Welcome to Podcasting Tech, a podcast that equips busy entrepreneurs

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Passe, your host and a 15 year veteran in the podcasting space.

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join us on this exciting journey to unlock the full potential of your

podcast. Taking you out to Portugal

today and checking out a new product that will help podcasters with their

podcast and creating not just that original content, but more

content to, you know, spread it out into the world, boost your SEO,

boost your marketing. Very excited chatting with social media Slobodan

Manic, AKA Sunny. He is the co founder

of Pod Pacer. That's the platform we'll be talking about a little bit. And he

is the co host of the. Excuse me, he is the host, not co

host. He's just a co founder and he's the host of the no Hacks podcast.

Sonny, thank you for joining me today. Thanks so much, Matthew. It was a

wonderful intro. Almost like I don't know the person you were talking about, but yeah,

it's great to be here. Awesome to be here. It was wonderful until I got

the title wrong. But yeah, it's a Monday, come

on. So you've been in development and you've been working on the

web for a long time, but you also have your own podcast.

So I'm just curious. Let's talk about your foray into

podcasting. Like what interested you in the space and creating content in the

first place. And then we'll talk about what led you to the development of Podpacer.

Yeah, so I started web development in 2007 or 8. I

don't even remember. It was. It was a while ago. That's just a fact. The

podcast I started 2021 and most people started

their podcast during the pandemic like that. That was the absolute peak

was 2020 and 2021. The reason I started it,

I wanted to build a personal professional network.

Personal slash, professional network. And I thought it's the pandemic

if I don't get them now when they're not going to conference. The people

I studied from literally whose courses I was taking and all that

stuff, if I don't get them now when they're at home with

time, it might never happen. So I just started reaching out to people

whose courses I was taking years prior. And most of them said, yes,

they want to be on the podcast. And, you know, one thing led to another.

It's four years later, still going strong, 200 episodes

in, and yeah, it's a fun, fun journey.

Very nice. I'm, I'm curious and I'm sure some of this is going to lead

into what, you know, what led to the creation of podpacer. But

what were some of your early challenges when you first started podcasting? What were some

of the things you're like, oh my God, what am I doing? But you

sort of learn from and mastered along the way. The most painful one

was how much of the episode needs to be scripted versus

improvised. And there's always that fine line

you have to walk between scripted and improvised. The first few

were fully scripted. When I say fully

scripted, I meant make it seem like it's a dialogue, but

it's actually scripted. And I was horrible because I'm not a professional actor or

a voice actor or anything like that. So I think a few were not even

published. But yeah, that. Finding the

balance between scripted and improvised was a

very, very difficult thing for me getting started because I had no idea

the way it was supposed to be done. When the answer really is just

try. If it doesn't feel right, try differently. If it doesn't

feel right, try differently. Until you just figure out what feels good to you.

Because there's no one answer for every single podcast in podcast, as you know.

I'm sure I love that. And yes, that's always been my advice. The beauty

of podcasting is you can pretty much do whatever you want and

try new things. I love people who experiment with the medium and

create new formats and ways of telling stories.

So I love that piece of advice. So now you're doing the podcast and now

what was it that led you to start to

plan out and create this platform POD Pacer? Right.

I have a story I love to tell everyone. So

one thing I did last year was I partnered with two conferences to interview their

speakers, help them promote all that stuff. And most of those

speakers were people I never really met. They're in the same industry

I was always covering, but it's just new people. One conference was really about

finding new voices and giving them the spotlight. So I had to interview,

long story short, 17 people in 34 days while I had a full time job

and, you know, preparing the interview, researching the guest having a

structured outline, having a list of questions to ask. If you don't,

you're just disrespectful to the guests. That's the way I feel and I didn't want

to do that and I did not have the time to do it properly. So

I just being a semi retired web

developer at the time, I just started talking to ChatGPT almost like

a therapist. And I know, how can we get this done? What

are the solutions for this? And once I broke it down, what I wanted and

what, what I needed to create,

ChatGPT wrote the whole thing. I built a prototype myself. And

the most basic idea was I have a guest bio, I have some of

their previous interviews or article they wrote or LinkedIn post or whatever it is. I

need to feed that into the machine and I need to tell

the brain, the AI, what the outline template is like,

which section I have with how many questions, how long it is, all that stuff.

And it just gives me an outline with the right questions to ask at the

right time. That simple. That, that was like the, the, the

first prototype of working prototype of Pod Facer. And

it did help me get through those 17 interviews in 34 days.

Because if I had to research everything, I, I wouldn't just show up and say,

hey, tell me about yourself. And you know, you know when, when you start, when

you listen to a podcast episode and the, the host only says, why don't you

explain me who you are, what you know, they're kind of winging it. So I

wanted to have good questions for my guest. I wanted to show respect to my

guest, and that's why I built that first version of the tool. This was

summer last year. All right, so the idea with Pod

Pacer is you feed it your

show, you feed it what you want to do, and it can

help you not just with planning your episodes, but then

also with promoting your content beyond

just the standard, you know, title show notes that

we have to use when we're uploading this to our podcast hosting site. Right. I

love, I love that you said have to use like the, the emphasis on have

to. Because everyone hates writing those show notes. I mean, not hate,

maybe a harsh word, but no one loves writing. Most of us

loathe the process. You're right. Let's be honest. Yes. So, yes, this is a

feature we added a few months ago where essentially

once your episode is out, because when you, when you create an account with

podpacer, you can enter your RSS feed and then we know every time you have

a new episode. Basically we transcribe the episode and

based on that episode and based on what the podcast is about and what

everything we know about the podcast, we write 20, 30

different content units. A blog post, a LinkedIn post,

a newsletter snippet, show notes, all that stuff. It

happens automatically. The tool Thoughtbaser will transcribe the episode and then

write all of it. And the beauty of it is because, you know,

AI can never do your tone of voice, all that stuff. Well, if it's

learning literally from your voice, yes, it can. It knows the way you speak

and it can write show notes the way you would speak those show

notes during an episode. So it's, it

saves a lot of time. That, that, that's really what it is. Something we added

a few weeks ago is you can create your own custom types of content.

So let's say you want to have an Instagram caption

or whatever else, you can just say, hey, I want you to also create

this and this and this and this. Here are some good examples of what that

should look like. You're just copying some good content pieces that are

in that format. And then every time it processes an episode, it will create

whatever you want it to create and you can just use it. How

do you get it to really one, how do you get it to really know

our voice and you know

what our typical tone is? And then also how do we know if

that's effective? Right, like, yes, this sounds like me. I

am not very good at marketing though. So how do we like, you know,

reconcile those two things of trying to have it match but also have it be

effective? That's an excellent question. And yes, everyone thinks

that's the thing with AI, Even if it gets your tone of voice, maybe you

don't like your tone of voice. Like this is basically what you're saying and you

think it should be different. Well, the

only way to know is to check and make sure it is. But what we

have is a, is a follow up feature. So if it writes, let's say, a

LinkedIn post, you can say, hey, I like this and this and this, but can

you change this? And then we'll rewrite it, it will try again and it will

get closer to what you want. So how do you know what's going to work?

Well, you don't. But if, if it can analyze a Full transcript

of 30 or 60 minutes of you talking, it will know

the way you talk, essentially. And that way it's

closer than just going to ChatGPT and say, hey, this is a transcript. Write a

blog post or write a LinkedIn post, and then it's going

to be sounding the same way that every single chatgpt created content sounds.

Unless you give a specific prompt, which is basically what we do. We have specific,

very accurate prompts to create those pieces of content.

What are some of the prompts that you think are

the most effective? Like, right, anybody can go to ChatGPT

and say, make me show notes, make me a LinkedIn post. Right?

Like that part is right. Anybody can do that. A monkey can do

that. What are the types of prompts or what is the type

of language that we should be using in

order to make these actually effective, though?

So I'm going to give you almost a cop

out answer, but just bear with me, it's a good answer because this is

when I changed the way I prompted this. It kind of transformed everything for me.

When you want ChatGPT to write something for you, let's say you wanted to write.

Don't say, I want you to write a blog post. Just ask, hey,

if I wanted you to write a blog post for me, what are the

details you want me to have in my prompts to help you create the

best possible output? And it will come up with a list of like five to

10 questions usually. And, and if you just write your prompt based on

that. So have ChatGPT help you write the

prompt. You don't need any more help than that.

So you're actually asking ChatGPT how to. Use ChatGPT

a hundred, because who knows better than ChatGPT?

Yes. Wow. It's transformed. It just

completely changes the way you think about ChatGPT. And

instead of looking at it as a black box, as almost like an

employee that you say, hey, process this and give it back when it's done, it's

more of a copilot where you go back and forth and you ask ChatGPT

if I want to use this feature of you, what

are the instructions for me? How do I use that feature? So we're

just guessing if I want to write myself a blog post without

this process, how do I know it's good, that prompt?

But If I ask ChatGPT, it will tell me, hey, how

long is it? Who is the audience? What are you trying to achieve? What

is the tone? And sure, you can write all of that in your prompt

without ChatGPT helping you, but it's so much

easier when you have a list to go through and then simply instruct ChatGPT

what to do. So when it comes to the episode planning because,

you know, I'm sure there are lots of people out there who are using programs

like this to plan their episodes as well as to help, you know, promote them

after the fact. But you were talking about, you know, feeding the machine

information about your guest and maybe past episodes, maybe things they've written. How

much of that do we have to do versus how much of that are you

basically asking the AI to do for you?

So the feeding of the AI is something that the

user has to do and this is by choice. And this is, we don't, you

know, remember the Notebook LM thing where, you know, you just click and there's a

podcast coming out. It was a hot thing in November. I hate

it. So this is not, this is the opposite of that. This is where you.

Podpacer is basically an assistant for those who don't have

research assistants. So you find your previous three

episodes about the topic you're covering or what your guest was

on previously, and you just feed that podpacer will

transcribe them, process and extract talking points and

questions to ask your guests. So this is not a self driving car. This

will never be a self driving car. I hate the idea of a podcast

being fully AI generated. And I can

get into that. I don't, I don't think we have enough time for me to

talk about how much I hate that as a concept. Because if, if

the person putting it out didn't listen to it, why would anyone listen to it?

This is an assistant that helps you with the research, that will help

you when you have a guest say, hey, remember six months ago you were on

that podcast and you talked about this concept. Can we explore that

a little bit deeper? That's what podbaser is trying to achieve

and not automate and like fully AI. I just, I

don't like that at all. So take us through your

show and what, what has been the

difference in performance before you started using

AI and specifically Pod Baser versus what it's looking

like today? So it's not scientific, but

I don't have, like, you need a lot more data for, to be statistically significant

and all that. But when I started using podpacer, this was season two of

my podcast was from September to December last year. This is when I really

started. I had 10 guests and eight guests

afterwards have sent me an email to say the questions were amazing

without me telling them what it is without me telling them anything. So for

me, that's significantly more than ever before because I

was never before able to go through three hours of audio

or video, whatever my guest was talking about previously, and

have the best possible questions. This is, this will help you get to that point.

And you know, you know when you have a guest and their eyes light up

and because you asked them something and they go, how did you know that, man?

That. That feeling as a podcast was just precious. All

right, so it's definitely anecdotally helped you be a better podcaster. What about on the

flip side? Have you seen any metrics or any

actual, like, gains in your numbers that, you know,

really reinforce that what you're doing here is working? I think it's

made it significantly easier for my guests to share the materials from the

podcast because if they feel like you really treated them

well, it's more likely. Again, this is anecdotal. This is,

it's several, dozens of episodes. Your experience. Yes, from my experience,

it is significantly easier to connect your guest with your

guest on a deeper level if the questions are really, really

something that they like talking about, that they have talked about in the past that

you can get into a deeper conversation over. And

that will make the guest promoting the episode much

easier. And we all know how important that is. If you have a guest,

like you have a great guest and they don't even share the episode when you're

done. It's not amazing. Yeah,

it is always very frustrating when you put your heart and soul into something and

you're really excited because you grab that big name guest and, you know, you put

it out there and then it's crickets from the guests and it's like they forgot

about you altogether. Even though, you know, oftentimes they promise you the

moon and the stars and everything else, life just happens.

I wouldn't blame the game. They just forget about it, like you said. Oh, yeah,

right. Like, and often you interview someone and maybe that interview doesn't air for a

few weeks or in some cases a few months. Right. Like, it's not always their

fault. Although in some cases it's just a matter of,

you know, this wasn't that interesting to me and so they

didn't promote it the way that you wanted them to or, or whatever, you

know, the reasons might be. But so maybe this will help you with getting those

big name guests to be impressed by you and to actually go out and

start sharing what it is that you're doing. Well, as a reminder, you should definitely

go and check out podpacer.com they have

a seven day free trial, but they have three plans you can sign up for,

put your show in there, test it out, take it for a spin, see you

like about it, and then, you know, let

Sonny know what you think and how it works and give them some

feedback. I'm sure they're always looking for ways to improve it. As a reminder, we

are chatting with Slobanon Sunny Manich. He is the

co founder of Pod Pacer and the host of the no

Hacks podcast. Sonny, before we let you go, there's questions that

we like to ask every podcaster come on the show and I'll be curious to

get your take on it, coming from your background of

software development and really kind of deep diving into this. And that

question is, is there something in podcasting where

you would like to see even more improvement? Could it be

from recording, production, distribution,

discoverability, listening? Right, like anywhere from the, from

the podcaster to podcast consumer standpoint, where you're

like, man, this is the next issue I want to tackle. So

I was worried I would not have a good answer because of the way questions

started, but. Improve your workflows, people, as

podcasters, we're sort of almost like an

analog old school kind of industry, like radio style interviews, all that stuff.

There's so much room for improvements and using AI

not to replace the creativity, but to replace the boring parts. And I don't mean

just Pod Baser, that can help you with some parts of it, but improve.

Just document your workflow with every single episode and you know, take

a pen, pencil, type it out, whatever you want and just mark the parts

that can be automated that without even paying for an assistant, that can be

automated with simple workflows like Make.com or

Zapier or whatever. Let's say you record and when

the recording is done, you want to email your guest automatically to thank them. You

can set that up, that, that can be easily done, easily automated, and

we never do that. Like no one ever emails their guest unless they

do it in the next hour. So why not set up an automation for that?

Why not set up an automation and this is easy to set up. I'll be

posting a lot about this on my LinkedIn in the future. Set up an

automation that transcribes the interview, analyzes it, and then

writes a simple draft of an email to thank the guest. Find like key

moments and whatever, put it in your draft folder automatically.

You review it at the end of the day, change whatever you want to change

and send that email. It's that easy. It's super

easy. The important step there is that you have to review it,

right? Always. Always. I don't trust AI. I will never trust

AI blindly. I hope no one ever does. Yes. And I have an AI based

product and I just said that. No, I love

that honesty and I love that, you know, that's really, really solid advice for people.

I think there is a line between

using AI and relying or abusing AI

that, you know, obviously there's a lot of the latter going on in the world

today, and when it happens, it's very obvious and you know, it's going to make

you look kind of silly. On the tech stack, is there

some service or piece of equipment that

either you've seen out there that you're like, oh, I got to get my hands

on it, or you're like, man, I wish somebody would make this. That would make

again, any aspect of podcasting easier, more convenient, right?

I. I wish someone would. And this is POD based, is not this. It might

be in the future. I wish some. I don't know if you use descript for

editing or anything like that. They have that underlord feature that helps you

kind of helps. It's bad. It's really, really bad at writing the. The content

and all that. It's good when it's good, but it's horrible when

it's bad. I wish someone would create something like that that

has your entire podcast as its knowledge base.

So if it's writing a social snippet for this episode, I wanted

to know which five episodes or three episodes in the past it can

refer to. I don't, I don't. I don't think

episode is one content piece is something that you can get

great results with. It need to know. It needs to know the background of your

podcast, the previous episodes, the description of the podcast, all that stuff, and take that

into account. We're trying to build something like that with Pod Pacer. It's not quite

there yet, but I wish there was a sort of like a

ChatGPT specifically for your podcast. You know, you

say that and I'm pretty sure we talked to somebody who was trying to work

on that, or I've seen some platforms that are kind of delving into that

space of analyzing your entire library

to give you, you know, enhanced understanding and

analytics and. Right. Like discover your voice and things like that. So

I got to go back and remember what it was. But I've definitely

heard that before, and I'm pretty sure there are some folks who are thinking about

that and making moves in that space.

And then, of course, the Question we ask everybody is what are some podcasts that

you are listening to right now that you will not let

a new episode go by without? There are two and they have

nothing to do with my work. They have nothing to do. One is Bad Friends.

It's a comedy podcast. It's one of the top 2030

podcasts in the world, week to week, depending on the week. It's two

comedians that should not work be working together as a co

host, but it just works. The chemistry is just unreal. So Bad

Friends with Andrew Santino and Bobby Bobby Lee. The other one is behind

the Bastards. I'm. I'm a sucker for side stories

in history. So they cover historical profile like bad people

in history who have, who people don't even don't

know enough about. So that. And let's say the third

one, the Real Dictators, which it's a great narrative podcast that I hope

everyone checks out. So those three are also. I only listen to podcasts

when I run and those are just the perfect length for my long runs.

So that's why I noticed there's a little bit of a theme in the kind

of stuff you listen to. Should we be worried? I mean, Bad

Friends, that's like, that's why I opened it, why I led with

Bad Friends and then went to the other two. But yeah,

I don't like alternative history or conspiracies

and all that, but I like just the lesser known side of history, let's put

it that way. Very interesting. I might have a couple of suggestions for it that'll

tell you all fair. I would love to hear that. Yeah. All

right, well, I can't remember them, so I'm going to look them up while we're

chatting. But as a reminder to everybody, please, please check out

podpacer.com check out the no Hacks

podcast and, and as Sonny was mentioning, he's going to be

putting a lot more stuff on LinkedIn. We'll have a link to his LinkedIn profile

here in the Show Notes so you can connect and follow with him. We have

been chatting with Slobodan Manic, AKA Sunny.

It's been a pleasure, sir. Thanks for joining us. Pleasure, Matthew, thanks so much.

Thanks for joining us. Today on Podcasting Tech, there are links to all

the hardware and software that help power our guest content and

podcast tech available in the Show Notes and on our website

at podcastingtech. Com. You can also subscribe to the show on

your favorite platform, connect with us on social media, and even leave a rating and

review while you're there. Thanks. And we'll see you next time on

Podcasting Tech.