You can listen to the above conversation that occured as we were prepping to record last week’s Valentine’s Day episode.
I was worried that our current brand name - “Wine and…” was proving overly unfriendly to search engines. Whether Google or native search results within Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon, etc, our podcast would fail to show to folks more often than not. It’s actually kind of miraculous we’ve grown as much as we have in the past year, on podcast platforms as well as here on Substack!
Search engines apparently hate the eplipses and just ignore it, even if you put it inside quotes. And “Wine and” without the elipses is such a generic phrase the engine struggles to spit out a specific show with just that as the search.
I still think the phrase works well for this Substack, as the parent umbrella to which our flagship podcast is only one piece. But the podcast really, really needed a new title. So we started brainstorming.
Coming up short on anything that inspired, I was soon noticed that Buzzsprout (our podcast distribution service) had released an AI custom-made to help brainstorm podcast titles for thier users, based on best-practices for such titles. I gave it a whirl.
It spat out a number of unweidly, overlong titles, a few decent ones, and a couple more that were solid yet had been used by now-defunct (but still available) podcasts from the pandemic years. I collected the handful of titles that might work and weren’t yet in use and ran them by Dallas. He was, like me, on the fence about them all, at best. And then he dropped a bombshell - he had this one title he’d brainstormed long ago, written down, then abandoned.
Folks, fuck AI. Dallas’ idea was PERFECT. In the video above he boasts “I’m nature’s AI,” and then absolutely proves it. The little show-off shit.
Gather creative humans around you. And again, fuck AI.
We tweaked Dallas’ original title slightly, to make it a bit easier to spell (I worried most folks wouldn’t know that “Vintner” has two n’s) plus simplifying this makes the word a derivation of “Vine” and not specifically “Vintner” (which neither of us are.)
So ladies and gentlebeasts, may I present to you, our podcast’s brand new name….
Again, this Substack isn’t changing it’s name, but this will be the new name of our flagship podcast STARTING NEXT WEEK. Thursday’s episode will be the last to be officially called “Wine and…”. And merrily we’ll roll along
Thoughts on the new name?
Let this also be a lesson to how you should never let perfection get in the way of making shit happen. Get your show / blog / video series / whatevr started. You can tweak it later. In fact, you should always be tweaking and improving - never rest on your laurels! Though maybe don’t change your name too often. Get it right the first few tries, if not the very first. ;P
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