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Raise your hand if you know someone who’s said the phrase: “I’m thinking of starting a podcast.” Or raise your hand if you’ve personally had that thought. Or raise it if you’ve actually started a podcast. Whatever the case, I’m guessing lots of you have your hands raised. Or rather, lots of you would have your hands raised if I could see you and you actually felt pressure to raise a hand.

The reason so many people have considered starting podcasts is because the idea of starting a podcast is like the digital equivalent of saying, “I should buy a bar.” In other words, it’s one of those things that appears to offer all sorts of valuable social capital while looking fun and easy from the outside, but, in reality, it’s tons of work, and, in the unlikely event you’re successful, the rewards are still fairly meager.

I should know. Two years ago, I launched a podcast about digital entrepreneurship called Web Masters, and I spent those two years posting new episodes almost every week. The podcast is even reasonably popular — especially considering I’m not a celebrity and didn’t start with a huge fan base. I’ve even had tons of guests you’ve likely heard of (or, rather, guests who founded companies you’ve heard of… Etsy, Vimeo, WIRED, Foursquare, Match.com, Meetup, and a bunch more).

I launched the podcast, in part, because I’m an entrepreneurship educator, and interviewing some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs seemed like a good way to teach people about entrepreneurship. However, I also launched the podcast as an experiment. I’ve had dozens of entrepreneurs, content creators, and clients ask me if they should create a podcast as a marketing strategy for their respective businesses, and I didn’t have enough experience to give them good advice.

However, I’ve now got two years of experience, and, as a result, I feel reasonably qualified to answer the question. The short answer is:

HELL NO!!!!!

The slightly longer answer is:

You’d be crazy to start a podcast as a marketing strategy because getting listeners for your podcast is almost certainly going to be a bigger marketing effort than whatever other marketing strategies you might want to pursue for your actual venture/product/company/etc.

However, after two years, I learned a lot more than just whether or not podcasting makes for a good marketing strategy. Since those lessons might be helpful to some of you, I thought I’d share them here. What follows are the five most important lessons I learned from two years of weekly podcasting. Sure, it’s not everything I learned, but it should be more than enough for most people to make a more informed decision about whether or not to actually launch that podcast they’ve been contemplating.

Lesson #1: Podcasts are surprisingly easy to create

Keep in mind, “easy” and “time consuming” are two totally different descriptive terms. I mention this because most people encounter the word “easy” and assume it also means “quick.” For example, rewatching every episode of Game of Thrones is easy (except maybe for the last season), but it’s not quick.

With that caveat out of the way, the first lesson I want to share is that I was pleasantly surprised by how easy creating podcasts is. I never needed a piece of software that wasn’t either installed on my computer by default (e.g. Quicktime, Garageband) or relatively ubiquitous (e.g. Zoom). I did order a nice microphone, but great options are available for relatively cheap.

In other words, with tools you either already have or can easily obtain, you, too, can make a podcast. Just record yourself and/or an interviewee, do some editing (admittedly has a learning curve, but there’s no shortage of YouTube tutorials), and upload the finalized file to all the podcasting apps and services out there by using any number of free or paid podcast hosting services.

That’s it. You don’t need a fancy studio or expensive equipment. All you need is a quiet space (get ready to spend a lot of quality time in your closet!) and your computer. Beyond that, the thing you’ll need most of is time. Lots and lots of time.

Lesson #2: Getting people to listen is unfathomably difficult

I can confidently tell you only two people in this entire world have listened to every episode of my podcast: me and my mother. (Who’s also surely reading this article… thanks for all your support, Mom! Love you!)

I mention this because, while creating a podcast is easy, convincing people to actually listen is really, really, really, ridiculously hard. If you want your podcast to be successful, getting listeners is what you’ll need to spend most of your time working on. Unfortunately, you’ll be spending so much time creating the podcast (see above point about “easy but not quick”), that you might not have tons of bandwidth to do all the marketing.

Lesson #3: Discoverability is non-existent

A big part of the reason getting people to listen to podcasts is hard is because the podcasting world doesn’t have great ways for people to discover new and interesting content within the ecosystem itself.

To understand what I mean, think about how you discover new content on TikTok or YouTube. As you use those apps, they’re constantly pointing you toward new content. The same thing doesn’t exist in the podcasting world because most of us rarely look at our podcasting apps. How, then, do people discover new podcasts? Which brings me to my next lesson…

Lesson #4: You should have an audience before starting a podcast

Most of us discover new podcasts in one of two ways. Either someone or something we already know, follow, and/or care about starts a podcast. Or, people we know and trust recommends a podcast they started listening to which happened most likely because someone or something they already knew, followed, and/or cared about started a podcast.

Do you see the pattern? Podcast discoverability is primarily based on the size of the current audience you can reach. Because of this, when someone asks me for advice about starting a podcast, my answer almost always boils down to whether or not that person already has access to an audience.

If you’ve got a million Instagram followers and want to start a podcast, sure… go for it… knock yourself out. If your company has a popular newsletter with a couple hundred thousand subscribers, a podcast is a great way to enhance your relationship with that audience. But, if a podcast is your first foray into creating content for a public audience, DO NOT DO IT. You’ll be wasting your time. Figure out how to build an audience somewhere with better discoverability first, and then, once you have an audience, start a podcast.

Lesson #5: Judging your success will be difficult

Podcast metrics stink. Basically the only metric is “downloads,” and it honestly means nothing. I could go onto the Apple Podcasts store right now, play any episode for 5 seconds, and it’ll count as a “download” for the person who created it.

And, yes, that creator will be excited to see another “download” on whatever metrics dashboard he or she is using, but it won’t really mean anything.

I’ll spare you the details for why podcasting metrics stink. All you need to know is that it’s a fundamental limitation of the technology and ecosystem with no easy or practical solution.

The more important thing to understand is that if/when you start podcasting, don’t expect any sort of Google-Analytics-level insights. (Shameless plug: one of my favorite guests on my podcast created what became Google Analytics).

This lack of metrics might not seem like a big deal, but, if you’re serious about growing a podcasting audience, not having sophisticated insights into how they’re engaging with what you’ve created is very problematic. It means you’re basically “flying blind” in terms of the content you create with only a vague “downloads” count to help you judge your success and/or (likely) failure.

Without more detailed metrics, you’re stuck guessing what’s good and what isn’t, which means you’ll be relying mostly on luck. Considering how much time you’re going to spend creating and marketing your podcast, is “luck” really the thing you want determining the outcome?