Why I fired our podcast host last month
I’ve intentionally waited a good while to share this story so that I could have as much emotion removed from its telling as possible. Also because I don’t want to unduly influence people’s perception of a legit and by all accounts honorable business providing a valuable service to the marketplace. It’s purely personal, as you’ll soon see.
I began using the service that eventually became Captivate podcasting in March 2015, just a couple of months after I got into the business of podcasting. It was recommended and promoted by people who’s opinion I respect and trust, and I got a pretty good discount as a founding member with their service.
They rolled out the Captivate hosting service in either 2017 or 18, I can’t remember exactly. And aside from a few inevitable hiccups along the way, all was going smoothly. So smooth in fact that when I began taking on new production clients in the fall of 2020, they were the only service I thought of recommending for their hosting service. I think I brought in around 10 new clients between September 2020 thru the present. Not all of them have stayed, but a good number did and remain to this day.
So I was a bit shocked to receive an email from the founder of the company – fully personalized no less – informing me that I was in “serious breach” of their terms and conditions because there were several “client shows” in my dashboard, basically the back office area where all the files are uploaded, show notes and graphics are added, shows scheduled, etc. So serious was this breach of their T&C that they were going to shut me down in a matter of days unless I took care of this, this, this, etc.
It was rather harsh and very impersonal: trial, judgment and sentencing in less than 500 words.
Captivate is a bit unique in that they allow their clients to host as many shows as they want with one account – provided they’re your own shows and not those of production clients.
I had done things the right way, asking each client to add me as a team member, while they paid for their own hosting. It was all legit and above board. And had the founder of the company – a friend of mine no less – taken a few seconds to check things out before sending that email, he would have seen as much and all likely would have been well.
But he didn’t check anything out before hitting “send”. And it just rubbed me wrong.
Loyal client who pays his bills on time for going on 7 years.
Referred many new clients to the platform in the last 12 months.
And this is the treatment I’ve earned…
The founder quickly acknowledged the error and tried to smooth things over. He told me he would have preferred to notify me personally rather than have an automated bot send a pre-filled message. Apparently my account “flagged” some algorithm with their robots that check for such things. I remember thinking it would have been better if an automated message had been sent. I would have replied there must be some sort of mistake, the humans would have corrected it and life would have gone on.
But I wasn’t interested in hearing it. I guess the personal touch accusing me of impropriety, with no presumption of innocence, all things considered just didn’t land well on my side.
So I told them I was leaving at the end of the billing period that had just begun that day. It wasn’t a fun conversation, but it ended up being as professional as could be expected given the circumstances.
I realized that one doesn’t need to be married to a particular service forever; in fact, moving on to something else can be a good thing. I had been feeling a bit in a rut with things in the business, and this new change of scenery with podcast hosts actually did a lot of good.
So truth be told, it’s probably for the best on all accounts.
There’s no real moral to this story other than that for all the automation and machines running things, this is still a human business. There are still humans with their emotions, biases, morals (or lack thereof) programming those machines, punching the buttons and mouse clicks and what not.
And if things don’t work out for whatever, there are always plenty of folks offering something very similar.
We pay more for podcast hosting with our new service, Acast, which is fine by me. Maybe that policy of allowing unlimited shows on one account is a disservice; maybe it prevents people from doing critical thinking before diving into a new project.
Maybe. But that’s not for me to decide. I’ve got my own problems.
Anyway, Sana and I have been busy pumping out new podcasts on our new hosting platform. We’re talking about really serious and relevant topics in my humble and accurate opinion. And we manage to have a few laughs doing so.
Check it out if you’re looking for a new show to listen to: https://flowjn.com/vojdaan
James Newcomb