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building and indie business in the center of venture capital investment I'm Alex Edmonds known as supremerumham on the Internet welcome to the building in any business podcast okay that's a new intro that I thought up just now I tell me what you think about it. This episode is going to be about interviewing and I thought this was very appropriate because I just interviewed someone so I'm going to go over the do's of interviewing the don'ts of interviewing what else yeah the don'ts of interviewing I'm gonna walk you through a little bit about how to interview someone I'm gonna talk about the mistakes I made I made a couple the benefits of interviewing the downsides of interviewing what software to use and how to get great guests okay before we get started I want to let you guys know that this is the 50th episode I believe and my goal was to hit 52 that's my only goal for this the podcast 52 episodes and so now that I'm definitely gonna hit that number I want to hear from you guys because I don't hear a lot of feedback from my listeners so I created a survey it's just ten quick questions I want to hear how you found out about the podcast what's your favorite episode is there anything you want to hear anything missing things like that so I'm going to be putting a link to the survey in the show notes okay so let's get started the dues of interviewing someone assume your audience knows nothing so when you have a guest on the podcast introduce your guests or let them introduce themselves let them introduce what they want to talk about or the history okay and you want to do this because your audience and you usually get lost or disinterested if you start a podcast or a conversation in this case in the middle start out light and this is because your podcast guests might not be used to being on a podcast and they might be nervous so allowing them to start with easy questions it'll make them less nervous and after some easy questions they will relax so start off with something about the background and they'll start from there open start do open-ended questions only so ask them questions that they can expand on and it won't start like end abruptly and you it be difficult to transition so an example would be don't ask what's your favorite ice cream flavor ask which ice cream flavor do you think is better chocolate or strawberry and why okay next is have a goal what do you want to get out of the interview what do you want to know aloud this allows you to direct where the interview will go the flow of the interview so for example my goal with Brennan was to learn about finance and Brendan's goal was to talk about product time and so I will go over and the walkthrough about how I achieved that okay let them know that things can be edited out and the reason why you want to do this is because it'll make them more comfortable and willing to talk if they might be afraid to be open with you if um they are afraid of making a mistake and thinking that you're gonna publish it no matter what okay the next do is be flexible don't stick to the script if the interview goes beyond your your outline let it in my interview with Brennan I had 15 questions that I had outlined and we only went through about five of them okay do avoid questions that might make the guests feel awkward so in my interview I knew that Brendon had just exited his his company that he was a part of so I didn't ask him like oh how much did you make because of the exit because that might make him feel awkward okay do remember that they're most likely doing you a favor and the reason why I bring this up is because you don't want to blindside them with one of your questions so one example would be that I wouldn't be like how do you feel about venture capital and the impact it's having on the lower-class in New York I wouldn't say that to Brennan because that's awkward and he has nothing to do with that okay um the next thing to do is give them the first question ahead of time so the reason you want to do this is because um it helps the podcast flow because the person is already thinking about what to say before the podcast gets started and they don't have to stop and then like they don't have to there's not an awkward pause right after you asked the first question because they already know what they're gonna say so with Brendon he knew before we started recording that I was going to ask him about university beyond okay so the next thing you should do is your research don't questions they've answered a million times and on so on with my research with Brendon I knew he has a background in finance I knew he was involved in a eSports startup he's a big fan of product on podcasts because he's a part of the open podcast community and he lives in New York so I don't have a example of a bad example of not doing your research for Brendon but I listen to a lot of Bill burr interviews and one thing you don't want to ask bill is don't ask him how he got started and stand up he's answered that question a million times don't ask him about why he started this podcast because he's answered that question a million times and he's answered that recently so if you're doing your research on Bill and you look through his videos in previous interviews you'll see that he's answered that multiple times it's bad okay the final thing that you want to do is make sure to allow your guests to mention anything you may have missed and you want to do this by saying is there anything else that you would like to mention okay those are the dues of of interviewing someone now these are the don'ts don't do rapid-fire questions they're lazy you don't have to do research for them and your podcasts ends up sounding the same because each guest will their answers will eventually mix and be the same okay don't express your opinion or comment on something that you're the person you're interviewing says it eats up time and no one cares what you have to say if you're interviewing bill burr and you express your opinion about something he says I don't care you're a nerd I'm listening to the interview for what bill has to say if you want to say something about what he said do an episode after the interview with solo episode explaining your thoughts through the interview no one cares all right don't jump right into the interview meet with them before let them relax and then start recording so with Brennan I spent about an hour with them before the podcast even longer than that and we just really got to know each other we talked we talked about the what questions to ask things like that and it really helped us have a better interview all right so interview walkthrough so for an interview what you want to do is you want to have 12 to 15 questions so half a page of questions for thirty minutes of an interview and so if you have like an hour interview you want a full page of questions and this is so you don't get stumped or have any like dead air during the interview okay and so you also want to map out the interview creating a web of potential answers so that way you know what to ask if the interview if the guest goes a certain way so for example if you ask her hold on let me just do my example so um I was gonna ask Brennan about his previous startup and then I was gonna ask about his role at the startup and then depending on what he said about his role I was gonna ask about finance or about his day-to-day at the at the company so if he said oh I was the CFO of the company I was gonna ask the finance question and if he said oh I was the see tio I was gonna ask what is your day-to-day like okay um so you want to do that and try to transition to each question so actually let me just go over the full interview that I had out in my head so I was gonna start out with tell us about yourself then I was gonna go to previous startup and I was gonna go to role at the company and if he answered about the finance I was gonna say advantages for a company to stay private longer and then I was gonna ask about the indie maker movement which is how I met him online and then I was gonna ask about product on and then I was gonna ask about the product type meetup that he has just hosted and then I was gonna say what are you working on now and so if he answered about like the CTO or a different rule I was gonna say what's your day-to-day uhm what attracted you to bootstrapping then I was gonna go to product time and I was gonna go to the Meetup I was gonna let him talk about the meetup and then we were gonna meet up what are you working on now and then I was gonna ask him about the podcasts industry some of these questions I didn't even get to because I just let him go I let him talk about his previous startup about college about his opinion about the education industry I didn't even we didn't even like I said we only went through like five questions that I had I was prepared first which as you always should be okay um the mistakes I made during the podcast or during the interview I uh I interrupted him by accident and yeah I so he was going he was talking and I said oh what year was this sent to get people to get a better frame of mind for people especially for me and so I interrupted him by accident and I think I ruined his uh his train of thought and that kind of slowed down the interview but another mistake as I transitioned badly he was finished making his point and I go oh is that it and so for what I meant was are you done with the interview and I felt like that was like oh I'm bored are you done with what you're talking about yeah I didn't didn't think that came out came off well um I have a final thing that I uh I did badly and I think that I did this really badly um is I didn't test the audio or software for the interview so I had just as assumed that if we were on any video platform that it would record the audio for me and I could just edit it somewhere I heard on audacity because that's how I do things okay but uh we tried zoom it wouldn't record the audio it would record the video but not just so solely the audio the the video the the audio it wouldn't record the audio only and so we tried Google Hangouts that didn't work either we tried Skype that didn't work either and finally Brennan was like oh is there like a podcast same interview software and I was like yeah let's try a Zen caster which I know about but I just wasn't thinking about it so finally we did send caster for the audio and then Skype for the video and we got disconnected after the interview and we saw the video but because the audio was on Zen caster we couldn't hear each other and so we had a hang-up on skype and then call each other back and I just thought that was really funny okay now the benefits of interviewing when you've interviewed someone who doesn't have a podcast and they have an interest in podcasting they'll invite you on to their new podcasts and you'll be exposed to a new audience and so will your podcasts so you'll get more listeners okay um another benefit is less speaking for the host so I've been talking for 15 minutes non-stop and with interviewing someone I talked about when I was interviewing Brennan I talked about for maybe two minutes total in a 46 minute podcast that was great I loved it okay the downsides of interviewing someone you constantly have to search for yes I was very lucky that Brandon had asked asked the jar or me to interview him I probably wouldn't have done an interview if it wasn't for him because I didn't I don't want to search for yes and that's why my podcast is so low okay um another downside of interviewing is the inconsistency and the quality of your yes so one person can have experience being on a podcast and that really helps you because they know how to handle being on a podcast and they might not get nervous another guest you have this might be their first podcast and they're not used to expressing themselves and so they'll be nervous and your quality between interviews will be inconsistent okay so now how to interview someone specifically the software to use so to record the actual interview I use Zencaster and what Zencaster does is it will send you two audio files it'll send you your audio and your guests audio the downside of Zencaster is you can only have two people on the interview so if you want to do a roundtable you can't do you can't use Zen caster for that we use Skype for video and yeah that's just for just see each other and if you want to make visual cues to each other and then for editing you can use audacity so like I said they'll Zencaster we'll give you two audio files and you upload them or import them to audacity and then you just you do like three different things I think you go to track and then mix and then render and then it'll it'll put them together it's very easy I was so relieved it was so easy okay um the next and final thing I want to talk about is how to get great guests on your podcast okay um the first thing you want to do is you want to tap into your network and this is how I had Brennan as in get a guest on the podcast I he is part of the open podcast network he was looking for to be interviewed and I was looking for someone in the community to help start the open podcast community podcast and I finally did and I will put it in the show notes finally okay um the next thing you want to do to find great guests is look for places where people are looking for yes so there's podcast stop me which has like basically ads for people that want to be guests on podcast Atlas what their area of expertise is why they want to be on podcast stuff like that so that is one place and I actually am currently working on a feature to post ads for people that want to be guests on podcasts and people that are looking for a co-host that will be a paid feature though but it'll be like one or two dollars just so I don't have to have these and it'll prevent spam on that page okay so the next thing you can do to create great guests and I think this is the final point I'm making yeah so um the final way to get great guests is have a specific person in mind and find out where to contact them and shout to them from there so let's say I wanted to have Bill burr on the podcast which I would love that but anyways um so if I wanted to have bill on the podcast I couldn't reach him on social media because he is 1.4 million followers something like that so I would he's always saying email me at bill at the mm podcast comm and his assistant goes through that so odds are um he would hear about that that I wanted to interview him on my podcast if I sent him the email so probably email would be best for him um so yeah that's how you would get great guests okay that's all I have for today this is a pretty long episode thank you for listening um have a nice day if you are a avid listener of the podcast please fill out the survey it'll be in the show notes thank you for listening again have a nice day Bye