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You started your business for freedom, not to be chained to your desk. I help small business owners grow without burning out through simple, powerful online automations.
On Streamlined Solopreneur you'll get real-world strategies, smarter workflows, and practical tools to help you reclaim your time and actually enjoy the freedom you set out to create.
Your host, Joe Casabona, is a seasoned technologist with over 25 years of experience. He's seen how the right systems can transform a business. But more than that, He's a teacher at heart.
His goal isn’t to overwhelm you with jargon, but to make complex ideas simple and give you an actionable plan you can actually use.
Because your business should support your life—not take it over.
Tune in every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts.
I have had a week of battles that I'm not going to bore you with today, but it's probably something I'm going to bring up in the future. Uh, just like bad customer service. Somewhat related to business. So it's not going to be just like a personal rant. But that's not the purpose of today's episode. Today is audio note. is about episode 500, which came out on Monday. Um, I'm really proud of the way it turned out. Um, I think I, I think I did a good job of like, I don't want to sound self-aggrandizing. I said this in the episode, but like honoring the history, you know, like I feel like 500 episodes of a podcast is a lot. Um, I mean, it definitely is, right? Most podcasts don't come close to that. Um, and so I think I did a good job of like, talking about the past and how it's affected the show and then the direction and then ended with some actionable advice. Um, it came out on Monday, which was my birthday, and uh, the same day as one of the biggest AWS outages. So downloads were down. I'm not sure what to do about that. I might release the video. Uh, on YouTube, uh, because I have a couple of shorts recorded to promote the episode. So I might release the video on YouTube just to see if it does anything, like a little experiment there. Um, so that was a, that's a bummer, but that's fine. There's probably like some stuff I can do with the packaging. Like, after 500 episodes, here's the real secret to success, like maybe I could, like, after 500 episodes, you know, I, like, I frontloaded that and maybe that's not the best thing to do. I think I'm probably banking on people following me. I also didn't like do, didn't, I didn't do a very good job of like generating press around it just because like, again, it feels like a big deal to me. Um, but I don't want to be like self-aggrandizing about it. Um, So those are my thoughts on the release. I think over the next month, I'll probably push it a little bit more. Um, but what I really wanted to talk about was my approach for coming up with the content for the episode. So I used Notebook LM for this, Google's Notebook LM, and I had my VA. So the way, if you don't know, Notebook LM is like your own personal language model. And so you feed all of the sources and it only uses those sources. is my understanding, right? Uh, you know, it probably uses like Gemini as a base. Um, it's it's ephemeral. So if you don't save the chat, then you lose it, and it doesn't work device to device, at least for the, you know, one of the benefits of having a pro account on Google Workspace is, it doesn't, it claims to not train the Gemini model on your notebook LM notebooks, right? So, the promise there is that, like, you can train it on internal documents and use it as an internal LM without worrying that it's going to go out into the world and get trained and use that material for training. That's the promise at least. So, what I did was I had my VA. Take all of the transcripts from the 1st 499 episodes. And you can load up to, I think, 300 sources into notebook LM. And so, like, I couldn't just take all the transcripts and upload them because that's more than 300. But what you can do is max out every Google Doc. So like most people don't know this, but Google Docs, uh, each Google Doc has a size limit. It can't go above a certain file size. And so you can max out those and then upload them. So it looks like, uh, you know, these episodes, probably between like 42 and 47, maybe 41 and 47 episodes fit in a single Google Doc. So, 30, uh, so this one's 35. So, I mean, it depends on the length of the episode, obviously, but, um, So, you know, we're looking at between, let's say, 30 and 45 episodes per document. So I've got 27, I think maybe 26, and then I added a couple of other thoughts on what episode 500 could be. So my VA created these documents all in a folder and then I uploaded them to Google LM. Uh, or notebook LM. And then I asked it a number of questions, right? What is this show known as what was the most common advice throughout the lifetime of the show? What was the most common advice since changing the name? And I'm like, when did I change the name? And then I said, I want to do something nice for episode 500. Here's what I'm thinking. And I basically said, like, it could be like a canonical reset. Um, it could be, uh, like, uh, look towards the future. I'm I'm really not sure. I think I'm making this too big in my head, but I want to do something good. And so it came up with a few ideas. And the idea, so the 1st idea was just like canonical reset anchoring the show to the gaps framework, which I liked that, but I had already done an episode on the gaps framework. But number 2 is what I liked the best, honoring the legacy, the evolving question and advice. So, you know, it basically recommended like, hey, do a callback to how did you build that? Uh, and I decided to do the trade secrets one because that was the one that lasted longer than how did you build that? And I thought that was just a more interesting anchor point. Um, and then point to the business's North Star before talking about something practical where the show is going and and and tying like the actual topic of the episode back to that. Um, and the 3rd was feedback in community engagement. And if I had thought about this longer or put more effort into it, I could have done that. But I really liked that. I really liked what it came up with. So if you listen to the episode, You'll know I started, um, I started, uh, Oh man, I lost my train of thought for a minute. Shoot, what was I just saying? This is a voice note. I'm not going to edit this. Uh, oh, if you listen to the episode, I started with the 1st trade seeker from my friend Jason Coleman and then anchored the conversation around that. And so I won't spoil the episode, but the entire process was like, have my VA take all the transcripts, most of which already existed. They just needed to be combined into these documents so that they can fit inside Google LM. And then I started asking Google LM questions about the episode. I gave it more sources for what I'm thinking and what I've been talking about. Generally, and, you know, how I want to honor the history of the show while recognizing that we've moved pretty far away from the original charge of the show, but there's been this North Star that's always been there. So if you haven't listened to episode 500. I would strongly recommend you do, streamlined.fm slash 500. And let me know what you think. What are you using Notebook LM4 if anything? Let me know that too over at streamlinedfeedback.com. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time. I hope you find some space in your week.