Hi, I’m Mark, and I’d like to be a guest on your podcast. By day I’m a podcast consultant and creative coach. By night I make music, occasionally perform standup and improv, and host a weekly podcast for soft nerds.
Things I’ve done that I can talk about
🎉 Appearing on a UK TV game show
My dad and I were on the ITV prime time game show Ant & Dec’s Limitless Win in February 2024. We did well. So well, in fact, that even Twitter was nice about us.
🎙️ Making podcasts
I’ve been making podcasts in exchange for beer since 2008. In 2016 I transitioned to being paid in money.
🧳 Running a podcast business
I run a business that helps people make podcasts that people haven’t heard before. That means making sure each show has a unique premise and isn’t just “a series of interviews with leaders”.
🧑🏻🦯 Living with an invisible disability
I have optic nerve hypoplasia, which means I have maybe a tenth of an average person’s vision. Like a lot of invisible disabilities, the social aspects are in some ways the harder to deal with, but they do come with the most fun stories.
🎨 Shipping creative work
I have a long relationship with creative work and burnout. I understand the cycle of almost hyper productivity, and the slump that can come with it. In my work as a creative coach, I try and help meet people where they are, and bring them to some sense of equilibrium.
🎤 Narrating audiobooks
In the years between 2015 and 2018 I narrated over a dozen audiobooks, exclusively in the gay romance area. It’s not my particular area but I was good enough at it that more people booked me to do their books, and I only stopped doing it when it stopped being fun.
👨🏻💻 Python & Django
My first 15 years after university were spent building websites and apps, mostly with design or marketing agencies. I still use my coding skills today to give me an unfair advantage in a competitive podcasting landscape.
📈 Bootstrapping a SaaS business
I built a podcast tech business on the side while doing other freelance work. 2017 involved a lot of late nights, and almost every year involved some kind of tech disaster that had to be resolved. But I was able to step off the freelance treadmill and earn a living through Podiant in mid-2018.
🤑 Selling a business
I sold that business to a rival in 2021, after realising I’d taken it about as far as I could, and it was time to do something else. As tech transitions go it was relatively smooth, but not without its rocky patches.
🎹 Releasing my own music
In 2017 I wrote and recorded a mini-EP of songs. One was a love letter to buskers in my city, another was a song I wrote in my early 20s, and the third was a song about a pet I said goodbye to the previous year. Then in 2019 I recorded a cover of an 80s pop song and made a music video on a park bench.
🐰 Writing a kids’ book
In 2019 I started work on a kids’ book after having written a couple of short stories for my nephews, which I’d had a friend illustrate. Molly Whiskers and the Blue Tentacle was self-published in 2021, and the audio version was narrated by one of my favourite audiobook narrators, Imogen Church.
Here’s a standup set I wrote and performed in early 2024:
Things I love
🍸 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
🤓 The music of Barenaked Ladies and Steven Page
🇸🇪 Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy
🐴 Mick Herron’s Slough House books
📺 Mike Schur sitcoms
🧟 Zombies
How I can help you
- I’ll tell my little corner of the world about my appearance on your show, including my podcast and newsletter.
- I don’t use social media much but I’ll happily post about it wherever I’m active.
- I’ll link to the episode from my website – an extra bit of SEO juice can’t help.
- I won’t offer unsolicited advice, but if there are any areas in your production pipeline you have questions about it issues with, I’ll happily answer them outside of our recording (that is my day job, after all).
Past appearances I’m proud of
- BBC Radio 4’s Podcast Radio Hour, talking about my Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast
- The Shit That Happened to Me, recounting a story I’ve dined out on since 2018
- Buy Grow Sell, on the sale of my podcast hosting business
- Note to Future Me, getting nerdy about podcast search
Me and my setup
- UK-based, working from home studio.
- I use an arm-mounted Røde Procaster mic with a Røde Streamer X and an Anker 4K webcam.
- I can provide clean audio from my side of the call if recording over Zoom or other VoIP software.
- I can also record asynchronously, if you want to ask questions and then edit in my answers.
Shall we do this?
Email mark@hellosteadman.com with a Calendly link if you have one. If not, I can send you one so we can work across timezones and avoid diary clashes.
I don’t care how many episodes you’ve made or how many listeners you have. 🙂
I won’t swear unless you tel me it’s OK. I don’t like religious rhetoric or conservatism, but I try not to be a dick about either.
Here’s my bio and whatnot
Feel free to copy-and-paste this.
Mark is a podcast producer, consultant, and coach. He founded a podcast tech company in 2016 which he sold in 2021. Every Tuesday, Mark publishes List Envy, where he collaborates with a guest to build a top-5 list on a topic they choose.
My username on all the socials is @hellosteadman.
