11. [Cross-Show: Ritan Park Talks] On the Fun of Making a New Podcast: Turning a Podcast into a Streetfront Café
Summary
- The core headwind for a new podcast is that show supply is growing faster than listening time, forcing finite attention to be split ever more finely. 小伙子老师 compares it with the boom in comedy variety shows, none of which truly broke through: creator resources and audience attention are being fragmented at the same time. 卫诗婕 adds that even when she knows many of the competing performers, she still cannot remember who appeared on which show or when each episode updated. She recalls that the first episode drew 1,000–2,000 plays without a platform recommendation; 小伙子 remembers the 618 episode seeming to clear 10,000 on its first day, while 卫诗婕 says it has “apparently” since accumulated more than 40,000. Those numbers are high, but they do not amount to a repeatable cold-start formula.
- The show’s founder–product fit is far stronger than its apparent zero starting point: 卫诗婕 is a new host, but not an amateur content creator. Nearly 10 years in media, more than “10,000 hours” of interview training, and experience running content and monetization give her mature interviewing instincts. She also stresses that her path had prerequisites and should not be packaged as a universal answer.
- 卫诗婕 believes the show’s real distinction is not its category but an “attitude” that listeners can consistently feel. Moving from institutional media to personal expression gave her more autonomy over agenda-setting, allowed her to retain a critical perspective, and let topics carry her own understanding of the world. Her name supplies reputation, moving listeners from trusting an institution to knowing and gradually trusting a fully dimensional person.
- The show opens its doors to different degrees depending on the topic: public-interest issues are made accessible to general listeners, while specialist business topics can impose a higher bar. Episodes on the 618 chaos and short dramas “open the door,” bringing in listeners who have never viewed everyday life through a business lens; topics requiring technical preparation can go more vertical and deeper. She acknowledges that this middle-ground strategy may not be the fastest route to monetization—the market more readily recognizes either fully mass-market or highly vertical shows.
- The packaging principle is not perfection but removing recognition barriers and getting moving quickly. “Business Talk sounds pretty tacky,” but the name leaves room for public interest beyond business, the fates of people at the bottom, and compelling stories. Adding 卫诗婕’s name gives the show search uniqueness. Her English name is James, and the English suffix is “James Talk”; her portrait and the conspicuous black slash make the cover easier to recognize. “I didn’t want to get stuck here. I thought: just call it something and get started.”
- Podcast monetization still looks like a collection of fragile individual cases, not a mature market with shared conventions and momentum. 卫诗婕 relays advice from Xiaoyuzhou CEO Kiss: “If you find podcasting interesting and enjoyable, come do it; if you’re doing it to make money, then don’t.” She believes podcasts can monetize efficiently relative to text and video, but the overall commercial scale is smaller; creators, advertisers, and PR agencies still lack a shared view of how podcasts should make money.
- What she ultimately wants to run is not a traffic plaza but a streetfront café with a workshop, a museum, and a public window. Creators can conduct their own explorations inside, while passers-by can stop for coffee and return repeatedly. 小伙子老师 captures the value of deep connection as “100 people walk past, and 1 person stops for you.” For a long-lived content product, sincerity, information gain, and a stable relationship with a recognizable personality are closer to compounding assets than a short-term breakout.
Deep dive
1. An Unscripted Cross-Show Reveals the Different Instincts of a Reporter and a Host
小伙子老师 discovered 卫诗婕’s new show by chance in a recommendation feed. Because it was so new, he “didn’t have very high expectations,” but the 618 episode left him “deeply shocked”: its structure, sound, and hosting presence did not resemble a newly launched product, so he asked a friend to introduce them.
卫诗婕 thought this would be another casual conversation like their previous one and brought recording equipment so she could ask for advice. Only after arriving did she learn that they were recording an episode. When she asked for an outline, she was told, “Just come.” For someone who had worked as a reporter, that meant going from preparing questions and examining someone else to suddenly having no idea what was waiting for her.
小伙子 admits he did have an outline; he simply withheld it deliberately to elicit an immediate reaction. 卫诗婕 understood the setup: the interviewee had to “hand herself over to him.” It also previewed the episode’s central question—how to balance polished control against genuine, emergent conversation.
2. 小伙子 Started Listening to Podcasts in 2016; 卫诗婕 Started Making Them in 2023
小伙子老师 remembers first hearing a friend mention 《日谈公园》 around 2016, in a park near Chaoyangmen. He even asked, “What’s a podcast?” Work later pushed him toward technology, business, and industry shows rather than conversational programs about everyday life.
In 2022, he interviewed Xiaoyuzhou CEO Kiss and proposed making a podcast inside a technology media company. His boss was “neither supportive nor opposed,” which meant he could use his spare time but could not add budget or resources, and had to finish his regular job first. He ultimately decided he could not manage both.
He also considered making a personal show after hours, but more experienced friends talked him out of it: building a personal IP immediately after joining a company could trigger workplace gossip. His life philosophy is “don’t rush”—something genuinely worth doing can wait a year or even 10 years. The cost is that he may have missed the stronger market tailwinds of 2022.
卫诗婕 then noted that 《极客公园》’s podcast failed to get off the ground in 2022, and that by the time she began making her own show in 2023, she had systematically listened to a number of excellent programs. She had previously led a business podcast at a media organization and worked on livestreams and multi-expert roundtables; that experience became the professional foundation for her personal show.
3. The Podcast Tailwind Is Narrowing as Shows Grow Faster Than Attention
小伙子老师’s core market view is that “the curve for new-show growth is steeper than the curve for growth in user listening time.” The audience’s attention pool has not expanded in step, leaving an increasing number of new shows to divide a fixed amount of listening time.
He compares it with the explosion of comedy variety shows: an offline event caused online and offline activity to largely stall the previous year, after which Tencent, iQIYI, and others released multiple competition shows at once. The programs were not bad, but they split creator resources and scattered audience attention, so none truly broke through.
卫诗婕 adds her own experience: she knew many of the competing performers and watched the shows deliberately, yet still could not remember who appeared on which program or when it updated. Once she missed the initial window, her viewing rhythm broke; the show could even be forgotten entirely. Strong interest was not enough to overcome crowded supply.
4. Podcast Monetization Still Has No Stable Market Momentum
卫诗婕 relays a comment from Xiaoyuzhou CEO Kiss: “If you find podcasting interesting and enjoyable, come do it; if you’re doing it to make money, then don’t.” The point is not that podcasts can never be commercialized, but that creators should choose the right frame of reference first.
Compared with advertising in the text and video products of mature media organizations, 卫诗婕 believes podcasts are also efficient at monetization, but their total commercial scale is smaller. More importantly, creators have not developed a shared understanding, and advertisers and PR agencies have not established a consistent purchasing logic.
When none of the parties share a consensus, successful partnerships look like “one individual case after another,” rather than predictable and repeatable momentum. That makes each case fragile. 卫诗婕 is still testing whether some forms of podcast monetization are “purely market-logic behavior,” and she retains a clear question mark.
5. What 小伙子 Heard as Maturity: Structure, Sensitivity, and Controlled Self-Revelation
Breaking down the 618 episode, 小伙子 first points to its clear structure. The rarer quality is 卫诗婕’s ability to recognize a new question that suddenly appears outside the framework. Some people ignore or fear unfamiliar material; she catches the topics generated in real time.
The second layer is her voice: comfortable enough to carry a serious business conversation. More important, the host’s professional persona does not swallow the person underneath. She occasionally lets a genuine inner reaction show instead of offering only a standard answer based on data and markets.
小伙子 believes self-revelation in a serious business show requires careful calibration. The program cannot be reduced to objectivity, stiffness, and assembly-line execution, but personal reaction also cannot replace the issue itself. 卫诗婕 lets personality into the conversation while retaining the structure of a business discussion.
卫诗婕 rejects the praise that she is an “inexperienced newcomer.” She has been a regular host and organized multi-expert roundtables. Institutional programs came from livestreams, faced cameras, and carried the constraints of an official role; her personal show feels better because her professional training has found a more suitable setting.
6. She Is Growing Wary of the Industrial Assembly Line and Moving Toward “Handmade Traces” in Sound
卫诗婕 has recently cut back on earnest business podcasts and shifted toward casual conversations among friends, including 《日谈公园》 and 《得意忘形》. Reexamining her own show, she feels it is “too much of an industrial assembly-line product, too standardized,” and needs to recover more agile moments.
She likes the sideways digressions and imperfect rigor of talk shows. A space jointly built by friends carries “handmade traces”—it may not be neat, but it has a beauty that standardized production cannot replicate. Sound is especially “hard to fake”; sensitive listeners can pick up an abstract but powerful feeling directly from the tone.
The shift also reflects a change in her personal state. She describes herself as having always been very proper—a Taurus and a J type, accustomed to arranging everything in advance. As she approached 30, she began to believe that the “unpolished, occasionally overflowing and free-floating parts” were more likely to produce flashes of insight.
7. The Name and Cover Are Not the Core, but a New Show Must First Be Findable and Recognizable
On naming, 卫诗婕 admits that simply calling the show “Business Talk sounds pretty tacky,” and says she was never going to spend a great deal of time agonizing over it. She asked a few close friends for quick reactions among several similar options. Their response gave her confidence, and she already preferred that choice.
“Business Talk” sounds broad, but it preserves room for the future. She cares about more than business: public interest, the fates of people at the bottom, and fascinating people and events. She did not want the name to become a launch constraint: “I didn’t want to get stuck here. I thought: just call it something and get started.”
Content, interaction, and sustained expression are the core. One listen may not stick, but after 3, 4, or 5 listens, the person listeners should remember is 卫诗婕. Putting her name first also solved the problem of “Business Talk” lacking search uniqueness; the English suffix is her English name, and the show signs off as “James Talk.”
She made the cover herself with a “random edit,” and does not even know how to use Photoshop. She chose a personal photo but deliberately kept her face from being too clear. The conspicuous black slash was initially meant to suggest handwriting; 小伙子认为 it creates segmentation, collision, and recognition in practice, allowing the cover to remain identifiable even as a tiny image among 20 shows.
8. A Personal Name Builds Trust—and Forces a Reporter Past the Shame of Self-Promotion
Putting her name before the title solves the search-uniqueness problem while telling listeners clearly that this is not an institution but a specific person standing behind the show. 卫诗婕 believes her actual track record creates personal reputation, allowing listeners to decide, “I can listen to you; I can trust you.”
That logic directly conflicts with the values she developed in media. Traditional reporters are used to hiding behind their subjects and believe the recorder should not step into the spotlight. Readers remember the headline, subject, content, and account, but often not the author. She realized that many colleagues carry varying degrees of “self-promotion shame” for precisely this reason.
Among her friends are people who call themselves “attention whores” and enjoy being the center of energy. She would rather “not be ignored, but also not be watched too closely.” An entrepreneur who moved from media into a personal IP once suggested repeatedly forwarding her own content into different groups “until some groups kicked you out,” which would mean letting go of pride and shame.
卫诗婕 did not follow that advice and may not agree with the tactic, but she began asking what she was actually afraid of. Her answer: reporters have long held the power to decide how other people are presented, while hiding themselves protects them from criticism and judgment. Genuine exchange requires exposing flaws, absorbing unpleasant feedback, and “breaking out of that cocoon.”
9. She Treats “Attitude” as the Hardest-to-Quantify and Most Viable Differentiator
When 卫诗婕 spoke with people from Xiaoyuzhou in Shanghai in the spring, she and Kiss discussed the crowded podcast market: “Why should people listen to you?” Her honest answer was “I don’t know.” She does not believe she is inherently unique or that the public has any obligation to pay attention to her.
She then offered a possible answer: “My attitude may be different from that of most creators in the market.” The idea was too abstract at the time, and the response was simply, “Why don’t you make it first?” After launch, she became increasingly convinced that listeners perceive attitude through agenda-setting, topic selection, and presentation.
小伙子强调 that attitude here is not an emotional posture of toughness or gentleness. It is why a topic was chosen and what the topic means now. The open-source versus closed-source debate, 李彦宏, 618, and short dramas all have clear focal points, but are not merely immediate hot topics designed to “tickle” the audience.
卫诗婕 summarizes the choice as 2 instincts: “A decision made knowing nothing is an instinct; a decision made after seeing everything is still an instinct.” She has been responsible for both content and monetization. Choosing instinct after understanding those logics is what she considers genuine—and scarce—in the market.
10. Leaving an Institution Does Not Mean Absolute Freedom; It Means Taking Back Control of the Trade-Offs
卫诗婕 spent a year at ByteDance because she wanted to enter a huge Chinese business organization and understand firsthand “how business actually works.” She had planned to return to content when she joined, but after receiving a complete team and broad authorization, she moved into running content at a technology media outlet.
Earlier, she had worked on nonfiction at 《人物》 and GQ Reports, and early in her career traveled alone through China’s grassroots rural communities. She says she had “measured the society we live in with my feet.” After moving into technology and business reporting, she wanted to bring people, warmth, and lived experience into relatively formulaic content.
She understands the social value of media as “agenda-setting,” but the self-media era has distributed that power to individuals and KOLs. She made the show independently because she did not want to be confined to technology elements or institutional presentation, and wanted more autonomy to select the issues she considered important to the era.
小伙子老师 says transactions across today’s media market are determined entirely by the buyer—the sponsor—and compares institutions and sponsors to a “200-kilogram contestant” and a “90-jin contestant” who cannot truly wrestle on equal terms. 卫诗婕 asks how large that force really is and stresses that independence still brings constraints from survival, advertisers, and partners. The difference is that more of the decision over how to establish the balance has returned to her.
11. The Audience Is Not a Fixed Persona; The Bar Should Move with the Topic
卫诗婕 thought seriously about who she wanted to listen, and ultimately decided not to make the show only for industry professionals. She wants ordinary people who do not understand business to use the show to reexamine daily life and society. Professionals are welcome, but they are no longer the sole default user.
She divides topics into 2 categories. Episodes on the 618 industry disorder, short dramas, and other public-interest subjects should leave “the door open wider” and impose as little friction as possible. Topics with greater business value or technical depth can go more vertical and become her own form of knowledge training.
小伙子 agrees with the dynamic threshold. A relaxed conversation does not mean it lacks substance, and a serious format is not inherently more valuable. But when the subject itself is serious, the show’s tone should adjust accordingly. He admits that only after making programs for years did he gradually move away from applying the same standard to every episode.
卫诗婕 also states the key constraint: if the goal is to break out as quickly as possible and maximize monetization, her route may not be optimal. The market may more readily identify a product that fully pleases the mass audience or one that is extremely vertical and specialized. She is willing to stay in the middle because she does not expect the podcast to generate substantial income, and because she has more than 10 years of accumulated experience and more than “10,000 hours” of interview training.
12. Short Dramas and 618 Show That Public Value Comes from Changing the Lens, Not Dictating the Conclusion
The short-drama episode drew sharply divided comments. General listeners said they learned information they had not known before; deep industry insiders asked whether the host had “not even learned the male-oriented and female-oriented categories.” 卫诗婕 clarifies that she had done the work. Asking guests questions whose answers she already knew was a deliberate hosting technique to build a bridge for ordinary listeners.
The core perspective she retained is that people instinctively regard short dramas as “low,” but from another angle they are also the spiritual sustenance of groups many people rarely encounter. How short dramas construct and present social value deserves a new perspective not supplied by existing media coverage.
小伙子 compares the dispute with film criticism. Much of the hostility may come from “this film was not made for you,” but people are accustomed to treating themselves as the default audience for every work. He also says criticism itself is value and discussion; the most frightening outcome is to be ignored.
He cites 《出走的决心》: some viewers ask why the mother is “so miserable” or how she could have become depressed, but at least those circumstances have been seen. “The most frightening thing is that everyone ignores it.” If content creators have a mission, he says, it is to put important issues on the table and then accept public scrutiny and criticism.
13. The First Episode’s 1,000–2,000 Plays Were Not an Ordinary Cold Start, and the 618 Breakout Was Not Just Recommendation
卫诗婕 remembers that the first episode drew roughly 1,000–2,000 plays without a platform recommendation. She thought the result was “neither good nor bad,” and even suspected the number was terrible. 小伙子 immediately judged it very high: for a purely cold-start show, even one riding a hot topic, getting more than 100 listens is difficult.
The result may have benefited from an existing network. She has roughly 4,000–5,000 WeChat contacts and guesses that friends and industry peers in her feed paid relatively close attention. But she is not good at socializing; many interviewees disappear from her life once the work ends. She did not forward the show into groups, and therefore was never kicked out of any.
After listeners asked for a group, the first filled quickly. She opened a second one, then said nothing for 1 or 2 weeks and even quietly enabled Do Not Disturb. Listeners called it “the strangest listener group they had ever joined.” When asked about group rules, she said only, “There are no group rules. Anyone can leave whenever they want.”
The 618 episode was selected as an editor’s pick by Xiaoyuzhou. 小伙子 recalls that it seemed to clear 10,000 on the first day; 卫诗婕 later says it has “apparently” accumulated more than 40,000, though she has not checked in a long time. 小伙子 also points out that even shows receiving the same editor recommendation rarely reach that level.
卫诗婕 believes that even if every “right” decision were assembled together, results like these would still be hard to produce. The lesson is that a method can be broken down, but the same outcome cannot be guaranteed.
14. Almost Anyone Can Deliver One Good Episode; Sustained Creation Requires Sincerity and Information Gain
When friends say they want to make a podcast, 小伙子’s first instinct is often, “Don’t.” Even if it is purely for entertainment, investing huge amounts of time and attracting no listeners can still be demoralizing. He then qualifies it: make one if you want, but do not expect too much.
卫诗婕 says she feels uncomfortable telling people not to expect too much, because she still hopes to give listeners something and wants to analyze which practices are worth borrowing, down to the technical details.
小伙子 cites the documentary 《四个春天》. An amateur director picked up a DV camera to record his family, yet the film made a powerful impact through its abundance of lived perception. An expression may not become a breakout hit; it may instead be healing, or leave behind a fragment of its era that is real and worth preserving.
He extends a line of reasoning from stand-up comedy: everyone can do 5 minutes because “everyone’s life is an epic.” By the same logic, almost anyone can make at least 1 good podcast episode. The key is to find subjects that genuinely trigger the urge to express and think deeply, rather than imitating the external shape of a show first.
卫诗婕 is still awed that listeners will give her an hour, calling it “such a luxurious gift” in an age of scarce attention. The foundation of sustained production is that every expression is sincere enough and brings information gain. 小伙子 summarizes the value of that depth of connection as “100 people walk past, and 1 person stops for you.”
15. The End Product Is Not a Content Factory but a Streetfront Café with an Open Window
卫诗婕 compares a personal expression platform to a plot of land of one’s own. Some creators build museums, plazas, grocery stores, malls, or screening rooms; the key is what kind of space for exchange they want to design. She is most drawn to a streetfront café with a window: inside is her workshop, and when the window opens, passers-by can stop for coffee and return if they are interested.
The space might also contain plants, nature, pets, a museum, interesting people who appear from time to time, and pop-up events, without having to follow the standard café template. She needs solitude to restore her energy but also wants to remain both “apart from the world and in the world.”
She compares life to a palette: any color can be added, and an unwanted one can be washed away. Mixing different colors may produce a feeling that did not exist before. The show will continue to discuss business because in a first-tier city “business is everywhere,” but she will also keep unpacking power, perspective, and the structures behind them.
小伙子 uses Fallaci’s writing about political heavyweights as an example of reducing powerful figures to ordinary people and stripping away the aura of power. The 2 hosts then reveal different end points: 卫诗婕 wants a streetfront café, while he wants a library that collects lives, works, and ways of seeing.
Form, tone, and technology will vary with the goal, but the shared vision is to make podcasting more diverse, allow people with different personalities to build spaces of their own, and let the people who genuinely need those spaces walk in.