Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Hello, welcome to rogue startups. I'm your host, Craig Hewitt. This is episode 300. You know, it's been a long time coming to this point. My longtime co host Dave Rudenbaugh and I did about 250, 60 episodes together over the course of several years. And I've been kind of flying solo on podcast for the last few months. And it's been a lot of fun all along the way. Both the time with Dave, we chronicled a lot of our story of both of us going from having a day job to going full time with our businesses. We've both bought and sold things over time. At this point, Dave and I are both full time on our businesses and I still keep in touch with Dave and he's doing great out in Denver.
[00:00:50] I wanted to take this opportunity to kind of share a few updates about myself. The last handful, really kind of dozen or so episodes of this podcast have been me interviewing folks, and I hope that you've enjoyed the interviews that I've done recently. They've been a lot of fun for me and I want to kind of talk about where the podcast is, where I think it's going, what things I have planned for it and for myself and my brand and for my business castos here in the next year. I think a lot of the benefit of having an interview based show is you get a chance to talk to amazing people. I just finished up a five part series all about YouTube and I have a few more episodes coming. I wanted to slot this episode 300 in here to give a bit of a personal update as well as just to kind of give a bit of a break from the YouTube talk. I'm going to talk a lot more about YouTube in a minute when it comes to marketing. But the YouTube series has been really cool, been really well received. A lot of you have given me high fives and virtual praise over on Twitter and I really appreciate it. I hope you found it interesting. If you haven't checked it out yet, back up a few episodes. And the last four or five episodes here are all about how to excel on YouTube.
[00:02:03] And I really like this kind of series approach. I'll be doing another one after we wrap up the YouTube series all about sales. I had Matt Wolak on a handful of episodes ago right before the YouTube series started. Matt's amazing knows a shit ton about sales and that was really cool for me to be able to talk to him, but I'm gonna have a lot more sales folks on. And I chose these two like YouTube and sales because I think they're both things that are a bit intimidating to a lot of us, right? Like, how do I break into sales? How do I have success on YouTube? Both, we know, are like huge levers to pull in our businesses.
[00:02:37] How can I excel at founder led sales? How can I get a YouTube channel up and get traction? We all understand that it's a place where there's a ton of eyeballs and a ton of attention. How do I do a good job there? And I think that's probably the first kind of personal update for me is like, I've been huge into media for a long time, right? You know that I started this podcast in my business, castos is all about podcasting and it's amazing. It's an amazing medium and I'm still really big into know. I'll continue this podcast, hopefully kind of for my entire professional life.
[00:03:11] But as a channel, I am super bullish on YouTube when it comes to long form, engaging, educational and entertaining content. I think there's no better place that any of us can spend our time and energy and resources than on YouTube. Here at the beginning of 2024, you definitely see the writing on the wall, right? That AI and Google SeRPs are changing dramatically.
[00:03:39] The helpful content update from a few months ago, we weren't hit really bad from it, but I know a lot of people were really badly hit.
[00:03:46] The jury's out on AI content, I think still you see stories on Twitter about, oh, we stole all this traffic from somebody, and then you see a few months later they tank. So we don't know. Right. I think is the answer. But I think just fundamentally, if you go back to first principles, the richer the medium, the better it's going to be for you to relay things about you and your brand and that you believe and the things you know to your audience. And for a long time, just the technology and the reach meant that that was the written word. And so blogging and SEO and inbound marketing was the thing to do. And I just think that podcasting was a stepping stone on our way to YouTube being like the place to do this, right? And this podcast is 100% on YouTube, and it's the place where I point a lot of people to like, hey, if you want to check out rogue startups, either go to roguestarups.com or go check out our YouTube channel. I just think it's the way that a lot of us are consuming content these days. Podcasting is not going anywhere. As a business owner in the podcasting space, I'm very proud to say that business is good. It's very steady. A lot of metrics look kind of similar year over year. We're six and a half years into castos, so we have the benefit of a lot of historical data at this point. And it's all like business as usual for us, which is really cool. I think one of the fears I had about castos and podcasting is like, hey, is this a whim? Is this a trend? Is this a fad that's going to go out of style here in a few years? And I think the answer pretty unequivocally, is no at this point, right? Podcasting is here to stay. It's an established, confident, evergreen kind of medium. And I think that you can't say the same about YouTube because it's established, but it's also growing really quickly. I have two kids that are eleven and 13, and I'll just tell you, the only way they consume content is on YouTube, right? YouTube shorts as their kind of social media. So we don't let them have social media and then long form stuff from everything about minecraft to sports and science and hair care and fashion and all this kind of stuff. It's just where people are going. And I know even from a lot of our team members at Castos, it's the same thing. Hey, if I want to learn about a thing, the first place I go is YouTube. And more and more I'm becoming that person who I'm kind of YouTube first when I want to go research something. So I think if we think about our customers and our audience and the people we want in our world, we got to go meet them where they are, right? So if you back up five years, that might have been like, hey, when I want to figure something out, I google it. That's probably going to change soon to where like, hey, I want to figure something out. I'm not going to go to Chat GPT, but I'm going to go somewhere that can tell me an answer to a thing, whether that's like AI built into a product or something. I think that's probably what will happen. Like Chat GPT won't be the destination for getting answers, but it will be that AI is in something that gives you the answer and that replaces a lot of what we do. Googling and listicles and read this article and read that article. And as a business, okay, I get a lead because somebody sees that I can solve their problem and we nurture them over email and they sign up for our SaaS platform. I think all that probably will persist for the next few years. But if I'm looking at, I'm 43, I got another 20 years, 30 years of doing business.
[00:07:03] Is SEO content going to be the thing that I really hang my hat on as the main marketing channel going into the next ten years? No, right? Like pretty unequivocally no for me. But do I believe that video and YouTube is really the thing that's going to grow exponentially? Yeah, I think it really will.
[00:07:25] I have a very ambitious goal, I think, of publishing 200 videos this year on YouTube. And I've stated it publicly. I posted it on Twitter a couple of times and I'm saying it to you all here, and I hope you keep me honest. And when it's halfway through the year, you're like, yo, Craig, what's up? Where's my hundred videos?
[00:07:44] I really hope you keep me honest because I take this very seriously. The whole YouTube series on this podcast was to prep me and get me ready for doing this. I'll be chatting with more folks, more on the creator side here soon. But between this channel, my personal channel, where I talk about sales and marketing, and the Castos channel, where we talk about our product and problems that podcasters have, I'm going to publish 200 videos this year. So one for this channel, two for my personal channel, and one for the Castos channel. So that's just how much I believe in YouTube.
[00:08:20] It is the number one thing from a growth and sales and marketing perspective that I'm focusing on. So YouTube is the thing for me, marketing perspective. AI chat GBT is going to break down a ton of barriers. I admittedly am not the heaviest AI user out there. I am using it some. I'm using it for my YouTube a lot, which is really cool. But I think I'm probably representative of the median, right? Like, I use it some, I'm getting into it more. I see where it's replacing other things that I would have done otherwise. And I think we'll just continue to see that, that it will chip away at other behaviors and activities that we have within our lives more and more and more and more. And the lowest hanging fruit obviously will get hit first and it will go to these higher level, higher difficulty, higher, more difficult to kind of replicate or replace over the years. I think at this point written content is the easiest. That's why things like content at scale are replacing so much of our written content efforts that writers would have done otherwise. Audio video probably way in the future. There's just so much more that I can relay about myself and my face and my voice in this camera, in this microphone to you all than I ever could in writing. And there's going to be writers out there that don't agree with me, and that's fine. But that's just what I believe. I think that aside from YouTube, the other thing that I'm actually really bullish on, and many of you will find this surprising because I just haven't been that active on social media in the past, is I think it's the same thing, right? Is with the barrier to entry getting so much lower with AI, that organic SEO content just probably isn't the thing that we're going to hang our hats on anymore. But personal engagement and personal content is going to be the thing. And that means social media for me, right? For me, the two channels that I'm focusing on are LinkedIn and Twitter.
[00:10:20] LinkedIn arguably, like very businessy, a lot of business conversations there. Twitter, I look at it as more of just like, this is about me, right? This is about me and about you and who you are and what we're doing. LinkedIn, much more of like, this is what I do for work and this is how I think about work. But I think that you look at some of these enormous brands out there these days and Alex Hormozi or Justin Welsh or whoever, and they're growing their big brands on social media.
[00:10:51] And there's a ton of examples, and I've had guests on in the past that said, like, you're crazy. This is not the way to do it. And I just respectfully disagree. I think that social media, LinkedIn and Twitter, Instagram, if that's your jam, TikTok, I don't know. I don't do TikTok. I'm sure it's great for some things. It's just not for me because I think you have to focus, right? Is the thing is, you have to say, I don't have unlimited hours, I don't have unlimited resources. I don't have unlimited expertise. I want to pick the best one, one and a half, maybe two places where I can focus my energy and I can really get a lot of bang for my buck in return on my investment of time and energy and money.
[00:11:30] And for me, that's just spending time on LinkedIn talking about what I think about business, about founder led sales and growth and marketing, the things that I've talked about on this podcast for 300 episodes, but just doing it in a different place. And I think that it's a little bit, this concept of like, there are people who listen to podcasts, there are people who watch YouTube, and there are people who troll Twitter and LinkedIn. And as marketers, we want to meet those people on their platform and on the turf and in the medium where they want to be met. And that's just really what I'm trying to do with having a really strong YouTube presence. I've already checked the box of, from a castos perspective, at least, having a lot of written content, our SEO footprint and our inbound and all this kind of text based web footprint is really, really solid. And I kind of feel like that's just not the place for us to put a lot of our effort anymore. We got to diversify, and I need to diversify my personal stuff into other areas from a bigger picture perspective. A lot of us looked at the economy in 2022 and 2023 and said, oh, fuck, it's like falling off a cliff and interest rates and inflation and blah, blah, blah. I don't know. Right? I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know where we are. It sure seems like a soft landing and a lowering of interest rates is probably coming sometime this year. That probably will mean really good things for things like M A. Interest rates going down just means that these big private equity companies can get some money at a little bit cheaper rate to where they feel better about going out and spending it. And that's probably good for a lot of us.
[00:13:08] My business has been growing, and I feel very fortunate. I talked to some founders that are like, we're down 20, 30% over the last couple of years. We're not right. We're definitely growing. We're not growing 100% a year, we're not growing 50% a year. But I feel confident that we're growing, we're profitable. There's not a lot of stress in my life about that. And I think that's one of the lessons that I took away from the previous few years, is we raised some money when we joined tiny seed. It's about three years ago. We raised more money about a year after that, a year and a half after that.
[00:13:44] And it's really stressful. I'll tell you. For anyone out there who has raised money and has a burn rate and is looking at the bank balance going like this every month and going down, it's super stressful. You have to think about, well, shit, how are we going to increase and ramp sales? How are we going to manage cash flow? Am I going to have to lay people off and all of those things happened in my mind, and they sucked. All of them sucked really bad. I'm really super grateful for the money that we raised. I'm really grateful for the opportunities that we had. But I'm also, at this point, really grateful that Castos is a profitable business. We don't need any more money to stay alive, and we have the optionality. That's the thing that a R. Volcet always says to us is like, you want optionality from funding and ownership and corporate structure, and everything is like, you want the maximum amount of options that you can have so that you can make the best decision for you and your company and your family and your brand now. And you don't have to be kind of beholden to anyone else. So from a company and kind of health perspective, that's where things are. I think that podcasting, being a stable kind of mature business right now, but not growing as fast, means to me that we're entering from the startup phase, we're entering the mature phase of our company.
[00:15:05] I've had a couple of really interesting conversations with founders in similar spots, right? And these are people that, you know, from Twitter and stuff.
[00:15:13] They were the darlings, they were the upstarts, and they got to a certain scale and all this. And now they're like, okay, we're 57, 10, 15 years into this. How do we think about running this business as a thing that we run for the next five or ten or 15 years? And how is this, like, my legacy? I'm not saying, like, castos is something I'm going to run for the next 510 or 15 years. Like, it may be, I don't know. But certainly we were running head on at the wall as fast as we could for a very long time, both from an energy and a mindset perspective, but also from a financial perspective. And this mature phase that we're running into now is like, okay, that's not healthy, right? From an energy and a mental perspective, but it's also not healthy from a financial perspective. And the business needs to be profitable for a lot of reasons, right? Like shit could hit the fan. And if I don't have 100 grand in the bank, that's really dangerous for all this time I've spent into building a really successful business.
[00:16:13] So the business has to be profitable. I need to be mostly working on the things that I really like and or are really impactful. And for me, that means, like, marketing and sales. And largely, I am. It's amazing. The team that we've built, development, product support, success. All just amazing. I went on vacation for a week and a half around Christmas, and I didn't worry about anything. There was nothing that I needed to do. And I don't say that to pat myself on the back, but to say that spend the time to build the systems and the processes and get the people, the right people in the right seats so that these things are taken care of, that aren't your best use of time, so that you can focus on the things that are most important to you, which for most of us probably are sales and marketing. But anyways, right? So at this mature point in the company's history, the company needs to be profitable. It needs to be very calm and stable, and I need to be the same way. A lot of us, especially early on, don't pay ourselves anything. And then we pay ourselves a little bit. Then we pay ourselves ten grand a month.
[00:17:22] And something that I've been thinking a lot about is opportunity cost as a founder, right? Like, if I am paying myself less than the market rate as a founder, aside from tax benefits and opportunity of selling the business in the future, I'm actually losing compared to having a w two, like, regular corporate job. I left a very high paying sales job to start this business or to start podcast motor back in the day. And I'm definitely in the negative still from an income perspective versus what I was doing before. And that was eight years ago. And so I look at that and say, okay, fuck it. The time for I'm reinvesting in the business, and this is an investment in the future version of myself and my business. The time for all that is over. And now it's time to say, I don't know if I'll sell this business. I probably will sell this business, but not today. And so today I have a 13 year old daughter who's going to college in five years. We got to start saving for college. I got to pay myself what I want so we can go on vacation and not have to stay at the cheapest hotel. And I don't say any of this to belittle the founder journey or to have sympathy from anybody, but just maybe you're in the same position where you've been reinvesting in the business for a long time. You've been deferring that kind of personal happiness or, like, company health, because you think like, oh, I got to reinvest in the business so much. And maybe this is just like an opportunity to say, you don't have to, right.
[00:18:54] You can pay yourself what you want now. The company can be profitable and you'll be fine, right?
[00:19:01] You'll be happy. Your company will be happy. The bit that you are reinvesting probably doesn't matter.
[00:19:07] Just be smart about how you're spending the money in the business that you are reinvesting, and take some of that money for yourself, especially if you're more than a few years into it. Every year that you go, you should be making more money because that's how regular life is. You get a raise every year and it's five or 8% or whatever. As a founder, I think there's this incremental opportunity cost that happens over time where you should get paid more, unless you're selling your business, because that's another year that you're not in the corporate world making 200 grand a year as a high paid, like, vp of sales or something.
[00:19:44] And so I would just say that's kind of the realization I'm at. That's where I am. If you're in a similar spot, I'm giving you the freedom and the opportunity to say, like, I'm paying myself what I'm worth. We'll figure out how the business can afford this, and that should be a big priority. So let's see, YouTube, AI kind of whatever, screwing up or altering, at least like inbound founders and this opportunity cost for us in terms of compensation. And I think the next thing is just like looking forward a little bit. As a mature company, it's interesting you always have this path as you're getting started. It's like, okay, when I get to this point, I'll sell, or when I get to this amount of involvement or demand on my time in the business, like, I'll do x. And at this point, Casta's pretty stable product, really stable kind of environment, and everything that it runs in, team, really stable. My involvement is pretty elective, right? Like, I elect to focus on this sales or this marketing thing, and that's pretty cool.
[00:20:53] This is one thing I just don't have figured out. It's like, how do I think about and how do I communicate this to the team that we are at this point? How do we not stay motivated, but how do we focus our energy in the right way? Not in a frantic kind of environment like we were in when we were in the startup phase, but as a mature company, how do we have the same sets of urgency as a mature company as we did when literally the app was crashing twice a week? And we have to figure shit out to just get this thing stable now that things are stable and profitable, and I'm paying myself a reasonable amount. How do we think about the urgency within the business? And so this is a place I don't have the answers. But if I look at like, yo, I want to run this business for another handful of years, I kind of have to figure that part out, both for myself and for the team. If we think about okrs or rocks or whatever, how do you stay ambitious after you've been doing something for almost ten years?
[00:21:56] And not that I'm getting complacent, but I'm just at a different point in the business. And so I'm thinking about ambition and goal setting a little bit differently at this point. That's a wrap for this week. Happy episode 300 to the Rogue startups family. Thank you so much for joining me and for Dave, for a lot of these episodes in the journey as we share things we're learning from growing and running our businesses. I hope this has been helpful for you. If there's anything you'd like to hear more about, either from a solo episode like this or folks you want me to have on the podcast to interview to get their insights and share their expertise, please let me know. Drop a comment in below if you're on YouTube or send an email podcast@roguestarups.com thanks so much for joining me in these 300 episodes. And here's to another 300 close.
