The onboarding most hosts dread looks like a long intake form, a kickoff meeting, a brand questionnaire and two or three weeks before anybody opens a file, and I understand why teams do it, right, it feels thorough and it looks professional, but for a podcast it is mostly unnecessary, because your show has already answered most of those questions in its last few episodes. What you actually need from podcast editing onboarding is much smaller and much faster, a short conversation, a place to put files, a team that studies what you already publish, and a first cut you can react to while the recording is still fresh in your head.
I'm Samy, my team in Dubai edits podcasts under the Pixel Samy Podcast name, and what I want to do here is walk through our first seven days with a new show in the order they really happen, and use that to describe what a sensible first week should feel like with any editing team, including one that is not us.
What happens on the first call with a podcast editing team?
With us it is a 15 minute conversation in which I watch some of what you have already published, ask how often you release and how many cameras you run, and give you a per episode price before we hang up, with no slides and no sales routine in between.
That is basically the whole agenda, and the reason it is short is that the important information is in your episodes, not in a form. I want to see how you record, one camera or several, how long the episodes run, whether there are sponsor reads, and whether you want vertical clips or show notes. Then I can tell you whether Starter or Studio fits, what an episode costs, and whether anything, a three hour episode or a four camera setup, needs a custom quote. If you prefer email, samy@pixelsamy.com works just as well, send a link and the same questions get answered in writing.
What you should leave any first call with, from any team, is a clear price per episode, a clear turnaround, and a clear answer on who owns the files, and if any of those three is vague, right, that is worth noticing before you upload anything. The post on questions to ask a podcast editor before you hire them goes further on that.
What should you upload in the first few days, and how?
The untouched camera files and separate audio for your next episode, dropped into the shared folder we set up, which takes files of any size, plus links to a handful of recent episodes so the team can study how your show already looks.
Upload the originals, not a screen recording or a compressed export, because the edit can only be as good as what goes into it. If you record on several cameras, upload every angle, and if you record audio separately, upload that too, even if the camera has its own sound, because we sync it all. A simple naming habit saves real time here, something as plain as the episode number and the camera name, and the file naming habit we like explains the one we use.
Also send anything the editor cannot guess, guest names spelled correctly, the exact wording of any sponsor read, the terms your field uses that sound like typos, and a note about anything that must not go out, a comment a guest asked you to remove, for instance. A two line note now prevents a full revision later, and it costs you about five minutes.
How does a new team match the look you already have?
By treating your last few published episodes as the brief and copying their opening, name straps, pace and colour, so that nobody watching can tell this is the first episode a new team has touched.
This is the part of onboarding that should take the most care and the least of your time. You send the links, we watch them properly, and the first cut uses your intro, your lower thirds placed where they always sit, your pacing, and colour that matches what your viewers already know. If you have original templates or project files, that helps, and if you do not, we rebuild from the exports, which takes a little longer on the first episode and then never again.
If you do not have a look yet, or you want a new one, that is a different conversation, and the intros and branding page shows what we can build for you. My honest advice is to keep the first episode with a new team as close to your current style as possible, and change things in week three or four, so you can tell whether a difference comes from the new team or from the new design. Does that track for you? Changing two things at once makes it impossible to judge either of them.
What happens during the 48 hours before the first cut?
Editors who sit through the entire recording line up the angles, make the cuts, grade, mix, and add your graphics and any sponsor read, and roughly two days after the upload the first cut is waiting for you.
Software does the mechanical part, matching the cameras to the audio and taking hum and hiss out, but where a sentence gets trimmed is decided by a person who has heard what came before and after it, and that is the difference you feel between a human edit and one where a detector simply removed every gap, which viewers experience as a jumpy rhythm without ever naming it. Before the cut comes back to you it goes through a check, and I wrote about the quality check every episode gets before it comes back to you if you want the detail. If your first episode happens to be a long one, graphics heavy or shot on four cameras, it may need an extra day, and the place you will hear that is in our reply to your upload, so you can plan around it.
For hosts in the US the time difference genuinely helps here, right, because Dubai is between 8 and 14 hours ahead depending on where you are, so an evening upload reaches us in the early Dubai morning. You go to sleep with files in a folder, and the work is moving while you are not watching it.
How should you give notes on the first cut?
In one pass, watching the whole episode once and writing every note with a timestamp, because one complete list gets you better revisions than a stream of messages spread over three days.
The first cut is where you teach the team your taste, so be more detailed than you think you need to be. Note the cut that felt early, the joke that needed another second, the lower third that came in late, the tangent you would actually keep, and say why when you can, because "this felt rushed" teaches us more than "fix this". The fixes are usually with you one working day after your notes arrive. On Studio revisions are unlimited, and on Starter one free revision is included, which on a well briefed episode is usually enough, right, because a single complete list leaves very little for a second round.
The first cut is a question we are asking you, and your notes are the answer that makes every episode after it better.
I have written separately about the revision round that actually works, but the short version for a new show is that the effort compounds, a host who writes long, specific notes on episodes one and two usually has almost nothing to say by episode five, because the team has absorbed the taste instead of guessing at it, trust me on that.
What does the first week cost?
Only the episode itself, priced exactly like every later one, which means 199 dollars on Starter when your show is one camera and runs an hour or less, a number you get on the first call.
I like it this way for a new relationship, right, because nobody should have to commit to a quarter of episodes before they have seen one cut. You pay for the episode in front of you, you judge the result, and if it is not right you stop there, which keeps the pressure on us to earn episode two rather than on you to justify a contract. Multi-camera shows, longer recordings, the multi-episode savings and the extras are all in the podcast pricing section, and I would honestly leave most of that until week three, once you know the base edit works.
One piece of practical advice on which episode to send first. Pick a typical one, not your hardest recording with the dodgy guest audio and not your cleanest solo episode either, because the point of week one is to see how the team handles the show you normally make. And if chapters are part of what you want later, it is worth knowing that YouTube builds video chapters from the timestamps in your description, so a first episode is also a good moment to decide how you want those written.
Signs the first week is going wrong
A good first week feels calm and slightly boring, and a bad one usually shows itself early, in the same few ways.
That is one, the questions you get are about things already visible in your episodes, which tells you nobody watched them. Secondly, the first cut arrives late with no warning, or arrives on time but with the intro, colour or pacing clearly different from what you sent. And on top of that, notes come back half done, or you are asked to explain again things you already wrote down. One small miss is normal on a first episode, a pattern of them in week one is a signal, and that is true whether the team is us or anybody else.
To be fair to the alternatives, if your show is a simple audio recording for internal use, a proper onboarding with any team may be more than you need, and an AI tool might honestly be enough. If you want someone sitting in your weekly meetings, an in-house editor gives you that in a way a remote team does not. And if you publish rarely and your deadlines are flexible, a solo freelancer can be a perfectly good choice, right, as long as you accept that one person means one calendar.
What week two and beyond look like
From the second week the routine is the one you will keep, recording on your side, the folder, our cut and your single list of notes, and that list tends to shrink each time.
By week two the team knows your intro, your pacing, your guests' names and the kind of moments you like to keep, so the first cut lands closer to final. This is also when it makes sense to add the extras, vertical clips from each episode, show notes and chapters, or packaging from ClickTheory, the thumbnail and title studio inside our company, through thumbnail design for podcasters. Each stage of that routine is described on our how it works page, and none of it creates a dependency on us, because the camera originals, our working projects and the finished episodes are yours from the start, and the projects travel with you if you ever move to another editor.
If you are coming from another editor rather than starting fresh, read how to switch podcast editors without missing a single episode before anything else. Whichever way you arrive, judge the first week by one thing, how little you had to explain, because a team that learned your show from your own episodes in seven days is a team that will still be getting it right in episode fifty.
So yeah. That's my way of saying it.