Design a Show People Can Find

Nobody is searching for your show. They are searching for a solution to something, or idly browsing a category, and your show has about three seconds to explain itself: in the title, in the artwork, in the one-line description. This lesson is about designing for that stranger, because your friends will subscribe out of love and strangers subscribe out of clarity.

Start with the promise, not the name

Write this sentence before anything else: "This show is for [specific person], and every episode helps them [specific outcome or interest]." Corporate worker turned freelance project manager who wants to hear how others made the jump. Home bakers scaling into cottage food businesses. Ops leaders in logistics. The narrower the person, the easier every later decision becomes: which guests to book, which topics to cover, which five keywords your episode titles should contain. A show "about business" is a show for nobody in particular, and nobody in particular does not subscribe.

Give that person a name, literally. Operators in the training corpus describe giving your listener a first name and speaking to them. It sounds silly and it works: "every episode of The Transition Desk is for Dana, a 42-year-old operations manager six weeks into a layoff" writes itself into episode titles, and Dana hears you talking to her.

Naming that survives a search box

Your name has three jobs: it is findable, it is sayable out loud, and it is legally safe to use. Run every candidate name through these checks before you fall in love.

1. Search it. Type the name into Apple Podcasts and Spotify. If three shows already hold a version of it, pick another. Then search it in a regular search engine with the word "podcast" attached. You want the first page to be empty of collisions.
2. Say it. If someone hears the name at a dinner party, can they type it correctly into a podcast app afterward? Clever spellings fail this test constantly. Puns that only work in writing fail it too.
3. Clear it. Search the United States Patent and Trademark Office's free TESS database for the name in your category. This costs ten minutes and prevents the worst kind of launch-week surprise, a cease-and-desist from a show or brand that registered first. Finding nothing is not a legal opinion, but finding a live registration is a stop sign.

A dependable pattern is the plain descriptor: "The [Noun] Podcast," or a two-word name that names the territory ("Transition Desk," "Cottage Baker Radio"). Descriptive names convert strangers better than clever ones because the name does explaining work the artwork cannot.

Artwork is a thumbnail, not a poster

Your cover art will mostly be seen at the size of a fingernail, in a scrolling list, on a phone. Design for that reality. Technical requirements first: a square image at 3000 by 3000 pixels, 72 dots per inch, JPG or PNG, RGB color, which is the spec Apple's directory asks for and every hosting guide repeats (Buzzsprout's artwork guide). Design rules second: a short title readable at thumbnail size, high contrast between text and background, no more than roughly four words on the canvas, and skip the photo of yourself unless your face is the brand (and even then, big and uncluttered). Free tools like Canva handle this fine. A modest one-off fee to a designer on a freelance marketplace is a reasonable upgrade if design is not your thing.

The one-person test for the whole package

Here is the final exam for this lesson. Hand your name, artwork, and one-line description to one person who fits your listener description, with no context. Ask them what the show is about and who it is for. If they answer both correctly in one breath, you have designed a show people can find. If they hedge, the concept is still fuzzy, and fuzzy concepts are what episode ten feels like when the novelty has worn off.

The concept is set. The rest is building.