The NORDIC Podcasting Stack: 6 Tools to Become a Full-Stack Creator
Stop wasting time on amateur podcasting. Here are the six essential tools for professional-grade content creation.
The NORDIC Podcasting Stack: 6 Tools to Become a Full-Stack Creator
Neither quantity nor quality alone is enough. You need both.
Leveling up your production values won't automatically gain you new fans, but failing to meet a basic quality threshold will lose you viewers and listeners. You don't want your show to become another amateur effort collecting dust in the graveyard of half-baked podcasts.
The problem has traditionally been that professional-looking and -sounding podcasts take longer to produce, or require a big budget and paid subcontractors. Now, there are dozens of shiny new AI tools promising to help content creators streamline workflows and boost production value. But this gives rise to a new kind of analysis paralysis. Most of these tools are overly specific and just add complexity - like duct-taping another gear onto an already overcomplicated Rube Goldberg machine.
The good news: you can create a professional-grade podcast or YouTube video, complete with polished assets like thumbnails, show notes, and social clips, using just 6 tools (and you probably already have one in your pocket).
These tools aren't magic. They won't generate compelling content for you. You still need to come up with quality ideas and have interesting conversations with guests. But they WILL allow you to package that content in an attractive, listener-friendly way, without wasting hours on busywork.
Remember our motto: Finish your work and go outside.
N is for Notion: Your Podcast's Second Brain
Still relying on scattered Google Docs and haphazard notes apps to manage your podcast? Time to sharpen your axe. Notion is an all-in-one workspace that acts as a "second brain," allowing you to organize ideas, content calendars, transcripts, and workflows in one intuitive platform.
Think of Notion as your podcast's mission control center. You can use it to:
Capture and categorize episode/guest ideas as they strike
Create dedicated pages for each guest and episode, complete with outlines, research notes, and key discussion points
Collaborate with guests and co-hosts, sharing resources and tracking progress leading up to recording sessions
Use a master database for your recording calendar that functions as a CRM - showing your list of prospective guests, the topics you want to discuss, and progress towards publishing each episode.
O is for Opus: Claude 3 Pro
Claude's most powerful LLM, Opus, has taken AI-assisted writing to a new level. It's scary good at reading a podcast and helping you brainstorm everything from show notes, to titles, to ideas for blog posts based on a meandering hour-long conversation.
While not a replacement for human creativity, Opus is a powerful ally. Of all the LLMs, it's the most conversational and the best at writing.
Opus can read and understand the contents of your podcast episode better than you at times, making connections between ideas and conversation points. Start by having it pull out the best quotes for short reels/shorts. It can also identify areas in the conversation that need to be edited out - technical glitches or meandering asides.
Use Opus to write full-length articles using transcripts and discussed articles as source material. Iterate in the conversational chatbot interface until you seize on the right big picture idea, then build out an outline. Finally, ask for help drafting the article from the outline.
R is for Riverside.fm
Riverside.fm is the best-in-class recording tool to get high-quality audio and video from your guest, for a more professional look than Zoom, which depends on all parties having a strong internet connection. Riverside records all parties' files directly at the source and then uploads them from the hard disk to the cloud immediately after recording.
Once your interview is done, you can export full resolution files to your preferred editing apps, or export short clips directly for YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, etc.
D is for Descript
Descript has done something amazing: they put the fun back into audio and video editing. Descript lets you edit text to edit the underlying audio, create and apply templates for intros/outros, captions, and visual effects, and much more. They have a large library of royalty and license-free music and sound effects, so you don't run afoul of YouTube's stringent copyright penalties.
Of all the tools, Descript has the steepest learning curve, but it is designed with the user in mind, and you can figure out basic features in an afternoon.
Key features:
"Studio sound" filter that turns audio from a decent mic into pro-sounding audio
Truncate silences over a certain length
Highlight and delete filler words
Active speaker view - automatically cut to a full-screen view of the person talking
Rapid export to web (preview and share without downloading clunky files)
Their Creator plan is easily worth the $12/month.
I is for your iPhone
You can go down endless rabbit holes about the best webcam and become convinced you need a DSLR costing thousands of dollars. But chances are, the best camera within your budget is already sitting in your pocket.
We often forget that we're carrying around a $1,000 state-of-the-art 1080p webcam/microphone powerhouse. It performs well in mediocre light, and even the microphone is good enough for most purposes.
The latest OS comes with a native feature called Continuity Camera that lets you connect your phone as a webcam wherever both the computer and phone connect to the same WiFi.
C is for Canva
Canva is a graphic design suite that's replaced Photoshop for many creators. The background remover filter alone is worth the price of admission.
They have templates for any conceivable kind of content - YouTube thumbnails, social media graphics, and more. While built as a graphic design suite, it doubles as a social media scheduler.
Most posts are improved by a simple graphic, and you don't have to reinvent the wheel if you use Canva.
Take the time to learn a few tools well. Don't go chasing after the latest shiny object - even if it has "AI" appended to it. Use them. Don't let them use you.