Should You Start a Podcast for Your Business? A Founder’s Guide

Quick take:

If you run an expertise-driven business, starting a podcast can be one of the best ways to show prospective clients how you think. It can also become an expensive weekly obligation you quietly abandon after seven episodes.

So should you start one?

For many founders, yes, but only if:

I've worked on podcasts across coaching and B2B, solo and interview shows, established shows and launches.

The ones that lasted weren't necessarily hosted by the most naturally charismatic people. The bigger difference was whether the founder had a reason to keep publishing once the initial excitement wore off.

Before buying a microphone or picking cover art, that's the question worth answering.

A founder podcast does something hard to reproduce in a short social post - it gives someone time with your thinking.

Twenty minutes is enough to explain why you disagree with a common industry practice, tell the story behind a decision, or work through a problem you keep seeing with clients, all the nuance that disappears when the same idea gets condensed into five LinkedIn paragraphs. The listener also hears the delivery, what gets emphasized, where the hesitation is because the answer's more complicated than it first looks.

That matters for businesses where clients are effectively buying expertise and judgment. Someone evaluating two consultants or advisors isn't only asking whether they know the subject, they're trying to understand how that person approaches problems. A podcast gives them a lot more evidence of that.

But there's a catch.

Starting one is exciting… you've got the name, the cover, maybe ten episode ideas written down. Then the business gets busy, a client emergency happens on Tuesday, a new hire, travel for a project.

Then recording slips from Thursday to Friday, then into next week. Nothing dramatic happens. It just stops. A few months later someone discovers the business and finds a feed whose last episode published four months ago.

I've seen this enough that the most useful question isn't would a podcast be good for the business. For plenty of businesses it probably would be.

A few signals worth checking.

You naturally think out loud. Some founders are writers, give them a blank document and 45 minutes and they'll come back with a thoughtful essay, but put a microphone in front of them and every sentence feels like work. Others are the reverse, ask a good question on a client call and they'll talk for 15 minutes without notes, explaining the idea better than they would in a 1,500-word article. If that's you, podcasting may be one of the more efficient ways to capture your expertise, and the recording doesn't have to stay just a recording either, it can become the source for an article, a newsletter, searchable resources, and more.

People already ask for your opinion. What do clients repeatedly ask on calls. What sends you on a 10-minute tangent in a meeting. What do people ask about at dinner because it's known as your thing. Those are potential episodes, and a founder who regularly has these conversations probably won't struggle to find topics, the expertise already exists, the podcast just gives it somewhere to live. That's very different from deciding a podcast is good for marketing and then sitting down every Monday wondering what to say.

You can tolerate a slow start. Niche business podcasts are often building small, highly specific audiences, you may be speaking to exactly the right 40 people before you're speaking to 4,000. If the download graph needs to validate the project immediately, those early months can be miserable. The real test: would you still want to record if the first 20 episodes didn't get much attention?

If speaking feels unnatural, you don't particularly enjoy the format, and you can't think of what you'd explore once the obvious launch topics run out.

Forcing weekly podcast production doesn't make much sense. A strong newsletter and searchable article library can build authority just as well. The format needs to fit how you communicate.

There's another bad reason to start one: your competitors have podcasts. That's a reason to investigate the format, not a reason to commit to publishing for two years.

A podcast built primarily because someone decided the company should be doing podcasting tends to become another item on the marketing calendar.

A good founder podcast should have a job, maybe helping prospective clients understand your methodology before they talk to you, maybe giving people more exposure to your thinking because the business depends on trust, maybe becoming the source material for a larger publishing system. Those are different shows, and knowing which one you're building affects nearly every decision after.

Before worrying about audience growth, try something smaller.

Can you name five real people who would want to hear episode 1? Not an audience persona, not "SaaS founders with 10 to 50 employees," but five literal names. Previous clients, people in your network, colleagues, people you've met online.

The point isn't that those five will determine the show's success, it's that picturing them forces specificity about who you're speaking to. If you can't think of five, spend more time on the premise before recording.

Imagine you've launched. You've told people why you started the company, covered your philosophy, interviewed the obvious guest.

What's episode 12?

You don't need twelve polished titles before launching, but you should be able to see how your expertise opens into dozens of conversations. If you can't get past the first handful, the problem might be a podcast topic rather than a durable editorial premise, and that's much easier to fix before launch.

Set a timer for ten minutes.

Open the voice recorder on your phone and talk about something in your work that's been on your mind lately, with no script. Maybe a client asked something yesterday and you disagreed with the conventional answer, maybe you've noticed the same mistake across your industry.

Talk for ten minutes, then listen back.

Not for whether you have a podcast voice. For whether thinking this way feels natural to you. Did you keep finding things to say? Did one thought lead into another? Did ten minutes feel surprisingly short, or did the whole recording feel like performing a podcast host?

That ten-minute experiment tells you a lot more about your fit for podcasting than another evening spent comparing microphones.

It can be. I've worked with founders for whom the podcast became one of the strongest marketing assets in the business, but it worked because they had something they truly wanted to keep talking about and a reason for doing it beyond having another content channel.

Don't start by asking whether podcasting works. Ask whether you have something worth publishing repeatedly, whether speaking is a good way to extract it from you, and whether you're prepared to build the library before the audience fully arrives.

If those answers are yes, then it's time to worry about the microphone.

It can be, particularly when the business sells expertise, judgment, or a high-trust service. A small, qualified audience can be more commercially useful than a large general one. The real question is whether the business can sustain the show long enough to build that audience and a useful library of episodes.

Not every episode needs to be planned, but you should be able to see beyond the initial launch ideas. Imagine episode 12: after introducing yourself, your company, and your core philosophy, are there still questions and opinions worth exploring?

There's no universal timeline. For a niche founder podcast, plan for a slow build rather than expecting results from the first few episodes. The early months are better spent building the library, refining positioning, and learning which subjects attract the right listeners.

Either can work. Solo episodes are useful for demonstrating the founder's own expertise, while interviews build relationships and bring in other perspectives. Many founder podcasts benefit from using both, as long as each format has a clear purpose.

Then a podcast may not need to be the primary format. A newsletter and searchable article library may fit better. Podcasting gets much harder to sustain when every recording feels like a performance.

In the original episode, I go deeper into the test I use to think about whether a founder is actually suited to podcasting — including the five-person test, Episode 12 test and the ten-minute recording exercise.

If you've already launched a founder podcast, the question changes from

Should I have one?

to

Is the one I have actually doing its job?

Take the Founder Podcast Authority Audit to assess your positioning, editorial strategy, packaging, discoverability, publishing system and commercial path.

Take the Founder Podcast Authority Audit →