How to Start a Podcast on Substack

There are roughly 900 things a business owner could be doing to market themselves at any given moment.Instagram, LinkedIn, email, networking, video, podcasting, Threads and whatever new platform everyone is suddenly talking about this week can pile up pretty fast.So when Blair Kaplan started talking to me about podcasting on Substack, my first thought was basically, absolutely not, I do not need another thing.And then she showed me how it worked.And I paid her to build mine.Blair is one of my hiking besties, a PR expert, a grief and resilience expert, and the person who taught me pretty much everything I know about podcasting and Substack.She is also one of those people who likes to test things instead of sitting around wondering if they might work.She had already been podcasting traditionally for years, with a podcast manager, editing, hosting and distribution. Then she got curious about Substack’s podcast feature and realized there really was not much information out there about how people were using it.So she decided to figure it out herself.She started a podcast called How We Navigate Grief and made the episodes short, usually around five to ten minutes. The whole idea was for them to feel more like a voice note to a friend than a highly produced podcast episode.Some she recorded in the voice memo app on her phone, and lately she has been experimenting with recording directly into Substack. She has played around with having an intro, then not having one, changing the format and paying attention to what people respond to.And what happened was pretty interesting.Before she had even hit 30 episodes, she had around 5,000 downloads.During our interview, she mentioned an episode she had published less than 24 hours earlier that was already heading toward 500 downloads.She also has a client who started with almost no existing Substack audience and has reached thousands of downloads.That got my attention.I am not saying everyone who opens a Substack account tomorrow is going to wake up to thousands of listeners. Blair has a strategy behind what she is doing, and she was very clear about that.What grabbed me was how much simpler the whole process could be.Traditional podcasting always felt like A LOT to me.I pictured recording, editing, show notes, hosting platforms, distribution and a collection of tiny technical tasks I had absolutely no desire to learn.I already have enough tabs open in my brain.The idea that I could create an episode through Substack and have it distributed from there felt far more manageable.There is also another piece that I really like.You are building an email audience while you are building the podcast.People can discover your work inside Substack, subscribe to what you are creating and then hear from you directly. That gives you a different kind of connection than putting everything on social media and hoping the algorithm feels generous that day.I am still very much a social media girl. I am not abandoning Instagram and moving into an email bunker.I do love having another place where people can find me, listen to what I have to say and stay connected to my work.Blair and I also talked a lot about repurposing because this is one of those places where business owners can make marketing wildly harder than it needs to be.You do not need a completely original idea for every platform you use.Blair takes things she is already thinking, writing and talking about and finds different ways to use them. A social media thought might have enough meat on it to become a longer Substack article, while something she has written could easily turn into an audio episode. A podcast conversation can also give you several smaller pieces of content to use elsewhere.That feels much more realistic than sitting down five times a week and demanding that your brain produce another brilliant original idea.She also uses AI as a thought partner to help organize and optimize some of her writing.I like that distinction because the thinking still belongs to her.You can hear Blair in it. Her experience, opinions and personality are all still there, with AI helping on the packaging side rather than trying to impersonate the person who had the idea.If AI removes everything interesting about you from your content, we have missed the point.One of the biggest takeaways from our conversation was how little your podcast needs to resemble the polished production you might have in your head.Blair is recording episodes on her phone and experimenting with recording directly into Substack. There is no requirement for a studio, a perfect radio voice or hours of editing. You can stumble over a sentence and carry on because, shockingly, that is how humans speak.She is intentionally testing content that feels like you are listening in on a conversation between friends.And people are listening.That makes sense to me because I think we are getting tired of content that has been polished within an inch of its life.Sometimes hearing somebody talk through an idea in their own words for eight minutes is far more interesting than listening to something that sounds like it took twelve meetings and a production team to approve.Of course, adding another platform still means adding something to your workload.There is no tiny Substack fairy who comes to your house at night, records your podcast and folds the laundry while she is there.Blair’s advice was to figure out how Substack can fit into what you are already creating instead of turning it into another enormous marketing project. Something you have written could become an audio episode, and an idea you talked through on Instagram might have enough substance for a longer podcast conversation. If you already have a podcast, you can also use Substack as another place to distribute it while building your email audience at the same time.And if you want the strategy but absolutely do not want to figure out all the setup yourself, you can hire someone.That is what I did.Toward the end of our conversation, Blair said something I think a lot of business owners need to hear.Don’t wait until it’s perfect.Try it and see what happens.She also shared a little mindset trick she had heard recently. When something new starts feeling intimidating, add “for fun” to the end.You are starting a podcast for fun. Maybe you are experimenting with Substack for fun, or trying a completely different type of content and seeing whether anyone cares.I kind of love that.There is so much pressure in business to know whether every decision is going to work before we make it. That can turn a fairly harmless experiment into something that feels like it should come with a board meeting and a five-year projection.Sometimes you can try the thing, pay attention to what happens and decide what you think afterward.As Blair said at the end of our conversation, let’s make cool shit happen.For fun, obviously.You can find Blair at blairkaplan.ca, on Instagram at BlairFromBlairland, and on Substack through her podcast How We Navigate Grief. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit loubowersmarketing.substack.com