You are reading contentfolks—a fortnightly blend of sticky notes, big content ideas, and small practical examples. Thank you for being here! ~fio
Hey there 👋
A few weeks ago, my Float colleagues Romina and Jasmin released an internal podcast based on short team member interviews. I don’t usually enjoy the format (I almost always read interview transcripts instead), so I was surprised to find myself hooked—it was fascinating how, in the course of a 15-minute episode, someone would go from a name I’d spotted once or twice in Slack to a human whose life I was now actively interested in.
So then I thought: would people enjoy a podcast where content marketers discuss the mundane things that make us who we are, beyond our content-related job titles?
…well, you tell me! There are currently five episodes live you can listen to:
A ‘minimum delightful’ approach to content marketing
Modern product teams often take a ‘minimum viable product’ (MVP) approach, shipping the bare minimum functionality needed to bring a product to market so they can get early feedback and iterate accordingly. A few of these teams might opt for a ‘minimum delightful product’ (MDP) instead, shipping an MVP equivalent that also takes into account the element of audience delight. But most content teams I know don’t do either thing, and go for a grand reveal at the end by shipping fully finished, extremely well-polished pieces after weeks or even months of work.
I hear the objection—the larger the company, the more established its branding and reputation, so you can’t just sit down and impulsively ship a slightly underbaked content thing in a third of the time it would normally take.1 That’s where a ‘minimum delightful product that meets your brand quality criteria’ approach could be very useful to a content marketing team: it stops you from shipping subpar content and causing brand snafus in the name of speed, but also forces you to get a lightweight version of your work out there much sooner than usual.
I gave myself two weeks to go from idea to three shipped episodes—I knew that, without a short-term and audience-facing goal, this would end up being yet another great idea that never sees the light of day.2
I whipped up a Notion page that same afternoon and shared it with ten potential guests to see if any of them would bite. I was very clear that I’d be 97% winging the whole thing, but by Tuesday I had five interviews booked, and by Friday I had three of them recorded. I posted a snippet from one of these calls on LinkedIn, and got a bunch of enthusiastic comments back. Minimum lovable product = ☑️
I decided it was perfectly okay to not invest in fancy equipment, use my existing microphone, and just plop random sofa cushions on the table to improve the acoustics.3 But there were other things I didn’t want to compromise on, so I spent a weekend designing a logo and composing the intro music instead of using stock images and sounds. Minimum lovable product that meets your brand quality criteria = ☑️
podcast studio 1.0
I shipped the first three episodes last Wednesday and two more today. It’s not a perfect product by any means,4 but at least it’s out there—and now I can start turning it from okay to (hopefully) great based on your feedback.
I hope you’ll give it a listen via Spotify or Apple and that you’ll have fun with it. And if you like it, will you let me and other people know? 😉
Random learning: they actually work far better than I thought. And the reason I know is because the one time I forgot to put them there was on a call with Rand Fishkin, and I can definitely hear the difference. Sigh.
Okay, it may not be perfect, but it’s already very well edited, especially when my interviews are usually ~25 minutes and each episode stays consistently around 12. That’s one of the perks of being married to someone who is a better podcast editor than I am 😇
Love it. I've been following you for a while and your experiments are always inspiring.
Well done!