Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: Okay, so, Spencer, we've been a customer for a while with Link Whisper, and I've seen stuff on Twitter, like follow you on Twitter. I love, love the stuff going on there about a new plugin that I'll let you describe it, but to me it's like, hey, it kind of breaks out how content is performing by several different parameters, like author and is it AI generated and stuff like that.
Maybe give us the spiel on what Link Whisper is and what this new one is and kind of where things stand there.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Yeah. So link whisper, thanks for being a user there, of course. But Link Whisper is an internal linking plugin that I built really out of my own need. Right. Just to be able to do internal link building faster, easier, more effective, helps you manage all of that, get reporting on all of that.
We've really implemented it into our workflow for publishing on niche pursuits. Make sure that we're adding new internal links to any article published. And overall, yeah, it's been a great business as well. It's been around for, since 2019 is when I launched it. So coming up on five years, I think this year, that's link whisper in a nutshell. And then the new plugin that you're referring to is called rank Logic. So I just really launched that one about six months ago. And rank logic really helps you manage your performance, SEO performance in particular, overall. And so it does a couple of things that, like you alluded to, it allows you to sort of track the performance of a basket of content, whatever that basket or group of content that you want. Right? So it has automated filters that you can select an author, and I'll select the 50 articles that that author wrote, for example, and I'll show you on a graph. Here's how much SEO traffic, other traffic that this author is getting, you can do automated by date before 2024 or after 2024 or anything in this year, and sort of group that content, and then you can do custom sort of projects as well. And so I'm doing, like, AI content. I want to know, okay, is the AI content on my site performing well? And so any new AI assisted article that is published, I'll just add that to the project, and then I can see overall how that content is performing. The other big thing that rank logic does is that it kind of tracks your content updates for you automatically as well, so that you can see if I made an update to this article two months ago, how is it doing since that update has happened? Right. So it'll put a little notation on the graph there was an update made here and you can see if your traffic's gone up or gone down and it does that all automatically for you. Right. So it's not like you have to write down or notate on a spreadsheet. We made an update six months ago. It's just done because it's in WordPress.
[00:03:08] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I love it. The reason I wanted to talk about this is the Castos blog is not nearly as big as niche pursuits, but it's pretty big. We have hundreds of articles, get 100,000 unique visitors a month, and it is to the point where the performance, monitoring and maintenance of the content is not trivial. Right. It's like, okay, yeah, we're just kind of remembering in our head, oh, we updated this article six months ago, or we need to do this one because some new information is out. And I think there becomes this point with larger blogs of like, how do you keep track of all this shit? Especially if you get into the AI realm, which I want to talk about more than a little bit of where we published like 20 articles in November.
If you keep on that kind of cadence, like, man, you got multiple times the amount of content that we would have had a year and a half ago with the human writers.
What is the market for this? Because as you're saying all this, I'm like, yeah, that's great for, you have thousands of articles. I'm sure that totally makes sense. I think we're probably on the edge of it. But there's not a lot of WordPress sites that have hundreds or thousands of posts to really get value out of this. Is that right? Or am I smoking something?
[00:04:25] Speaker B: I think it becomes more valuable the larger your site does get, right? Because there is a lot more maintenance involved, whether that's content updates or just tracking performance across your site. But I do think that sites of any size, I mean, even if you have a site that's 100 articles, right. It does become important to understand, is your new content performing well? And so I think anybody that's publishing, even if it's five or ten articles a month, it starts to become difficult to go to Google Analytics and remember the 50 articles you published in the last six months or last year and really nail down which of these articles are performing well.
It can be very effective on a smaller scale as well, I think. And then I like to also just say, I mean, it's great for any site because it also is a rank tracker. Like, it automatically tracks your keywords, your performance in Google, just as a keyword tracking tool, it's cheaper than pretty much any alternative out there. Right. It's an annual subscription. Right. And so if you're tracking 50 or 100 keywords, this does it for you. So it's pretty easy. Yeah, no, interesting.
[00:05:43] Speaker A: I mean, that was one of the reasons we hung onto hrefs for so long, is tracking our keywords, and that takes the place of that. Yeah, interesting.
We're recording this early February. Where are you as of today? With like, let me frame the question a little bit. You have a lot of opportunity. You also have a lot of risk with a site like niche pursuits. Like, you have a bunch of articles, a bunch of domain authority. If you go publish a bunch of kind of questionable or risky content, there's the chance that Google comes in and slaps you and you're worse off than not doing it.
How are you viewing that risk reward trade off? And then practically, how are you using AI for content? Because I view you as way up there in terms of quality of the stuff you put out. So I think you're kind of the bar that a lot of us would go for.
[00:06:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Now, great question. I would love to dive into this topic. So I wasn't somebody that jumped on the AI bandwagon quickly. Right. So if we think about chat, GPT, and when AI started to get a lot better, it's been a year and a few months since that happened. It was probably, I don't know, seven, eight months at least, before I started playing around with things because of the risk versus reward aspect. And when I started seeing, okay, people are actually doing okay in Google, they're publishing AI content, they're ranking. And then when Google kind of came out and they changed their guidelines, that I forgot exactly what the line was. But it was something like content created for humans, by humans. And then they changed that line to content created for humans. And it was kind of a big thing, like, they removed the phrase created by humans.
It's like, okay, Google appears to be signaling that, hey, they're going to rank AI content if it's still valuable content. And so that's sort of the overall framework I've moved forward with.
And so I feel like removed a little bit of the risk, but in order to test it out, I did it on a very small scale. Right, like we did, I don't remember ten or twelve articles and kind of let them sit and see what Google would do with that content.
And it quickly became apparent from our end that Google was willing to rank this content.
And that's the case. And we've scaled that process quite a bit. And so I will talk about the process because I 100% want to put out quality content. I don't want to just say, AI, generate this article, it's done, and we hit publish all within ten or 15 minutes. That is not the case at all for us. I still feel like AI does not do a good job writing an entire article, certainly, but even sort of chunking out that article, you can take it and say, okay, write a couple of paragraphs on this subject. Okay, write a couple of paragraphs on this subject. Even that can get a little wonky, for lack of a better word there.
So where I've become comfortable using AI on niche pursuits on my site is listicles. Doing listicles. And so we will find keywords that a listicle is clearly what the user intent is. The search intent is for that keyword we use chat GPT plus, that's all we're doing is we go in there and we ask it to generate a list of whatever the item is, and we will chunk out that list, right? So a lot of these we generate huge lists, right? So it's like 200 items in the list. And we'll say, okay, do 25 items that are like a sub niche of this, 25 that are this, 25 that are this, right. And it does a good job. It's just creating a list of whatever it might be.
And a lot of times they're like original items that aren't showing up in the search engines anywhere, right? It just kind of generates whatever unique list it has. And so we generate the list, we get our 200 items, and then human editor goes through all of that, makes sure it looks okay. We write an intro, we write a conclusion, whatever else filler we need, and then we publish that. And so it still is taking a human writer easily two to 3 hours to go through that kind of write the intro.
So that's my caveats is, yes, we're using AI, but it's not like push button stuff that we're just publishing.
[00:10:48] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm doing a similar thing for some of my content. Like on my personal site, I'm writing some content about sales, marketing, and I want to have my own kind of flavor to it. So the angle will sometimes be kind of my angle, but I do take some content generated by either chat GBT or I've been using by word, byword AI.
[00:11:12] Speaker B: Okay, it's pretty good.
[00:11:14] Speaker A: And then like heavily editing it, which in retrospect takes about the same amount of time as just like writing it from scratch, but I think it's kind of a little less cognitive overload because I don't have to research stuff as much.
Listicles are great. I did a kind of like, best sales books kind of roundup post, right, there you go. And it was great. So just like, hey, give me the best 25 books. And then it put them into some categories, which were cool. It was like sales mindsets and sales tactics and enterprise and SaaS or something. And then I gave it kind of a template for each one. And I said, write whatever two or three paragraphs that have these kind of parameters, talk about who the book is for and who it's bad for, and summarize it. And it was great. It was so good. It was every bit as good as I could do. And then I just lightly edited some of it. Yeah, we're looking at doing a lot of that for gear reviews for castos.
[00:12:16] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:12:17] Speaker A: Because it can go out and it can look at gear reviews for microphones or cameras or lights or whatever, but they largely have the same parameters and the same flow and everything. And it's pretty cut or dry. Like, there's not a lot of linguistic variety that needs to go into those. So I think it could be a good kind of contender for, for some AI generated content.
[00:12:38] Speaker B: Yeah. And the, the books example is, is a great example to kind of look at, you know, for somewhat similar things that we're doing. Because you can do all sorts. You can slice and dice, like the best sales books in a lot of ways. You could say, I just want all the sales books written in the year 2022. Right? Give me ten that were written in 2022 or only list the books that are under 200 pages. Or you can kind of do a lot of things with the list. Right. And you can break that out and say, okay, here's ones that are more in depth. Here's the new ones. Here's ones written before 1985, if you want to read old ones. I don't know.
[00:13:22] Speaker A: Let me ask you a higher level question about AI. And I think it's like AI and Google search and traffic and stuff like that. I think the so what for a lot of folks is like, so much easier to create a bunch of content. It's devalued in some respect, and people are just not going to go to Google to search for shit anymore. And so the whole kind of customer acquisition or business building strategy of SEO and content marketing and inbound is to the extreme, I'll say, is just not going to exist in a few years. Right?
Do you buy that or do you not? And where do you sit there?
[00:14:01] Speaker B: I wish I had a crystal ball and could predict the future.
I don't know for sure what's going to happen, but that's the question that we all have, is what will Google look like in five years, ten years? They're giving us a taste right now. They've got their SGE, their search generative experience, where you go to Google and an AI spits out the answers for you. That's already happening to a certain extent. It's not everywhere just yet, but the leaders at Google, the management team, the CEO there, they talk about it a lot, right? They just put out their quarterly earnings, I think, last week. And SGE was mentioned a lot and AI was mentioned a lot on that call. And so they're investing heavily in that right now in its current form, even though SGE doesn't show up for all searches, right, most searches are still served by your natural, organic results, but even the ones that are served by SGE still references other websites, right? So even when you look at that answer, it links to ten different articles. And so in a way that still doesn't really change the fact that you can get traffic from SEO, from Google.
Will that change?
Gosh, I don't know. Because AI has to be trained on some sort of model. It has to be trained on content.
And so if Google or whatever other, you know, OpenAI Chad GPT is not sending traffic to publishers, what's the incentive for publishers to write new content? And so you can get into this space where if this happens and publishers are no longer writing new content, you get new information, right? Google has said the long tail of search, there's something like 20% of searches every day are searches they've never seen in the past. And a lot of that has to do with new information. A new product comes out. And if people are no longer writing about the new information, you can't train the AI on it.
I believe there will always be some sort of relationship of publishers are needed and search engines are needed so they can send traffic to those publishers. But this is probably in the last twelve months, the first time I've truly believed that, okay, SEO is probably going to go under some sort of radical change in the next five years.
But what that looks like, who knows?
[00:16:49] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's the big question. I mean, I think I was talking about it on a previous episode of talking to other founders who grew their business through content. And they go, that's probably not the playbook today. If I was starting a new CRM or a new podcast hosting platform, would content marketing be the play?
Probably not. There are other levers to pull maybe, yeah. And so we, like you, have just invested heavily in content and SEO over time and believe it's a really good investment of our marketing dollars and time and still think it is.
[00:17:25] Speaker B: Right.
[00:17:26] Speaker A: But in five years, is it still going to be worth it? You know what I think for sure is if you already have this, like Beachhead, if you already have this huge amount of authority, it's probably still worth it. If you were just starting out, I think it might be less worth so for castos, like, I'm sticking with it.
[00:17:45] Speaker B: Yeah, no reason not to. I think we've seen that with the helpful content update as those sites that had more authority, more links, tended to do better in the helpful content update.
The other thing that I will say just about content marketing as a broader umbrella I think is still very effective even if SEO goes away. Content marketing in general, in terms of there's other platforms, YouTube, a podcast, being active on social media, you and I have both seen businesses just go nuts just through Twitter alone. Right. People that are just super active and build a huge following there.
So there's still a lot of important things that can be done with content marketing in general.
And so I think content will always be there. As consumers, we always want to read and learn and educate.
So we might have to change tactics a little bit.
[00:18:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:54] Speaker B: I'm still investing heavily in SEO. I'm definitely not moving away from.
[00:18:59] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I promised a listener the other day, I said, we're not going to talk about YouTube for a while, but I think that's the answer largely is like.
[00:19:06] Speaker B: Come back to YouTube.
[00:19:07] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a pretty good place to invest your energy.
[00:19:12] Speaker B: Cool.
[00:19:12] Speaker A: I want to switch topics kind of entirely. And it's funny, I was doing an episode yesterday with someone kind of our age and afterwards I was like, I'm talking about old guy stuff and you and I are probably the same age, like mid 40s, but let's call it in the middle of our career and both have had solid degrees of success and stuff.
I'd like to talk about mindset at this point in your career because I think it's something that we don't hear talked about ever, right. Is like fucking guy goes and he sells for a couple of million and he goes and does whatever, or he's still trudging along. But you get to this point in your life and you said before we started recording, family is good. Family is growing. Everything else doesn't really matter. Right.
I guess to make it concise, how do you think about your career at this point? Right. Like, you've. You've had some solid success. You're still in it, right. Still in kind of largely the same, the same kind of place. Like, how do you think about where you are today, what the next 20 years looks like? Maybe that's too far, but I think this is a question I never asked myself until recently. Yeah, I'd love to just hear how you think about it.
[00:20:27] Speaker B: Yeah, good question.
I think about this more often than I probably should now, but it's probably a function, like you alluded to, that I've had some success in my career. Business has done very well and provided for my family and everything quite well. And I have a couple of assets right now that I know if I were to exit those assets, even at this point, we're great, probably.
And so that becomes a little bit different of a mindset of like, okay, I know I'm within, potentially, if I wanted, within the next two, three, four years, if I decided to just exit business, I can. It's an option. Right. And that does change how you think about things.
Why am I still working on things? Even though a lot of people will post on Twitter or social media and say, oh, man, I love what I do. I love business. I love getting up and grinding and hustling. And when it really becomes a point of where you truly maybe don't have to do that, do you really love it? Right? Do you really love it?
[00:21:44] Speaker A: Or do you just better than having a desk job, or do you really love it?
[00:21:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
Once you're financially, everything is sort of in place and taken care of, which, again, I'm still working. But like I said, if I were to sell everything, I'm getting to that point.
And so I guess maybe I'll just leave it or say that I do enjoy what I do now, but I certainly feel like whatever that timeline is, I don't know that at some point I will exit everything that I'm doing because I don't think I love everything that I'm doing enough to say, oh, I want to do this for the next 20 years. Right. Okay.
I think I will probably move to something. I mean, I could retire on a beach and play golf and whatever all day. I don't think that's the lifestyle for me. I think if I were to start something new, it'd probably either be a nonprofit or some other truly passion project.
And I don't know what that is. I don't know what that is. Right. Other than to say that I probably won't be running niche pursuits, for example, for the next 20 years.
I don't think I need to.
And so that's kind of where my head's at. Maybe check back in with me in a couple of years.
[00:23:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:24] Speaker B: Have you back on for now. And it is an interesting spot to be in because I still want to grow the business. I'm excited about the business, but I know it's a business. It's not like my life. Right. And I've separated and just thinking about, okay, I'm still in the hustle phase of my life, but maybe that's sunsetting pretty soon. I don't.
[00:23:47] Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting. I kind of largely agree.
I really like castos as a business. It's a really great business. Provided so much for my family.
I'm 42. We've been doing this eight years about and I think that one of the things that's really clear is there's probably a transition coming up from individual contributor and operator to more truly owner level.
Not even manager, but like owner level. I can see being very happy having castos and a couple of other small things maybe where there's a whole team and there's like a meeting or two a week and I get involved from time to time to hire or fundraise or do M a or whatever it. But like if I never log into WordPress again or never log into our email provider or anything like that, that's probably where I want to get to in the next few years. Because just like family story, my dad stopped working when he was about 50 and 55. Maybe like his health went downhill really quick from there. And coincidence or not, I don't know. But I see a lot of people in their sixty s and seventy s still working and they're rocking. And conversely, you see a lot of people who retire early, move to Arizona to play golf and drink a bunch, and the opposite happens. And so I kind of think I want to keep working. I really like business and work a lot.
And I think that where I'm getting is it's just the flavor of work that over the next couple of years that will just change. Like my definition of how I work will change a little bit.
I think that's what I'm coming to grips with. It's been like you kind of like ease into this realization and then come to grips with it and then build that plan for what the next few.
[00:26:04] Speaker B: Years looks like, yeah. And I feel like we're kind of on the same wavelength. I've done a little bit of what you're describing already, right. Over the last two, three years, really, I've shifted my business a lot from where I was definitely the go to day to day in the weeds, writing the blog post, hosting the podcast, doing everything.
I was the guy. But over the last couple of years, I really have removed myself a lot from the operations of all my businesses. Right. So for the blog, I hired a content manager and a bunch of writers, and we're publishing more content than ever before. And quite frankly, I don't read any of the content before it gets published. At this point, I have a team in place that they know the process. Right. I've trained them all. We've got very detailed sops. And so we published over 1000 articles last year, and I could have been gone the entire year and it would have happened like just fine. Yeah, right?
[00:27:12] Speaker A: That's awesome.
[00:27:13] Speaker B: And then same with the podcast, right? I'm not saying stop hosting, right? But for me, it wasn't my favorite thing to do was host the podcast. But I know it was a great show and people loved it. So I hired a host to step in and I am not involved in the podcast, although I added myself back. We do a weekly news episode where my new host and I, we chitchat SEO news and stuff.
So anyways, I've done a lot of things to kind of remove myself from the day to day operations of the business, including on the software side. I launched link Whisper.
I'm still involved, but I have a growth manager in place now that does a lot of the marketing day to day, of course. A support team and development team.
[00:28:02] Speaker A: Any surprises?
[00:28:05] Speaker B: Sorry?
[00:28:06] Speaker A: Any surprises from the kind of extrication of yourself from the business, either like positive or negative?
[00:28:16] Speaker B: Yeah, positive is that it's gone a lot better than I thought it would. You could do by yourself. A huge concern, right? Like how is the blog going to perform if I am the blogger, I am the face.
What happens? And same with the podcast. Honestly, I was very nervous, like, who's going to listen to the niche Pursuits podcast if I'm not the host?
And I came to the realization that really the guests that we're really trying to highlight anyways, they come to listen to the great stories.
And Jared, the new host, is a better podcast host than I was, and it's done great. So on the positive side, things have just gone way better. I probably should have done it sooner.
Negative.
It's a small negative, I would say. But even though the blog traffic, for example, has grown, I still look at a lot of the articles. I'm like, I don't know if I would have said that or published that, right?
So getting the authors to really have the voice of what I liked to publish or what the niche pursuits brand has been difficult. Has been difficult. It's hard to find somebody to just write the way that I would write. And I don't know that I'll ever get there, and I just need to let it go.
The traffic is coming. People are happy with it. It's not perfect, though.
[00:30:00] Speaker A: I think what you're saying is you have become a better business owner than operator or individual contributor, which is huge. I think it's the only way to scale past a reasonable point.
[00:30:13] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. I agree. I always say, right, you can be the burger flipper in the business, or you can be the manager in the restaurant. Or eventually, like you're saying, the owner of the business where you're not even in the restaurant looking at the burger flippers, you're just looking at the financials every once in a while and hiring and firing the general manager if needed.
[00:30:40] Speaker A: Well, both, as you kind of have been doing this for a bit and taken a step back from the day to day operations of the business, how are you learning these days? Anything about that change? Because I know you're a big consumer of content, too. Anything about how you're learning and keeping yourself fresh, that's changed, or is it just at a different level?
[00:31:05] Speaker B: Okay, maybe I'll just walk through how I am learning.
You can see a bunch of books behind me. I still read business books. I try to mix in some fiction as well. So I'm maybe not reading as many business books, but I definitely do.
So business books, YouTube, Twitter, love following people there. And then I guess sort of my secret sauce, if you will, is that I tend to reach out to people individually. When I see them doing something cool or have an interesting idea, is I'll reach out to them and hop on a call or exchange emails or whatever. So learning one on one for free, I guess I would pay for somebody if needed. But a lot of people I'll reach out to, hey, you ever want to hop on a call? And fortunately, being in the industry, they might know who I am and they're doing something cool and so they're willing to hop on a call. So that's been very valuable, is hopping on one on one calls or getting together with other people to learn a bit more. I guess I will say in addition to that is I do have a small mastermind group that I've been a part of, a couple of buddies and I, that we've been hopping on calls every month for I don't know how many years, three, four years, something like that. And I get a ton of value out of that.
Hearing what they're doing in their business, they always bring fresh ideas. And being able to present my own problems of like, hey, I'm having this issue. What do you guys think I get a lot of value out of?
[00:32:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:32:49] Speaker B: Anybody listening that's not maybe part of some sort of mastermind group, it can be very helpful.
[00:32:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I like all those. I have two kind of points or questions, I guess. One, I saw a thing on Twitter, which you take it for what it's worth, and it said, podcasts are for losers.
Of course, it's just like clickbaity. But the premise is like, there's so little context, so little depth in a podcast episode. Like, you and I will talk for 45 minutes, but we'll just scratch the surface of some of these things. Whereas a book is more focused, in depth, all those kinds of things.
[00:33:34] Speaker B: I agree.
[00:33:35] Speaker A: And I don't agree, to be honest. I like podcasts for updates and entertainment or infotainment, kind of like we're doing here. Maybe. But if you were to write a book, it would be 100 times more in depth. And so if I really wanted to learn a topic and you wrote the book on it, I think that's a fair point.
[00:33:54] Speaker B: Yeah, I have a thought on that.
A podcast, I think is super valuable.
I think a lot of times you don't know what you don't know. Right.
If you are going to buy a book, you know that you need to scale a business. You get a book about how do I remove myself from the business, right. And you go get a book you already know. That's the topic you need to learn about when you're listening to podcasts. Hopefully it's entertaining. You learn a couple of things, but it might trigger some very new ideas that you just had no idea you should be thinking about. Right. And so there might only be one or two interesting things that I say here today, but hopefully somebody can take that and go, oh, I'm going to research that topic a ton more. And then they go in depth, right? So it's kind of like a gateway drug, if you will. You might get a tweet, and then from that tweet, you go listen to the podcast, and then from the podcast, you go listen to a book on some other subject. So I think it's all super important. It's kind of.
[00:35:04] Speaker A: Interesting.
I mean, that's the exact flow we pitch our castos productions customers around. It's like social media is the tip, and then they engage with you either podcast or YouTube, and then you want them to go to your website, hopefully to do something that's inbound marketing.
The reason I ask about the how do you learn question is.
[00:35:27] Speaker B: Yeah, I.
[00:35:27] Speaker A: Mean, I've been in podcasting for, whatever, eight or ten years, and there are definitely better people at this than me now. Well, they have been for a long time, but I find myself needing or feeling like I ought to really stay up on what's new to be able to effectively run the business. And for a long time, it wasn't an issue. It was just like, yeah, I'm in the space and I'm consuming and I'm creating so much, and I'm doing a little less of that now. And so I definitely see like, ooh, I need to be a little more intentional about staying up on things because what I don't want to do is be the guy that's like, well, back in the day, we did this. And so I'm just going to keep doing this thing over here. And I think it's a fine line because, one, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Just keep doing the thing you've been doing at the same time. Yeah, you got to stay hip and up on things. And actually, I think that's probably where social media has the most value for me, is just seeing all the new stuff and filtering 99.5% of it out. But then there's like, the one thing that you're like, file that away, bring that back out in a few months. That's worth kind of holding on to. That's about the only reason I'm active on Twitter.
[00:36:45] Speaker B: Yes, I agree.
Seeing either that new information or what's trending or what's happening, people sharing their successes, right. And kind of what's working in their business, that can spawn a lot of interesting ideas. But I agree. That's why I use Twitter is mostly just to stay up to date with industry news.
And then, of course, I research industry news every week because then I have a podcast and so I need to talk about it. So there you go. I tend to stay pretty up to date, try to with SEO news in particular.
[00:37:25] Speaker A: So I have more of a personal question. I want to get more into conferences. I think fucking COVID and all this. And just like, I have a little more time now and I want to go to more conferences. I went to one in January, which was like a large mastermind. It's about 30 people. That was awesome.
Associated with the tiny seed group. I have kind of space for two more on my calendar. Plus we're going to do a pretty small eight or twelve people mastermind golf event probably in early fall.
What conferences do you like? And then I'll talk about what I'm considering, maybe.
[00:38:04] Speaker B: Okay, well, one that I like, that we met at ten years ago. We were trying to remember how long ago that was the rhodium. It's now called the Rhodium network, but they do a rhodium conference that I really like a lot. That usually happens in October. Chris Yates is the founder.
Know, it's a vetted group of people, people that have some sort of success in their business, right. And that kind of share similar values. And so I found just a lot of great people in that network. So that's one I go to if I can.
I haven't been to traffic and conversion summit in a while, but that has in the past been one that has been pretty valuable. They try to share more cutting edge strategies and tactics for traffic strategies. And so that's been decent.
And then I have been going to Nathan Barry's conference, the creator, what is it?
Craft and.
Craft and commerce that I go to that one because it's not too far from where I'm at, so it's easy to travel. But I love everything that Nathan Barry's doing there as.
[00:39:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I think rhodium is definitely on the list for me. The other one I was considering was main street comp put on by some of the kind of SMB Twitter guys.
[00:39:51] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:39:52] Speaker A: Largely for offline business, but just general. I think the categories I want to put around, the conferences I want to go to, to be a little intentional is like how to be a better business. Know, generally I think rhodium probably ticks the box there and then maybe just how to be a better human being. So that's a Tony Robbins ish kind of thing.
[00:40:13] Speaker B: Maybe.
[00:40:15] Speaker A: I've never been to anything like that, but definitely a lot of people do it that are very successful. So something there probably.
[00:40:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:26] Speaker A: Cool, man.
One of the things we see on Twitter is I grew the business to 5 million and then we sold it. Now I'm going to go buy a sailboat and go around the world.
Pump and dump, if you will.
More and more just because I've been doing the same generally thing for a long time. Am finding more interest in people like Nathan Barry or Joel from Buffer or whoever, who this is their business and this is going to be their business for a long time. And it will have different kind of iterations and kind of lifecycles and they will too in it.
I don't know, maybe it's just a point and I don't know if you have much to add to it, but I think there's a lot to founders who stay with the business for a long time and we just don't see it a lot. I don't know why, but I'm digging it these days. I can see doing castos for a long time. Podcast hosting will certainly exist for a long time.
[00:41:22] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:41:22] Speaker A: I don't know. Any thoughts? Have you kind of noticed this? Is it interesting, is it not?
[00:41:28] Speaker B: I don't know. Yeah, no, it is interesting. I think somebody that is able to sort of say no to a life changing amount of money and make the decision to say, you know what? Instead of that, I'm going to keep growing this thing for other reasons, because I love growing the team, because I believe in the mission of the business, because whatever reason, they love being in the business. And I think that's great. I think that's commendable for, I mean, you see his numbers. I don't remember what they're doing every year now, but it's. It's insane, right? And certainly if he were to exit that at this point, he's set for life.
Maybe I could take a lesson from that, because here I am in the first part of the podcast saying, hey, I'm ready to maybe move on to something else. But I think it's great.
I think my problem, if it's a problem, is that I always have multiple businesses going on at once. Right? And so niche pursuits has always been a core of that. But I've now started a few different software tools and those will be ones that I sell. But, yeah, the big question mark is how long will I run and grow niche pursuits? Maybe, who knows? Like I said, ask me the question again in a couple of years, maybe if niche pursuits keeps growing, I'll kind of have a mindset shift and say, you know what? Hey, I love the team. I love the mission. I love how it's helping other people, and I'm going to just keep growing it into something better. Maybe that'll happen. Who knows? Yeah.
[00:43:10] Speaker A: And I think that as I look at it, for that to exist for me and Castos, there has to be evolutions of the business and what we do and kind of what we stand for and who we are. And my role in the business, that's the other thing, is I'm not going to be on sales calls in two years. Right. And so it's like, how do we hire people to fill these gaps? Let me operate kind of where I want to operate to where it's a whole new business at that point, because my day to day is just different than it was a couple of years ago than it is now, and then it will be. So that's what gives me some solace that like, hey, if you kind of reinvent yourself and your role in the business every few years, then it is kind of like a new business.
[00:43:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
Fresh and interesting.
Yeah.
[00:43:57] Speaker A: I mean, I just kind of look at it and say you sell the business and you get a bunch of money, and then you have to figure two really hard things out. Like, what do you do with the money to where you don't fucking go broke and have to go get a job? And then the other is like, what do you do with your time?
I don't have either of those to figure out right now. So that's not nothing.
[00:44:18] Speaker B: Yeah, no, not a small thing to figure out. It also kind of reminds me of compound interest. Right. Warren Buffett being able to just continually grow and grow and grow.
That's what happens with a lot of these businesses. And it seems like as long as the founder stays on, there's something magical about the founder of a business versus the PE firm that comes in or whoever that comes in and grows the business. Kind of having that magic sauce that a founder has that truly cares about knowing where the DNA of the business is, where they want to take it. There's just something special about that. And perhaps a lot of that growth maybe doesn't come for 10, 15, 20 years in a business.
And so maybe a lot of founders leave before they kind of have that compounding effect that happens in later years, surely.
[00:45:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
Spencer, super fun, man.
Folks who want to reach out and connect, what's the best way?
[00:45:25] Speaker B: Oh, man. They can head over to the blog. I've got a contact page there. They can reach out, but on Twitter they can follow as well. I'm pretty active there. So it's at niche pursuits on Twitter.
That's probably the best way. Cool.
[00:45:41] Speaker A: Awesome. Spencer, thanks so much, man.
[00:45:43] Speaker B: Hey, thanks, Greg. Appreciate it.
