From Podcast to Profit: How to Build a Podcast Studio From Scratch
Part of Twin Cities Startup Week 2026, September 14–18.
Twin Cities Podcast Studio started with three founders, an empty room, a lease, and no experience running a podcast studio. They signed the lease in September, brought in their first paying client by November, and were profitable within six months.
In this talk, Karl Ness will use Twin Cities Podcast Studio as a case study for how to take a service-business idea from “maybe this could work” to something people will actually pay for. He'll break down how they identified an opportunity in the market, figured out what they actually needed to spend money on, scraped together the resources to get started, found their first customers, and adjusted through the slow months as they worked toward profitability.
The goal isn't just to tell the story of how they built a podcast studio. Attendees should leave with lessons they can apply to their own business idea, including how to test whether there's a real market, decide what you need to launch versus what can wait, find your first paying customers, and use early revenue and customer feedback to figure out what to do next.
Speakers:
Karl Ness, Founder @ Twin Cities Podcast Studio
Daniel Espeseth, Co-Founder @ Twin Cities Podcast Studio
Getting here on Wednesday. Parking, Basecamp, lunch, and the rest of the day: tcstartupweek.com/wednesday