Back in February, I announced that ComfyCozyCast—the affiliate podcast of ComfyCozyCon—launched its first episode. Now, I’m happy to say that we have completed this season!
Not all podcasts follow seasonal episode structures. (Lots will just have their episodes numbered individually and then get up to the 3 digits!) The main reason behind ComfyCozyCast having seasons was so that we had scheduled breaks. I wanted to prevent burn out and doing weekly episodes can get pretty taxing! So, we decided before we began that we’d do 10 episode long seasons. And we just released episode 10, the finale, today!
Things I Learned from Season 1
Considering this was my first ever podcast (actually the entire cast and crew‘s first podcast), there was a steep learning curve. Getting the website, RSS feed, and all the podcast distributors figured out was a headache in itself. And then there was figuring out the logistics of how we’d record a podcast during a pandemic when we can’t meet up in person. We figured it out as we went and I think we did fairly well, all things considered!
I learned quite a few things from this first season. Not all necessarily just the technicalities of running and hosting a podcast, but just some life lessons in general.
Anything that can happen will happen.
The amount of times we had to delay an episode’s release because of some crazy thing out of our control was much higher than I thought it would be. (I thought it’d be zero! It was not zero.) Both times were due to freak storms that caused a lot of headache for our Chief of Technology / Editor Offbrand. Power outages, audio file corruptions, you name it: it happened. But we learned to roll with the punches and simply opted to delay. Nothing wrong with delaying.
Just ask. The worst that can happen is they say “no.”
We somehow managed to have guests on seven out of the ten episodes of this season. And every single one of those required us reaching out to people in the hopes that they’d say yes. We’re a brand new podcast and have a very meager following of mostly our friends, so we were banking on people just being nice and wanting to chat with us. So imagine our surprise when so many accepted! As nerve-racking as it was to cold call people to have as guests (even if they were friends or mutuals), it was worth it because we got some really great episodes and had a lot of fun doing them!
Own up to mistakes. Issue corrections if you must.
We’re not perfect and I had my fair share of mistakes during the podcast. The one I beat myself up over most is misgendering someone (that Offbrand thankfully caught so I could correct myself). I also gave a disclaimer for an earlier episode once because I didn’t want people thinking we were condoning leaving a convention hotel room in disarray for the housekeeping to clean up. (Be responsible, put things back better than you found them!) We’re human and we’re gonna flub it up every once in a while. The best thing to do is own up to it, apologize, and move forward knowing how to prevent it in the future.
Ask for help.
I would not have been able to do this podcast were it not for the amazing cast and crew. I know I have micromanaging tendencies when it comes to these types of fun personal projects, but this crew was so good that I really could relax and know that we’d be okay. Yes, we did have to delay a few times, but what show hasn’t done that before? Putting off an episode is far from the end of the world. It’s a very low-stakes hobby to have. Don’t really have anything to lose at all!
Season 2
Season 2 is currently in the planning stages. (Pre-production? Is that what the pros call it?) We’ve started reaching out to potential guests and have a few already scheduled. We haven’t started recording yet, but will be picking that back up in June.
We’ll take all the lessons we learned with Season 1 into this next season with us and hopefully we can slowly improve as podcast runners! I’m looking forward to it! But I’m also very much enjoying this break.
Interested in guesting?
If you would like to apply to guest on the podcast, click here!
Image by Fabrizio_65 from Pixabay
Ashweez Cosplay 
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