits her job and. So that's ultimately what we ended up doing in 2021. We sold the house, we stored all of our stuff except what we could fit in our S U V and mm-hmm. We made the crazy leap.

And so October 1st we pulled out of our Nashville home, sold my studio, which I had lovingly and painstakingly designed and had built, and basically just put all of that on hold and said, I don't you. I don't know when we're gonna return to this. I don't know if we'll return to this. We don't know what's next.

We just know that we're going on the road. Mm-hmm. And I had this podcast business that I was really enjoying building that was going super well, was onboarding clients, was bringing on new team members, expanding services, you know, thinking of better ways that we could serve clients. And the rest is kind of history.

We've traveled to all four corners of the us, Vancouver and Montreal in Canada. We've been to Mexico. We're planning to head overseas to Europe later this year. And so fun. I know it's been really, really wild, but somewhere along the way, I met you, Mickenzie, when we started working with, uh, the Living centered Podcast.

You produce and co-host, and that's kind of how we met and I just saw your brilliance and expertise in action really on a weekly basis as we've worked together on your podcast. So tell the folks a little bit about your background in that. Yeah, I have loved watching you grow Podcircle in the last two years that I've been working with you and knowing you even before, just through knowing through Kristin and saying, Hey, would your husband be willing to help us figure out how to edit this podcast we're starting because I was like one of the literal million podcasts that launched between 2020 and 2021, um, for the organization that I work for. And so we launched the Living Center Podcast in January of 2021. And. It was just kind of a dream come true for me.

I have been a part of promoting and making podcasts for most of my career. Every organization that I've been in has kind of, either I've been promoting it or being behind the scenes and helping it working in the social media space for a long time. Being a client of Podcircle and a big fan of Kyle, when you asked me to do this, I said, yes, an opportunity to nerd out on the things that I love, um, and to talk about what we're seeing in the podcast space.

I just could not turn on the opportunity. And I, I also just wanna pour back into someone who wants to start a podcast and feels the intimidation that comes with that because, um, I read something a few weeks ago that said, every podcaster you love once Googled how to start a podcast. Mm-hmm. And. I am just excited to be a resource because I know that you have so much brands, Kyle, um, and I have experience on the end of promoting it, on the parts of how to launch and produce and sustain Absolutely.

Um, from a content perspective. And so I'm excited to have the technical and the content meet together.

I know it's, I mean, when I thought about starting the podcast and I've wanted to for years start a podcast for podcasters. When I thought of it, I was like, man, I really, I think Mickenzie would be the perfect match because I'm kind of.

I'm in the post-production world, you know the editing? Mm-hmm. Audio, video editing, creating, you know, social media content to market podcasts. But you are so brilliant really on the front end of things with the strategy, creating the content, and then just your marketing mind. I don't know. I kind of feel like we're gonna provide a ton of value to listeners and not just providing content on how to market and grow podcasts. We're really gonna get into things like who we think the best podcast host platforms are.

Cuz I've used probably a half a dozen now and there are, yeah, there are better ones than others. Good ones and bad ones. Yeah, totally. I mean, some of them are built for the future and. Aren't. And so we're just, we're gonna get into all of it and hopefully provide a lot of value to the listeners and a lot of guidance, and I'm really excited about that and I have some fun along the way.

Absolutely. I hope that this is absolutely practical and fun is kind of my hope for it.

Right on. We're excited to be here. We're gonna be doing this weekly, so stay tuned for the Podcircle podcast.