Last week we laid out the full scope of what a podcast producer really does: the research, the guest management, the editorial calendar, the audio work, the distribution pipeline, the strategic analysis. It’s a lot. And if you read that piece and thought “I do all of that myself,” this one is for you. The Solo Podcast Producer.
The solo podcast producer, the host who is also their own producer, editor, scheduler, marketer, and everything in between, is one of the most common figures in podcasting and one of the least supported. Most podcasting advice is written either for complete beginners or for shows with teams behind them. The one-person shop sits in the middle, doing professional-level work with personal-level resources, and figuring most of it out alone.
This post is a practical guide to doing it well. It follows the same production arc as last week: pre-production, recording, post-production, distribution, and at each stage covers the tips, habits, and tools that make the workload manageable without letting the quality slip.
A downloadable checklist at the end of this post gives you a single reference document to run through for every episode, so nothing falls through the cracks.
Pre-Production: Set Yourself Up Before You Show Up
Pre-production is where the solo podcast producer loses the most time, usually because they’re reinventing the wheel every episode instead of building systems that carry forward.
Build an editorial calendar and actually use it. This doesn’t need to be complicated. A simple spreadsheet with episode number, topic, guest name, record date, and publish date is enough. What matters is that you’re planning at least four to six weeks ahead so you’re never scrambling to fill a slot. Block recurring time on your calendar for planning, recording, and editing. Treat these blocks like appointments you can’t cancel.
Create a guest outreach template and a standard pre-interview briefing document. Both of these get used repeatedly with minor customizations, which means the time you spend getting them right once pays off across every episode. Your briefing document should cover the show’s format and tone, what the guest should prepare, technical requirements (microphone, headphones, quiet environment), and a few example questions so they arrive oriented and ready.
Do your guest research in a structured way. Before every interview, create a simple one-page brief on the guest: their background, their most relevant work, two or three angles you want to explore, and any prior interviews worth noting so you’re not covering the same ground they’ve covered everywhere else. Tools like Notion or a simple Google Doc work well for this. The goal is to walk into every recording genuinely prepared, not approximately prepared.
Tools worth knowing: Calendly or TidyCal for scheduling without the back-and-forth email chains. Notion, Trello, or Airtable for editorial calendar and episode tracking. A shared Google Drive folder per episode to keep research, notes, and assets organized in one place.
Recording: Protect the Conversation
As the solo producer, you’ve already done the pre-production work. Now your job is to protect the recording both technically and creatively.
On the technical side, run a brief systems check before every session. Confirm your microphone is selected as the input device. Check your headphone levels. Do a thirty-second test record and listen back before the guest joins. This takes less than three minutes and catches the problems that would otherwise ruin an hour of work.
Record a backup. Always. Use your primary recording platform, Riverside, Squadcast, Zencastr, or similar, but also run a local recording simultaneously using Audacity, GarageBand, or even your phone as a backup device. Remote recording platforms have improved dramatically, but they still fail occasionally, and a backup has saved more than a few episodes that would otherwise have been unrecoverable.
As the host, your job during the recording is to be fully present in the conversation. This is harder than it sounds when part of your brain is also monitoring levels and watching the clock. One practical solution: set a recurring silent timer on your phone to check in on the technical side every fifteen minutes, then let yourself focus on the guest in between. Another: keep a notepad next to you for jotting follow-up questions as they occur to you, so you’re not holding them in working memory while trying to listen.
Conduct a brief post-recording debrief with yourself immediately after the guest hangs up. Note the best moments, the timestamps of anything worth highlighting, and any production decisions you’re already thinking about. Do this while it’s fresh. You’ll thank yourself in the edit.
Tools worth knowing: Riverside.fm for high-quality remote recording with local track backup. Audacity (free) or GarageBand (free on Mac) for local backup recording. A simple notepad, physical or digital, for in-session notes.
Post-Production: Edit Like an Editor, Not Just a Host
Post-production is where the solo podcast producer is most likely to either spend too much time or not enough. Both are problems.
Spending too much time usually means editing at the word level: hunting down every filler word, every breath, every micro-pause. This is time-consuming, often unnecessary, and can actually make a conversation sound over-produced and unnatural. A better approach is to edit at the idea level first: identify the sections that don’t serve the listener, cut them, and then do a pass for the most distracting technical issues. Aim for clean and listenable, not clinically perfect.
Spending too little time usually means publishing a recording that hasn’t been shaped into an episode. The best material is buried, the opening is slow, and the overall listening experience hasn’t been considered. The edit is where you serve the listener. Give it the time it deserves.
A practical editing workflow for solo producers: listen through once at 1.5x speed and mark sections to cut, keep, or consider. Make the structural cuts first. Remove anything that doesn’t belong in the episode. Then do a cleanup pass for the most obvious technical problems. Then export and move on. Resist the pull toward endless refinement.
Audio leveling and mastering matters more than most solo producers realize. Your episodes should meet the standard loudness level for podcasts: -16 LUFS for stereo, -19 LUFS for mono. Most editing software includes a loudness normalization tool, or you can use a free tool like Auphonic to handle this automatically after export. Consistent loudness across episodes is one of those invisible quality signals that listeners notice when it’s wrong even if they can’t name why.
Write your show notes as a standalone piece of content, not a summary of what was said. Include the guest’s name and credentials, the core topics covered, any resources mentioned, and relevant links. Use the language your audience actually searches for. A good set of show notes extends the life of your episode well beyond its publish date by making it findable months or years later.
Your episode title is the single most important piece of copy you write for each episode. Specific always beats vague. Benefit-forward beats descriptive. “How Regulatory Commentary Is Reshaping Fintech” will consistently outperform “Episode 47: A Conversation With [Guest Name].” Spend more time on your titles than feels comfortable. They earn it.
Tools worth knowing: Descript for editing audio and video via transcript is a genuine game-changer for solo producers. Auphonic for automatic loudness normalization and audio cleanup. Adobe Audition or Reaper for more advanced editing needs. ChatGPT or Claude for first drafts of show notes that you then edit into your own voice.
Distribution: Get It Out and Make It Work
Distribution is where the production work meets the audience, and it’s frequently the stage solo producers treat as an afterthought.
Upload your episode to your hosting platform with full metadata: title, description, season and episode number, guest name, chapter markers if your platform supports them, and a properly sized cover image. These details affect how your episode appears across podcast apps and how easily it can be found. Don’t skip them.
Schedule your release for a consistent day and time. Audiences are creatures of habit, and publishing on the same day each week, even if that day occasionally shifts by a few hours, builds a predictable rhythm that listeners appreciate and that some podcast app algorithms reward.
Create at least one social asset per episode. This doesn’t have to be elaborate. A quote card, a short audiogram, or even a well-written text post pulling a compelling moment from the episode gives you something to share that’s more engaging than a plain link. Identify the shareable moment during your post-recording debrief so you’re not hunting for it later.
Send an email to your list on publish day. If you don’t have an email list, building one should be near the top of your priority list. Your list is the one audience channel you own outright. It is not subject to algorithm changes, platform shifts, or account suspensions. Even a short weekly email with the episode title, a one-paragraph summary, and a link does the job.
Follow up on your own promotion. Respond to comments. Acknowledge shares. If a listener asks a question in response to an episode, that question might be your next episode topic. The distribution phase doesn’t end when you hit publish. It ends when the conversation around the episode goes quiet.
Tools worth knowing: Buzzsprout, Transistor, or Captivate for hosting with solid distribution and analytics. Headliner or Descript for audiogram and social clip creation. ConvertKit or MailerLite for email list management. A social scheduling tool like Buffer or Later to batch your promotion in advance.
The Sustainability Question
One thing the tools and workflows can’t fully solve is the sustainability of doing all of this alone over the long term. Burnout is real in solo podcast production, and it usually arrives not in a single moment but as a slow accumulation of skipped steps, declining quality, and mounting dread before recording days.
A few things help. Batching: recording two or three episodes in a single session rather than one at a time, dramatically reduces the setup and teardown overhead per episode. A clear minimum viable episode standard: the non-negotiables that every episode meets, below which you don’t publish, protects quality without requiring perfection. And an honest relationship with your own capacity means knowing when to take a planned break rather than waiting until you’re running on empty.
You’re doing the work of multiple people. The least you can do is treat that work, and yourself, with the seriousness it deserves.
The Checklist
Click the button below to download a per-episode checklist I specifically drafted for the solo podcast producer. It follows this post’s workflow from pre-production through distribution and covers every stage so nothing gets missed, no matter how busy the week gets.
Contact The Podcast Wizard
Need a little more guidance? That’s what Podcast Wizardry is here for. Send me a DM on the Podcast Wizardry LinkedIn page (fastest) or via my Contact Us page. I’m happy to help you make the most of your production.