"Maurice, we want to make a podcast."
Now I've been producing shows long enough that you'd think I'd be thrilled every time a tech company tells me that, and yet…I'm usually not. But I also have bills to pay and they have money to spend, so here we are.
I'll start by asking a few questions to get to the root of their request:
What do you actually have to say? (they usually don't know)
Who should be saying it? (it's usually always the CEO, because they think podcast = clout)
Why would anyone want to hear this repeatedly? (arrogance? inability to read the market? a secret desire to be Joe Rogan?)
And what does a podcast let you do that you couldn't do somewhere else? (cue the longest pause of the meeting)
I'm not trying to dissuade them, but after these questions, the fantasy fades pretty fast and we're left with the reality: there's no strategy behind the request. They don't really want a podcast. They want an advertisement with theme music.
Okay. Now we can get to work.
Here’s the thing: the solution to this request is almost never "make a better podcast." It's figuring out what they already have (a person, a point of view, a community) and building the right container around it.
I was thinking about this recently when I heard that Ina Garten launched a podcast called Happy Hour With Ina Garten with Vox Media.
On paper, it's your standard weekly celebrity interview podcast. Ina invites people over for conversation, stories, food, and cocktails. Vox Media is handling sales, marketing, and distribution, and the video version lives on Ina's new YouTube channel.
I watched the first couple of episodes, and it's very well-produced. It's beautifully shot in a nice New York apartment with warm lighting, and it’s cozy and inviting, like you're sitting at the table with close friends. It doesn't really feel like a podcast, and I think that's on purpose. The format bends to fit Ina, not the other way around.
Like, I guarantee no one thought "how can we turn the Barefoot Contessa into a podcaster." No. They started with Ina: her personality, her curiosity, her reputation, and the feeling people already associate with her. Then they built a recurring format around those things.
And you say "well sure, but she's Ina Garten, not a company," that's kind of my point. Ina is the brand. Decades of cookbooks and TV built it long before anyone handed her a podcast mic. The show didn't create any of that. It just gave it somewhere new to live.
It sounds really obvious, but lemme tell you…it is amazing how often it isn't.
The reason this matters even more now is because different content formats are collapsing into each other. Podcasts are on TV, YouTube shows are podcasts, events get distilled into clips, shows become tours, and creators turn into product companies. When the container keeps changing, the editorial concept has to be stronger. (Sound familiar?)
A clear premise travels. A recognizable personality travels. A useful editorial point of view travels. An audience relationship travels.
"We have a podcast" does not.
I've seen this play out with the branded shows I've built, too. At Glitch, I worked on Function with Anil Dash, a show about technology, culture, society, and the ways all of those things collide. It didn't work because Glitch needed "content." We already had plenty. It worked because we had a host with a real point of view. Anil had spent years thinking, speaking, and writing publicly about technology, power, platforms, culture, and who gets included in building the web. Glitch had a perspective, too: at its core, the company cared about making building software more approachable, creative, weird, and human.
Function gave those ideas room to breathe. We could talk about big topics like surveillance and labor and the social consequences of technical decisions, and it all made sense because the show carried the same spirit the company believed in and it’s what Anil had been preaching for years. Audiences loved it too: it became a Top 200 ranked show in the Technology category on Apple Podcasts upon launch, and its early popularity quickly laid the foundation for our second season.
That proved to me that a branded podcast doesn't become interesting simply because the company paying for it is interesting. The show needs its own editorial reason to exist.
Honestly, though, Glitch was the easy case. The host and the point of view were already sitting there. CodeSandbox was harder, because it started exactly where this post did.
The initial premise was "CodeSandbox needs a podcast." I asked the same questions, and the real premise turned out to be this: CodeSandbox exists inside a larger ecosystem of people building tools for the web and we want to be part of that mindshare. What conversations would be useful to that ecosystem?
That gave us a strategy and somewhere to go. Actually, it gave us two shows. The CodeSandbox Podcast was built around the developer community surrounding the product. On Version One, I talked with the people behind influential web tools and companies about how their products actually got made, including the CEOs of Webflow, Netlify, and Vercel. Guests talked about product decisions, early mistakes, technical tradeoffs, and a lot more. Those conversations were already adjacent to CodeSandbox's audience and identity, so we didn't need to spend every episode elbowing our way into the conversation.
In my experience, the best branded shows understand that the brand earns something by creating a worthwhile editorial experience. It's an opportunity to demonstrate what you care about, to show your taste, and to introduce people to interesting ideas. That creates an association between your company and a particular community, a segment of culture, or an area of expertise. And if you're lucky, you barely need to talk about your product at all.
That's true of Ina, of Glitch, and of CodeSandbox. None of them manufactured a conversation around the brand. They recognized what they had and built the right container around it.
That's why I push back when somebody tells me they want to start a podcast before they've worked out what they're actually trying to build. Those four questions I ask at the start aren't there to talk anyone out of it. When the answers are good, they're the whole blueprint: a clear editorial question (what you have to say), a credible host (who should say it), an existing community (why anyone would come back), and something the company genuinely has permission, for lack of a better word, to talk about (why a podcast, and why you).
And if you don't have answers yet, that's fine too! Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is absolutely nothing until you have a better idea.
That's the real work. Everything else is production.