Dec 19, 2025
Calling Our Shot: How We're Building an Award-Winning Podcast in 2026 on $500/Month
The Unfair Advantage
Jacksonville's podcast scene lacks one critical thing: a business and AI-focused show that actually ships content at scale. While others post occasionally and hope for traction, we're building a content machine that will publish 3,000 pieces in 2025 alone. That's not a typo. Three thousand.
The $500/Month Tech Stack
Here's exactly where every dollar goes:
Riverside - Recording live simultaneously to YouTube and Facebook (soon LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok)
Opus Clip - Automated clipping, scheduling, and cross-platform posting
LinkedIn Sales Navigator - Hunting high-caliber guests
Claude - Turning transcripts into newsletters, social posts, and playbooks
ManyChat - Delivering playbooks to our social audience automatically
Kit - Newsletter infrastructure
Framer - Website presence
No fancy studios. No expensive editors. No bloated agency retainers. Just the right tools operated consistently.
The 4-Hour Weekly Workflow
We invest exactly four hours per week, broken into a ruthlessly efficient system:
Record the episode (live streaming creates immediate content)
Let Opus Clip slice it into short-form pieces
Feed transcripts to Claude for written content
Schedule everything across platforms
Use ManyChat to automate playbook delivery when people engage
That's it. No wasted motion. No perfectionism paralysis. Ship and repeat.
The Guest Strategy
Primary Target: Jacksonville 40 Under 40 recipients
Guest Criteria: Business operators doing $400k+ annually
The Hook: When we land a guest, we rent a professional studio. We make it special. We make it worth their time. This isn't a Zoom call in someone's bedroom - it's a production.
The Baseline: When we don't have guests scheduled, it's Chad and me on Riverside talking AI and business. No dead air. No gaps. We always ship.
The Content Multiplication System
One recording becomes dozens of assets:
Short-Form Video (12 pieces/day)
4 platforms: YouTube Shorts, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok
3 posts per platform daily
Opus Clip handles the heavy lifting
Written Content (2 pieces/day)
Daily posts on X
Daily posts on LinkedIn
Claude transforms transcripts into engaging written content
Newsletter (2-3x/week)
Deep dives and playbooks
Delivered via Kit
Gated through ManyChat for social engagement
The Math: This system generates over 5,000 pieces annually, but we're targeting 3,000 as our conservative, must-hit number.
The Success Metric That Matters
Forget downloads. Forget vanity metrics. We have one lead measure: hitting 3,000 published pieces of content in 2025.
Why? Because volume + consistency + quality creates an inevitable outcome. The award is a lagging indicator. The content output is the leading indicator.
If we execute the system, the recognition follows.
Why This Works When Others Fail
Most podcasters fail because they:
Overthink production quality
Post inconsistently
Wait for perfection
Don't have a content multiplication system
Give up after 10 episodes
We're different because we:
Ship live content immediately
Have automation handling distribution
Use AI to scale written content
Turn one recording into 50+ assets
Committed to the system for 12 months minimum
This System Has Already Proven Results
In 2024, I built this exact content distribution system for Hardly Initiated Podcast. When I started working with them, they had 10K Instagram followers and no TikTok presence. Five months later, they hit 100K Instagram followers and 67K on TikTok (launching from zero).
The secret? The same approach we're using now: 3 posts per day across platforms, systematic clip identification, and consistent execution. They were averaging 250,000 views daily and producing 3+ million-view clips every week.
Two years later, they're at 500K YouTube subscribers and still using the system I built. The difference now? AI tools like Opus Clip and Claude have automated what used to require a team of VAs and editors. What took a 5-month build in 2024 now takes 4 hours per week in 2025.
That's our unfair advantage. We're running a proven playbook with better technology at a fraction of the cost.
The Honest Truth About "Award-Winning"
We're not hoping to win. We're not manifesting it. We're systematically becoming impossible to ignore in Jacksonville's business and AI space.
When Folio's voters or Best of Bold City judges look at 2026, they'll see one podcast that showed up every single day, delivered massive value, featured the city's top business leaders, and built a real audience.
That podcast wins. That podcast is us.
Your Turn
This isn't theory. This is our actual playbook. We're executing it right now. By the time you read this, we're already weeks or months into the 3,000-piece journey.
Want to follow along? Want to see if we actually pull this off? The links are in our bio.
And when we win that award in December 2026, remember: you saw us call our shot.
