We launched The New SquadCast Studio and Backstage in late June! In this episode, our co-founders, Zach and Rock, break it down.

Listen in for

  • Why we launched our biggest update yet
  • All of the new features and changes
  • What Zach and Rock are most excited for
  • What’s next for the community and for the product
  • How to get involved
  • How community and listening went into every step of the process

More Info

  • New SquadCast Studio and Backstage blog post
  • New SquadCast Studio and Backstage demo video

Credits

  • Written and produced by Arielle Nissenblatt
  • Mixed and designed by Vince Moreno Jr
  • Artwork and logos by Alex Whedbee
  • Hosted by Zach Moreno and Rock Felder

Episode Transcriptions

[music]

ROCKWELL FELDER: Welcome to The SquadCast Podcast. SquadCast is the best way to record studio quality, audio and video for content creators. We’re using it right now to record this. I’m Rock, co-founder of SquadCast. I host this show with my co-founder and friend, Zach. You can learn more about SquadCast and how to get started on your content creation journey at SquadCast.FM. For the past few months we’ve been running feed drops on this show, showing off the amazing interviews that have been recorded by our community on this platform. It’s been such a blast to hear from so many talented podcasters, such as Chris Angel Murphy, Liz Sumner, Gabby Akala, Damona Hoffman, and more. We ran feed drops for another reason, too. We’ve been working really hard behind the scenes on shipping our latest and biggest update to SquadCast, which just launched. We’re also working on revamping the concept behind this very podcast. More on that later. Today, though, we wanted to get together to discuss our latest update. Here we go!

ZACHARIAH MORENO: What’s up, Rock. 

ROCK: Yo, how you doing, man? 

ZACH: Great. It’s good to be back on the mic. How about you? 

ROCK: It is good to be back.

ZACH: And we are back in a big way. We got a huge update, reimagine SquadCast, the new SquadCast Studio and Backstage. Shorthand version five. And we just launched that. So we wanna take this opportunity to share where our heads are at what, how we got here. Probably a little bit about where we’re going. That sound good to you? 

ROCK:  Yeah. Sounds great. Lot to cover, but, uh, let’s get into it cuz yeah. There’s so much to cover. Where do you even, where do we even begin?

ZACH: Just like why change SquadCast at all? Start from the top? There’s changes in technology that sometimes are more obvious than others, right? Like, oh, this would be better, that would be, you know, it’s just kind of obvious if I tell you: Hey, what if SquadCast had search. It’s like, who’s gonna disagree with that being better, compared to an app that does not yet have search. There’s things like that. But I think it’s more holistic for us. Like how did we decide what’s in this release versus a next release? And, uh, you know, what’s a priority for the creators that, that we have the privilege to serve. So for me, um, and I-I’d, I’d love to get your answer on this, is just like, for me, it was about like, seeing all the different ways that creators grow. A lot of growth that’s talked about in the, in the creator community and, and, and podcast community is all around like downloads and listens, but like upstream from that, these creators are producing that content. And some advice out there to get more listens, or have more surface area for, for ad spots and things like that is like, how often are you releasing an episode? How many people do you have on your team? Have you thought about joining a network or creating a second show, uh, that are complimentary to one another, right? Like these are all things that are upstream from growth of listeners that feed into growth of listeners. And that’s where SquadCast sits, is in the middle. Right? Is the, the production, the recording, in our case, remotely, of those conversations. So what can we do to, to help with that downstream growth, help our creators scale, their productions, their media businesses, to continue reaching their audience and growing, growing their businesses. So the, the new SquadCast is our answer to that question. How can we help creators scale their businesses to match and feed into the growth that they wanna see in their audience? How did you think about it, as we were coming into V5? 

ROCK: Yeah. Well, I’m glad you started with the question of why change at all, which I think makes me kind of reflect on my bias towards change or progression because in my mind, it’s like, You don’t have a choice. You gotta change. You gotta evolve, especially in the tech game. Like things can change so fast and, and you gotta change or get passed up is, is, is kind of how I feel. And really, I think it’s also what was exciting about this particular update though, was that really we needed to change and evolve as a platform because of essentially what you were saying is we were seeing our community and customers, the, the creators within those, uh, groups, they were evolving and changing and growing and needed the tools and services to grow with them. Or they were gonna have to find something else that, that could fit what they needed. And so, yeah, that’s why we, we had to do it, I feel like. I mean, you know, there’s certainly some things that weren’t gonna change, like our recording engine that will be patented any day now. Well, not any day now, but, uh, very soon. That didn’t change. And that was really important to us. That’s one of the things that I think, you know, we can truly be proud of. Uh, and, and the patent is a good example of that, but, you know, just the fact that, that’s what our reputation is known for is, is the high quality recordings, but also just the reliability with it, in addition to our team and how we interact and engage with our customers and the rest of the community. So weren’t gonna change any of that stuff. But I do think a lot of the ways that we help our current customers and future ones collaborate with their teams and do it in a really, um, seamless way. One of the other things I’m excited, and it’s gonna be, uh, an evolving story for us, is the use of integrations of other-of integrating SquadCast with other platforms and services that we know our customers are already using or could benefit from. We’re trying to help you level up because if everybody that we can impact levels up, then the, the industry levels up and, and we’re just stoked to be a part of that and, and responding to that through this latest update. 

ZACH: Yeah. Big word for us, mantra throughout this update is workflow, right? We have had collaboration, you know, our mission is to amplify collaboration. I feel like we do that really, really well when it comes to the collaborative remote recording in our, what we call our Studio when you’re actually recording on mic, on camera. That is very real time. Very collaborative. The experience, you know, is, uh, has been how we got here. But outside of the studio, you have pre-production and post-production, and what’s the cohesive workflow there. How is that, how is that collaboration being amplified? What’s the workflow from start to finish when people come into SquadCast, and where are they going when they, when they leave or switch to another, another tab or whatever’s next in their workflow? How do we make that seamless, is a big part of this update that comes to life in a bunch of different features that, that we can get into, but maybe, maybe before we get into the, the features and, and the why and all that stuff behind some of those, that are dope, we also, and this is not necessarily product-related. It is, but, but we took the opportunity to also simplify our pricing. And that is something that, um, you know, you and I are very much students of the state of the art, the best practices, the knowledge when it comes to pricing, a, a subscription business, a SaaS business. That’s an evolving story. So that’s something where we found a way to, uh, found a bunch of different ways to, to not just make this the most value packed version of the SquadCast pricing. There’s a bunch of new features and value that, that just weren’t there before, like shows and teams and integrations, but also, it’s just simpler. There’s, there’s three options where there used to be six, and it’s just overall. I think it’s, it’s just easier to kind of digest and make a informed decision about like, Hey, what plan’s gonna serve my creation, you know what the, the, the content that I’m working hard to produce. That was also something that I’m really proud of in this version. And it makes SquadCast more accessible as well, especially when it comes to video recording. So now video recording isn’t its own separate product, from like a pricing perspective. Now it’s a, it’s a feature within our, uh, our Pro and Studio plans. That’s another element that I, I didn’t want to gloss over because it’s, it’s huge, right? Like, uh, we’ll link to the blog post in the, in the show notes, but it starts off with simplified pricing. So I, I didn’t wanna gloss over that and skip over it when we get to, uh, all the features that we, we love.

ROCK: Yeah. No, it, it shouldn’t be, it’s a big one that hits home to me because I think I was one of the big proponents of establishing a price, uh, early on at SquadCast. And, you know, we learned pretty early that we made a mistake there by setting one price for unlimited usage. But in a lot of ways, it was a successful test to validate price to anchor around. Uh, but then also started to see that we should not just anchor the price and only have one, but find something to anchor at least like two to three plans around. And so that became recording time. We did a lot of work to inform that price. We did a lot of conversations with customers, we’ve talked with, uh, or, or gathered a lot of feedback from all of the folks in the SaaS pricing world to really help us  establish, uh, that next iteration of pricing. Um, and it felt like we got that right. But what we, what we, I think we screwed up on the video recording pricing, which I don’t think was, um, incorrect of us to hypothesize that video recording was in some way more valuable or there, there was a higher willingness to pay, I think would be the more appropriate way to, to phrase it. Uh, but I think we went too high. And I think we leaned into that not because we were a bunch of greedy capitalists, but I think because part of the advice in the SaaS pricing world is that most products tend to under-price themselves, misprice themselves. And so we wanted to avoid that early on to not have to send you one of these pricing emails that I’m sure we’re all getting right now of like, Hey, we changed our prices. Uh, we didn’t wanna have to do that after video recording rolled out. And so I think we leaned into it, but clearly we, we screwed up and leaned into it too far, too much when we have some of our mentors and advisors such as the TinySeed community telling us, Hey, we’ve never had to tell anybody this before. Yeah. We think your prices are too high. And then even the pricing consultants that we worked with Price Intelligently, AKA ProfitWell, they were telling us, Hey, we’ve never had to tell, tell a client this, but we think you’re gonna need to, to change your prices and, and lower these video recording ones. And so, um, I mean, yeah, it was hard to argue with that. Once we got some data behind it, even though our intuition and sense of how things were going, even though folks were adopting and using video recording, it was those really higher price plans that were, were mispriced in my, from my point of view. And so having experts kind of help us inform that and, and root a lot of these decisions in data, with our intuition and judgment, you know, feels, I feel really confident about it. And like you said, it feels good because it’s more accessible to, to people now. And again, simpler. Uh, we, we pride ourselves on solving problems, not adding to them. Um, and so I think, you know, unintentionally for better, for worse, maybe that previous iteration of pricing was a little bit along that line. But no more. 

ZACH: Yeah. I’m glad we’re taking ownership of that. We, we do make mistakes. We’ve made mistakes in the past. It’s one of those things that, you know, it’s, it’s about evolving. Uh, so glad we’re here as well with that. With that, should we talk about some features? We’ve started at the very, the highest level, but should we, should we dig in a little bit deeper?

ROCK: Go for it. 

ZACH: Okay. So in the past SquadCast has always been one creator, one show, you can invite guests to recording sessions. A show can have as many recording sessions as you want. Those roughly correlate with an episode, whether that be in your podcast feed or your YouTube channel, or a chapter in your audio book or whatever production you want to use the audio and video that we help you record in studio quality, pretty slim, right? When it comes to like who, who has access to the recording side of the house, the production side of the house, it’s just one creator. You can invite co-host as guests, but they’re not like gonna have controls. They’re not gonna have their own account, stuff like that. So in the new SquadCast Studio, everybody now has an organization and that organization gives you some, some new things. You can have, uh, branding for it. You can invite team members to join you in that organizations. And they have their own proper SquadCast credentials to sign in and, uh, collaborate with you on those shows. We also have roles. We won’t get into the nitty gritty of that, but you can choose their access roles as well. And that is a much broader structure for us to, uh, to move your past show into, into one show. But then also then give you the ability to create more shows and invite, invite those team members that I, I mentioned, and you can have branding at the organization level, but you also get branding at the show level. Um, and that just feels really cool, right? Like, hey, I’m part of the, the SquadCast organization, in our case, and we have our show Between Two Mics, the remote recording podcast. Uh, I’m looking at our artwork up in the, up in the corner now. And, uh, and the invites are branded, the Green Room is branded. Backstage is branded,  something we’ll get to in a second here. But I think that that, that branding goes a long way and, uh, it makes you feel at home, right? It makes you feel like you’re, you’re in the right place. And we’re doing that for the whole team. So there’s some people who are gonna be on mic, on camera. There’s gonna be some people who are more in like pre-production or, or post-production roles, um, and the organizations and teams and shows structure that I’ve been describing really helps facilitate collaboration, amplify collaboration outside of, and in the studio. So the whole workflow that I mentioned before, and, uh, this has been something that has been obvious to us for a while. We’ve, we, we had like coming soon: teams and shows on our homepage for a while. And, uh, you know, there’s like, um, there’s a lot that needed to be done to make sure we didn’t rock the boat for existing, uh, existing shows to, to get them moved over in this new structure, bring in more people, keep it secure. We can come back to security in a second. We have part of this update there, but what did I miss when it comes to orgs, shows, and teams or, or what’s your favorite parts about those?

ROCK: You didn’t miss much. So this was this, what I’m excited about this update is it helps a lot of folks that we like, this is direct from a lot of customer feedback, and it speaks to, again, the evolution of the industry where we’re seeing a lot more networks or studios or organizations, businesses, using the platform, and they have teams and those team members, uh, have different shows, different roles, different responsibilities, and were able to do a lot of the collaboration like you said, inside the studio when it came to recording the content. But when it came to the management of files, the, you know, scheduling of sessions, inviting people, working with the, uh, VIPs of like a guest team. So not just only the person that’s being interviewed, but if they have somebody that has to be a part of that, uh, session as well, that recording session, um, you know, what’s their experience supposed to be like, they don’t necessarily need to have a recording file or, or even be on screen. Right. And so it impacts just a lot of folks, but it wasn’t the original use case that we saw for SquadCast. It was very, and still is, very independent. Uh, but now we’re seeing more and more of, of, of those indies start to grow into professionals and start to expand their operations into more of a media company. We talk a lot about how indie creators are micro media companies and becoming less and less micro, it seems, every year. And so the platform needed to cater to not only the original indies and future indies that are coming. But also as those indies grow, we want to grow with them and help them grow. And be able to enhance the collaboration with their teams, whether they’re recording a session, which I do think we, we had nailed, but this, this update even furthers, that which we’ll get to a minute with the Backstage stuff, but absolutely. Like the dashboard is incredible. I love it so much. I think it also addresses a lot of little, quirky things that happen, like the way files are, you know, kind of listed. I think it’s just all enhanced, and it feels just more yours. It feels more like you own this stuff and, and you can do more with it. Bryan Barletta from Sounds Profitable, and I mentioned this in our Podland interviews, uh, so thank you if you’ve listened to both. But he said that it just feels like it’s his when he logs in, and what, that was an incredible feeling to hear. Like he’s like, yeah, the old version of SquadCast it’s, it’s cool, and, and it does what I need, but like when I log into this one, this feels like mine. I love that. I hope a lot of people feel like that. And I think that’s little, just little things like seeing your artwork or seeing your team members’ faces pop up when you log in. That’s powerful. And I think that’s going to add nicely to the power that it feels when you are on SquadCast, in a recording session, seeing your files, seeing how fast and quickly, or how fast they upload, how, uh, quickly you’re able, they’re able to render, all that stuff. Like that’s also the magic. So I think, I feel like we’ve just added more magic to more areas of the platform. 

ZACH: That’s really cool to hear. I like how you said that. And one thing that, to tie this together with what we were just saying about pricing, is that a lot of these things like with teams and orgs and shows, this may sound like enterprise features like, oh, what are, has SquadCast lost sight of the indie creator? You know, we’re mindful of that. And it’s, it’s part of our decision making when it comes to roadmap and product, uh, and, and the things that we’re discussing here, and these features are all available, uh, from indie, all all the way up. Uh, so, uh, that’s another thing that was, you know, very near and dear to my heart in making some of these decisions, is that we’re not like saying no, no, no, you need to like upgrade to, to get, to invite somebody to your show. Everybody can invite a collaborator or, or more, uh, everybody can create a show or more. And, um, you know, that, that’s really beautiful to me that those aren’t some things that’s just like locked away for like, you know, the, the big companies or something like that. Um, we want to, to your point, we wanna help indies grow to whatever they wanna grow to. Um, whether that’s, you know, keeping things a fun hobby or going, you know, going pro, like we’ve talked about a lot on this show.

ROCK: And, and to speak on your point, Zach, about not forgetting about the indies. I feel like the latest version of the studio, which I know we’re gonna get to in a minute. Like I’m hearing more folks recording solo, uh, on SquadCast, which isn’t the original intention, of course can definitely happen, but I’m hearing about it more. So I think that maybe leads nicely into what we’re gonna talk about the changes to the studio and, and, and the addition of Backstage, but that’s something I’ve seen. And I thought was really neat.

ZACH: Yeah. Wasn’t expecting that. Uh, of course the possibility always exists, but we, we talk about the magic of SquadCast is when you connect with at least one or more people and record together, right. So that’s really cool to hear. And I, I mean, I do that. I do a lot of weird things on the platform. So I thought that was just me. But yeah. The new Studio, where to start. In in a lot of ways, you mentioned, we love the reliability and stability and reputation, quite frankly, that our recording engine and patented technologies have earned us. And we’re not eager to squander or rock the boat on that. So this update, uh, was not about making improvements to our core recording engine technology. That’s where we’ve focused a lot in the past. So as long as we can, you know, keep that the same or better, that, that was kind of our, our goal there. So don’t worry about that. Backups, primary, separate, quality. All of those same things are, are in place as you would expect. And the new SquadCast Studio is additive on, on top of that. So you’ll notice first and foremost, that like, it’s, it’s a reimagined design that’s through, throughout the app. So in Studio as well, um, and we have a brand new layout engine that will maximize the, the video, the space that you and your collaborators who are on mic and on camera can, can see and use. And we better utilize the space when it comes to screen sharing. We now have the ability to pin, uh, and, and control the layout, uh, hiding yourself or pinning other people. These are features that allow you to control the layout, as does the size of the window, the, the, the screen, you can kind of drag drag one side to see what that looks like. And, uh, you know, hats off to the engineering team, specifically, Kamal, the newest member of our engineering team for really putting a lot of like love and craft into the layout engine. It also comes to life in something that we’ll probably touch on a second here, SquadShots, the same layout engine applies there. So it’s, uh, it’s pretty amazing how, how well that’s working. And in addition to that, we now have, uh, we, we, we used to have a sidebar in earlier versions of SquadCast. We’d switched to like overlay menus. There were some, you know, improvements to the user experience we felt like we could make there. So, so we, uh, we expanded this, this sidebar now to have our new chat, our new participant sidebar and, uh, and the new recording sidebar all available on the, on the right. Uh, and it doesn’t cover up anybody’s face. It doesn’t get in your way of the production or distract from the conversation, it gently pushes everything aside, and you can still, uh, see and hear everything. That’s kind of from a layout perspective, we, we mentioned also the branding as well. There’s another element to the branding in that the labels on the tabs, this is super small detail, but there was a lot of polish put into this update. The text that you see in the browser tab will now be branded as well. It’ll be the name of your recording session, your show, and your org, depending on kind of the pages you’re at in the app. So that’s also an element of branding. Like, you know, it’s the name of your show, not, not just SquadCast, so. That’s another element that I, I didn’t want to gloss over, but I feel like I’ve been talking. What else do you love about the new Studio, Rock?

ROCK: I love, I love SquadShots. That’s pretty awesome. You know, we’ve been having, asking folks to manually take a screenshot and then share it on social. Now that is a button that’s been requested by Harry Duran, our founding advisor. If you’re a fan of this show, he should be no stranger. So really happy to finally have that out. It’s one of those examples that, Hey, we are listening, even if the feedback doesn’t immediately get implemented into the product, maybe even years later it will. And this is a good example of that, uh, something that we’ve wanted to add, but, um, you know, for one reason or another, it just took now to, to get it there and so excited for folks to be able to just speed up the promotion of their show. Um, and, you know, just make it easy to, to spread the word about who they are talking to, and, and how great their conversations went. So really excited about that. The backstage, of course, I know I’ve talked about it a little bit, but that’s been another thing that seems pretty obvious now, but we just, when we were first building SquadCast thought, well, why wouldn’t everybody want to be on camera or on mic. I mean, of course you have the option to turn it off, just like you do on, uh, something like Zoom or Skype or whatever, but much like Zoom, there is a way to be an audience member, or not on screen on camera, uh, or, uh, on mic as well. But, you know, the use-case I think was not very clear to us, right? Like we, we were thought that, okay, the only reason to join on SquadCast was because you were part of producing some piece of content remotely. Uh, but again, what we’ve learned, and through the evolution of folks that are using the platform, is not everybody needs to be. And so providing them a way to participate, but not be, uh, destructive or disruptive to the content that’s being created, so producers or editors or, or even coaches. So like if you’re a podcast coach or, uh, producer, you can sit in on the session and kind of manage it, but you’re, don’t have to take up any recording files, which you know, can lead to it, does, you know, that takes up more bandwidth. So it’s a, it’s an, a less demanding way to, to interact and engage. But then also the guests, they sometimes will have folks that, again, you almost, you almost don’t even want them taking up a recording seat, uh, or recording files, or having files recorded. So, yeah, Backstage, I’m stoked about that. That is, that is one that we’ve been thinking about, like how do we do this and do this in, in a, in a professional, high-quality way. And so really grateful that to the team at Sixzero, our lead designer, Alex, those were the two that were really leading the charge when it came to figuring that stuff out. And they did it a lot with, um, hands on engagement with a lot of our, our customers that were the ones asking for this. So shout out to all of those customers, too many to name, but, um, we’re really grateful for you, and hopefully we’ve let you know that this one’s for you.

ZACH: Yes. And Backstage is kind of two sides to the coin. There’s the producers and kind of production team members that are probably part of your show or organization. They can join and they have controls, right? They can start and stop recording. They can now mute people or, or turn their camera off, uh, even, even remove them from the session. These are all new controls. Um, but you can also invite kind of more passive guests, like VIP audience, uh, like really high profile guests tend to roll with their own crew. Right? So they’re kind of like their team, uh, wants to be part of the show, but they don’t necessarily want to be recorded. Uh, they just want to be there to protect their client or whatever it is that they want to do. So the backstage facilitates all of that. and, uh, it’s just a separate invite link. So if you’ve been using SquadCast for a while, you’ve had one invite link to invite your guests. Now there’s an option for a second invite link to invite people to the backstage, and they don’t need to give permission to their mic and camera. They don’t need to do anything like that. It’s really just clicking a button to, to, to be able to see and hear you. And then they can engage through chat, which is another big part of this update, chat. Uh, we can keep this short, but you now have groups, and those groups can have different people involved in them. So you can DM people if you want. You, you get automatically, an everyone group, people who are on mic on camera, the stage, and then Backstage, you can create as many as you want with, uh, @ mentions are new, slash commands, emoji reactions. We’ve had gifs, but they’re better now. Uh, and chat is really cool, especially @ mentions, with all these new participants in the mix. So, and, and I also wanna come back to something, uh, about SquadShots is that these aren’t just pictures that, you know, we just take for you and you post to social, maybe. You have a button to, to do this when you want. We prompt everybody. They can sit it out if they don’t want to be part of it. And we take everybody’s picture separate, similar to how we record audio and video. And then we composite that into a squad shot that you can post very easily if you like, but you also, you also get access to those source images for everybody separate as well. So if you want to use that for promotional materials, uh, it’s a higher resolution because it’s not composited into this other picture. And, it is something that I, we feel is very useful for things like, uh, like YouTube thumbnails or artwork for your, for your episode. So that’s a very SquadCast way to do things, right. It’s basically the same way it works for audio and video recording, but applied to photos. So this is a full new format that we’ve added to the collaboration and, uh, creation experience on the platform. So now we have audio, video, screen, and photos, so pretty cool. We can help people collaborate on creating those assets, uh, in all those different formats in the highest quality. 

ROCK: So much going on in that, that little feature. Right. I know it. It doesn’t do it just as calling the little features, but it’s one button and all that stuff is going on.

ZACH:  It’s one button. 

ROCK: Yeah. I’m glad you brought that up. 

ZACH: Exactly. 

ROCK: That’s why you’re the technologist.

ZACH: [laughs] Yeah. And it’s something that, again, listening, right, uh, core to our culture and, uh, and we ask people, Hey, would those other pictures be useful to you? Would you like the ability to choose when you wanna take those pictures? So you can smile, maybe. I don’t know, just guessing, and, and then sitting out, you know, I think that was, uh, not obvious to us and somebody, I, I forget who mentioned that that would be cool. I think the last bit we can touch on here is probably recordings, which are largely unchanged, but we’ve improved the UX on top of it. And we’ve done that through takes and quality checks. So with takes, uh, it’s pretty, pretty simple. Whoever is part of a recording, those are, those are now grouped into those recordings that were created at the same time. So you, you click record, you click stop, you get, take one, you get, take two, you get take three. So it’s largely a way to help you stay organized as to which of the recordings that you wanna find later on. But these can also be named, as like intro outro, stuff like that. Shout out to Arielle, our community manager, for that dope idea. Um, and again, helping you stay organized with multiple team members. The last bit that we added on top of recordings, and this leverages our patented recording engine, Progressive Uploads, to generate at around the 20 or 30 second mark, we now render a preview of everybody’s recording. So you can playback and confirm the quality is there. You expect the, you know, I expect them to be using this mic, this camera. As the best practice has always been recommended to record like a 10, 20, 30, second sample recording. Now, the app just does that automatically for everyone. And it’s pretty magical, if I can say so myself, because you can literally watch the first 20 seconds of your guest recording while they are still recording it. And that is something that is very unique to SquadCast because of our intellectual property. And the experience is one that, uh, makes it be proactive to follow a best practice and will be proactive to make any equipment changes, uh, to get the quality where you want it or make sure somebody’s using the mic that’s that they think they are. And really just have that ability to say, yeah, we’re good. I, if you see that quality check, you can pretty much rest easy that the rest of it’s gonna go smoothly because that’s what validating what..It’s validating the quality of the audio, the quality of the video and that a fil, those files were uploaded and rendered properly by our backend. So we do that, uh, for everybody on every recording. So it’s really pretty magical and, and we are excited to hear what people think about it. It’s a pretty cool addition for us. So that wraps up our studio. So to, to put a bow on this and quickly wrap it up, our dashboard has also been reimagined and ads search. I mentioned before, but you have full search of all your past recordings to make it easily, easy to find. Uh, anything that you’ve ever recorded, you can filter by guest name, you can filter by a bunch of different things to very quickly find what you’re looking for. And then we have this new workflow drawer where any recordings that you want to select with the, the checkbox next to it, you can select those recordings, you can select a whole take, you can select a whole session, and those will pop up in this new workflow drawer that we’ve added, that really make your recordings much more plugged into your workflow. So from there, you can do things that you’ve always been able to do on SquadCast, like download all, deletem mix, master the audio with Dolby, but we’ve also added a new integration to edit with Descript. So you can very easily select those recordings after you’re done recording. Select those, edit in Descript, a new tab opens and are automatically imported. So this saves you a ton of time. We’ll link to the webinar where we launch this integration with, uh, our friends at Descript, and it saves a ton of time to make your recordings, uh, accessible in the next phase of your workflow. Post-production really is what Descript, where Descript shines. And that is really great in conjunction with the SquadCast recordings, because they’re gonna be super high quality. Those, are you know, more reliable to transcribe with higher accuracy and on and on. So this is something that we think is really great for creators. It makes the recordings, as I said, plugged much more into your workflow and what you said earlier, Rock about us continuing to add to our integration story throughout the, the year. Um, you’ll see, you’ll see more value added for you in that workflow drawer. 

ROCK: Yeah, I love the workflow drawer. It was kind of a late edition, kind of creeped up after a weekend or something like that. So shout out to you, and I believe Alex, were the two that kind of, uh, led that particular effort. So that was, you know, it was really awesome. And that’s a great lap around all of the improvements to, to V5. Of course we’re leaving some stuff out or, or missing some things like, for instance, we became SOC 2 certified during this whole update. So like we’re making sure that our security standards are up to par as we continue to start to work with more and more of these business customers. So not only do their recording needs are, are starting to evolve and change, but so are there other, non-production related business needs. And so we’ve had to evolve in that manner as well, which has been exciting to have that effort going on in parallel with the, the updates. So shout out to the engineering team for, for helping out with that, but mostly, uh, to Vince Moreno, AKA your dad, uh, for leading the charge when it came to the SOC 2 stuff. I mean, it’s a, it’s a funny thing for me. I, you know, my days working at an accounting firm, this is something I was exposed to. I knew it was an important document, but never expected to actually like care so much about it. From a personal level. So that’s pretty cool. But like I said, you know, we’re, there’s a blog post that we’ll link to that kind of gives all of the updates comprehensively. You did a great job of, of documenting that all, Zach. So thank you for that. I think before we, we wrap up and, and leave folks, the inevitable question is. Okay, great. I love V5. I love the new SquadCast. I love search. I love dashboard. I love the integrations. Uh, edit in Descript. I love adding my team, but the next question is always, uh, okay. But what’s next? What’s coming next? So of course, you know, we’re no, there’s no shortage of ambition or vision or ideas of what we have in store for SquadCast, but let’s talk a little bit about in the near future what’s to come. Like obviously there’s things that pop up, little quirks here and there issues, bugs. We’ve been already squashing those and will continue to. And so, but overall the platform did roll out in a very soft landing as, uh, I think the government’s trying to do with inflation is the, is the word that they’re using. It seemed like a pretty soft landing for us. However, you know, we are going to continue to making improvements and updates, but what are some of the more big things that, that folks can come to expect? I think integrations will continue to be a part of that story. Yeah. What else can, can you quickly list off that, we’re working on and folks can expect to see from us in the, not too far out future?

ZACH: Yeah. If there’s an integration, that’s that you’re passionate about in your workflow, either pre-production or post-production, let us know. We’ll talk about it. There’s a good chance it’s already, already in the works, but we’re stoked about that, to your point. We’re also stoked where the features that, the new features that we’ve added in SquadCast, there’s some obvious kind of phase two and phase three versions of those that we can expand on to add even more value. And, and in some cases, they kind of overlap and add value in a kind of a multiplying fashion. So I think that there’s like search is one, where it’s awesome on day one, uh, because you know, compared to no search it’s, it’s fantastic. And it’s really fast. Even like my account is old, and has a bunch of sessions all the way back to the founding of SquadCast and finds what I’m looking for, super fast. So that’s rad. And I think there’s some features we can add to that that’ll make search even more robust. There’s, the same as true for Backstage. There’s some features that we’re excited about that will make it even more robust. This is just phase one. The obvious kind of, you know, we’ve been in, uh, we’ve had iPhone and iPad support since right before Christmas 2021. And that’s been in beta. So I think that, uh, now that we’re through the thick of it with V5, we’ve been monitoring how, you know, the, the rollout, the beta has performed for iOS and iPad. So I think there’s a case to be made for taking off the beta flag and committing to stable there. So, so we’ll be looking into that. And of course, a bunch more. That will keep you in suspense on for now. One thing that is often the case after we make really big updates to our platform is that now it inspires more ideas, right? Ideas lead to more ideas. So, uh, let us know. We’re big on listening. We’re big on the community. It’s how we got here. That’s hopefully comes through in the stories that we’ve been telling today, but we’re gonna continue to do that. So you’re a part of that story, and we’d love to, uh, how our technology inspires you to, to think about future features that we add to the platform for everyone.

ROCK: Well, thank you. And, uh, I just wanna thank you personally, Zach, for all the work that you put into this yourself, but also the leadership you’ve demonstrated throughout this whole process, because now it’s my turn to kind of take over, and, you know, you’ve given me this amazing product to just get in front of people now. And I, that’s, what I love about this job is it’s, it’s pretty dang easy when you’re, when you’re working with an amazing product and an amazing team behind it. And so I’m just, uh, now I feel like it’s my time to take the great work that you’ve all done. It’s not just me. It’s, you know, it’s the, it’s the other side of the business, you know, getting it, getting it out there, but I just wanted to thank you for, for what you’ve done and, and what you’ve continued to do for the product, the company. And yeah.

ZACH: Thank you. Thank you. You caught me off guard here. I, I feel the same, you know, I’m grateful that, that we are on this journey together and it’s been quite a road V4 to V5, uh, in a, in a relatively…

ROCK: How about V0?

ZACH: …short amount of time? Yeah, that’s I think, uh, somebody, Vince, my brother, and head of our support team, pointed out to me, this is the, the fifth official time that we’ve done this. And it’s even more than that if you count minor releases, beta, all that stuff. So, yeah. Interesting that we’ve had, you know, so many, uh, we’re very, very fortunate to have so many experiences like this. Um, here’s to here’s to 5, 10 more.

ROCK: It’s a lot. We’ll do it though. 

ZACH: Yeah. So check out the links in the show notes below to the official blog post for the release. Great thanks to our friends at Podland for, for interviewing Rock and I, uh, on that fantastic show and, um, you know, we’re, we’re just getting started here with V5. So, uh, let us know what inspires you, what you think could be awesome. And, uh, we’ll keep doing our job to listen and build in cool things so that the creators we serve can make great content for their audiences.

[music]

ROCK: Thanks for tuning into the show. This has been a production of SquadCast Studios. We’re your hosts, Zach and Rock. Our show is edited by Arielle Nissenblatt. It’s mixed and designed by Vince Moreno, Jr. The show is transcribed by Sabeena Singhani. Our designer is Alex Whedbee. Our music is by Sean Ballas. Peace!