DIY Podcast VS Hiring a Podcast Production Company?

When starting your podcast, you need to decide whether to use a DIY approach or hire professionals.

Each approach has pros and cons, so here’s our handy guide to help you choose whether to produce your podcast yourself or hire a production company...

Understanding the Options

First, it’s essential to understand the two options available to you. If you choose to do the podcast yourself, you’ll be responsible for everything to do with the podcast - as the name suggests. This includes planning, recording, editing, hosting, distributing and promoting the podcast.

Conversely, hiring a production company takes many of those responsibilities off your hands. Whilst you’ll still be involved in the planning and recording of your podcast, the production company will handle a lot of the process, including the potentially time-consuming process of editing.

DIY

If you’re leaning towards the DIY route, you need to consider several things before making your final decision. For example, although you’ll save yourself the fee you would pay a production company, you’ll be putting an extra drain on other resources such as time and focus for you and your team. 

When producing a podcast, you should expect to spend an hour recording the episode and between 3 to 4 hours editing the podcast, uploading it to your hosting provider, writing the show notes and creating the promotional material for the episode.

Expect to spend at least 4+ hours creating each episode for your podcast

You’ll also need to invest in specialist equipment which will cost you.

Running a podcast in-house is much more work than you might think. As well the planning and effort that goes into recording each episode, you then need to deal with the post-production, which includes editing, hosting, distribution and promotion. These can all be time-consuming parts of the process.

Each episode must be edited from the raw files into a polished final product. If you’re taking this responsibility on as well, it takes time, expertise, and a good computer and specialist software. 

Editing involves seamlessly removing mistakes, false starts, and background noise and applying compression and EQ to make sure you can hear everyone speaking clearly. 

If the editing process seems too daunting, you can opt for a hybrid DIY & Production Company approach and outsource the editing to specialists. At Story Ninety-Four, we offer an Edit Only service which means that all the editing is taken care of by us, so you don’t have to worry about it.

Lastly, you need to think about the quality of your podcast and remember the reason for starting it in the first place. If you don’t have much experience in podcast production, your podcast’s quality may be lower than you were hoping for, which may detract from the overall aim.

The DIY approach is perfect for some aspiring podcasters, but not all. 

DIY Pros and Cons

• Pro: No hiring fee for a production company
• Pro: Autonomy over the entire process
• Con: Drain on non-monetary resources such as time
• Con: Still includes costs for equipment and software
• Con: Lower quality finished product
  

Podcast Production Company

That last point takes us neatly onto the significant strength of hiring a production company - they have the expertise.

Another significant advantage of hiring a podcast production company is that it takes a lot of the stress off your hands. You won’t need to worry about making mistakes or taking the time and effort to learn new skills because the production company will be able to offer their expertise and take care of the technical elements for you.

Hiring a podcast production company takes a lot of the stress off your hands.

You may have some slight trepidation over handing part of the production process to another company, but remember that they’re working with you. You will still be able to retain creative control over the podcast’s content - after all, you’re the expert in your field, just as they’re the experts in theirs!

Production Pros and Cons

• Pro: Higher quality podcast produced by experts
• Pro: Takes the stress away from you and your team
• Pro: Saves you startup costs such as equipment and software.
• Con: Comes with the price of a hiring fee
• Con: Lose some of your autonomy over the process
  

And that’s all there is to it. Both approaches have pros and cons, but remember that you may recoup in time and effort down the line any costs you pay in the short term by choosing a production company.

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