Table of Contents

Hosting your own Interview

Here at Talk Story, we feel that everyone should be able to host their very own Talk Story interview with or without a paying account. While paying for a subscription does make the process much easier, it's still definitely doable by hand.

Tools

  1. Curated list of questions

    With a registered Talk Story account, you can export a list of ~300 Talk Story questions to use as a starting template. After signing in, feel free to export our questions.

  2. Spreadsheet software

    In the very beginning, we used Airtable to help track the progress of our Interview - all the questions, when a question was asked, answered, and/or skipped. Here's a link to an example Talk Story Airtable that we've used and created (feel free to customize it) - you should be able to replicate this in Excel as well.

  3. Email templates to correspond with your interviewee

    To notify your Interviewee of a new question, we would suggest using a standard email template so that your Interviewee becomes familiar with the format of your emails. Check out Talk Story email templates to get an idea of what we use.

  4. Cloud storage

    While you don't absolutely need cloud storage to host your own Interview, you'll want to figure out a way to seamlessly transfer the videos from your Interviewee to a place you can access. At Talk Story, we use Dropbox, but Google Drive, Box.net, etc would all suffice. If you don't like the idea of your videos stored in the cloud, if they are small enough, you could just email them back and forth or use a messaging application like WhatsApp or Google Hangouts to transfer the videos over the Internet.

Steps

Setup

  1. Once you've spoken to and gotten confirmation from your Interviewee, you'll want to select a way to seamlessly share videos. In addition to selecting a cloud storage, as the Interviewer, you'll have to share a folder with your Interviewee.

  2. Once your Interviewee accepts the shared folder request, you now have a conduit to share videos between one another.

  3. Copy our Talk Story AirTable by selecting "Copy base" in the top right corner.

    https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/a3a18ce1-0dfb-4be9-b0bf-5dc67fa35cab/Screen_Shot_2019-12-16_at_2.16.23_PM.png

  4. Login to Talk Story to export all our Talk Story questions and copy them to the template you've copied above. If you don't want to use our ~300 question template, feel free to create your own.

Conducting the Interview