173: Spencer Handley - Building Crystal Clear Audio Tools

"Don't give up, tenacity is huge, it's the whole thing." - Spencer Handley

About: Spencer Handley- Founder of PodClear

Overview: Spencer is a passionate entrepreneur who is out to help Podcasters achieve the greatest results with each of their interviews. He shares his background and what experiences and desires have led him to where he is today.

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Highlights:

Spencer's Background: Spencer is from Colorado originally, lived in LA- went to UCLA where he studied Chinese- actually lived in China for a year and ran a small little language acquisition tool business where he manufactured Chinese tools. He was also a musician (received an Associates in Music Composition) so he worked as a Jazz Musician/DJ in a night club. When he came back from China he went to Draper University, which is a school for entrepreneurs, and at the end of that program he pitched his business plan to venture capitalists and ended up winning the competition. From there, Spencer ran an enterprise software company for manufacturing for a year- had pretty good traction with it, but ended up folding the company because it wasn't what Spencer really wanted to do with his life. After that, he became heavily involved in consulting and is also planning on sticking with PodClear for as long as possible- it's more up his alley of work.

What is PodClear: A software application for desktop (both Mac and PC) that allows podcast interviewers to interview guests with crystal clear audio quality. It records locally on both people's machines, and you are able to have unlimited guests. After the calls are complete, the audio files are synced to PodClear's servers, processed, and as a result you get uncompressed audio for your podcasts.

How it Came About: Spencer is not a podcaster by trade, but is an avid podcast listener. The idea was evolved because Spencer and his team were listening to podcasts and found many of these podcasts were hard to hear. Spencer and his team were determined to create a way where the podcasts were recorded on both ends, and recorded crystal clear. It took about six weeks for Spencer and his team to create the software application.

How it Works: You simply invite someone to be on the show, start a PodClear session, add your interviewee/s into the session, and then it will send them a 4-step process to follow and then are quickly added into the recorded session.

Goals: Right now, Podclear has about 1,100 users. For Spencer, this is more of a passion product and not necessarily motived by money. The intention is to have this business to support them, and to be wherever they want (location independent) and let them interact with people the way they want to. Spencer does not work on PodClear full time, he is also an independent consultant. The more they can work on PodClear, the better the product they'll be able to have. They'd like to start working on it full time in April of this year.

Biggest Challenge: Finding personal balance- working full time as a consultant and working on PodClear on the side has proven to be a hard task. Spencer shares that it can be really easy to get burned out and lose balance with life, but he also realizes that it's all part of starting a company.

Advice for Entrepreneurs: Just keep experimenting until you find what works for you. Build a solid skill set that is marketable, something that has a high hour-to-cost ratio to help you bootstrap if necessary. Premeditate about what you want to do, choose what you love, and do what will work best for you.

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Website | @PodclearTweets | 

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