Kendall Breitman: Riverside.fm in 2026

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  0:02  
The sound of podcast. The show about podcast and broadcast starts now.

Matt Cundill  0:12  
Kendall Breitman is the community manager  at riverside.fm. She's the go to person for all things Riverside. One of the biggest questions I get that also gets asked in all the podcast news groups is, what should I use for remote recording? Do I use descriptor, Riverside, clean feed or stream yard? You know, in the end, I find most people gravitate to what feels good for them. It's kind of like your favorite pen. Also, post production tools are factoring into decisions. Does it make video clips? Can you go live with it on your social channels? Will it fix your shitty audio? Will it get you dressed and send you to work? So no to that last one, but Riverside is one that I recommend. Full disclosure. I don't use Riverside a ton, but I do recommend it as an excellent recording tool. Kendall is here to talk about her career video podcasting. Riverside is your podcast host. We even get into journalism and the value of video clips. As mentioned, I do recommend Riverside, so please use the affiliate link in the show notes when you sign up. And now, Kendall brittman joins me from Riverside headquarters in Tel Aviv. How did your career evolve into becoming the community leader? Riverside? Oh, a winding road.

Kendall Breitman  1:27  
So I actually my background is in political journalism. Like a while ago, I was working as a political journalist, and that's for TV and for print, but for Bloomberg for the 2016 election, and then at NBC, and after that, I kind of transitioned. It's kind of tale as old as time, like former journalists going into either marketing or PR, and I guess I joined the I did the marketing route, and so I started doing content writing and realizing that maybe the love that I had for journalism wasn't particularly the writing, it was actually for talking to a bunch of different people and then understanding what the headline is like, how can you talk to all of these people at a political rally and then figure out, like, what's the story here? So Riverside reached out to me for and I'm also, like, very much extrovert people person. So Riverside reached out to me about a community management job. And I was like, what's that? And then when I learned more about it, it it kind of played into that part of journalism that I loved. It's talking to people, hearing their stories, hearing what the important part, like, the takeaway is from those stories, and then being able to learn from it, and being able to tell those stories in different ways. So that's kind of a little bit of how I ended up in community management. There's, like, definitely a longer story in there, but it's a lot of driven by being really into people and hearing from them and connecting with them, and just having conversations, and then also just understanding how those conversations could be applied to different things, that makes sense.

Matt Cundill  2:58  
So you work with a lot of podcasters, but you yourself, did you know or have a lot of contact with podcasting before you started at Riverside?

Kendall Breitman  3:06  
So I didn't have that. I mean, besides being a listener of podcasting, I was not. I've never podcasted myself before joining Riverside, but I think that where the cool meeting point of that was that I was doing television, and I know that there seems like as we kind of, I was gonna say, I know that there's a huge difference, but I can think that, like, as we're kind of going through time, there seems to be less and less of a difference. And I'll tell you what I mean. So for example, I would watch a an hour political rally, and then, okay, what are the clips we're gonna play that night on TV? What do we title the article for this? It's kind of in the same way of making a video. How long should you edit that video? What are the big clips? How do you market that? How do you figure out, like, what's going to actually draw people in? Who's your audience? Who are you speaking to? What do they care about? What questions do they have? So as far as like, understanding hosting and questions and interviewing. There's obviously a lot of overlap between being a reporter and interviewing people for podcasts, but then also, just as far of a video, aspect of how do you create an engaging video? What are the tricks that you can use to clean up your edits on these videos? How can you use a second camera angle to make that go smoother. All of that is becoming more and more important when it comes to podcasting, especially when the lines between audio, video, YouTuber, all of that are just forever being even more blurred.

Matt Cundill  4:33  
Yeah, so that's a wild discussion right there, and I love having this one. And you really opened it up by saying, oh, you know, it's about the videos and the clips, but that's all marketing. That's not podcasting. It might be marketing for your podcast, though. So when I look at the Riverside tool and all the things you can do with it, I look at it as being sort of like this big podcast marketing machine,

Kendall Breitman  4:56  
yeah, but I would also say so yes, all of the clipping, all of that is marketing. But what I'd also say is that having the conversations and like, good interviewing, good hosting, there's still a lot of that that comes in and kind of mixes with journalism, right, like, what are, I think it's your job as a host for a podcast to understand your audience and understand what questions are the people that are going to be listening and having their headphones, and what are they asking themselves as as your guest answers a question, for example, what are the follow ups? What are the interesting roads that you can lay down? Maybe you have a list of questions in mind, but like knowing when to take a little bit of that, of the answer that somebody gives you and follow that down this path when to go on a quote, unquote tangent. Because I'm all for tangents. I think that they're actually just having conversations. How to listen to people. I think that what makes a good podcast is like, if you're doing a guest podcast. For the examples I'm using, is to be able to interact with somebody and be able to have a really detailed, long form discussion, because I think that that's kind of what people I mean. I'll say as I own my own listener, I think that a lot of the time, because of these clips and Tiktok and reels and YouTube shorts and all of that, like, what I come to podcast for is the conversation and being able to really unpack something and talk with somebody and have a longer form conversation. So I think that a lot of that is stuff that I learned in journalism. A lot of it's how to listen and now how not to speak. I think that as a journalist, I mean, at least when I was doing journalism, the whole point is that you're also not supposed to have an opinion, right? So I'm listening to you, and I'm only listening to you, and I'm not trying to challenge you on your opinion, because then I'm kind of injecting my own opinion. I'm just trying to understand more about your position and ask questions that get me to understand you better, you know, rather than it being like a discussion where I want to move your opinion, you know what I mean? So I think that those kinds of things have also taken from journalism. I guess it's interesting though, that my mind immediately went to, like the clips and all of that, because you're right, that isn't the podcasting. That's that's the marketing of that podcast.

Matt Cundill  7:12  
Yeah, you know, there I was this morning on x where I shouldn't be spending the first few hours of my morning. I'll tell you

Kendall Breitman  7:18  
what a way to wake up.

Matt Cundill  7:21  
I know, but one of the things I had to say, and this is on the heels of the CBS 60 Minutes story that leaked into Canada that, you know, they weren't going to air in the US, and now it's aired in Canada on on an app. But somebody said, oh, you know, it's a left leaning this, or it's, and I'm like, you know, when it comes to reporting facts, they're not left or right leaning. It might upset people on the left or the right, but, you know, facts are they're agnostic.

Kendall Breitman  7:46  
Yeah. I mean, I could go on a whole rant about this. I think that journalism in general, I think a lot because of X actually, and because of other social platforms like to make a brand for yourself as a journalist, you need to be hyper online, and a lot of that is commentating on news, and I'm just like, I guess I'm more in like, the Walter Cronkite camp of like, when he came out, like, against the Vietnam War, it was a huge deal because he never shared his opinion, you know. And so suddenly this must really mean something, to share your opinion as a journalist. And now I think that, from my own experience, that journalists are being asked more and more to maybe not share their opinion, but give more news commentary rather than news reporting. And I think that that's about creating a brand for yourself as a journalist, but also creating a brand for the large organization that you work for. So yeah, I think it blurs the lines a little bit, and I think it's led to later on, like, a lot of discussion on is this fact, and questioning reports about whether or not they're factual or having a lean. You know, I think that it all kind of compounds in itself.

Matt Cundill  8:47  
And a tool like Riverside amongst other tools, but Riverside as well, it's easy to use, and a lot of people have gravitated to it. But we used to have the term citizen journalist, but now we're all journalists, and we're all able to create stories and work through through a tool like Riverside, and now, you know, you add tools on to make it easier. So we talked a little bit about the clips, we talked a little bit about the editing. I know people that I work with that never edited a thing in their life in audio, but now they're editing their own video and sending it to me and saying, Oh, this is the podcast. Can you post this up for me, it's about making people's lives easier, right?

Kendall Breitman  9:22  
Yeah, and I mean, I think that as far as making things easier, I think that one of the cool things that does come out of it is that when you make things easier for more people to tell their stories in the form of podcast or whatever that might be, YouTube channel, whatever, I think that it brings out more stories for more people. So the more stories that we have, I think that people connect with each other through stories. So it used to be that you'd have to have this multi million dollar studio to be doing your podcast and have it completely curated and all the right equipment and everything to be able to start that podcast for yourself. And now that we make things easier, it means that we get more stories out there, which means more perspective. Perspectives. And I think that that's really important for the discourse, like being able to hear directly from somebody in a place that you've never been before about their experience, you don't need that whole studio for that. You can still get those perspectives without having that so I think that that's kind of the one of the very cool things about Riverside and just remote recording in general, is that you're able to get a lot more stories out there and a lot more ways to

Matt Cundill  10:25  
connect, and you're always making it a little bit easier for people to tell their story in particular ways. So I know because in the last few months, I've tried out something new. I think we christened it Coco at one point, and that's an AI tool that helps you arrive at the right place for what you want to create. So you're a couple months in on this. Give me a little background about why you put this in, and what it's all about and how it's evolved in the last few months.

Kendall Breitman  10:51  
Yeah. So I think that, like, the reason why, why we originally did the CO creator, is because it started in the project page, which is where you get, like, your marketing materials, for example. So there are a lot of people that are doing their podcasts, then they start. They're super excited. They're like, yes, let's do this. But then they realize that there's so much that goes into podcasting if you want to find more listeners. So now podcasters are almost being expected to be their own full marketing team. You need a blog post, you need a newsletter, you need to be creating social captions and posting social clips, all of that. So it started in the project page, being able to create those marketing materials, being able to chat with it and say, from this recording, I did write me a blog post. So that kind of idea. From there, it kind of evolved, and that's when we spoke, I believe was when it came into the editor. I'm pretty sure that's that's that's when we had spoken so, and that was more like, okay, so people love the conversations. They love to record, but a lot of people hate editing. I actually am a weird person that I really enjoy, kind of like the tediousness of like tinkering with somebody.

Matt Cundill  11:55  
Oh, as a journalist, you would definitely love editing.

Kendall Breitman  11:58  
Yeah, I really love it. But a lot of people don't. Apparently, that's not I can understand why a lot of people don't like the repurposing part, but I definitely love just sitting there and editing the heck out of something a lot of people don't. So what we decided to start doing was, okay, let's bring that kind of idea, this, like chat based creation, into the editor. So what does that mean? Hey, co creator, can you remove all the pauses here? Can you make the video look more dynamic with changing scenes? Can you fix up the audio so it's like chat based editing? So that's kind of where it's evolved to what I will say is that first of all, the way that it's evolved since we've last spoken is that with all AI, the more that people are using it, the more that it continues to get better at what it's doing. So that's something that we've seen, but also we're just improving it on the back end. So right now, it can create YouTube templates for you, but what we've added recently is, okay, let's create YouTube templates based on the content that you created. So for example, right now, instead of just having the title and a picture of you. Maybe we're talking about forest preservation. Maybe now the background of the YouTube thumbnail that it gives you will be a forest so taking those kinds of cues from what you recorded and applying them to the different materials. So for example, the thumbnail, but I will kind of tease that as we continue to go, okay, so we have the CO creator after you finished recording, you have the CO creator once you're editing. Maybe the next step for the CO creator could be while you're recording. You know, maybe there's a way that it can, for example, give you or even before you're recording, give you examples for questions that you could ask, give you some research on the person they're going to be speaking with that kind of stuff. So how can we incorporate this more so that you can focus on the part that you actually love to do about podcasting, but the parts that you find to be tedious and difficult can be helped in a

Matt Cundill  13:53  
way by AI and again, back to the point of, you know, helping out creators in ways. I thought it was curious when Riverside announced that they would be doing hosting. And I'm like, we do not need another podcast host. Yes, I'll get to that, because I think you're right. We do, and I'm going to say why, and then you tell me, if I'm right, I think there's a lot of rush to video from people who don't even really think about doing podcasting, they go and they create their video, and they don't even know that there's an option to host a podcast on, you know, Apple and Spotify and other places, because they're so enamored with just creating a video and putting it out in video spaces. When you present them with an opportunity to host that's good for the podcast space and Riverside, from what I've tried out here, makes it fairly easy to host your podcast. And I think anytime you get somebody podcasting,

Kendall Breitman  14:45  
that's a good thing. I agree. I'm actually interested in what you said about the I mean, I'm interested in everything that you say, but I'm interested in the part that you're talking about rushing to video, because I look at it as I think that a lot of podcasters rush to video too quickly, or that they get. Overwhelmed, because suddenly they just wanted to, like, talk with their friend about something that interests them, and then now they have to be, like, a full video editor, and it's overwhelming. But what I think, where I say that there's definitely room in the hosting space is because a huge barrier when you're saying more people should be podcasting and helps with everybody, yes, but the reason why a lot of people can't do that is because they come with an idea, and then they're suddenly like, Oh my God, how many tools do I need? Like, I need something to schedule, I need something to record, I need to have another tool to edit, and then I also need to buy a hosting platform. And a lot of people are making money from doing this, you know, like, maybe they wish to in the future, but they're not. And so I also think that then you're recording somewhere, you're downloading all those files, then you're uploading them to an editor, then you're doing whatever, all the edits that you're doing there, downloading them, uploading them to your hosting platform. Just one is price, and two is file passing, like just passing it from one tool the other. So the idea here with Riverside doing hosting is that one, it's all in one place, a lot easier for your workflow. But two, we didn't up the price at all for that, so it's included in your plan already. So if you're already recording on Riverside and editing, then you can also be hosting on there. And doesn't that help more creators be able to actually finance the stories they want to tell.

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  16:20  
Sound design of the sound off podcast is inspired by mega tracks, the sound of entertainment, providing music and sound effects for radio podcasts and media professionals. Mega tracks is your one stop shop for library and custom tracks. Start your music search now at Mega tracks.com the sound off podcast with Matt Cundill, I love

Matt Cundill  16:45  
that you said file passing, because I sit around all day. And you know this, I work with 3040 podcasts at a time, I can't tell you, especially since, since video has impeded on what I was doing before, file passing is now a task like I spend most of my time staring at my computer, watching files move, and I've got super, super, super, super fast internet speed, yeah?

Kendall Breitman  17:07  
And you're like, Okay, let me go make myself a coffee, and you come back, you're like, Well, I guess I'm just gonna still sit here, and then it doesn't it feels so much less efficient in your work day to be it to be doing that. So yeah, that's one of the pain points that we were answering. Is just like, why, if you already are creating your content here, why not also host it and then be able to publish directly to YouTube, Apple, podcast, Spotify, and also, as far as when you publish that we already know the content that you've created. So Why can't your show notes come pre populated? Why can't there be title suggestions? Why can't we use the chapter time codes that we already generate for you and already is in there, so a lot less of not just file passing, but also content passing. If that makes sense, like written content passing.

Matt Cundill  17:51  
Can I add a third party prefix, like for something like pod track?

Kendall Breitman  17:56  
I believe not yet. I'll have to check for that for you. But yeah, I asked this recently. I believe it's not yet. The thing is that this is also kind of version one for us. If you you've known Riverside for a while, like the editor when we first released, it is a completely different editor than what we have now, because we're always adding new features. So the same thing is what you can expect for for hosting, we're gonna have more analytics, we're gonna have more features that we have in there. So what we like to do at Riverside is, like, put something really great out that you can start using, and then as we continue on, we can introduce more features to you so that you are able to kind of get on it and

Matt Cundill  18:32  
start, yeah, unfair, because it's early days, but I'm going to bomb you with all my favorite questions about hosting

Kendall Breitman  18:37  
opens up a Slack channel with my product team. Yeah,

Matt Cundill  18:42  
is it IAB certified for the stats?

Kendall Breitman  18:45  
Not yet, but we are following all of the guidelines, so we hope to get that certification soon, and in the meantime, we are working towards that certification by following exactly all of the guidelines that they set out.

Matt Cundill  18:58  
And can I toss in a 301 redirect if I need to leave. Yes, I believe so. I mean, it's not nice to talk about leaving before we've actually got there.

Kendall Breitman  19:07  
Yeah, yeah, just don't leave. But that's okay if you want to, yeah, we're not gonna be like, No, you're here forever. Like, you can be direct.

Matt Cundill  19:16  
I like Riverside for its workflow, like, the fact that you've thought about workflow when I can tell I work with a lot of people who are over the age of 55 which means older than me, but when they go in there, like for them to be able to send me files, you know, using Copy Link, using share tokens, being able to give access to a producer, to the studio, and then just simply being able to edit it themselves. Or, you know, you don't understand how you can really empower somebody who's like, 55 years old by letting it, you know, generate clips the ease of use. So like, how much time does the product team spend thinking about ease of use? A lot.

Kendall Breitman  19:52  
Like, so as community manager, one of my big things is that, like, I kind of split my job into two different sections. I call it like a bridge. Between the product and the users. So one side of that bridge is like communicating from the product to the users, and that means new feature updates. Let's I communicate all of those, or I we have webinars. I'll speak on those. But the other side of that is user to product, and we are very focused on user feedback and meeting with users about everything that we're putting out next. So first, it kind of educates what we're going to be doing next. So if we keep hearing from people, my least favorite part of the process, what I really struggle with is repurposing. Okay, what can we be doing to help you repurpose? But alongside that, whenever we're doing beta testing or we're at we're looking for users to speak with about a new feature that we have. We are purposefully, and I am purposefully making it so that, if you're a product manager, you're going to be speaking to somebody that's very young and techy and can really go into the weeds with you. But I'm also going to throw to you like three podcasters who are very much hobbyists and who may be plugging in a microphone, but that's kind of it. You know what I mean? Like, I want them to be speaking with all of those types of people, because that's important. I need, you need to have the real, like the technical side down and be able to do the really professional content, but you also need to make sure that that professional content is approachable. So, yeah, ease of use is kind of baked into that. So really important.

Matt Cundill  21:24  
What is the product team working on next that you can share that's not going to get you in any trouble, that's going to be a big, giant secret and create a viral sensation for this podcast episode?

Kendall Breitman  21:35  
Yeah, let's create a viral sensation. I will just say that. I think that I'll tease that. I think that as we continue to add more features, Riverside started as like, just a remote recording platform. I don't mean just because, you know, that's amazing, but then we added the editor, and I think, and all these repurposing tools. And I think that as we're continuing, people are seeing the value in Riverside, right? They're like, Okay, I can get my transcripts, I can get my clips, I can do all of this. I can immediately host all through Riverside. Great. So we're starting to see more and more people asking about in person. And how can I, even if I'm not recording remotely, still utilize Riverside? And so that's what I will tease. Is something that is definitely on our radar. It's something that I hope to have some updates for in the next coming year. So that's, yeah, we hear about it. It's exciting for us because it means that people really see our value, and it also creates an entire new frontier of features and things that we

Matt Cundill  22:31  
could do with it. Give me something you will tell someone. So when someone says, my recording didn't go well, I had a problem with something and something that would make you say, I can't believe you did that. Don't do that. Don't use that. What is one thing that people use that is just an absolute NO NO when it comes to doing any form of recording. So, for instance, for years it was like, please do not use a Safari browser. Another one for me is like, sometimes I think wireless headphones get in the way of recording. Now I think we've evolved beyond that stuff. And, you know, we've sort of ironed all that stuff out to the point where I think you don't really need to use headphones to record a podcast, although you shouldn't. If Taylor Swift can use headphones to record on her podcast, then, you know, you probably should too. But I still sometimes I see there are some mistakes out there. You know, it could be like a poorly treated room. It could be the wrong microphone. What is something that you know, if somebody doesn't get the right quality that you look at and go, Yeah, that's an obvious one that people can fix today to make their show better.

Kendall Breitman  23:28  
Okay, well, first of all, I'll say, as far as the Taylor Swift thing, a funny little podcasting note is that they got engaged right after she recorded the podcast with her then boyfriend. And I called it because, before they announced that, because I thought that she had headphone like imprints in her hair, which I thought was just like such a podcasting niche thing to notice, to be like, are those headphone dents in her hair? I thought that was a very, very funny little detail. The one thing that I would say when I see it and I'm like, Oh no, for me, it's funny because you're saying that you want to avoid wired headphones. I would say wired headphones only because every time that I've recorded with somebody with wired headphones, and I mean, like that, they're using the microphone in their wired headphones, that's what I mean. I meant to say wireless headphones. Oh yeah, yes, okay. So what I'm saying is that, like you're saying wireless headphones could be an issue. What I'm saying is that when somebody uses wired headphones and they use the microphone on that wired headphone, I'm like, Oh no, just because every movement they make, it'll, like, slide past their it just, I shudder at the thought of a microphone on wired headphones. If you have wired headphones, then, like, I don't know, maybe the microphone, like, is on the headphones. But if it's on the wire, and it's like near your shirt, like, I'd rather just use the microphone in your computer, just because there are ways you can clean up that audio, but it's much harder to take out scratching and bouncing off your chest audio.

Matt Cundill  24:58  
So all this talk about, you know, video. Looking good marketing and the clips and stuff like that, but this is where I come from. This is just who I am, and this is why I'm alone most of the time. But if your audio sucks, you have no chance at this. That's just the way it goes. I just explain that to people as much as possible. And there are solutions out there now to fix audio that does not go well, and I've had a chance to work with it a little bit, but tell me about what magic audio does.

Kendall Breitman  25:25  
Yeah, so magic audio is our tool that can help fix up your audio. So for example, I did a recording couple days ago, and I was like, Oh my God, I am set. I am using this microphone, and I'm recording on this fancy little camera that we have. And then after the recording, I realized that I didn't plug that microphone into the computer, so everything was being taken off of my computer, so it didn't sound so great. So what it does is, like, what match I applied magic audio to it, and it made it sound much better. So you can use it to clean up the audio if there's background noise, you can use it if, like, you're not using that great of a microphone to make it just sound richer. But the cool thing, and I'll tell a kind of side story about this, is that we released magic audio, and then it was a toggle feature. You just, like, toggled it on or off. And so for some people, that worked perfectly. For some it was like, Okay, it's applied too much. So we heard that from the community, great. We now put a slider there so you can toggle on and off, but then you do like an intensity slider. So I could say, I want 13% magic audio, and then you can listen to your audio and hear, okay, maybe I want to crank that up more. Maybe I want to turn it down, that kind of thing. So that's magic audio. And also this kind of a side story about how you were talking about ease of use and feedback from the community, like a perfect example of

Matt Cundill  26:46  
applying that. Yeah, another example, too, about workflow and saving time. I would have to take that audio in the past. I'd move it over to something like Adobe enhance. Use it there. If you pay for Adobe enhance, then you can use their toggle switch or their slider, and then you could bring the audio back. That's moving a lot of audio and video back a few times, and that's a half hour right there.

Kendall Breitman  27:10  
So you're saving me time exactly, and saving time and keeping it professional, like looking sounding. Those are the two kind of guiding principles of everything that we're creating. I love this.

Matt Cundill  27:22  
It's just great to get involved and have the conversation with you to find out more about, you know, Riverside and what you're up to. I have not tried this yet, so I'm a little reluctant to talk about it, but I'll let you talk about it, and that's the live component, because I don't know that a lot of people know, because people focus so much on on recording their podcast, but you can go live, yes, and you can stream it to a whole bunch of different places. So tell me about, you know, going live on Riverside with your show?

Kendall Breitman  27:49  
Yeah, so you can go live on Riverside with your show, I'm kidding. So you can go to YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, LinkedIn, like all the social platforms. Also really cool is that you could, if you want to do kind of like a gated type of experience, you could just live stream right in Riverside, and we have a chat so you can, like, if you're just doing it in Riverside, you can chat with people in the in the little chat box. But if you're doing it on other social platforms, all of your chats are condensed into are put into that Riverside chat. So you don't have to look through your YouTube and your LinkedIn to see people commenting on your video. It's all there. So you can monitor everything that you're doing in your chat and monitor all the comments, all of that we also have like you could switch the layouts. You can overlay video, you can overlay text. So there are a few things that you can do, as far as going live. And then the cool part, also, besides going live, is that at the end of it, it's treated like any other Riverside recording. So by that, I mean, you get the transcript of your live stream. You get clips of it. You get the ability to edit it, and be able to take that and host it if you want, or publish it directly to YouTube. All of that, you get all of that Riverside post production experience as well. That's one thing. As far as going live, you can also go live and up to 1080p so it looks really great. And we also introduced recently a webinar plan. So if you're somebody that does webinars like if you're maybe podcasting for your business, a lot of people will use Zoom, for example, to do their webinars, but then at the end, you're going to get that Zoom quality audio and video and kind of the name of the game right now with webinars is that, like you need to be repurposing them. They need to be something that you're putting in LinkedIn posts or blog posts or things like that, to really get the most usage out of them. So if you are using Riverside for your business's podcast. You can now also, again, we were talking about keeping things all in one place, file, passing all of that. You can now also do your webinars. There we have registration. We have the ability to create forms, pre register, have people join in the audience mode, live call, Ins, all of that. So. Yeah, we have a whole live solution that I know a lot of people know about, but I think that for a lot of podcasters, live kind of becomes the next step, like the next challenge for them. I don't know if you agree

Matt Cundill  30:10  
with that. Yeah, no, I think, listen, I think going live is is a great idea, if you can do it consistently and get people to show up at a particular time every week for something, then that's something I come from radio. Radio is built on showing up every day at the same time, presenting the news at the top of the hour, the traffic and weather together on the nines. You know, that sort of consistency in being live, you really can earn a piece of someone's media pie by going live. I think

Kendall Breitman  30:42  
that a lot of it too. I think I agree with you, is somebody coming from news cycle, being going live is like a whole new other beast, like be able to think on your toes, being able to capture somebody's attention and have a plan like you. It's not a forgiving space in that way, like that. You need to go into it with a little bit of a of an idea of what you want to do. But it is forgiving in the way that I think when people see live content, if, right now we were live, and one of the things on the back of this bookshelf fell down, there's more of like an understanding from people that, like this is live and things happen. You know, I think that for podcasters, it's more of an opportunity to also maybe get some interaction with the people that are listening. I think that what a lot of podcasters are missing is that there, there's this number of people that are streaming or downloading or whatever. But like, who are those people? What do they care about? Are they actually enjoying that content? So I think that where I've seen people having success with live, as far as podcasting is, like, even if two people from your community join that and suddenly you're like, talking with them, answering your questions live, it's just like we're kind of starved for that feedback, unless somebody leaves a review, which we all know is like, there are a lot of steps to do, and people need to be kind of coaxed into doing that a little bit more. So I think that that's where the beauty of live comes in, specifically for podcasters, and specifically for podcasters that don't have a gigantic audience.

Matt Cundill  32:09  
Want to talk about the webinars for a sec, because you've caused me to have flashbacks to a year ago when I had one of my clients come to me and say, we need to do a webinar. And I walked them through a bunch of tools, and they were like, no, no, and we wound up having to do zoom. And zoom is not fun. I don't like zoom. It's kind of like when you listen to a podcast recorded on Zoom, you know, it was recorded on Zoom.

Kendall Breitman  32:34  
The thing is also that, like, in the beginning of covid, like, I just remember downloading it, and it was like, this whole thing, and I was so confused, like, what's happening? So now it's kind of seen as, like, this easier tool for people that are like, that are doing something for something in webinars. But I think it's just because it's familiar, you know, I just like, I flash back to, like, early covid days, being like, what am I installing? What's happening? You know,

Matt Cundill  32:55  
listen, we're approaching 2026, and I know there's people who are listening to this. They're on the fence about starting something new, a new show, a new podcast, getting into, you know, the content creator business. What can they look forward to? What are some of the first things they should do after they get involved with Riverside and

Kendall Breitman  33:12  
sign up? I would say, and I'm not just saying this because I'm a community manager, but I'm gonna put it out there. I would say, to join our we have a Facebook community, but it's called conversation creators by Riverside. But if not that, then like, just another community, like, find a space online with other podcasters. There are tons of them on Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn, whatever. I say this because the community of podcasters, as somebody that came from news, like in news, your currency is like the sources you know and the information you know, and no one's really sharing that information with each other. What I found to be the best thing about this podcasting space is how much people are willing to share and help each other. So whether that's starting a podcast, whether that's like kind of jumping into something new, there are so many people that are willing to tell you what they've learned from it and what they wish they knew when they started, or giving some advice or anything. So having that kind of community, especially with podcasting, where a lot of us are doing this alone, where a lot of us are doing remote or, you know, like, you kind of finish your recording, and you look around, you're like, well, just me in this room feeling happy for myself. I think that joining communities is helpful, both in developing you as a creator, but also I think that it's makes the experience more whole and well rounded and fulfilling.

Matt Cundill  34:34  
Kendall, thanks so much for doing this being on the sound off podcast, and we look forward to seeing you, likely, in London and a few other places in 2026

Kendall Breitman  34:43  
Yes. Thank you so much for having me. It's always fun

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  34:45  
to talk with you. The sound off podcast is written and hosted by Matt Cundill, produced by Evan sir Minsky, edited by Taylor McLean, social media by Aidan glassy, another great creation from the sound off media company. There's always more at. Sound off podcast.com you.