The five tool tax. Growing a podcast means juggling different tools and hours of chores per episode.
For most people, a podcast isn't just a thing that ends up in your ears delivered through a podcast app. It's also the clips that somebody shared on TikTok, the video playing on YouTube while you make dinner, the article that turned up in a Google result, or the newsletter that landed in their inbox on Friday. A podcast became a cross-media format that reaches people across every channel they're on. And making one of those is a very different job than making the 2018 version of a podcast.
It's Sunday night. You recorded a good episode on Wednesday, you edited it on Thursday and Friday, and the audio is going up on Monday morning. The thing is, audio isn't really what the show is anymore. There's also the video version that needs to go to YouTube, and seven or eight clips that need to be cut for TikTok, Reels and Shorts. There's an article that you're supposed to write from the transcript, a newsletter that's supposed to go out on Friday, and a couple of pull quotes for X and LinkedIn, plus a webpage that ties all of this together.
So it's 11 at night, and you haven't written any of these yet. The episode itself is finished, but everything around it is the next hours of your life.
The episode itself is finished, but everything around it is the next hours of your life.
That's the five tool tax. And it's the part that nobody really puts in the pitch deck.
You can't really skip any of those other surfaces either, because that's where the audience actually is now. YouTube became the biggest podcast platform in the world in 2024. Spotify already has half a million video podcasts on the service, and around 390 million people have watched at least one of them.
Stephen Bartlett's Diary of a CEO sits at 16 million subscribers on YouTube. And his personal TikTok, where he posts clips and pull quotes from the show, has another 5 million followers with around 126 million likes. Andrew Huberman's clips actually outperform his full episodes with 180,000 views per clip versus 85,000 per episode. Lenny's product and startup interview show sits at around 600,000 subscribers and a meaningful share of his listeners come in through the clips that he shares on LinkedIn and X.
The 2025 industry survey found that 58% of new podcast discoveries start with a short clip on somebody's feed. So the episode is a source, but the clips are where most of the audience actually meets you.
58% of new podcast discoveries start with a short clip on somebody's feed.
The newsletter and the webpage are the only two surfaces where the audience really belongs to you. So if you skip those, you're not really building anything that lasts.
The first thing that you notice when you try to publish across all these platforms is the cost. You'll be on Riverside for the recording, Descript for the editing, Buzzsprout or Captivate for the RSS feed, Opus Clips for the clips, Beehive or Substack for the newsletter, and Squarespace or Framer for a webpage. That's six different tools with five separate bills and somewhere between two and three hundred dollars per month in subscription fees just to keep the tools running.
And none of these tools know that you're all working on the same piece of content.
The harder part is actually time because recording is an hour or two, editing another two to four and cutting clips on top of that takes another two to three hours. Then there's the article draft, the newsletter, the show notes, and cross-posting to every social channel. Realistically, you're looking at 11 to 19 hours per episode on top of the recording itself. That's half a working week.
11 to 19 hours per episode on top of the recording itself. That's half a working week.
And if you're running a weekly show, the distribution side becomes a full part-time job by itself, none of which is actually making the content itself.
The biggest podcasts solved this by hiring people on their teams. Diary of a CEO is basically a media company at this point. Huberman Labs runs a full team of editors, clippers, social managers and writers. And their clipping operation alone is bigger than most of the independent shows you've heard of.
You're not them. You're a show with maybe 500 or 1,000 or 10,000 subscribers. You make the show, you book the guest, you record the audio and then on Sunday night you sit down to start cutting clips. Or you don't. And then you quietly skip the surfaces that would have grown the show.
Most independent creators end up just skipping them, and then they wonder why they're not growing.
On top of all of that, the platforms themselves are not actually on your side. Because Spotify wants the listeners to stay on Spotify. YouTube wants the viewers staying on YouTube. Substack wants the readers subscribing to other Substacks. None of them are going to push your content out into the world for you.
Their incentive is a one-way revolving door. Your audience comes in, your relationship belongs to the platform, and they have no reason to send anyone back out.
Your audience comes in, your relationship belongs to the platform, and they have no reason to send anyone back out.
Which means that the cross-platform work falls entirely on you, because you're the only person who actually wants your reach to spread everywhere.
Now, run the same Sunday night in a different way. So you record once, and then the same recording quietly becomes everything else. The audio file and the video are generated for you. The clips get cut automatically, watermarked with your own handle and linked back to the source recording. A first draft article gets written in your own writing style. A newsletter draft is ready to go on Friday. The captions, the chapter markers, the show notes, the pull quotes, they're all there sitting waiting for you.
You're not doing the busy work anymore, and what you're doing is the editing. You pick the right clip and you make sure that the article exactly sounds like you want it. And then you hit publish.
The cost moves from 5 paid subscriptions to a single free account and the time moves from 15 hours per episode down to just 2 or 3. The big shows already crossed this gap by hiring teams to do it. You can now cross it without one.
This is a workflow problem that we've been working on for 5 years. We started Detail in 2020 because video creation was a workflow problem. We built a tool that made recording, editing, and sharing video significantly easier. But what we kept seeing on our own channels and across our community was that the workflow doesn't end with just an edited clip or a finished video.
The recording is just the start and everything that has to happen after it (the clips, the article, the newsletter, the captions, the chapters, the webpage) is where most of the time and most of the cost lives today.
Subwave is the realization that the workflow has to cover all of this. So that's what we built.
We're building tools to capture, craft and share your story. You get a free podcast feed at your own handle, ready to go out to Apple, Spotify and any other podcast app. It's just standard RSS, which means that you can take it with you if you ever decide to leave.
One recording goes in, and out comes the audio episode and the video page, the clips for social, an article drafted in your writing style, a newsletter draft, plus the captions, the chapters, and the show notes.
Your subscribers belong to you, not to us. You can bring an existing podcast in and you can take everything with you if you ever decide to leave. We won't charge you for it and we won't make it hard. We offer a free account and not another subscription on top of the five that you already pay for.
And we're building this together with the first shows on Subwave. There's a starter toolbox ready today and we're shipping the next set of tools alongside the people using them. So that what we build ends up being what they actually enjoy using and what actually helps them grow their show.
