RWDevCon Inspiration Talk – NSBrief by Saul Mora

Can We Actually Use This Name?

However, there was a dilemma. I don’t know if you ever followed a lot of the app store mishaps in the early days where apps were rejected for almost no reason or random reasons or it’s really unclear. Although that really hasn’t gone away has it?

Apps were having a hard time with being experimental and such back in the day. One such app was named Briefs.

Does everybody remember this app? It’s by Rob Rhyne. Me being a conscientious, somebody that’s trying to get on to the scene, just trying to cover my bases I guess and such, I was like, “Brief and Briefs are too close to really be synonymous in the same field, so I should really just ask the author of this app for permission.”

I sent them an email, I tracked them down. I didn’t know who it was and I found his blog and I’m like, “Hey Rob, I’m going to start this podcast called NSBrief and I noticed your app is Briefs. Are you okay if I called my podcast this?”

He’s like, “Sure. Thumbs up, go right ahead.”

I’m like, “Sweet.” Then I got my thinking hat on and realized, “Hey wait do you want to be a guest on this podcast I’m just starting? I haven’t started it yet.”

Rob Rhyne, CEO of Martian Craft back then and now, was the very first guest of NSBrief. It was a very crude interview. It was done over a telephone line. We had something that would actually record the telephone conversation. The audio quality is horrible if you go back to it. You can go Nsbrief.com and look at the very first episode.

We talk about his adventures through getting Briefs in to the app store, which basically never really succeeded. The one that’s out there now is a completely different version than it was originally intended.

Evolution of Sound

I use Garage Band which is a very simple, free way to edit audio and put stuff together and I still use the Garage Band to edit NSBrief. I also started with a fairly cheap microphone.

This was maybe $40 – $50, the quality wasn’t so great, but it was alright. It made it through maybe a few episodes, maybe 10 episodes. I would talk to some friends of mine at conferences and I would actually even record with my iPhone. I get the microphone app and just record, interview and do this and it was a little hokey but I wasn’t sure I was invested in this thing. I just wanted to try it out, do it on the cheap and see what I could do. Just Garage Band and whatever I had with me.

Hey it worked; I got a few episodes out of it, but then I was like, “I need to make a breakthrough.” I need to do more because it wasn’t really taking off like I’d hoped.

The thing is on one New Year’s Eve. I made a stupid resolution. I bet myself that I could post a new episode once a week for a year. Does anybody make New Years Resolutions? Who does crap like that?

I did and it worked. Challenge accepted!

It took a little while, but things kept going. These are my original stats from when I hosted the feed on feed burner.

That very first number down there is not quite zero, it’s just 20. Only 20 people have heard that first episode back in the beginning, but it slowly crept up and it crept up and it turned out that the more episodes I produced more frequently, the more listeners I gained and got a lot more feedback over time too.

I eventually invested in a little bit more high quality gear. I’ve got the microphone and I’ve got the actually arm stands so it looked like an actual radio person.

I got a little soundboard down there. That’s all my test devices if you’re really interested.

One of the things that was really useful was this portable voice recorder.

I’ve actually still got it here. This was really useful, because it much higher quality. It’s also in stereo, where as if you just use the iPhone microphone it’s only just a mono audio feed. Instead you can take this and just have people voice in stereo, have it sound a little bit more comfortable to your ears.

I would go to meetups and things and asks friends, “Hey you want to do this podcast?” For this one with Tom Harrington what I did was I just said, “Hey let’s talk about Core Data.”

What were talking about here actually is we’re just going through some Stack Overflow posts and answering random questions. You can go in the show notes and see that episode and see the questions that we asked and see how we answered them

You can also see down there at the bottom how crude my set up was. All I did was just talk normally and the voice recorder was really down there, way down there in the bottom. Now that can come back to haunt me later.

Needless to say I have improved my technique a little bit. I’ve got some better equipment, some better microphones. Well that’s what happens, you get better and better at your craft and you have better tools to do a better job.

Lesson Learned #1: Audio Quality Is Important

I’ve made my fair share of mistakes producing NSBrief. One of them is actually producing the audio. Having not done audio or been an audio engineer or anything like that in college or anywhere else before, I was basically learning on the fly. That didn’t really turn out well in the early days.

It turned out later that I actually asked for some help and got a lot of help from the community to help me learn how to do audio and make it so that people could actually hear the podcast and hear the content that they wanted to get to so much.

That was nice to at least to get some feedback on that, but I only got a 2 star rating for that. It’s still up there. It’s kind of sad, but moving on.