Can I get some brutally honest feedback on a podcast I ran for 2 years (100+ episodes at once per week) at https://runninginproduction.com/? It's a podcast focused on chatting with developers around how they build and deploy their web apps. It mostly focuses on the "why", tech stack choices, libraries, workflows, lessons learned, production war stories, etc..
In my mind I thought it was a good idea but it got so little listeners that I had to abort recording new episodes due to burn out since there was no path forward to ever sustain it by outsourcing the burn out inducing parts. I still think it's a good idea but I wonder where I went wrong.
I tried everything I could think of. Guest variety from solo devs to bigger companies like Mux and Dropbox, audio editing to ensure the highest quality I could get for a remote guest<->host podcast with new guests having assorted mic qualities, removing a lot of "ums" and other fluff but not over editing things to make it unnatural, tags to quickly find tech stacks you care about and a ton of clickable timestamps with a summary of each show that's skimmable in seconds along with tons of reference links.
On paper it feels like I did everything I could to make things "good", but in practice after 100 episodes I had like 200-300 listens per episode which made it no longer viable to continue doing since each episode was about 6 hours of end to end time to put together (finding a guest, editing it, show notes, etc.).
I learned a ton from chatting with every guest and regret nothing but I overall see the podcast as a total failure since if it didn't gain any traction on it, it must be trash. I'd love to revive the show because chatting with someone new about what they enjoy working on was really fun.