What Do Podcast Producers Do

I’m Travis Vengroff – Showrunner, Producer, Sound Designer, and Editor of Fool & Scholar Productions. We are one of the most successful independent podcast teams in the world.

As we produce audio fiction, as opposed to traditional talk podcasts, our work is somewhat different from a normal podcast routine. I rely heavily on Google Calendar and Trello to keep me updated on what I need to accomplish in a given day/hour and to keep me on task. Notwithstanding interviews, presentations, travel, or directed recording sessions (which are rare for us as our cast generally self-directs), here is what a normal day looks like for me.

*All hours subject to some variance*

7:00am – Hit snooze on the alarm.

7:30am – Wake up, have a huge breakfast, check emails, social media, read the news. On Mondays, I’ll check google alerts on our respective brands and make sure that no one on Redbubble is stealing our art.

8:15am – Work out and morning hygiene

9:10-9:30 am – Reply to emails, check Patreon messages and social media. Typically I’ll check in with the various people I work with on a regular basis: Our mixing engineer, dialogue editor, and anyone else I need to follow up with who isn’t on Pacific time. This is also when I typically post on social media.

10am – 12:00pm – Edit audio or scripts. Most of my work is sound design and everything after an initial dialogue cut. We produce about 30 minutes of new, fully scripted content per week. Lately, it’s been double that. I will also periodically address small issues that come up from accounting, reporting, time-sensitive fan mail, feedback for musicians/artists we work with, and things of that nature.

12:00pm-12:30 – Walk our dog Eezo. I’ll also eat a small snack and check social media.

12:30-3:00pm – Edit audio.

3:00pm – Final casual email check of the day. If it’s not time-sensitive, this is my best opportunity to reply to it.

3:30pm-5:05pm – Edit audio. I try to stop at 5pm but I rarely end on time.

5:15pm-7:00pm – Dinner and family time. Our dog is very punctual about when he eats and is an accurate alarm for 5:30 if I work for too long.

7:00pm-??? – Some days I’ll edit until much later (10pm or well into the early hours of the morning). Typically one day a week.

I’ve been working to create a work/life balance, and while I’m presenting a 9-5 job I am pretty much always “on”, working on things like PR outreach, social media, community building. I work an extra 6-8 hour day every other weekend, and I am in the process of reducing the number of simple tasks on my shoulders. Prior to hiring our dialogue editor, I worked an extra 8-12 hours a week. It’s important to also recognize that podcasting is something you do because you love it, not because you want to make a lot of money. We are quite fortunate to have had the success we’ve seen, but Kaitlin and I have also worked harder than the majority of people would find acceptable for the last five years.

You can hear the vast majority of our works for free however you find podcasts (Spotify, Apple Podcasts, etc), and we are fully fan funded through Patreon.