Unlocking podcasting potential: The art of working with talent

Steve Jones is Content Director at Crowd Network, one of Europe’s fastest growing podcast networks. Crowd Network works with brands like Greenpeace, BrewDog, Sage, and Red Bull to tell their stories in creative, innovative ways. Steve has years of experience working with podcast hosts, and in this article he explains how he determines if a podcast host will be a good fit for Crowd Network…

Starting a podcast can be a rollercoaster: thrilling, but with enough ups and downs to make you feel sick. New hosts quickly realise the path to success is rarely a straight line. In fact, it often takes months of hard work before they’ll see any profit.

On top of this, working with sportspeople can be exhausting. They have high standards, they constantly want feedback, and they’re much more comfortable focussing on the negatives than the average podcast producer is. Sportspeople are used to sitting in a room on a Monday morning and picking apart their own performance, in front of all their mates. They’re used to coaches calling them out when something could be better, and they’re obsessed with marginally improving each week.

Eventually you see all that previous paragraph as a positive, but it took me a while to get to that place.

Our strategy involves re-investing early profits back into a podcast to enhance quality and increase reach. There will be a moment when a host starts to earn, provided they have the right mindset, but it’s rarely in the early quarters. Because as soon as we make money, we tend to spend it.

Crowd co-owns its content with athletes, and as with any financial investment, you need to establish a strong foundation of trust. We commit to transparency, and openly discuss expectations, goals, and challenges. We like to tell our hosts they’ll see no profit for the first six months, partly to see what reaction they give. You can tell a lot about a person if you ask them to podcast for free for six months and they just nod and say, “I’m all in”.

Choosing the right host is hard. For me, it boils down to one question: would you run a coffee shop with them?

Stick with me. It’s an analogy that started off as that one about politicians needing to know the price of a pint of milk to prove they are in touch with reality. Only, to host a successful Crowd podcast, we need a bit more.

Not only should you know the price of milk, but you also need to know the cost of the beans, the coffee machines, the sandwiches and the cookies. You should understand your customers, your competition, and your place in the market. You have to be reliable. You have to be nice to the team around you, and you probably need to be famous enough that we can stick your face in the window.

It’s a tough combination to find, but if you wouldn’t take on that financial and emotional burden with your suggested frontperson, then it’s probably not going to work.

Consider Dan Cole, England rugby legend and cohost of For The Love Of Rugby. Dan has no social media presence, which is not ideal, but he asks more questions than any Crowd presenter when it comes to spending his podcast’s money. Off air, he’s a details man, he enjoys talking strategy, and he has a vision. On air, he’s just as engaging when moaning about traffic on the M6 as he is when taking you inside an England scrum.

His co-host Ben Youngs, England’s most capped male rugby player, calls me three times a day with fifteen new ideas for what the podcast could be. He wants every episode to be better than the last, and he’s appointed himself as commercial director for the show. They could run a very successful coffee shop with each other, but instead they host the “Best Rugby Podcast” – a title given to them after a fan vote at the 2025 Sports Podcast Awards.

At Crowd we find working with sporting talent incredibly rewarding. Athletes dedicate countless hours to honing and perfecting their craft, and this same work ethic translates seamlessly into producing high-quality content. They’re also obsessed with analysing statistics and, in podcasting, constantly aiming to climb higher and higher in the charts.

Their competitive nature pushes our sportspeople to excel: they’re not just striving to beat teammates, but also their own personal bests. When Tour de France winner Geraint Thomas started podcasting, he was driven to deliver the most insightful and entertaining cycling show in the world. If his show ever stops growing, we just mention that Joe Marler or Jimmy Bullard are catching him, and he soon finds another gear.

In truth, every podcaster (and coffee shop owner*) needs endurance and commitment to consistently deliver. We’re just lucky that it comes naturally to our athletes.

*The author has never run a coffee shop in his life, but he thinks about it a lot

To find out more, visit the Crowd Network website.