#232 · how to actually land retainers in 2026
I think it’s not a bad idea—I could funnel the Stack podcast into the workflow, although I don’t have many daily deliverables tied to work for it right now. I like to keep things related to my daily deliverables, so I’d only do it if it fit that pattern. Honestly, I’m not sure yet, but I’m open to the possibility.
You can sell the podcast repurposing engine to anyone who has a podcast. Start by scraping podcast directories (Apple, Spotify, Google search) for the first 100 pages, turn those into distinct links, enrich the email addresses, and pitch directly. In your pitch say you've repurposed 10 of their episodes, mention you love a specific show, highlight something they discussed, and explain how repurposing could make them more money—offer to send 10 free clips (don't include a link in the first email; if they want them, let you know and you'll send all 10 for free). If they show interest, let them know you provide this as a service, offer 50 free clips up front, and discuss a pricing package if they like them. Sending this to a thousand podcasters will get a good response because the market is very underserved.
Yes, of course. I recommend refactoring your internal flow that generates these clips. Video processing doesn't need to take 70–90 minutes if you parallelize. For heavy workloads, people often rent a high‑core VPS (not a full supercomputer) with fast network storage, using saved configurations or code that pulls the video quickly. This lets them parallelize, run the jobs, and finish in about 5 minutes instead of 2 hours on a personal computer. To scale, turn this into a real podcast offer that saves time per client—it's easy and simple. Besides that, focus most of your time and energy on outreach, as most people do. Nick notes that there's still an overhang between what people think AI can do and what it actually can't.
I appreciate it, John Overflow AI, but I know the main channel doesn't do super well, but it kills me because the main channel only gets like 3x the total number of views that the podcast gets at this point. Isn't that crazy? Podcast is over 50 times smaller, which I think is a good segue into strategy.
Jack made the stacked podcast visualization; it’s a visual deck with a background image where we generate text. It’s gotten longer over time and we’ve tweaked it, though we can’t zoom out. The slides are essentially graphs. You could simply ask an AI to create a slide deck and it would do it without any special prompting.