Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:05 Hello, welcome Rogue Startups. I'm your host, Craig Hewitt. Here. Each episode I'm gonna be sharing a nugget and a piece of wisdom that I'm learning from growing my business. CAOs from seven to eight figures, and hopefully beyond, you know, business is tough. There's no easy button to push to take all the right answers in the shortcut to, to GED success. But I truly believe that with the collective wisdom we have from this tech community, we really can do better and easier than we could alone. You know, I'm basing a lot of this on an amazing amount of help and feedback I've gotten from other podcasts and other founders and other YouTube channels, and, and this is my attempt to give back a little bit to the community to help you grow your business more sanely to a higher level, more profitably, to where you're having a better experience in this journey.
Speaker 1 00:00:49 I sincerely hope you like the new format here. You want to connect with me, head over to Twitter, I'm at the Craig Hewitt, and for show notes for this and every episode, rogue startups.com, let me know what you think. Hello, welcome back to Rogue Startups. I'm your host, Craig Hewitt today with Colin Gray from Ali two and the podcast host. Uh, I've known Colin for six or eight years, uh, kind of running in the, in the podcast space together. Uh, and today, Colin, Colin and I are gonna talk about a lot of marketing, a lot of community ops, um, stuff. And, and I think like what it means to be a big company versus, uh, <laugh> a little company, uh, when it comes to like, marketing and brand. Colin, how's it going? Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:01:28 Good. Thanks, Greg. Yeah. Honored to be on Rogue Startups. The, uh, one of the longest running shows. I've listened to <laugh>.
Speaker 1 00:01:34 Yeah, yeah. Thanks. Yeah, I mean, it's, uh, it's been, it's been a hot minute. It's been eight years, um, almost nine years. So yeah, it's been, it's been, well, we're 290 ish episodes.
Speaker 2 00:01:45 That's
Speaker 1 00:01:45 Great. Um, not many shows get that. It's, it's definitely the longest running thing I've done <laugh>
Speaker 2 00:01:50 Excellent stuff. Yeah. Cool. Well, plenty of stuff to talk about
Speaker 1 00:01:53 <laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I mean, I, I think that, uh, I think le let's frame it, the, the two things we're gonna talk about are, um, are, are both marketing related, right? Mm-hmm. One is kind of community, um, and education and, and like, uh, maybe like the leading part of success is what I might say. Yeah. Uh, and the other one is, um, you know, big boy marketing versus little startup marketing <laugh> and, and like brand versus marketing tactics maybe is, is kind of the, the similar way to put it. But, um, you know, I think that, uh, I think that the, the reason we're probably looking at this is like this, the shit we'd done in the past isn't working as well as it used to. Um, just very generally, I'll speak for myself, <laugh>. Um, and, and so I think a lot of us are looking at like marketing in general and our businesses and saying like, okay, we probably just rode the tailwinds of, for, for the two of us in podcasting, um mm-hmm.
Speaker 1 00:02:46 <affirmative> podcasting being cool, uh, and it still is, but like it's reached a maturity level mm-hmm. Which I think is actually healthy, but Yeah. Um, but, but that's a thing. Um, zero interest rates for a very long time to where all of our customers had a bunch of money and now they don't <laugh>. Yeah. Uh, and, and as a result, like the economy and, and like the post covid boom, uh, kind of equalizing. So, um, actually think we have quite a few headwinds and I think a lot of the creator economies, maybe not headwinds, but don't have tailwinds anymore, uh, that we probably had for most of the time that you and I have been in business. Um, and, and so kind of seeing this new reality to where the good stuff we enjoyed, we can't count on it being there in the future. Not, yeah. Not to be doom gloom, but like, that's probably the reality, right?
Speaker 2 00:03:30 And, and whether that's actually, see, I'm struggling with this as well, like whether that's just an excuse, like, is it, I, I kinda wonder like, are there companies out there still growing just fine? 'cause they're doing the right things, whereas, uh, I'm just not doing the right things. That's, that's something that's, that's definitely on my mind as well at the moment. Hmm.
Speaker 1 00:03:48 <laugh>. So let, let's, uh, let's take a detour then and, and talk about like self-doubt, right? Because like, <laugh>, okay, you're a successful, you're a successful founder, you have a a team, you're profitable, you have, you know, all this stuff, right? Um, I, I've been thinking about this tweet I want to put out <laugh>, and it's like, oh yeah. In every day I think I am a total rockstar and a complete loser. Um, because, because I will, I'll, we'll close a customer or we'll launch a feature or we'll have this thing, or just internally like this great interaction with the team, and then, you know, shit happens and you're just like, I cannot believe <laugh>. I cannot believe that we're still struggling with this. Yeah. Like, I don't know. How, how do you, how do you perceive that, um, like that balance on a, on a regular basis?
Speaker 2 00:04:33 Well, I'm exactly the same to start with. It's like, uh, ups and downs every single day. Um, and it's that annoyance that, uh, at the end of the day, generally remember more of the downs than the ups don you, it's hard to <laugh> hard to internalize the up bits and finish the day on that, as opposed to mull over the down parts. So, I dunno, honestly, I don't, I don't, I'm not sure. Like, I, I think it, I think every time I feel like I've conquered it, like I feel like I managed to get over a lot of that when I was just working by myself and then I took on a couple of employees and then suddenly that kind of amplifies it a lot. 'cause you've got, you're trying to help them with things and they're asking you questions. You're like, I don't bloody know. No idea. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:05:15 <laugh>,
Speaker 2 00:05:15 What do you think? Yeah, good management style, but actually it's just genuine. I have no clue. Um, yeah. And then you start to conquer that. You're like, oh, it's actually, that is a good thing just to ask the questions and then suddenly have 10 or 15, then it's a whole different level of problems. So I feel like every time I, I've got a, a handle on it, it changes. So, <laugh>, is that, is that just me or is that you as
Speaker 1 00:05:40 Well? No, I, I, I, I mean, I talk to my business coach. He says that I talk to other founders that are, you know, more successful than you or I. Yeah. And no <laugh>, no shame, but like, they're just further along and they say the same thing. Um, yeah. It's crazy. It's crazy. I, it's, it's interesting. I have a call with a, a founder we all know later today or tomorrow that, that they're doing 20 million a year. And his email back to me after I gave him some context of why I wanted to talk was like, yeah, I'm totally in the same boat all the time. I was like, oh man, <laugh>, there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Um, <laugh>. But, but so like, how do you like, really specifically, like how do you deal with it? Like meditate, exercise, alcohol, <laugh>, other drugs, microdosing dosing
Speaker 2 00:06:26 Exercise is a big one for me, actually. Yeah. Like I, I, I know that if I am managing to get my workouts in each week, like I, I really enjoy, um, sort of hit style strength training, like the old school kinda CrossFit, functional fitness type stuff. So if I, if I'm used to get a work in workout like that in every, um, two days, then I'm, I'm much happier. Uh, 'cause I feel like I've kind of progressed in something <laugh>. Yeah. It's like, so that does make a big d big difference to me. I'll controversial opinion. I have tried meditation, um, many times. I just don't think it works for me at all. I dunno how much it works for anyone, um, apart from people that manage to get it to like two hours a day or something. Yeah. But the whole 10, 20 minutes a day just doesn't seem to make the slightest bit of difference to me, and generally tends to just wind me up because I, I'm probably just doing it wrong, but I dunno. Are you into that?
Speaker 1 00:07:17 Uh, no. No. I, I tried for a long time. I did Headspace, I did calm. Yeah. Blah, blah, blah. And yeah, it's just not me. I think to me, the, the, the place for mindfulness is an exercise. You know? It's,
Speaker 2 00:07:32 Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:07:33 I'm running and literally like, I, I don't take, I don't wear a watch. I don't do any of this. I just go run. And like, that's the time and the space where like, I'm just with myself. And that's, I think that's like what meditation should be. Um, I think that's where I get my mindful time. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:07:48 Yeah. And I shouldn't, I shouldn't write it off entirely. 'cause I think the, I went through Sam Harris's, um, meditation course, can't remember what it's called. Mm. Can't remember. Anyway, he has a really good course on it. And the training he gave in that, actually I use quite often in that, like when I'm making my coffee in the morning, I'll kind of come to <laugh>, you know, become aware and just think, right, I'm gonna concentrate on this and not think of anything else apart from listening to the water going to cup. And that actually, those little bits, those tiny little mindful moments make a fair difference to me. They kind of, yeah. They just create a little bit of space and take my head off that, um, massive issue we're dealing with today that's currently like making my mind turn and stuff like that. So that's kind of, I remember did you ever listen to the Arnold Schwartzenegger, um, interview with Tim Ferriss?
Speaker 1 00:08:39 No. Uhuh, no.
Speaker 2 00:08:41 Hey, that was one of the things I took from that. Um, I got, that was a surprisingly good interview. I dunno why. Surprisingly, the guy's amazing. I'm fantastic
Speaker 1 00:08:48 Interview. Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:08:49 Totally. Yeah. I, I really enjoy his stuff. But like Arnold Schwartzenegger has like, so many little mind little takeaways and one of them was that he spent like two months, uh, meditating and now just uses those lessons and little kind of bits of daily life. And this is one of, it kind of made sense to me in this sense. Like, you just kinda use it. You don't need to sit down for 20 minutes the same as everyone else does. You can take that kind of approach and apply it, whether it's exercise like yourself, or whether it's literally just every time I make my coffee, that's four minutes of, um, concentrating on one thing. I dunno mm-hmm. <affirmative>, but that, that seems to help for sure.
Speaker 1 00:09:23 Yeah. No, I like that. I like that. Okay, so jumping into the business a little bit, I didn't give you a proper introduction. Can you kind of share what Ali two is in the podcast hosting? Kind of what, what your role is these days in the business? Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:09:35 Sure. Uh, it, I suppose it started with the podcast host. That was our content site. I just started writing about podcasting really. Um, because I was using it in my work at a university. I used to teach lecturers at a uni how to, uh, teach better with tech. And one of those technologies was podcasting. So I started writing about it, um, and just kind of fell in love with that whole medium and everything the same way. Um, all of us in the industry do. Uh, and the podcast host was my outlet for that. I just wrote blog posts on best mics or how to get, how to be a better speaker or how to grow your audience, all that stuff. And that just grew over a fair few years. Like when was that? 2010? I started that I think. But Ude came along later on after the content was pretty well established because I, one of the biggest questions we always got from our audience was, how do I make editing easier?
Speaker 2 00:10:27 I hate editing. It takes too long. I hate like spending three hours on a podcast episode. Um, so I just started building, see what we could create that made, that could make editing easier. So Otus started out just as a kind of podcast specific editing platform with the audio cleanup built in. And then over time, we've built in call recording as well. Uh, we've got transcriptions in there. We've got kind of, it's a full all in one podcast creation platform now. Um, and we integrate with guys like you. So Casto obviously is one of our partners in there. Like people can make their podcast ality to, but they can publish direct to Casto via the a p i. So yeah, that's kind of where we are now. I I run both of those. I'm the c e o of, um, both sides. Uh, and I'm pretty heavily involved in the kind of product side of Al two. Uh, and, um, still a bit in the content, but actually Matthew, uh, runs most of the content side of it now. And I ate primarily on the, the, the product.
Speaker 1 00:11:26 Yeah. Yeah. Gotcha. So we were talking before we started recording Cardinal Sand of all Yes. All Podcasters. Recording is not recording right away <laugh>, but, um, that you all are, are kind of thinking about what community means to, to altitude and how to fit education. And I would say success. I kind of put those words in your mouth. Yeah. Into, into community. Like where are you in that and like what kind of things are you, are you considering? Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:11:52 We started, we started our community. Um, well we've, we've all, we've had an academy for like six or seven years and it originally had a big chat board, you know, like old school Chatboards. Yeah. With the proper button board type thing. We had that like five, six years ago. Um, but shut it down because it's just so hard to get people to participate and stuff like that. Um, 'cause they're just all on Facebook or whatever else. Uh, but we started up again about a year and a half, two years ago on Circle, so mm-hmm. <affirmative>, you come across Circle, I presume. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Circle A. So, um, and they seem to be doing really well with it because it's a place where quite a few of our audience already have an account on Circle and already are a member of a community on there. And actually they just make it a lot easier to get in there and participate. And it's a bit more quickly interactive as opposed to on a bulletin board. You always felt like, remember I always just felt like you had to write an essay every time you contributed <laugh>. Yeah,
Speaker 1 00:12:46 Yeah. Had
Speaker 2 00:12:47 To hundreds of words, <laugh>. Um, so we started building that. And so right now we're at about 2000 something people members. Wow. 2,100. That's huge. Members. It feels good. It feels big. And we get quite a lot of engagement as well, actually. We get a lot of people participating. Although it's still only, you know, 20, 30% of people, it's still, it's a low percentage. But for that kind of thing, it seems decent. So Yeah. I'm, I'm thinking a lot around our next stage of that just now. Um, is that something, have you guys ever ran a community like that? Or something similar?
Speaker 1 00:13:21 Yeah, so I mean, I think like, like a lot of companies, we have a graveyard of failed and abandoned projects. Uh, and community is, is one of 'em. I mean, we started a Facebook group, it's called Podcast Hackers. Yeah. I think it still exists, but, but we never do anything with it. And then Matt from our team started a Discord server. Yeah. Yeah. And it also still exists, but, but isn't active. Um, and yeah, I mean, community is a big thing that is on our radar and we very purposefully didn't attack it 'cause I didn't feel like we had the resources to, to be successful with it. Yeah. Um, like the the people resources. So,
Speaker 2 00:13:57 So what one person dedicated to that? Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:14:01 Yeah. I mean, like you, it's really easy to do bad, right? <laugh>, which we've done twice. It's like, stand this thing up and it's a graveyard. Um, I think the people who do it well, like they have that organic interaction and community that that's going on, whether they're in it or not. And like, that's the, when you get it past that critical mass, it's, it's great. But I think it's just super tough.
Speaker 2 00:14:23 Yeah. It's, it's really hard getting that engagement going. Again, it's, it's like to try to get somebody to develop a habit around visiting your thing. Like what can you give them? What value can you give them? And there's always that snowball. It's the network effect, isn't it? It only becomes really good once you have a bunch of people doing that <laugh>. Yeah. So you somehow have to get 'em all doing it at once. How were you? That was something we did actually was we invested a person about half of their time, of a full-time person into growing that in the early days. So I think that did make a fair difference. Um, yeah. How curious though, how did your Discord one go? We, we thought about Discord as a place. 'cause it does feel like there's a lot of people using that. Um, or maybe even Slack too. I dunno. How did you find that?
Speaker 1 00:15:04 Yeah, I mean, those were the three choices Slack we threw out. 'cause it would just be too expensive, right? Because like free and then stuff goes away after three months or something paid. Especially now with Slack has pricing updates, you know, terrible. Um, the, yeah, the other two options were circular Discord. Um, I, I probably, I like being in circle more than Discord. I'm a part of like, uh, limb list, like the big email, you know, outreach Company has a, a really thriving community in circle. Um, so that, that, that probably would be it. I find Discord incredibly difficult to use. Like, it's just like, I go in there and it's just like <laugh>, you know, it's just like overload. Um, reminds me of the scene from Ready Player one when they're talking about like, when the bad guys take over, they're gonna <laugh>, they're gonna do all this stuff. It's just like popups and Oh yeah. Everywhere.
Speaker 2 00:15:54 <laugh> colors and
Speaker 1 00:15:54 Shit everywhere. Yeah. We won't, what is it? We won't induce seizures until 80% screen coverage. I feel like that's what Discord is going for. Um, and Circle is just clean and, and kind of more with our motif, I think. Um, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, so like, I think the big question for us, and, and like be curious to hear how you're tackling this is like how, how does this fit into the customer journey? You know, is this like, maybe this ties into our other question about funnels and stuff. It's like, um, website visitor, uh, you know, interest somehow email, opt in, maybe join the community. Is that the, is that the call to action or is it like, uh, the community comes after they become a paying customer? 'cause that was a question of ours. Like, is the community just for customers or is it for anyone? Um, like yeah. How does that fit in with Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:16:40 The rest of
Speaker 1 00:16:40 Stuff you're doing?
Speaker 2 00:16:41 We are, the way we are thinking about it, and uh, it'd be great to get feedback on this actually, is we have our free content on the podcast host. We have, um, a hundred and some 120,000 people visit that every month. So we want to give them something else that's a kinda step up from just reading a blog post. Uh, and the community, the free part of the community, the free tier is intended to be kind of what basically the most valuable version of that that we can offer that still gets some kind of way for us to kind of more better engage with them. So they sign into the community and then hopefully they become engaged there and we can basically keep 'em up to date on things. It's, uh, a place we can almost, um, not do marketing. Exactly. Well, well, frankly, is it is partly around the marketing side of it.
Speaker 2 00:17:29 Yeah. So the free tier was kind of intended around that. And the next level up from there is we have paid courses. We have the Academy, so we can try and encourage them once they're in the free tier to upgrade inside Circle behind the paywall. We have all of our courses. We've got like, um, 10, 12, 13 courses around how to do different elements of podcasting from launch right up to monetization. But we've also got weekly q and as. We've also got challenges that we run every, um, other month. We've got live events. So there's a whole bunch of stuff in there that's like beyond the basic blog post podcast level. So, so that's the funnel on one side is from free content to free community tier, which is the signup, that's the opt-in, you know. Yeah. If we're, if we're kind of following the, the email metaphor, and we do that too, by the way.
Speaker 2 00:18:19 But anyway, this is one, uh, and then paid courses, but equally we, we cover ALI two a fair bit in there as well. So we've, one of our free courses is about Ali two and and we're not, we don't sell in there, but certainly Ali two's the answer to some of the questions and we'll mention. Sure. Um, so that's kind of one of the other funnels in there too. Um, but yeah, that's the kind of, that's the kind of idea. Um, so there's, there's the other element which has being able to upgrade people to actually the success side, like you said. So I want that paid tier to be quite valuable. So we charge, um, 45 a month for that just now for the courses, the access, the challenges, the q and a, and we're gonna give that, we haven't quite tied this in yet properly, but we want to give tude members access to that as well.
Speaker 2 00:19:11 So you pay less for tude, it's less than 45 a month for tude. Yeah. But you get access to this paid tier. And the idea being that that's just a success tactic. It's really just to help them be better at podcasting, make their show more successful, and therefore they'll stick around and edit their show for longer with ude. So we kind of struggle and flip flop a little bit in that we kind of, it's almost in our interest to give everything away on the content side, including the courses, because it'll send people towards our product, which could be the most sticky, scalable part of what we do, as long as we help people be really successful at their podcast. Yeah. So that's, that's the idea. Roughly
Speaker 1 00:19:51 <laugh>. Yeah. So, um, yeah, I I certainly don't know the answer. <laugh>. I, I'll just like, uh, I saw on Twitter this week, uh, Jane Portman of user lists, uh, users list, hi team, um, had a, had had a course, uh, or part of their academy that they were charging for and, and they started giving it away for free recently. Mm-hmm. And, and I said, you know, really great, awesome. Like, good job. Uh, I remember HRES did this a few years ago, they're blogging for business course. Mm-hmm. Um, I bought for our first marketer 800 bucks, which at the time was like, holy shit, I can't believe I'm sending 800 bucks for a course. It was amazing. I mean, it transformed Denise and her contribution to the team and really like the, the trajectory we're on, they made it free like the next month, of course.
Speaker 1 00:20:34 Um, <laugh>, so it's free now. And I, I kind of look at it like you're a bit of a hybrid, right? Because like the podcast host and al two literally are like separate whatever websites, businesses, you don't have to get into that. Yeah. But like you, you do have, um, uh, a mixed business model. I'll say. You're not just like a pure SaaS, just like, we're not pure SaaS. We have the product I service too. And yeah, we've sold, we sell consulting, we sell, we we've sold in the past info products and courses. Um, so, so I don't think it's wrong, like categorically wrong to sell information. I think it's a matter of priority. Like what are you trying to optimize for? Is it like passive income, cash flow on the podcast host side? Then I think what you're doing is right. If it's like, Hey, we want to build the best possible success program and like, funnel for altitude, then I would give it away. Um, and you can't do both those at the same time. <laugh> obviously. So it's just like, which relatively which one's more important, I guess. Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:21:33 Yeah. Well, I am, I'm wondering if we can kind of do, in a way do both at the same time, as in only if you're a paid altitude customer, you get access to this. Sure. Yeah. Pretty high level membership. So that, I think that's what we're playing with. That's where we're going with it just now. But yeah, it's, it's figuring out though whether we can also earn a bit of a living out of, um, just the courses on their own. 'cause we used to set, we used to have a pretty decent M R R from just our courses and our education and that coaching and stuff like that. But that kind of died away because we pivoted so much of our marketing juice, our marketing power, whatever you wanna call it, towards ude instead. So that kind, a lot of that disappeared,
Speaker 1 00:22:11 But yeah, one of our competitors on the Castus production side does this. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, they have a course you have access to if you're a customer. Um, and then you can buy the course as a standalone if you're not a customer. Yeah, yeah. So that, that's kind of the model you're talking about.
Speaker 2 00:22:25 Do you guys offer, do you have educ educate? Like when people sign up for a castoffs as a, as a hosting customer, do you have much in the way of, you know, how to make a good podcast stuff, education to help them actually with that side of it?
Speaker 1 00:22:40 Well, <laugh>, I mean, one you would know, because I know you look at HFS just like I do, and I see your freaking name up there all the time, <laugh>, and you probably see ours <laugh>. Um, but I mean, we have an enormous amount of totally publicly available content, right? Yeah. We get, you know, 150,000 website visitors a month too. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and then we have the CAOs Academy, which has a ton of stuff. Uh, yeah. And we have our YouTube channel, which has 180 videos on it. Yeah. Um, yeah. And, and so like, we're, we're, we're kind of like, uh, well take a half a step back. Um, I'd love talking to people like you because <laugh>, we're going through the same things. I hate talking to people like you because it seems like in two months when I do something related to this, it's because I'm copying off of what you did. Um, <laugh>. So I promise, I promise I'm not, but I mean, it's crazy how, or,
Speaker 2 00:23:31 Or we've done the same with you, <laugh>.
Speaker 1 00:23:32 I mean, I, it's crazy how so many of the things that we all Yeah. Think about and talk about are, are very similar. Um, and so like, I, I think what maybe we'll just give each other grace to say, like, there's a lot of great ideas out there and we shouldn't feel bad about borrowing them from, from other people. Um, that's
Speaker 2 00:23:48 It. And, and there's only so many, I mean, as much as we can give ourselves credit for being creative marketers or whatever, there's only so many ways you can do this stuff, isn't it? Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:23:56 Yeah. <laugh>. Yeah. Um, but, but I'll just say, like, I, I think we have, we have a couple of paths we could go with, um, with content and education mm-hmm. <affirmative>, um, I, I think there, and I don't know what the answer is, but I'll just give my options. Um mm-hmm. <affirmative>, you know, right now we kind of have it in three places. The blog, the academy, so academy.castle.com, and the YouTube channel. And we don't have a community, so four, maybe mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Um, I think one of the smart things could be take the academy and drop it inside circle, right? Which would combine two things and, and create hopefully a, a community. Um, I think there's an argument for just putting it all on YouTube and putting all of our eggs in that basket. Um, which I'm inclined to think that's the smartest one, because then it's totally available.
Speaker 1 00:24:39 There's discovery built in. There's not as much community and success. Um, and then we don't do, like you're getting at, we don't do anything <laugh> with, if you're a customer, you have access to all this content. I mean, you can, you can just go sign up and it's free. I mean, we, it is behind like a membership wall. We use paid memberships pro for the academy. Um, but, but like, I mean, we link to it from the navigation in the app, uh, and it's in the success emails and onboarding and stuff, but there's not like academy videos embedded in the product. Like we do a little bit of linking out, but, but we don't do a lot of it, so I don't, we don't have it cracked, that's for sure. Hey, it's Craig here. You know, while I love podcasting and long form conversations like this, also really love writing and really love email newsletters. I have a newsletter called Founder Insights, where every Saturday morning I share something I'm learning in my business that I think could help you grow your business sustainably, insanely and profitably as you go along in this journey. If you're interested, head over to Craig hewitt.me/join to get Founder Insights my newsletter along with your cup of coffee this Saturday morning. See you there.
Speaker 2 00:25:56 Oh, that. Meet us neither. Don't worry at all. Like we, that's the bit that I, that's the bit that I wonder about the most is the kind of guided aspect of it, because like, it's the, I don't about you guys, but one of our biggest churn factors is just simply people giving up on their podcasting. They're, it's not that they don't like ude, it's not like they don't like whatever the software, but they're just, their, their podcast isn't as good as they hoped it would be, or they lose steam or they can't get the workflow settled where they can fit it into their week, all that kinda stuff. Um, and there's, there's something about just being much more proactive about helping them with that stuff, which is nothing to do with how they use our bit of software. Your bit of software. It's about what you need to think about to make a podcast. And like you've said, you've got all of that stuff. We've got all of that stuff, but people don't go and look for it. It's the trouble, isn't it? It's like, how do you actually get it in front of their eyes at the right time and convince them that it's worthwhile reading, watching, listening to that, it's actually gonna make the difference. And that's the bit that struggle with certainly sometimes <laugh>.
Speaker 1 00:27:03 So, so I, I'll, let me, let me, and this is not my style, but, um, so I did a podcast called Seeking Scale with Andy Balducci for about about a year and a half. We actually recorded an episode last week, so we'll be Oh, cool. Yeah, we'll be on every once in a while, maybe quarterly <laugh> for, for a while. But, um, he thinks about a lot of this stuff really different than I think you and I do. Um, and, and I think if he was here right now, he would say, you are paying attention to the wrong people. You're paying attention to people that aren't gonna be successful and are gonna churn no matter what. And you're trying to prevent people who don't care, don't have the, the facilities and the access or, or the ability to, to be successful and, and you're spending energy on kind of a lost cause. Why not spend more energy on the people who really wanna be your customer and just make them more successful?
Speaker 2 00:27:57 So are you saying that if somebody is not capable of doing it on their own, then we can't help them? It's, they're, they're a lost cause entirely.
Speaker 1 00:28:07 Uh, I mean that's Yeah, generally,
Speaker 2 00:28:09 Yeah. That's one argument. Yeah. Yeah. I get
Speaker 1 00:28:11 You. I'm not saying that's right, but I think that's what Andy would say. And, and I think there's a, there's a part of that. That's right. Right. That like, um, and, and let me, let me, uh, and I think that's true in the situation where, uh, the podcast is like, this one started out as Right, it was just me, a passion project. I started this podcast New Year's Eve, right? That's how like, I had a one year old and it was just like, like it was just a hobby, right? Um, and so like, the ones talking about your favorite TV show or your sports team or whatever, you're not gonna make any money forever, right? Mm-hmm. Because monetizing a podcast if that's the only thing you have, is so hard. Um, and it's a labor of love. And so it's just so easy to quit, right?
Speaker 1 00:28:51 So I think that it, it, it could be, it could be, um, customer selection that guides that more than anything, right? If you have, you know, super cool startup that wants to start a podcast, like they're gonna be in it 'cause they, you know, brand and marketing and all the other shit that we might talk about <laugh> about, like brand marketing, like that's where a podcast is super valuable. Um, if it's a part of other stuff that you have going on. Um, so I don't know, maybe it's that we're in this sense thinking about the wrong type of customer.
Speaker 2 00:29:25 You could be, right? You could be right. Because I've tried a few, quite a few different things over the years and how to get people to engage with it. I did a, I did a doctorate in this thing, <laugh>, like online learning, that's what my PhD's in is like, how to get busy people to take courses. And like, I managed to figure out ways to, you know, give it them a 10% better chance essentially to get through a course, which is cool, but it doesn't make this slight better difference really to, um, to our revenue. Uh, so yeah, maybe it, maybe it is about actually finding those people that do hit certain pieces of our education that show that they have engaged, they're proactive, they're, you know, they, they've, they've hit these first one or two milestones by themselves, which indicates that motivation that if we put a bit of fuel on that fire, maybe that's what it is.
Speaker 2 00:30:15 Like. 'cause I, I do believe that we can make a difference. I think that our teaching can make a difference on how long a podcast runs for. 'cause I think a lot of people drop out despite enthusiasm, skill, um, you know, passion, all that kinda stuff. I think some of them do drop out simply because they don't have quite the right mindset around it or, or the right workflow, or, um, just forget about certain types of editing or certain types of things that just take 'em too long. So I think there are bits of fuel we can put on that fire to help, but I think you might be right in terms of, it's, it's probably a really good point around maybe you need a better indicator of which like 20% of those initial people that come in are, are capable of, of achieving that <laugh>.
Speaker 1 00:30:58 Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:30:59 They need to have at least a good bit of motivation themselves.
Speaker 1 00:31:02 Yeah. And I mean, I, I certainly don't know. So like, uh, you know, I say all this as, as more questions than, than like declarations. But, um, yeah, I, I think that pod for podcasting specifically, the, the, like, there's two, to me, there's two big buckets that go into success. One is like creating great content and editing is a big part of that. And being prepared, unlike I am for the show <laugh>, um, you know, and researching your guest and like coming up with interesting topic ideas and all this kinda stuff like that. That's all one part. And then I think everyone focuses their attention there, <laugh>. And then the part where they do absolutely nothing is promotion, you know? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Um, and, and so like that's something that we're on our Casto production side we're thinking a lot about right now is like everyone's putting all their energy in the how do I create great content bucket?
Speaker 1 00:31:51 And, and we help, you know, kind of get them to the, to the finish line there. But then like for success, if the podcast is successful, <laugh>, they're gonna stick with it. And so what can we help with around like promotion and marketing? I don't have any answers. I mean, I think it's, I think it's a lot of the same best practices as a lot of the stuff that everyone else is doing is website, newsletter, social, YouTube, you know, all that kind of stuff. But, but kind of, uh, enabling customers to do it without having a social media marketer on their team.
Speaker 2 00:32:25 Yeah. Yeah. I think you're totally right. That's really smart actually. Yeah. If you can get people above that, even that three figure, you know, um, download per episode, get 'em into the hundreds, then it's just so motivational to people like
Speaker 1 00:32:37 It a magic switch,
Speaker 2 00:32:38 Isn't it? Either 50, 60, 70, they're like, oh, it's only like, yeah, two figures, but somehow over a hundred just hits people's imagination somehow. <laugh>.
Speaker 1 00:32:46 Yep. Yep. And, and well just like anything and growing a little bit <laugh>, right? Like the, the flat line is just like a motivation killer. Yeah. Um, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:32:55 Totally
Speaker 1 00:32:56 <laugh>. So yeah,
Speaker 2 00:32:58 I, it, it almost ties into, sorry, I was just gonna say it, it ties a little bit into an experiment we did recently, which around, um, we went credit card free. So we, we've always had credit card requirement in our funnel. Uh, so when people sign up, they have to put a credit card in, but they get a seven day free trial. And we've always converted our free trial to paid really well. Like it was over 50% for years, regularly. Um, and, and then even beyond that, people stayed around. Like, it's not like they forgot to cancel. Like our churn wasn't horrible. We're certainly not the best in the business, but it's not horrible by any means. But we went to credit card free with the principal that maybe we can bring more people in the door. Um, we can convert more of them. And actually it's a bit of an awareness thing.
Speaker 2 00:33:43 Ali two is a funny thing in that I think that people need to experience it to see kind of how much easier it is. 'cause it's quite different to the normal way you would edit. So we just want more people to try it and talk about it and all that stuff. So we did it, we hit the switch project took way longer than it should have. Um, not that it should have, sorry, way longer than we thought it would because of all sorts of unexpected little barriers and stuff. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> and checkout and check out such a fragile little thing. Like you need it to be perfect 'cause you're gonna lose money otherwise. Yeah. Um, so a few months later we launch it like, right, okay, let's see, let's see how good this goes. And it just went like, it just, our conversion just went off an absolute cliff. Like not just, we obviously thought it would be less, we knew it would be lower, but we hoped that it wouldn't be, you know, drastically lower. And that our, obviously our influx, our in, um, inbound would be much higher, but our inbound only went up by, it didn't even go up by two times. So we went up by about one, like, number
Speaker 1 00:34:38 Of trials.
Speaker 2 00:34:39 Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So our number of trials went up by about 1.7 ish, so about 70% increase, which is not terrible, you know, if we can convert a fair bit of them mm-hmm. <affirmative>, but our conversion dropped by, uh, about five times. So it was about 20% of our previous conversion. So that amounted to something like a third or so of the customers at the end of the funnel <laugh>. It was terrible. It was absolutely terrible. Um, so we tried a
Speaker 1 00:35:05 Couple Did you, did you turn it back?
Speaker 2 00:35:07 So we tried a couple of little experiments over a couple of weeks, but I was just sitting staring at that m r r graph, like going down, down, down, yeah. <laugh>. I was like, right guys, we're turning this back. I'm sorry, I can't, I know, like yeah, theoretically you're supposed to try these things for a month, two months minimum, but I, I can't take it. My, uh, yeah. <laugh>. So we switched it back. Um, but it, I think it's something around that, uh, what we're talking about before around the commitment required for certain types of things, and podcasting is one of these things that you need to make a real commitment to, otherwise you never get it running. It, it takes that kind of, and I, I think that credit card thing was something that helped people make an actual genuine commitment to it, and then they ended up paying and they didn't cancel because they thought, right. Oh, I've paid for it. Even if they had forgotten to cancel, they're like, no, but I do wanna make one and I've paid for it now, so I'm gonna do it <laugh>. Yeah. So there was, I think there's something in that. I think there's something around that, around that commitment that kind of somehow getting people to just put a bit of skin in the game to get it going. And once they do, they they love it. They figure it out. So it's, it's funny,
Speaker 1 00:36:16 Uh, I'm laughing like, I hope Rob Walling is listening to this because <laugh> people who have followed us know we started CAOs with credit card up upfront, and then right after we joined Tiny Seed, basically, uh, a lot of people's suggestion was like, take credit card away. That's just not the way people buy SaaS, da da da da. And then three years we did that ba basically that, that transition you're just talking about, we saw no change, um, except for a fuck ton of work and development and had a bunch of work with like, onboarding sequences and Drip and how are we sending emails and triggers and customer acquisition and product usage and all this kinda stuff. And then we started seeing a bunch of spam about a year ago. Yeah. Really. Um, and it was unbelievable. First it was, um, people coming in and using our Spotify integration to post like Taylor Swift and stuff to Spotify, really, uh, on a free trial.
Speaker 1 00:37:14 Unbelievable. In the Spotify, it's like, we're gonna shut you down, da da da. And we're like, oh, of course. We put that behind the like paid wall, you know? So you had to be a customer to use that. Um, and then, and then people started signing up to put, to, to use our podcast website. So it's like, you know, rogue startups.castus.com as like Link Farms. 'cause our domain rating's like 86 or something, it's insane. So they're, Hey, for at least two weeks we can get a link to this site and they think it's worth it. I'm like, oh my gosh. Um, and so we, we did the same thing. We went back to credit card and none of it makes any difference in the end to
Speaker 2 00:37:52 Has it being exactly the same, to,
Speaker 1 00:37:53 To paying customers at the end of the month. You know? And it's just like, but I, but I'm in the same boat. Like I want people to commit, you know, it's 19 bucks, you know? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, like it's 19 bucks. If you can't commit to 19 bucks, you're, you're just not gonna be, you know, whatever. Um, and like, yeah. So not nothing has changed. Like churn has not changed, uh, went up like two tenths of a percent, which like, I think that, I think it is because people forget and then we charge, like if, I bet if we look at our 30 day churn, that that's where it is, um, that like new customers at the end of the day hasn't changed. But the, the great result is Jimmy and Kelly, our support team have a fifth of the trial <laugh>, you know, customers Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 00:38:35 To mess with. And we can just like, yeah. Think thinking about like success calls. Like we get 200 trials a month. Like, ooh, like I could talk to 200 people in a month. You know, if they wanted, like, if you send an email like, Hey, give you a 15 minute success call, 10% of them would take you up on it, that's 20 calls a month. Like it's one a day. Yeah. You could totally do that. And, and like, what would that do versus, I mean, I think it's the dream. I think that's one of the many dreams that we have dispelled as myths of self-service SaaS is like, it's ultra profitable. Like, nope. Like, 'cause as founders, we want to invest every last cent of revenue into growing the business. Uh, it's passive. Nope. You always have development and you always have support. Yeah. And that's what I mean, that's all the costs of SaaS. I mean, we have, we pay about 15 grand in infrastructure a month, but, but aside from that, like it's a all people. But yeah, I mean it's, I dunno, that's a bit of a rant, but like, nothing's perfect. Uh, <laugh>, everything takes work to do well. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:39:36 I got you. No, as it actually ties into that whole topic we're talking about, about kind of, um, big company marketing versus little company. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, because it's, it's the concept around, and it was, somebody else brought this up to me actually, that the idea of when things are a bit flatter, when the economy's harder, when, when the world is a bit tougher for businesses, it tends to be much less, um, beneficial to play around with those refinements, those optimizations, those like one, 2% better, you know, playing with the color of a button or the wording in a headline. And actually at that point, those things don't make half as much difference. And really it's big betts you need, it's something kind of much bigger, much bigger. Um, yeah. So that, yeah, we've been thinking about that a lot. Like how do we, 'cause we're used to running experiments 'cause we've got the same as you. Like, when you have that much traffic, it is quite worth like trying out different CTAs and things like that, but it's just not, it's not making the difference we need it to now. So Yeah, thinking about those bigger bits. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:40:39 Um, I mean, I'll give a, give a shout out to the, the HubSpot. Um, I think generally HubSpot Podcast Network, amazing. Like they have Oh yeah, a few really, really, really good shows. Like probably my two favorite shows these days are my first million, like Uhhuh <affirmative> about about half the time I'm like, you gotta be kidding me, <laugh>. But about half the time I'm like, wow, that's amazing. Yeah. Um, but the other one is Marketing Against the Grain. Um, I don't know if you've listen I'll to that. No,
Speaker 2 00:41:03 No.
Speaker 1 00:41:04 Uh, Kieran Flanagan and Kip Bodner, Kieran, the c m o at Hub at Zapier now was at HubSpot. And um, yeah, so it it it's just a really good show. I mean, they talk all about AI right now, but, but before AI <laugh>, they were talking a lot about like the, the, exactly. This is like brand and um, and like marketing that you can't measure and, and like how we're exiting this like Facebook pixel tracking world where everything is super attributable. And it probably started with like, um, the Google not specified thing, you know, from
Speaker 2 00:41:40 Six years ago or whatever. Yeah. Years ago now. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:41:42 Pro probably started with that and then iOS 14 update or whatever. And now like, yeah, I think so much of marketing is, is not measurable. And then it makes it hard for businesses that want to grow faster, aren't ultra profitable to where you can just throw away 20 grand on this bet, um, to say like, we're gonna do this thing. I have no idea if it's gonna work. Mm-hmm. And I have no idea how to measure in the medium term even like, whether this is a good idea or not, like that it's terrify. Like all those are the worst possible scenarios. And I, I don't, yeah, I don't have an answer for it. I, but I also think it's what you gotta do, right? Because like doing what we've been doing is not given the results we want, so we gotta try something different. Um,
Speaker 2 00:42:25 Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:42:26 But not knowing what that is, is, is terrifying. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:42:29 I, I feel maybe there's, maybe there's two sides to that. I feel like the stuff we've been doing has maybe you're under, under value in the work you've done there. 'cause obviously you've built a, a really good big business out of, I mean big for our size out of Sure, yeah. All the content you've created, the kind of older school marketing, like just the stuff we've done ourselves, I think we've done well with it, but you do get to this point where you feel like to reach at kinda next level, whatever that might be. Maybe that's when you need to shift to the brand marketing or something like that. But yeah, again, maybe that's just not our skill or I don't know. Or, or like you say, it's not measurable. So I brought, I took on a growth guy, um, three years ago who's much more interested in that side of things.
Speaker 2 00:43:11 Um, and he's done some great stuff for the company. And one, one of them though that I don't know if it's worked very well or not because we can't measure it in this way, is the thing that brought this to mind when we were talking about what might we talk about. Um, and that was we decided to do a kind of big thought leadership exercise that took probably man hours. I wouldn't be surprised if it was something like two, three months full time between three, four or five people. So that is a lot of money. That's like tens of thousands, I think we spent on that, tens of thousands. Um, and we came out with some really nice output from it. So it was, we did a survey basically with 2000 plus podcasters analyzed a whole bunch of data. We called it a census. Um, it got some really interesting stuff out of it.
Speaker 2 00:43:56 Created what we called, uh, a manifesto from that around how indie podcasters can best set up a show and run a show successfully. And, um, loads of advice in there based on real structured solid data. Um, and we created all of that stuff and it was great. And we ran a live event as well, which actually went really nicely too. And all of that felt great at the time. It felt like, here we're doing some big stuff. This is big company market and this is brand marketing here. This is, uh, this is the good stuff. Um, and, and people responded really nicely to it, just about every element of it. We've got so much nice feedback and now it's all done <laugh> and it's like a month in the rear rear view Miller the last part of it. And nothing in our growth has changed. Yeah. Nothing in our growth has changed. Um, yeah, we can't see any particular uptick from it. There's no kind of ongoing No. I'm sure there'll be some longer term benefits, some deal. Think of us because they saw this five months down the line. We might get a partnership or something. Another, I don't know. I'm not sure something might come from it, but yeah, that was what was on my mind, certainly <laugh>. Yeah. Does that resonate at all? Yeah. <laugh>,
Speaker 1 00:45:03 I, I, it totally, totally resonates. I mean, I don't have, I don't have an answer for this one. I, I think it's just something that we all, that we all struggle with. I, I surely do is like, how do you, how do you have confidence to place these subjective betts when the outcome, you may never know and certainly you won't know for a long time. Um, and, and it's not as established as like ss e o and content marketing. 'cause like a hundred percent five years ago, if you start blogging and you're intentional about keywords, you're gonna have traffic. And some of those will turn to customers <laugh>. That, that still I think, applies now even with ai. Um, but but like the, when you go past that, like what, you know, even podcasting, right? Podcasting, YouTube, all that. Like, can, can you categorically say, if I keep with this, it will be successful and we'll get customers and brand and partnerships and all that.
Speaker 1 00:45:53 Like, I, I think podcasting, YouTube, yes. Social even prob probably if you're doing it well. Um, and to me that that's like a safer bet is like, instead of going from where you and I kind of started, which is blogging to, uh, yeah. Events and surveys and like, thought leadership stuff like that. Like one, especially one-off stuff. Um mm-hmm. Like I would probably say I, I would probably go like the one next step, which is like podcasting and YouTube. Yeah. And then, and then like try to get much better on social. Yeah. Um, and that's, I mean, that's what we're doing. Like we launched a new podcast a couple months ago, um, launching another one called Creative Architects Soon. Mm-hmm. And that's where we're bringing someone, uh, from the outside in to, to run the show. It's gonna be, it's gonna be in seasons, it's gonna be a 10 or 12 episode season and then, we'll, we'll probably run two of those a year. Um, but, but that's our kind of near term Beth of, for like really different marketing and then all the other, you know, this podcast for me and audience that Stewart does and then our YouTube channel. Yeah. Um, yeah.
Speaker 2 00:46:57 Nice. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. The, the other part of it,
Speaker 1 00:47:00 I dunno the answer. Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:47:01 Yeah. Events, like sponsoring events, stuff like that. That's, that's the other big boy thing that we don't really do. <laugh>. Yeah. Alright. We did one and it again, it felt good. The team did, the team did a great job setting up the stand, all that kinda stuff, but no difference really. <laugh>.
Speaker 1 00:47:16 Yeah. That's tough. It's tough.
Speaker 2 00:47:19 Yeah. Yeah. But that sounds like, yeah, I know what you mean. So doing more basically of what we do well, figuring out how to expand out your content
Speaker 1 00:47:27 Yeah. Bit more effectively. I mean, and it's like concentric circle, right? It's like you start with this one thing and then once that is maybe kind of saturated or not working as well, or not giving you growth you need then, then may maybe like those next, those next couple of steps next to it instead of a bigger leap. I don't know that, that's just how I think about it, but I'm also kind of chicken and I don't want to take those big betts that I'm not <laugh> that, that I'm not sure about. So Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 00:47:49 I have, I have thought about a different, like starting a new blog altogether sometimes for, uh, one of our like main target audiences. It won't be for people who already know they want to start a podcast, it's to help people in a certain niche. Um mm-hmm. <affirmative> that Will Ben definitely benefit from a podcast. And therefore, yeah. So just using what we know to grow that. Yep. Such an investment though, again, but, but still, it's probably more reliable and more predictable than this other stuff I'm talking about. So, yeah, I think you're probably right.
Speaker 1 00:48:18 Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Colin, this is, uh, super fun, man. Thanks for, thanks for hopping on, um, ALI two.com for folks who wanna check out Ali two and, and if folks who wanna reach out and connect with you, where's the best place?
Speaker 2 00:48:31 I have been attempting to, uh, build some social again on, uh, LinkedIn this time actually. So, uh, I'm actually just calling Mick Gray on LinkedIn, calling Mc Gray. Um, yeah, so that's probably the best place Twitter too, to be fair. Same, same username. Colin. Mick. Great. <laugh> awesome. But yeah, thanks for having me on. It's, uh, it's been good, man. Always good to chat. Awesome.
